[SunRescue] Linux on SPARC

[Ido Dubrawsky]

On Fri, 25 Feb 2000, Paul Khoury wrote:

> Okay, I hope I don't create too many flames with this one - I think 3 Solaris boxes is pretty good
> for now, but I'm thinking of trying UltraLinux - anyone have a suggestion on which distribution
> is good?  A friend suggested Mandrake, but I'm unsure on what to use.  Or should I just
> stay with Solaris on it?  The machine is a SS1+, 660MB drive, 32MB of RAM, but that's going
> to 64MB hopefully this weekend.
> 
> TIA,
> 
> Paul
> 

  UltraLinux is for the SPARCs with the UltraSPARC chip.  For the SS1+ any 
flavor of Linux (i.e. Mandrake, RedHat, Debian) should do just fine.  Just 
yesterday, I installed OpenBSD 2.6 on a SPARCstation2 at work (better than
having that old hardware just sit around and do nothing).  It's a much smaller
footprint than Solaris or Linux (the entire OS installed a 150 MB root 
partition and I've got ~1.8GB still to go on the disks!
  Anyway, so far as I know, the Sun4c architecture is still considered some-
what "secondary support" as far as RedHat is concerned;  from what I understand,
that means that it may crash unexpectedly (though not often from what I've 
heard) for unknown reasons.  I don't know why they would say that, but they
did a while back when I was looking to install it on an older SPARC myself.
RedHat seemed to consider the sun4m architecture as the first "primary" support
platform.

Ido

--
Ido Dubrawsky
Sr. UNIX System Administrator                   E-mail: ido at globeset.com
Command and Control Group/Application Services
GlobeSET.com
Austin, TX