[Gllug] Sun Sparcstation - is it any use...?

[John Edwards]

On Fri, Aug 12, 2005 at 11:37:49AM +0100, Adrian McMenamin wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-08-12 at 11:28 +0100, Steve Nelson wrote:
>> On 8/11/05, John Edwards <john at cornerstonelinux.co.uk> wrote:
>> 
>>>> How can I go about getting some variety of Linux on the box since I
>>>> don't know how it is currently configured?
>>> 
>>> Debian runs well on them, except that dselect can take minutes to
>>> startup. Slackware may also run.
>> 
>> Slackware hasn't run on SPARC for a very long time.  There is a
>> splack!, which is based on Slackware 8.x but its pretty primitive. 

Yep. I've just checked that, and Slackware say they support SPARC 
machines in the FAQ but not in the download section.


>> For linux the two main contenders are Debian and Gentoo.  I've not
>> used Gentoo, but I have 4 SS5s, two of which run Debian beautifully.

I would have thought that having to recompile Gentoo on a SS5 would 
make a good definition of infinity. Plus there is a little gem in 
their Sparc install documentation:

"At least 512MBytes of RAM + swap is required for bootstrap and some 
larger compiles."


>> However, if you really want to fly, netbsd on SS5s is absolutely superb.

To speedup SSL and SSH on Debian you can recompile OpenSSL for sun4m 
(which is the CPU version used in the SS5) instead of the mathematically 
challenged sun4c (SS1, SS2, IPC, IPX). See:
	http://osinvestor.com/sparc/slowssl.html


> There is a distro called Aurora that is written specifically for Suns -
> it is modelled on Red Hat/Fedora. Sadly for the sparc32s the best you'll
> get is Aurora 1  which is modelled on RH 7.3 though, in my experience is
> no where near as stable.
> 
> (I couldn't get Debian to install at all - the distribution notes
> cryptically refer to the fact that the installer might not work on all
> SCSI card/CD combos but doesn't explain it any further).

I've never had a problem with Sun or IBM CDROM drives. You should make 
sure that the SCSI ID is 6, and you could try adjusting the block size 
from 2048 bytes to 512 bytes. For more info see:
	http://www.sunhelp.org/faq/suncdrom.html


> I had the thing as a mail server for about 6 months but it was so slow -
> took up to a minute to load a large IMAP index and seemed to crash every
> week - 10 days or so. But it only cost me a fiver.

IMAP is probably too much, as it requires a fair bit of disk, memory 
and (sometimes) CPU usage. POP3 would be fine for a Sparcstation.


> The replacement - which cost me a whole £20 is much faster - but it
> crashes quite a bit too :( (it's an ia32 box)

Intel x86 machines can be made stable.


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|    John Edwards   Email: john at cornerstonelinux.co.uk    |
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