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.

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?

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.