[rescue] [OT?] Linux on a SS2

[Patrick Finnegan]

On Saturday 14 February 2004 09:06, Carl R. Friend wrote:
>    Greetings Rescuers!
>
>    I've got a (possibly off-topic) question to the assemblage here:
> Is anyone successfully running Linux on a SPARCstation 2, and if so,
> how'd you load it?
>
>    I'm getting really sick and tired of an old firewall box (on a
> 486) that I want to bring (1) a little more up-to-date and (2) to a
> slightly more obscure architecture.  I'd like to take advantage of
> the stateful features of the newer kernels and get a bigger disk
> drive so the auditing stuff doesn't have to be rotated twice a day.
>
>    Right now I've got a copy of RedHat 6.1 for SPARC on CD, and it
> gets to about the third package (ld.conf) and wedges up.  Ideas?

As someone else mentioned, if you want Linux, you can (should) use 
Debian, which you can CD-boot (which I rarely do), netboot (also rare) 
or even boot off of floppy (on *most* architectures - I think the Sun 
U5/U10 doesn't work due to a buggy floppy controller).  

Personally, I'd recommend you up that to a Sun 4m processor if you can - 
Linux felt much less sluggish on my LX or SS5 than on my SS1.  Of 
course, YMMV.  If you do want a SS5, I could probably send you one 
(70MHz/64MB ram/2GB disk) for $5 or so plus shipping - they're not 
worth much at all now-a-days, and I still have some I don't need.  I 
used to have more, but I've been working on getting rid of some, and a 
bunch of my 85's have been turned into "bladed Sparc 5's".  At some 
point, it'd be fun to get back to putting together a rack of bladed 
SS5's. :)

Pat
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