[rescue] howto make multiple main boards work on a Sun Sparc 670/MP

[Kurt Mosiejczuk]

On Fri, 15 Jun 2001, James Sharp wrote:

> i386 platform bias...All these companies run out screaming "Our product
> runs on Linux!".  No...it runs on Linux/i386.  What about those of us
> running it on an Alpha or Sparc platform?  Its not that hard to copy your
> source code to an Alpha or Sparc box and type "make" and then tweak the
> little 32/64 bit issues that might or might not come up.

I understand this one a lot.  I've been using sparclinux for years now
and it is disheartening how many packages are i386 only.  One company
that has really earned my love is Opera Software.  The other day I was
downloading their browser onto a linux laptop with lynx.  They misdetected
what I was running and put up Win9x, so I chose the 'Other...' button.
Right under linux(i386) was linux (sparc) and linux (ppc).  This is
even before they have a Solaris port, which makes sense, since it's
easier to recompile for sparc linux from the i386 linux source than to
go to Solaris, but so many companies don't go to that small effort. And
don't even get me started on the amount of free software that doesn't.
(The exception to this being the debian sparc folks, but who knows
how many upstream maintainers don't take their patches)

--Kurt