[Gllug] Debian on SPARC 64bit

[Ian Northeast]

Paul Brazier wrote:
> 
> I've got the possibility of looking after a SPARC 64-bit server and
> ideally I'd like to have Debian on it for ease of maintenance. I've had
> a look at the Debian SPARC-64 pages and it seems that it is kind of
> working but maybe not too stable/complete.
> 
> Has anyone had experience of running this? - I've only ever used x86
> processor machines.
> I guess the main problems will arise if you're compiling your own
> software on it plus maybe a restricted selection of deb packages.
> 
> Might I be better off with Solaris even though I'd rather avoid it
> (being non-free and never having used it before)?

Quite probably IMHO. Solaris 9 for SPARC is free (as in beer, not
speech, it is not open source of course).
http://wwws.sun.com/software/solaris/binaries/get.html.

Solaris isn't that difficult to get the hang of if you're used to
general UNIX style principles. The installer is fairly straightforward
(but omits to ask for your default route - this goes in
/etc/defaultrouter). Solaris 9 is fairly up to date for a commercial
UNIX - it includes ssh out of the box for instance. Still no MD5
passwords though. There's plenty of the usual public domain software
available from http://www.sunfreeware.com/ both as source and binary.

Regards, Ian


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