[Gllug] Debian on SPARC 64bit

[Richard Cohen]

On Fri, 28 Jun 2002, Ian Northeast wrote:

> 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).

I've got the source :-)

> 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.

May I recommend the Solaris Companion CD, which comes in the box with
Solaris?  It's got well over 100 packages on it now, source and binary too,
and we *do* try to keep it up to date.  Not that we compete with
sunfreeware.com - we work with them, and I was in a conf. call with Steve on
Wednesday - but it bruises my ego to see people recommending his stuff over
ours :-)

http://wwws.sun.com/software/solaris/freeware/

And yes, I have moaned at length over the use of the word freeware.  Blame
marketing...

Although there's a possibility I may be biased, I would honestly say that
Solaris 9 + the CCD is a pretty decent system.  It's effectively what I use
for 8 hours a day at work, and if I didn't feel comfortable on it, I'd be
using Linux instead.

> Regards, Ian

Cheers
Richard



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