[Sunhelp] Re: [SunRescue] Linux on SPARC

[Paul Khoury]

On Fri, 25 Feb 2000 07:49:50 -0600 (CST), Ido Dubrawsky wrote:

>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.
>
Hmmm...

Even though this isn't going to power a nuclear power plant, that mission critical
durability would still be a nice feature.

Also, on ultralinux.org, they refer to S/Linux as UltraLinux even for non-Ultra machines, which
I found quite interesting.

Paul