[rescue] Q: non-Solaris OS on Sun Blade 100?

[Meelis Roos]

> Has anyone successfully installed any OS other than Solaris on a
> Sun Blade 100?

After being tired of compiling different freeware programs fro Solaris 
8, I did install Debian Woody on my Blade 100 at work several years ago. 
Later upgraded to debian unstable. Driverwise I had no problems with 
either version, IDE DMA worked fine, even firewire worked unlike in 
Solaris of that time. Haven't tried current Debian installer on Blade 
100 yet.

It was different from Solaris usability-wise. The environment was more 
productive for me (my background being several years Solaris desktop 
use and almost 10 years Linux desktop use). Lowlevel work was faster in 
Linux (both by real work test and by benchmarks like UnixBench) but X & 
graphics was unusually slow in Linux at that time. I fixed some of it up 
but it was still visibly slower than solaris (which is strange - people 
I know use XFree on Solaris to get more out of the same old ATI Mach64 
hardware). It was probably because of some gcc sparc target inefficiency 
of the time.

Last year I tried desktop Linux (Debian unstable again, with XFree and 
KDE) on my 360 MHz Ultra 5. Wow! Linux/gcc/... had come a long way and 
the 360 MHz machine was much more usable than the 500 MHz one had been. 
About the speed of Celeron 500-600 by rough estimation.

-- 
Meelis Roos (mroos at linux.ee)