[rescue] [OT?] Linux on a SS2

[Joshua Boyd]

On Sat, Feb 14, 2004 at 09:06:01AM -0500, Carl R. Friend wrote:

>    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?

Sun4c support is broken on a lot of versions of linux to my
understanding.  RH6.1 is Linux 2.2.x, right?  I don't recall for certain
if that is one of the broken versions, but I think it might be.

I think you will either have to step back to an older version if you
really want to run linux.

However, my advice is to just run NetBSD.  A lot of people will say
OpenBSD instead.  I've never tried OpenBSD, but I'm sure it's fine too.
However, I know from personal experience that NetBSD runs well on SS2s,
and have tried both NetBSD 1.4 and 1.6 on Sun4cs.