Slashdot Mirror
SuSE Announces Linux Version For SPARC
riggwelter writes: "SuSE has announced a version of their distribution for the Sun SPARC architecture. It's available as four ISO images from their FTP site and mirrors. This mean s that SuSE now supports PowerPC, Alpha and SPARC in addition to i386. Anyone with a SPARC knocking about the place fancy reviewing it?."
Sorry, but I just don't get too excited about trying to find drivers for, well, ANYTHING under Solaris i386...
And I lift my glass to the awful truth which you can't reveal to the ears of youth except to say it isn't worth a dime.
True, so true..
I keep copies of AS/400 V3R7 'Hardware Troubleshooting and Upgrade' and 'OS/400 Reference' on my desk. Every time I get pissed about the shoddy design of some clone I have in for testing, I'll jerk 'Troubleshooting..' out and read about the right way to do hardware. Or when Windows NT pisses me off, I'll grab 'OS/400' and thank god I don't have to deal with THAT!
.sig: Now legally binding!
Visit http://www.ultralinux.org/faq.html for details about what hardware the Sparc 32/64 kernels will and will not run on..
Oh, and it will run on an IPX, and supports the full range of normal IPX hardware.
.sig: Now legally binding!
Scale and fault-tolerance. Solaris can scale from a 4 year old, single-CPU Ultra-1 to a 64-CPU E-10k. Also, with the E3000+ machines, Dynamic Reconfiguration allows for hot-swapable drives, CPU boards and memory. I don't really see Linux making those kind of strides in the next few years.
This is because I in general find Linux much more pleasing to work with. The gnu utilities are in general, far superior. KDE/Gnome beats the crap of CDE any day of the week. The ability of Linux to work in a heterogenous environment (i.e., so easily work with smb shares, nfs, etc.) is great.
I'm writing this on a Solaris 8 machine running Helix Gnome on one monitor and KDE on the other. I have all of the GNU tools I need to use installed, and I'm running Samba....so your argument on lack of applications is groundless. Yes, CDE and Suns compilers suck....so don't use them.
I find Solaris, while not unpleasant to use, definitely not as pleasing on a day to day basis. I am also amazed at how poorly it performs sometimes. I know Solaris is supposed to perform well, and I just don't understand it. I do operations on fairly fast hardware, such as removing many files, etc., that I _know_ my little linux box could do faster. I don't administer the Solaris boxen though, so it could be our sysadmin just doesn't know how to set them up efficiently? I don't know.
Some Sun hardware, (the E3000-E6000 especially) is not designed to run at blazingly fast speeds, but to keep running at repectable sppeds under extreme load. I have a E3500 with 40,000 users which seems to run everything at the same speed if there is 1 user or several hundred logged on at the same time. Linux machines (although, it could be the intel arch.) tend to run very fast with a few users, but lose processing power as load is applied.
I really don't see Sun or Solaris going anywhere for a long time. Current Intel-based machines do not scale and are at nowhere near the level of fault tolerance that is required for most large applications, and Beowulf-type clustering is not satisfactory for many applications.
You left out the 1.1 ghz athlon:
fp base 311 peak 331
HARDWARE
--------
Hardware Vendor: Advanced Micro Devices
Model Name: Gigabyte GA-7ZM motherboard 1.1GHz Athlon processor
CPU: 1.1GHz AMD Athlon Processor A1100AMT3B
CPU MHz: 1100MHz
FPU: Integrated
CPU(s) enabled: 1
CPU(s) orderable: 1
Parallel: No
Primary Cache: 64KBI + 64KBD on chip
Secondary Cache: 256KB(I+D) on chip
L3 Cache: N/A
Other Cache: N/A
Memory: 256MB PC133 SDRAM CL2 Non-ECC
Disk Subsystem: IBM DPTA 372060 ATA-66
Other Hardware: Savage S4 video card
--Shoeboy
I already have my OS of choice on my old Sun, a Sparcstation LX (50MHz sun4m, 32MB ram):
:D
[root@sune:~]# uname -a ; uptime
Linux sune 2.2.15 #1 Wed Jun 7 12:30:24 EDT 2000 sparc unknown
8:45pm up 85 days, 7:54, 1 user, load average: 1.00, 1.00, 1.00
--
DEBIAN POTATO POWERED
SuSE was my first distro, actually. It's pretty decent as long as you don't mind sorting through multiple gigs of extra packages and fluff.
:P
Nice to seem them supporting Sparc. I'd test it, but my box already runs OpenBSD just fine.
--
There are Solaris package archives available, such as the Solaris Package Archive and Freeware4Sun, and Freeware for Solaris. And if you really want to get something compiled and running, you can do it. But overall, my Linux software install experience has been much more convenient.
On the other hand, if I were in the high-end-server market rather than the geek market, there would probably be many apps I could run better, more conveniently, or only on Solaris. And I guess that's the market Sun is mostly going after.
Another issue is that Solaris is more bloated (in terms of disk usage) than other free Unixes, in my experience.
Obviously industry standard benchmarks are no match for an AC who claims to have a rendering package, but look here
--Shoeboy
One thing about Sparcs, _bootable_ 512-bytes-per-block scsi cdrom drives are hard to come by. That's why many people with secondhand Sparcstations choose to do FTP or NFS installations, e.g.:
attach monitor + keyboard, or serial terminal, then power on... .
*beep*
Sun SPARCStation OpenPROM 2.x.xx blah blah
insert floppy
>boot floppy booting . . . . welcome to $OS_SETUP. press [space] to configure networking. configuation ensues. . . select FTP site . . . download . .
How simple is that?
--
You can buy a personal solaris license for about $20 all together. $10 for the media and $10 shipping, manuals and everything.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Such machines won't be challenging the Distributed.Net "Keys-per-second" benchmarks, but if they allow you to put in place a web server on hardware actually designed for serving rather than the sort of absolute trash you'd get in IA-32 hardware for $100, that's certainly worth something.
I doubt many will be using SPARC Linux on a spanking new E10000 Enterprise Server; but watch out, since as Linux improves, while it may be less featureful than Solaris, the differences are likely diminishing over time.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
I've been running the Sparc port since it was posted August 11, and my feelings are kind of mixed. First, let me say that I use SuSE exclusively on the Intel platform, and have been for a couple years. Before this port, I had been using RedHat on my Ultra5 workstation and my AXi servers, not something I enjoyed.
First off, yast2 is not complete for this port. It evidently isn't using the fbdev X server, as it came up full GUI on one machine, and in some Really Ugly text-based menu system on another. Definately boot yast1.
Second, it gives you all the options for using reiserfs, but as some of us know already, reiserfs only works on x86. I don't see how this one got past the beta-testers.
Third, it ships with kernel source that won't compile. The SuSE modified 2.2.16 will not compile on architectures other then x86. Best idea: upgrade to 2.4.0-test8, which finally seems to work on Sparc again.
Next, one of the big things I was looking forward to, KDE2, seems to be included in spirit alone. Haven't tried Gnome, but kde1 works just fine.
Beyond these issues, it seems pretty solid. They have a couple major updates you should get on thier ftp site, but thats a no-brainer.
I highly reccomend this to any UltraSparc users. SuSE is way more friendly then Solaris, and Linux itself seems much faster on the same hardware.
With Sun selling Ultra5 workstations (fully loaded! on Ebay on the cheap, this is a great way to break free of "lin-tel" and see how good 64bit can feel!
Squash
I don't see why not. I used to run Red Hat on an Ultra Enterprise 4000 at work a while back. The E10K has a different internal architecture to the rest of the Sun Ultra Enterprise line, but the support's already there in the Linux kernel. See arch/sparc64/kernel/starfire.c.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
I love Linux and all, and I guess it's good to have it available on even more hardware, but why would you throw out an excellent OS like Sun's in favor of Linux? What benefits are there to Linux that don't already exist on a Sun?
Got Rhinos?
Now to just find which hardware they actually support.
i.e. SparcIPX?
Vote Naked 2000
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Now I can trash that copy of RedHat for Sparc that I had been saving. I think this announcement highlights what the earlier story said about RedHat kind of losing ground to companies like SuSE. SuSE is in the midst of a strong push to loosen RedHat's stranglehold on the US Linux market, and I wish them the best of luck. I've been using SuSE for years, and have always preferred them and Caldera to RedHat. Does anyone know the processor limitations on SuSE's Sparc release? Since most Sparc based boxes I know are multiprocessor boxes, it would be nice if SuSE was accomodating.
Windows is going the way of phlogiston...
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
Linux has a lot of little features that I'd miss otherwise, even on a Sparc.
Probably the biggest one for me is virtual text consoles. I know the Sparc has *a* console, but it sucks! (furthermore, people generally configure it to write some error messages there even in X! That's really stupid...)
Also, the threading should be slightly faster. At least gcc has improved somewhat as well, 'cause it used to really suck on the Sparc platform. (or, for that matter, most non-x86 platforms....)
Of course, Solaris does have some features of its own; I'd happily stick Linux on an Ultra 10, especially if I could get the 3D acceleration to work. But heck, the Ultra 10 is basically a glorified PC with a Sparc processor in it; you can find them with PCI buses and IDE hard drives!
However, on huge, enterprise-level Sparc boxes, of course I'd keep Solaris on there. Heck, the support contract alone is enough to make you do that, much less the superior multiprocessing support, and any other native hardware support they have...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
If I had somethin nice like an ultrasparc I'd prolly keep solaris on there just cuz it works real nicely. Its a great OS. but unfortunately I have a sparcstation IPC (25 mhz). It came with solaris on it and it was slooooow. I threw red hat on (bad choice...too big) and it at least doubled in speed.
-Stype
Bus error -- driver executed.
I'm a regular user of both Solaris and Linux for scientific applications.
I don't see why anyone would want to use Linux for Solaris. In the future I think we will be using mostly big multiprocessor x86 machines running Linux, with workstations being PCs running linux. Solaris boxes will be relagated to the really large multiprocessor machines, and the ocassional one around for legacy apps.
This is because I in general find Linux much more pleasing to work with. The gnu utilities are in general, far superior. KDE/Gnome beats the crap of CDE any day of the week. The ability of Linux to work in a heterogenous environment (i.e., so easily work with smb shares, nfs, etc.) is great.
I find Solaris, while not unpleasant to use, definitely not as pleasing on a day to day basis. I am also amazed at how poorly it performs sometimes. I know Solaris is supposed to perform well, and I just don't understand it. I do operations on fairly fast hardware, such as removing many files, etc., that I _know_ my little linux box could do faster. I don't administer the Solaris boxen though, so it could be our sysadmin just doesn't know how to set them up efficiently? I don't know.
I would greatly look forward to running Linux on them instead. Unfortunately, the only reason I'm not doing research on a x86 box is that many of the programs, libraries etc. I use in my research are Solaris specific. They aren't ported to Linux yet. However, this is changing quickly, and I actually only need one more vendor to support linux and I can drop Solaris. Its ironic, because in every other way, the application base for Linux kicks the crap out of Solaris. Running windows emulators can even get me Windows apps (for those damn word attachments etc.).
I recently set up a little linux farm for a colleague of mine who is starting up a lab at a major university. He had previously used no other Unix except solaris. I set him up personal linux work stations, and a solaris enterprise for the main number crunching. His statement after using it for a week was "I love it. Anybody else who isn't using this setup for research is stupid." He now has colleagues interested in using a similar setups.
My analysis, as far as the world of science is concerned, is that Sun is in big trouble. I can get pretty impressive PCs nowadays. The workstations and servers of the future will be running Linux and fast/big PCs. Sun will be relegated to the very high end, big multiprocessor machines, although people are gradually going beowulf too.....
Sun has a little breating room until Linux can get better SMP support for many processors, the journaling file systems become more robust, PC hardware becomes larger scale (Can you even easily get, say a 4 or 8 processor PC?), and more applications kick in. After that, I forsee Sun and Solaris getting dropped like a hot rock.
Anyway, just my take on it.
If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide. -Ghandi
There are plenty of cool operating systemst that will run on an IPC. I probably haven't thought of them all, but your options (besides Sun) might include:
--
Yeah, we ordered 3 or 4 of them and haven't put them all to gd use, yet. We have a testing lab of sorts here.
Do really dense people warp space more than others?
But do we really need another dist ported to sparc? IMHO, for higher end sparc's the best OS is a finely tuned Solaris, 2.6 or higher. Now it may well runn better on older boxes but for any real production work, on a big box, solaris is still the king regardless of whether you actually like the OS.
Shameless Plug! If you like trance, tell me what you think!!
I don't really understand why anyone would want to run linux on sparc.
Sparc's are pieces of shit. The USII has the dubious honor of being the only *performance* risc cpu that gets hammered by the IA-32 in both integer and floating point.
The only reason to buy a sparc is to get services, support and software from sun. If you want a decent processor, check out the alpha.
The amazing thing is that instead of using an aggressive OOO design for the USIII, sun decided to stick with an in-order cpu. It's like they aren't even trying to produce a competetive CPU.
The reason sun sells boxes with 64 procs in them is that it takes that many to compete with 32 proc offerings from HP, Compaq and IBM.
--Shoeboy
Go over to eBay and look for IPCs and IPXs they're probably going for $10 each, with memory.
Vote Naked 2000
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Cool, I've been wondering about SuSE for SPARC since a friend is donating an old IPC to me. Already running it here on various x86s and have a PPC machine and SuSE PPC in a box just waiting for me to get a chance to bring them together :-)
(Oh, I've tried and like other distros but settled on SuSE, and AFAIK Red Hat (the only(?) other distro with wide cross-platform support) doesn't support PPC.)
(And yes, I'm too lazy/have too little time to recompile everything in a distro for another platform myself.)
No, no, no. It ain't ME babe,
It ain't ME you're looking for.
-- Alastair
You don't really need a wacky Sun monitor. It's possible to install *bsd on a sparcstation with just a serial terminal. Once you've got it set up, you don't need a monitor anyway.
--
SuSE also has Linux for:
* IBM's S/390 and soon - AS/400
* IBM's RS/6000
* Soon - Linux for X86-64 (AMD Sledgehammer)
* IA-64
As you can see - if someone is very good as porting Linux to - it's the SuSE guys
Hetz (Heunique)