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This one http://auroralinux.org/ was developed by Morgan Stanley, perhaps the most enterprise-y possible....

I ran a multiuser office from a Linux server all the way back in '92, using four VT100 terminals and a console on an i386DX/25 with 8MB RAM. And at home, I ran TWM on my Linux desktop along with NCSA Mosaic for World Wide Web access through term rather than slip which gave me TCP/IP through 7-bit shell dial-up, along with InterViews (which I later replaced with Andrew) both GUI WYSIWYG office suites on an accelerated full color desktop that were also free.

This is long before Be. And before Linux was Linux, its direct ancestors (sharing virtually the same user interface as today) were X and GNU applications on the hardware accelerated Unix desktop (mine was SunOS on an sbus Sparc) at 1152x900 full color with 32MB memory, which I was enjoying in the '80s when DOS users were still oohing and aaahing at Windows 3.0 (can you say 'no preemptive multitasking, 640k application limit') running 640x400 in 4-bit color on their 1MB machines.

BeOS wasn't even a sparkle in anyone's eye when Linux was already powering sites on the Internet. And to suggest that BeOS predates the Unix 'way' and the dominance of Unix and Unix desktop applications at the high end of microcomputing (including high-end graphics) through the '80s and '90s is very, very silly.

How about Aurora Linux? Works great on SPARC32 up to the latest 64 bit stuff. I use it on two SPARCStation 20's (SMP), three Ultra 2's and a bunch of Ultra 5's and Ultra 10's, along with a Blade 1000.

Version 1.9x is very Fedora-ish.

Actually, RedHat does support SPARC through Aurora Linux, which is on track to merge with Fedora. Its latest release has most of Core 2 and the next ISOs will be Core 3.

I'd suggest either NetBSD or Aurora Linux (the latter's latest release being based on FC2 it's pretty current).

And no I am not raining on their parade. The quality of the distro is unknown to me. I wish them the best of luck.

Another thing to remember is that, using 64bit in user-land can actually slow down some applications. You're pushing around twice as much data for every single operation. I have a 64bit ULTRASparc running Linux (Aurora). The OS is compiled in 64bit, but most of the applications are still running in 32bit mode. Many applications break when you compile them in 64bit mode. Others work, but slower. Don't think I've seen any actually run faster. Unfortunately, I don't have anywhere near 2Gig RAM on that box, so I can't really take advantage of the addressing space extensions.

I started porting this to sparc 32 as a kind of contribution to the Aurora Linux project, but damn is that tedious. I dont even know of a distro that has an up to date port for sparc 32... except maybe gentoo, and I still think it lags behind a little.

• File Server - Running NFS and Samba, my home directories and other shared files can be reached from any computer in the house (current count a little over 2 dozen).
• Squid - I have all my web browsers using this machine as a proxy server.
• syslog - All my *NIX boxen send copies of their syslog events here.
• DHCP/DNS/NTP - These services could probably run on a pocket calculator, or maybe my old VAX, but the Ultra 5 is seriously underworked.

UltraSparc has a 64bit userland if you care to compile it. Currently the only distribution that I know of that provides one is the Aurora Linux distribution that is based off of RedHat 7.3. More information about the project is Here at the Aurora Linux website .

Currently its 64bit userland is limited to the C library and a few support libraries. This allows you to compile applications in 64bit mode so that they can gain the benifits of 64bit mode.

Most cases using 64bit applications cause the machine to be slower due to the doubling in the length of the addressing pointers and other factors. Better explination is available in their FAQ entry on this 64bit vs 32bit issue .

-h-

In my opinion, go with Linux. You'll generally get more bang for your buck than with Solaris workstations. Unless you've already invested a great deal in classes based on Solaris, I strongly recommend Linux.

I actually run a much smaller lab of 12 workstations of Sun Ultra 5's, and we're running Aurora Linux (link). In my opinion, we'd be much more happy with Intel hardware running Linux, it's more upgradeable (our lab was set up in 2000 and the computers are already too slow to run applications like Mozilla). The main reason that we're running Aurora is that we know and like RedHat Linux, and nobody ever liked working on CDE.

Perhaps things have changed since Solaris 8, but I truly think that Linux is the way to go for a situation like this. Perhaps you could compromise go with Sun boxes for your fileservers and other servers that you set up in the future.

I have a Classic running RHL 6.2 because that was the last supported release on SPARC. It's been extremely stable (KDE/GNOME apps run like dying dogs though). However, my new SS5 will run Aurora Linux 1.0, which is based on RHL 7.3 and has a 2.4 kernel.

Ade_
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There is an obscure manufacturer of SPARC-based notebooks going by the name of Tadpole. These are marketed as portable Solaris systems but I'd bet some flavor of Linux will run on these (Aurora Linux comes to mind).

Why pay for x86 Solaris? Why pay for Sparc Solaris? Upgrade to Aurora!