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?."

Comments

Convenience

[Brighten]

I used to have a Sparc 5 running Solaris, and it was a great underlying OS -- never crashed on me. But after I switched to LinuxPPC on a G4, I noticed a big difference in how convenient it was to install software. Not only does Solaris not come with as wide an array of software preinstalled (c compiler, a nice window manager, etc.), but it's not as easily available on the net in package form. And when compiling software myself I usually ran into more problems.

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.

Re:What's the point?

[Shoeboy]

Obviously industry standard benchmarks are no match for an AC who claims to have a rendering package, but look here
--Shoeboy

Yuck, no FTP install

[Kartoffel]

Looking at SuSE's ftp site, I can see one directory with individual packages, and another one with four (FOUR?!) iso images. Where are the boot floppy images?

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?
--

Cheap SPARCS are the main merit of this...

[Christopher B. Brown]

The main merit of SPARC Linux is that it means that it gives you something to run on some of the Hordes of SPARCs on eBay that are priced as low as a couple hundred bucks, but which likely don't come with a Solaris license.

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.

One question: Why?

[Trevor Goodchild]

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?

Re:One question: Why?

[jslag]

What benefits are there to Linux that don't already exist on a Sun?

Plenty. If you're used to developing on / administrating the Linux way, Solaris is different enough to slow things down a bit. Linux also seems to perform quite a bit better than Solaris on most of the older Sparcs (I don't believe this applies to Ultrasparcs, though).

Sure!

[zpengo]

Yeah, no problem, I've got one right h....Oh, wait, you said *SPARC*...sorry I thought you said 286.

cool

[bubbasatan]

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.

One answer: Speed

[stype]

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.

Solaris-linux migration in science.

[aardvaark]

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.

SuSE supports more platforms

[HeUnique]

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