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

[Adrian McMenamin]

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


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 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.

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

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