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Is Linux Losing Its SPARC?
flsquirrel asks: "As I spent 5 hours of my Sunday afternoon trying to get some form of Linux to load on my Sparcstation 5, I started to wonder where the support for all these Sun boxes is headed. Redhat has dropped Sparc altogether as a supported platform. Some others like Mandrake have recently picked it up but seem dismally unprepared to tackle the platform. Most distributions ignore the platform completely. So I thought I'd throw this out to the Slashdot community for discussion. Is there any hope of saving Linux on the Sparc? What options do SPARCstation owners have for a reletively up to date distro that isn't in beta or otherwise have bizzar issues stemming from someone just trying to recompile an Intel distro for the Sparc architecture?" One of the great things about Linux is its ability to run on many different architectures. So why is SPARC support beginning to lag? Lack of interest? Lack of resources? Would anyone be interested in contributing the missing necessary resources?
You know the answer! Tux is just so cute!
Debian does indeed have a sparc port, which is alive and well.
I currently have it running cheerfully on a Classic, Ultra/1 and Ultra/10, and have seen it running on an IPC, IPX, and sparc/(2|5|10|20).
For me the greatest thing is that the people who write everything also puts the OS together, it just plain works better, and a lot too. Give it a shot and you'll never go back.
Solaris had a journaled file system via Disksuite for a very long time. Disksuite was included with the server version of the OS, not the desktop releases.
Saying Disksuite isn't a part of Solaris is simply splitting hairs. Have a look through the Solaris source code, there are disksuite hooks in the UFS code.
Remember, Disksuite was available even for SunOS 4.1.x....a *long* time ago.
You must be a moron. Ultra 5/10 is a 64 bit processor and the price is under $100 for the OS.
Go check out some Netcraft uptimes before you say BSD is dying. Basically, what you're saying is that BSD needs better marketing. BSD will die when programmers lose interest in it, not just because a bunch of marketing drones can't sell it.
Well, I can tell you why we did. Solaris' care and feeding is just too expensive, and Sun is just too arrogant.
... he assumed the project was finished, "oh no, that's part of our ongoing dataflow, it's over there..." the boss chirps up, pointing to a beatup old IBM netfinity on the otherside of the room, with a tux sticker on the front of it, and a sign hanging above it that says "sparcless.blah.blah.blah" and it's list of IP addresses. If those machines are "recycled" in the functional sense rather than the scrap metal sense, they'll be running Linux, just as the netfinity that replaced them was recycled from it past life where it ran OS/2.
:)
;)
I'll use the first application we moved from Solaris to Linux as my example. It was deployed on a trio of maxed out Enterprise 450s. Each box handled 1/3 of the work load which was handed out to them by another machine. By our figures and the specs of the machines we figured we should have had about half again as much throughput as we did. We called in a support request, worked with their engineering team to understand how our application worked for about two days, then they sent us a small benchmark and directions on how to run it. We did and sent them back the results, they sent out a field tech a couple days latter that said "we figure you're getting about 50% of what you should for your appliction" (mind you we estimated 66%) he adjusted three or four kernel paramaters on each box and rebooted, retested, adjusted again, rebooted, retested. Wham! our performance skyrocketed to about what we expected (98% of our prediction anyway.) We were happy, but curious why we didn't see any mention of these paramaters in any docs? "because they're not public." Turns out the contract we signed to get their help not only had a clause that said they wouldn't reveal the secrets of our application or problem, but that we wouldn't reveal the solution! One of our engineers spent most of a week out searching the internet and several books, looking for those paramaters... she didn't find them anywhere. We paid a five figure price tag for that "service". Ended up with no idea what what the paramaters he changed do, or what they're values meant... future applications would obviously have to go back to them for appropriate tuning.
About a month latter we had finished migrating the application (all three servers) onto a single box running linux (slightly larger box, different architecture) and we got better throughput than we had with the solaris boxen. Our initial port ran about as well as it did on the solaris boxes at first, but a week of reading on the net, and looking at some source code and we had tuned it to the point that it outperformed the sparcs by about 10% with only about 3/4 of the hardware horsepower of the trio combined. Total cost: under a thousand dollars including the time of four engineers and a couple books, plus the results of that experience were 100% retained, we now know enough to tune our own boxes.
About two months after that our local Sun sales rep was in town and the boss brought him down to our lab, he wanted to just check base and see if we were happy with the improved performance. Someone laughed, someone else just pointed him to the three machines on the other side of the lab... even a sales guy could tell they had been "decommisioned". I think the exact phrase that was used was "we'll be recycling them."
Sadly we still have several hundred Solaris boxen scattered throughout the company, and the guys in engineering who negotiated 120 new workstations with him after his little visit to our lab were quite upset with us. That's why I'm posting anonymously... they're vicious and petty when annoyed.
Since then, we've migrated 14 major applications off of Windows, Solaris, HP/UX and VMS... most of them to Linux. (I personally decommisioned the last of our Vaxen... it was fun, a large sledge hammer was used, then it was feed to an industrial crusher. Everyone with an account on the box in the end was given a chunk, makes a nice paper weight.
Speaking of annoying an petty, that brings me to Solaris itself. This is another reason why many of us would rather run Linux, the os is simply painfull to use. Granted that given dozens of hours to tweak and configure it, plus a slew of other software, you can build a functional machine that won't drive you crazy... but why should I have to? The last Linux distro I installed had everything configured integrated and functional right off the cd. Vanila CDE off the cd is about equivalent to WFW 3.11. There's also a skills gap, the kid I just interviewed yesterday is comming out of college comfortable with both Windows and Linux. Is he fluent in Linux sysadmin? No. But he knows enough to get around the basics, we'll teach him the rest. Compare that to Solaris... find me a college kid that understands how to re-install a package from the original CD, we're loosing our Solaris experts as they move up in the company, or retire and can't replace them, the ones you can find are all flush with certificates from Sun that are about as meaningfull as an MSCE, and want absurd salaries. I'm sorry, but a piece of paper signed by McNeally that basically means you've successfully installed a scratch copy of Solaris doesn't mean I'm going to pay you as much as the gal that's been here for 12 years and came in at midnight on a saturday last summer to rebuild an entire system from the ground up in 14 hours to replace one that got melted in an office fire... that's pulling parts from storage through OS load up, application installation, data restore, functional checkout and delivery to the shipping doc in 14 hours.
Part of me says: Solaris is dead. Sparc will probably go with it, and since Sun really is a one trick pony so will they. The only use for Linux on Sparc is to salvage a few more years of life out of old boxes after Sun files chapter 11. Then the other part of me looks at the list of applications that have us tied to Solaris and laughs at the idea of getting them all ported over to Linux or one of the other platforms we're consolodating on soon enough. Yes, it's almost a religious issue, but it's not because we all love Linux and want to put it everywhere, it's because we've come to hate slowaris and the arrogant bastards behind it and want it out of our data centers.
You see why I post anonymously?
- A.P.
--
Forget Napster. Why not really break the law?
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Um, would you like kernel- or userland NFS? Because Linux has both. And I've been able to get about 6 to 7 MB/second sustained on my 100 MBit/sec switched network between different machines running different operating systems (not just Linux) from my NFS Linux box.
Where's NFS, indeed... - A.P. (nice troll tho...)
--
Forget Napster. Why not really break the law?
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
s/Free/Net/ - and it runs pretty sweet too, Xsun uses ~4mb, leaving plenty of room for fvwm2, Netscape etc. on my olden 32mb SS10.
Actually I find that Linux pretty much sucks on PCs and also on Ultra 5s. The hardware is garbage; the OS can't make up for that. Linux on reliable solid hardware like Ultra 2 is the finest platform I've worked on in all my experience.
You can laugh if you like, but I consider peecees a poorly-supported cousin in the linux world. To me, sparc64 is the primary platform for linux. The hardware is fast, stable, and well-made. The OS is fast, stable, and well-made. It just doesn't get any better. If you use FreeBSD on a peecee because you tried linux and thought it was a piece of crap, you fixed the part that wasn't broken. The OS was fine, it's your hardware that needed replacing.
I can't stand to use linux on peecees either...so I can sympathize. I was just starting to think Linux basically sucked the big one until I put it on a sparcstation 20. I've since bought 4 more Sun systems, run Linux on every one, and never looked back. I now lead a peecee-free lifestyle and enjoy using OpenBSD on my older systems and Linux on my newer ones. Sparc support in Linux is far from dead...all of Red Hat's expertise can't hide the fact that peecees are widely disparate in capabilities and quality, that there are so many different devices and different drivers of varying quality, or that the peecee is a 20-year-old system design. The Sun platform is simple, fast, and reliable. And, believe it or not, it's fairly easy to write a very good OS for a platform like that. David S Miller and the many other fine hackers who wrote the ultrasparc support have done exactly that.
The NetBSD port is brand new, missing support for many devices, has no SMP (I think - it's not explicitly mentioned), and is largely untested. Yeah, it'll probably boot, but the other two OSs mentioned are suitable for serious production use. Pardon my error, but I really don't think the level of support is in the same class.
The only two operating systems supported on 64-bit sparcs are Linux and Solaris. Linux is noticeably and decisively faster on 1x200, 2x200, and 2x400 Ultra 2s. I have no data for much larger systems. There's no way I'd run solaris on these systems; linux is fast and rock solid.
Whether we like it or not, Free Solaris and the Foundation Source program are causing at least the Linux SPARC port to whither.
Why? Here are some reasons:
If Sun really wants to cause heart failure in both their open and closed-source competetors:
But then again, God help us if Sun rules the world.
Their secondary objective is to cut the competetion off at the knees.
As has been stated repeatedly, Sun's #1 concern at the moment is Linux. Sun is doing three things to contain this threat:
Since SPARC Linux is dying, what they are doing must be working.
If Sun's sole objective is to sell hardware, then how do you explain the x86 port? You must conceed that you are wrong.
They probably consider the situation contained, and are taking no further action, though I wish they would.
However, consider this basic fact - for as much as the BSD people bitch about the GPL, you don't see them abandoning GCC. Sun is the only open-source distribution that can strip all GPL code if they wish. This is a good thing, if the GPL breaks down in court, but also a bad thing, if Sun decides to take out Linux.
That's a homogeneous network :)
--Matthew
Solaris 8 is free software too. Go download the ISO image from Sun's web site for either x86 or Sparc. Ohhhh you mean you need the source and you might happen to need to run it on your 8 processor system at home right? hehe. Whatever. Solaris kicks ass on decent Sparc hardware.
Did you guys try PostgreSQL? Seems like it might've been a good middle ground - a more full-featured, transaction-based database system, with (admittedly) slightly less features than Oracle, but a lot less cost (it's free!).
_____
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
And they put the iso-images of their release-canditate for 7.1/axp online - something
/
they don't do for x86
ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/axp/7.1-beta/iso.rc
c'ya haegar
If you are running on IA32, then there is little point in running Solaris. The "happy combination" of Solaris+Oracle only works if you are running decent sparc hardware. Sun support of IA32 has always been second rate as has been Oracle's support for Oracle on x86 Solaris.
Also, if your Oracle skills are still "in development", then Oracle likely will run poorly on any platform actually. This includes Sparc+Solaris.
Running on Solaris won't automagically make up for naive administration.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Originally, Sun support denied the problem existed, even after a Sun VP talked about it in an interview.
I've had far better luck with hardware quality and overall stability using Athlon servers running NetBSD, FreeBSD and OpenBSD. The system vendors I've used are ASLab at http://www.aslab.com/ and Rackmount.Com at http://www.rackmount.com/
Specs are:
ASLab systems - 850 Mhz Athlon ASLab's choice of RAM in two systems, Mushkin in one. Asus K7M motherboard Adaptec 39160 Ultra160 SCSI Two of the systems are connected to an external SCSI-> SCSI RAID, using an Infortrend SCSI->RAID module. The cabinet was built by Enhance Technology - http://www.enhance-tech.com/
Rackmount.Com system: 1.2GHz Athlon, Asus A7V motherboard, Rackmount.Com's choice of RAM, Mylex RAID controller.
All systems use IBM SCSI Ultra160 drives.
None have experienced OS crashes or hardware failures since being put into production under moderate to heavy load.
That said, I've had generally good results with lower-end Sun systems. Eg., E450's, Netras, etc. But, Sun's main advantage is the ability to scale, and integrate with things such as Veritas Volume Manager / File System / Cluster server. So it doesn't make much sense at low-end. For web servers, application servers, mail servers and DNS servers, for instance, network-based load balancers or inherent robustness of the protocol provide more usefulness for failure masking and availability.
While working as a Solaris admin in big corporate sparc shop a while back, I developed a NetBSD floppy-based disk wipe procedure (for systems being decomissioned), which went onto become official there. Much nicer than waiting for a Solaris CD boot. I also managed to get Linux to be the OS on the on-call laptop, after the managers had tried pushing Solaris x86 (on a laptop.. heh..), and Windows NT.
So, sharing my hard-won knowledge as a Unix admin over 5 years is now Overrated on this thread with most other messages at ranked at 2?
can't open more than 253 files? It's not fopen()'s fault that you dont know what the ulimit command is.
There's one reason to buy an Ultra 5: you're developing software that you later intend to run on larger Sun kit, and you want a workstation that makes this easy to do. (I'm ignoring for now the use of U5s in render farms, etc).
If all you want is a desktop PC that happens to run X Windows, then of course Linux is a better choice. But then, why on earth would you pay the premium for a SPARC based machine? A machine that's poorly supported for what you want to do? (Versus the very good support you get from Sun - Solaris just works on Sun kit, no messing around with device drivers and so forth. Etc).
I'm sorry to be so blunt, but if you've just bought a brand new SPARC workstation and don't want to run the bundled OS, you've wasted your money. The only sensible use for Linux on SPARC is to support aging kit like the Classic than can't run Solaris 8 at a reasonable speed.
Maybe I'm out of date, but in the early days of the Sun4, we were told it was "Scalable Processor Architecture RISC Computer".
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
That rat-bastard Steve Jobs won't give the Linux/SPARC people the specs they need to write to the SPARC hardware! Just like he screwed Be with the G3!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
In order to remain profitable, Shell Oil must focus on the most popular, and money-generating platform: the Ford Focus. Granted, it's not the best car out there, but everyone has one.
I just can't afford, and cannot justify using Porsche hardware when Ford cars will do the trick!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Yup, RH6.2/Sparc ships with Communicator. 5.2 doesn't though so make sure you get the last RH/Sparc version.
Democrat delenda est
Maybe you should wake up and look at a real distribution like Debian.
It currently supports: alpha, arm, i386, m68k, ppc, sparc.
In development: hppa, hurd, ia64, mips, mipsel, s390, sh.
But you are right about commercial support being mostly x86.
This isn't something that requires a budget equal to the deficit of the western world. This is something any kid in their garage could do.
In fact, this is something I would strongly suggest kids in their garage =TO= do! Build a SPARC Linux! Build the latest software for it! Sell the distributions to organizations that are junking their old Sparcstations. You may not make the Top 100 Richest People, but I'd be amazed if you didn't earn a whole lot more than you would doing door-to-door sales, paper rounds, or other toy jobs. What's more, you'd earn more than money. You'd earn a name. You can end up with a resume that stinks to high heaven, but if you've a name, you'd be favourite for the BIG money.
(In the real world, the thing that counts most is reputation. This is followed by the name of the school you went to. THIRD comes your grades, and last is what you actually know.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
You might just be suprised at how well they perform.
-dan
Distributions make sense when there are tons of people who are going approximately the same thing you are. If a distribution is not really doing much with sparcs, it's not going to be particularly helpful.
On the other hand, most programs build with tar/configure/make install these days, so, once you have a shell, a method for fetching tarballs over the network, and a set of tools, you can get the rest easily; it should take a couple of days, assuming the tools and libraries you start with aren't too far behind. It took me about a week (admittedly on x86), including migrating from libc5 (which I had working already) to libc6 (which I wanted to have on the new machine).
I have been using linux on an Ultra 5 for years, and have had very good success. Netscape is available (128 bit even), as is java, but I prefer Konqueror for my browsing. I do my internet banking just fine with Konqueror, and that was the last thing keeping me on Netscape/Mozilla.
Commercial software definately isn't the strong point, but it has full source compatibility with other linux, and unless someone didn't take into account big endian/little endian when they wrote something, it all works great.
Currently running SuSE 7.1 on 2.4.3.
Squash
Yeah, in theory. In practice, Linux runs on x86 very well, Alpha not so well, PPC support is so-so, and anything else is pretty-much non-existant. [emphasis added]
Bull. Linux runs just fine on Alpha. I run it on three of mine and have several friends who also run it on multiple machines. Debian also support about 6 platforms (last I checked) that run Linux.
That's not true. Solaris 8 no longer supports the Sun4c(SS1, SS2, IPX, etc), but it still supports sun4m(SS10, SS5, SS20, etc.)
I'm deeply offended that you are offended.
I'm not quite clear on this, myself.
:)
I have a Sparcstation 10 at home and run Solaris 8. My primary reason is because I wanted an Oracle platform, and this is one of the available downloads.
I see some other comments about heterogeneous environments, which is a valid concern. Although I find it humorous to see this coming from Linux advocates who bitch about Microsoft heterogeneous environments created for the very same reason.
I guess to me the reason to buy Sparc hardware is solely to run Solaris and learn more about it. If I just wanted another Linux PC, I could buy a PC a lot faster than my SS10 for the same money.
Yes, I do. I spotted it in that fraction of a second before my finger clicked "Submit", but it was too late to change it...
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Well apart from the fact that giving people choice is always a good thing, perhaps they're using a 32-bit SPARC (e.g., a sun4c or sun4m machine). Solaris 8 no longer supports 32-bit CPUs, and while older version of Solaris continue to run, I don't know how committed Sun are to providing timely updates for security holes, for example. I personally run Linux on my SPARC because it gives me a hetrogeneous network. I run Linux on everything, which makes admin very easy.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Actually, that's not strictly true. The new Sun Blade 100 workstation comes in at US$995, which is pretty impressive. Admittedly, it's essentially a PC with a SPARC CPU rather than a "real" SPARC, but it's there, nonetheless, and even though they've had to remove 90% of the on-chip cache to get it under the $1000 price point, performance is still acceptable. Of course, enterprise SPARC hardware still costs the earth...
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
At the time I'm referring to (late '98), Linux did beat the snot out of Solaris 2.5 on my IPX at work, had great framebuffer console support, and ran SunOS 4.x binaries (Netscape!). It ran pretty well for my purposes (Netscape & xterms, running wm2). I don't remember why I didn't go with NetBSD at that time; I used to run NetBSD at home on a Macintosh SE/30 a few years prior, and was using my BSD-based NextStation as my primary home machine.
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
...Solaris is better suited than Linux for most SPARCs.
I have, in the past, run Linux/SPARC on older machines (pre-sun4m boxes like the IPX, IPC, SS2) where the lower overhead of Linux made a significant improvement in the usability of the machine as a workstation, but that's about the only circumstance I can think of where Linux is better suited for a Sun box than the OS it was designed with.
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
That might be this guys problem. I installed SuSE 7.0 sucessfully (boot net via tftp) on a SS5/170 but it wasn't stable.
Lots of memory and disk access introduced memory corruption with kernel 2.2 or 2.4 alike.
Had to install Solaris8 then (with only a bwtwo -- that's fun)
Robert
Net/OpenBSD have a much better MM infrastructure than Linux. Linux MM is still very much tied to a page table based architecture. Anything else must emulate the page table structure. The old 4d(c?) machines, like the IPX etc don't use a page table based MMU, instead using a TLB based system (I think) which doesn't fit well with the Linux MM scheme. BSD has a much cleaner seperation of virtual memory management (segment mapping etc) and address translation mechanisms (page tables, TLB, inverted page tables etc.) This seperation allows the MM in BSD (and SVR4) to be more portable. Linux MM is a hack and needs sorting out.
Debian installed great on my Sparc4, which has a 110Mhz proc and 128MB ram. It doesnt run that slowly, either. I have it running as a web server (with PHP and MySQL even), and a mail server. It performs wonderfully.
::DO:: work with Solaris regularly). Theres more software for the kinds of applications I want to run, etc. Solaris is great, dont get me wrong, but it has it's niche, much like Linux does. If you're going to be running a large-scale server (and I'm not talking about VA Linux-sized boxen here), Solaris is THE choice to make, hands down. It's robust, very solid, very stable, and it has what is necessary to run in a constant environment on really big hardware. Linux in this area is very lacking, namely because the people who develop for it don't have access to the really expensive (and really big) hardware. That's not necessarily a bad thing.
/boot partition. I tried OpenBSD as well, however I discovered that the installer tried unpacking the packages onto the floppy disk itself, rather than onto the created filesystems.
There is a reason that I didnt go with Solaris. I am a Solaris Certified Administrator (I've passed both the tests necessary from Sun), so dont think my opinion is biased, because I'd be going against myself. I find that solaris on a sparc offers alot less functionality than Linux when it comes to things like personal use. IMHO, Linux is alot easier to maintain and use than Solaris is on a daily basis (and I
I've had very little problem with Debian so far, the only issue was that SILO has a problem with a seperate
Thusly the floppy disk would fill up and the installer would give an error that the filesystem was full, and quit. I thought that was a bug that needed to be addressed. =)
--
Dave Brooks (db@amorphous.org)
http://www.amorphous.org
Debian installed great on my Sparc4, which has a 110Mhz proc and 128MB ram. It doesnt run that slowly, either. I have it running as a web server (with PHP and MySQL even), and a mail server. It performs wonderfully.
::DO:: work with Solaris regularly). Theres more software for the kinds of applications I want to run, etc. Solaris is great, dont get me wrong, but it has it's niche, much like Linux does. If you're going to be running a large-scale server (and I'm not talking about VA Linux-sized boxen here), Solaris is THE choice to make, hands down. It's robust, very solid, very stable, and it has what is necessary to run in a constant environment on really big hardware. Linux in this area is very lacking, namely because the people who develop for it don't have access to the really expensive (and really big) hardware. That's not necessarily a bad thing.
/boot partition. I tried OpenBSD as well, however I discovered that the installer tried unpacking the packages onto the floppy disk itself, rather than onto the created filesystems.
There is a reason that I didnt go with Solaris. I am a Solaris Certified Administrator (I've passed both the tests necessary from Sun), so dont think my opinion is biased, because I'd be going against myself. I find that solaris on a sparc offers alot less functionality than Linux when it comes to things like personal use. IMHO, Linux is alot easier to maintain and use than Solaris is on a daily basis (and I
I've had very little problem with Debian so far, the only issue was that SILO has a problem with a seperate
Thusly the floppy disk would fill up and the installer would give an error that the filesystem was full, and quit. I thought that was a bug that needed to be addressed. =)
--
Dave Brooks (db@amorphous.org)
http://www.amorphous.org
SCSI hard drives NO IDE
you can argue on performance for SCSI (*), but reliability? Of the drives I've had fail on me over the course of perhaps 50 machines, 2 were seagate IDE, one was seagate SCSI, and one was WD SCSI. As a result, I generally avoid Seagate, but not IDE.
(*) and there are many who will claim not even then.
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
I have 3 sparcs at home off a 56k modem connection - two IPCs and a SS1. I was *given* the SS1, and got the two IPCs for $30. One IPC runs OpenBSD, the SS1 runs NetBSD (the other IPC is butchered for bits). Both work great, in their limited performance range. If it wasn't for the hellish noise the IPC makes, I'd use it as a workstation to connect to other boxes. As it is, the SGI Indy wins.
Anyway, the point was, there are an awful lot of IPC/IPX class machines falling off the end of their life in CS labs at the moment. If only I could find a decent priced ELC, I'd have one of those too. Don't assume it's all corporate.
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
So in summary, *BSD is dying, and SYSV rocks!
People run linux/sparc generally because they want to squeeze some more life out of an old machine. People run Solaris/sparc (or Solaris/x86 for that matter) because they want to run a very stable OS that has huge application support, a very responsive developer base and excellent hardware support.
For those who diss Solaris/x86, think about the time it takes you to get your pc to run linux or another free unix variant, and compare it to the effort that Sun puts in to making Solaris/x86 work on specific hardware listed in the HCL (http://access1.sun.com and follow the links). If you build a system from bits listed in the HCL then you will get a working Solaris/x86 system. (Start with a listed motherboard and save yourself some pain....)
SVR4!!!
Maybe is the lack of interest of the Linux community for maintaining a decent Sparc version, maybe is the will from Sun to keep they workstations loyal to Solaris, but we've had tons of problems with Linux on Sparc and we had to switch them to Solaris because we couldn't afford to have machines that get a kernel panic every week.
:)
Definitively, there's a long path for Linux to run on this matter, all the advances that exist on the Intel platform are quite good and they make Linux a great solution for Intel machines, but not all the server market is Intel.
There are my $0.02
May the source be with you!
It was developed partly by a uni in the US IIRC, and then Sun took it on.
s/primitive/clean and simple/g :D
Seriously, though, I'd hold my horses before going with Slackware on Sparc, at least until Slackware 7.2 is realeased.
--Moo
Did you pay attention to the CD-ROM with the big orange or green sticker on it that says "ATTENTION" and details what you have to do to install 2.6 on the 440Mhz+ machines? Colorblind, maybe?
Why do you think you'd have to run different distributions of Linux on all of them? Debian runs on all three platforms. I think Debian runs on almost any 'major' platform Linux runs on; i386, Alpha, Sparc, M68K, PowerPC, ARM, and MIPS and IA64 may go out with the next release.
> I am not sure how Solaris 1 releases synch up with SunOS numbering because I am too young (I started out with Solaris 2.5.1).
Officially, when "Solaris" was invented, Solaris 2 was the SunOS 5 based environment, and Solaris 1 was the SunOS 4 based environment. (Officially SunOS is the kernel/core and Solaris is the "distribution" (including desktop environment (OpenLOOK or CDE), roughly). SunOS 4 was more BSD based, whereas SunOS5 was more POSIX/SysV based.
But no-one ever used "Solaris 1", and lots of people used "SunOS" and "Solaris" to mean "SunOS4 based" and "SunOS5 based".
--
rant
Both basically say Solaris 8 doesn't run on old systems or is too slow on not as old systems.
Uh...so? Microsoft doesn't support your 25Mhz 486SLC with 4M or ram any more, why should Sun support your old hardware with it's new software? That hardware is almost 10 years old. You still have the option to run Windows 3.1 on your old 486's, run old Solaris on your sun4c and sun4d platforms. In fact, that solution is more viable than M$ platforms, because you have the option to build your own software from source, and not use the binaries that are out for newer versions.
I agree with the poster of the parent of this comment (#51). Solaris runs well on the architecture it was intended for. Backward compatibility is nice, but it's gotta stop somewhere...
This space for rent. Call 1-800-STEAK4U
Both basically say Solaris 8 doesn't run on old systems or is too slow on not as old systems.
Uh...so? Microsoft doesn't support your 25Mhz 486SLC with 4M or ram any more, why should Sun support your old hardware with it's new software? That hardware is almost 10 years old. You still have the option to run Windows 3.1 on your old 486's, run old Solaris on your sun4c and sun4d platforms. In fact, that solution is more viable than M$ platforms, because you have the option to build your own software from source, and not use the binaries that are out for newer versions.
Backward compatibility is nice, but it's gotta stop somewhere...
This space for rent. Call 1-800-STEAK4U
3 years ago acquiring Sun Workstations may have seemed like an interesting prospect, but now there seem to be much more attractive choices available that cost a lot less and run faster.
;-)
Supporting an old Sparc 5 is still doable, but it's value diminishes very quickly because of the kind of machine that can be had for very little money these days. In addition, most people I have come into contact with who are purchasing new Suns intend to run Solaris on them.
IMHO, I think Sun may lose it's edge in this market, given the kind of power that can be had on x86 and PPC for a lot less money. Since Sun produces an OS and supports their own specific hardware with it, Solaris seems the obvious choice on new Sun hardware, since supporting their devices is a lot of work. Sun may still hold a strong position the in high-end and mid-level server market, mainly for multi-processor Solaris boxes and Enterprise 10Ks, etc., but it's getting harder to justify getting Sun workstations, particularly for running Linux, when Linux runs better on other hardware.
And an even bigger disaster is trying to get x86 hardware that runs well with Solaris x86. If you want to run Unix on x86, *BSD or Linux seems to be the obvious choice.
Is Sun going the way of SGI?
The machines have been left on for 24x7 and stuff just doesn't fail.
My PC-webserver "just doesn't fail". Manually rebooted after 461 days of uptime (85 days ago according to "uptime"). Before that: unplanned downtime: power loss for the whole city, and the expected planned downtime: installation of UPS....
Roger.
Slackware has a port to SPARC in their -current tree, which will freeze to 7.2 sometime this summer. They also have an working Alpha port.
I know someone whose Sun 4c's main hard drive died. The second hard drive was ok but he couldn't boot.
I loaded NetBSD on the second drive. It was beautiful, and he was very impressed. It emulated all the Sun binaries he needed, and the speed seemed as good as better as it was under SunOS.
He had never heard of NetBSD, but he was quite reassured by the (C) Regents of the University of California messages that scrolled past on bootup...
--dave (who works for sun, though) c-b
davecb@spamcop.net
Linux consistantly runs quicker on older SPARCs than the same-age versions of Solaris. Just like people run Linux on 486s, they also run it on SPARC 10s and 20s.
davecb@spamcop.net
I realize this is a bit late in the game for this thread, but why don't you try SuSE?
I've been very happy with their Intel distro, and have used their sparc distro for some time now, as well.
the ISO's are available at www.linuxiso.org; it's 5 CD's (3 with binaries and 2 with source).
SuSE will eventually revert to selling it as a boxed set only, possibly with a single-cd "evaluation" edition, like with their Intel ports, but hey, get the 5-cd set while the getting's good!
I used to think printing on on Unix sucked. Then I figured it out. Printing on Unix *does* suck. Like a Kirby.
I haven't seen much discussion of benefits of
Sparc Linux over Solaris. The main one to me
is the use of virtual consoles and the fact that
I can setup a console with a decent rows/cols.
Perhaps it's my ignorance of SunOS working against me, but after years of dealing with
Suns, I haven't once come across info as to
how to get virtual consoles, or better than the
default text mode on a sparc. And this is
done by default when you install sparc linux.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
I'm not sure on the 64-meg minimum (in the license?), as I've done test installs on machines with as little as 32 megabytes (the minimum to load suninstall).
You must just be having bad luck with hard drives. If probe-scsi in OpenBoot can see it, then Solaris will see it, since Solaris just copies the OpenBoot device tree to /devices. I've got a mix of Sun, SGI, generic, and Compaq drives in one of my SPARCs, and Solaris 8 (obtained under the FBL) installs without problems.
Are you sure the problem isn't that you forgot to make a Sun disklabel on the drive? If the installer boots screaming about bad magic numbers and misking disklabels, you forgot to run format on your disc. When suninstall loads (I'm assuming you're not doing the webstart install), enlarge the console window, and type format. Tell it to label every disc--no need to partition, suninstall can do that automagically.
If you don't label the disc, the result will be that the installer ignores it, assuming that it's in use by a non-SunOS operating system.
Of course it's not documented, because if you bought disc drives from the evil marketroids at Sun, they'd be prelabeled, and you'd never have to fiddle with format.
Then again, you have to run fdisk manually in Slackware, too, so I suppose it's not horribly crufty.
Pining for the days when The Glorious MEEPT!!! graced SlapDash with his wisdom.
Well, it's my personal experience, so any bias that shows through is as a result of me actually using both systems for years on SPARC hardware. To the best of my ability I've given both operating systems an equal chance, and I still have Linux, IRIX, and Solaris hosts on my network. I'm really only biased towards the IRIX boxen, though, which (thankfully) haven't entered into this discussion yet. :)
If your suspicions are because of my .sig, it's there just because I'm sick of interviewing job applicants that supposedly have "loads of Unix experience", yet sit down at an IRIX or Solaris console and cry "where's GNOME? Why isn't my shell bash? Where do I get the RPM for it? Does this version of IRIX have the new 2.4 kernel? Why can't I #include anything in <linux/>?". So, a sign bearing that sentence (with demonstrated emphasis) is a permanent fixture on my desk.
The vendors who tell me to "reboot into Windows and see if the problem is still there" don't help the morale, either, but that's another rant for another day....
I'm sure I could download the source to everything necessary for recovery, and build it statically (in fact, I have done this on my PC running Slackware), or download n packages to do it for me. The point is that this is part of a standard Solaris installation. /sbin/sh is static. /sbin/* are static.
I'm comparing the environments by what I get when I do a fairly reasonable install of each on the same platform, not by what I can download or hack-together--if we were to use that as a basis, all operating environments would be approximately equal.
I haven't heard of it, but (from reading the manual page) it seems to work at the fileystem level. How can that possibly affect the order in which the kernel detects devices and assigns them to node-numbers?
I wasn't saying that my partitions were drifting, my devices showed up in all sorts of odd orders, and they shift when you add or remove one. Solaris labels discs by controller number, SCSI ID, and LUN, so if you know that data, you know the name of the device, and attaching labels to anything is only a convenience--not a necessity for a consistent system.
Yes, emulation is slow, and incomplete. There are some SunOS system calls that are unimplemented, beacuse they require hardware features that Linux does not yet suppport. All of this really wouldn't matter if there were commercial apps for S/Linux.
I honestly did not know that LD_LIBRARY_PATH worked in Linux. I stand corrected. Thanks for pointing this out!
Pining for the days when The Glorious MEEPT!!! graced SlapDash with his wisdom.
The buzzword standard is POSIX, now known as Unix95 and Unix98. That's the Unix standard.
To the best that I can tell, the free software untiites conform to the "I thought it would be cool to..." standard. Sort of like "I thought it would be cool to dump man pages and use info pages, even though man exists on every Unix machine on the planet, and I have to get info from ftp.gnu.org and it requires GNU terminfo and GNU readline and...". In some circles, GNU stands for "Get New Utilities".
If you know Unix, as a user, you know Solaris as a user. I came from an OSF/1 (ow) and IRIX background, and hit the ground running (because of the POSIX standards). I used Solaris and IRIX as a user and a developer long before I was had to manage the systems, and this adherance to standards made life easy both as a user and a sysadmin.
It's not an obvious case where free software wins anything, it's a difference in paradigms: do you add every imaginable bell and whistle, or do you stick by the rules and do what people expect. For some people, one paradigm works, for some the other works. I happen to like consistency--I think it makes life easier.
Pining for the days when The Glorious MEEPT!!! graced SlapDash with his wisdom.
Note: By ``Linux'', I mean ``operating systems based on the Linux kernel''. Likewise, I mean ``operating systems based on the Linux kernel for SPARC platforms'' when I say ``S/Linux''.
Well, I realize this is an unpopular opinion for this forum, but, I feel that it's a valid one, as I've run both Linux and Solaris on many, many SPARCstations (everything from a lowly Sun 4/440 through the gamut of SS10/SS20 configurations, on SS1000 servers, and enterprise-class UltraSPARCs), and have had to work with both operatingsystems on a fairly close level day-to-day for the last several years.
To put it gently, Solaris is a far better operating environment than Linux (for most things. Solaris sucks as a workstation, for counterexample), on the SPARC architecture. If you've only seen Solaris on the x86, and are are convinced that it blows, you're entirely correct: Solaris/x86 blows. Solaris/SPARC shines.
For the longest, I ran Linux on my SPARCstation/LX simply because Solaris 2.6 demanded too much hardware. The streamlining that's taken place in the last two releases makes it a valid option again on the older hardware (except for the -old- sun4 and sun4c platforms, which aren't supported).
Really, what it boils down to is the audience. Right now, Linux has very little to offer over Solaris, and is missing a few features that are critical for the majority of people that run the newer SPARC hardware. People like me (ie: Developer/Sysadmin for demanding corporation) don't have the time to hack Linux all day long to get it to work on hardware (we need it to ``just work'', just like the lusers, but for different reasons so we can't offer our expertise with the SPARC platform. Also, since many of us work in high-security environments, we can't open-up our machine to be probed and compiled-against, either.
It's not-at-all that Linux sucks or that it runs awfully on a SPARC (on the contrary, S/Linux blazes (compared to Solaris) on low-end hardware), it's just that Solaris works, and there's no reason to switch away from something that works that well.
Here's why I use Solaris on my systems. If Linux obtained these features, people like me might switch on a few machines (ie: machines that don't have to run certified software configurations (like Oracle) to meet SLAs):
That's not to say that Linux doesn't have its share of practical advantages:
The fact-of-the-matter is that Solaris is a very, very nice operating system, and those who run it are reluctant to switch just because it does its job so well. And, if you don't have a receptive target-audience, your development project (in this case, S/Linux) doesn't move forward very quickly.
For your average J Random BOFH, it's the same price, too (I really don't need the Linux source for most things). If you need the Solaris source for some site-specific customization, Sun has it available.
In summary, Linux really is a nice OS, but Solaris is a very, very, nice OS, and it's got the full support of the OEM, and is the same price as Linux, and runs the vast majority of the same software. I mean, if you like Linux, you'll still run Linux (and that's a good thing), but if you have no preference, which would you choose?
I mean, let's look at why Linux was a success to begin with. Linus wanted an affordable, professional-grade Uunix-like OS that would run on his 386. If I want an affordabe, professional-grade, Unix-like OS for my SPARCserver 1000, I go to www.sun.com and download Solaris 8.
Pining for the days when The Glorious MEEPT!!! graced SlapDash with his wisdom.
There are a decent number of people who use Linux because it is free software, other considerations aside.
go look at debian. debian 2.2 was released with support for 6 architectures, and there should be at least one more for 2.3.
2.2 is a bit out of date (xfree 3.3.6, glibc 2.1.3) but it's very stable. and you can always try life in the fast lane and use the testing or unstable branches.
disclaimer: i'm a debian developer. i'm biased in favor of debian, but only because it's the greatest linux distro ever, while all the others suck rocks.
---
Linux on Sparc is hardly being dropped. Debian supports it, Mandrake supports it, slackware supports it. "Redhat" is not the whole of linux.
Not that RedHat has completely dumped Sparc, either. They just didn't release a 7.0 or 7.1 for sparc. They didn't release a 5.0 or 5.1 either. It's just taking more time. 6.2 is still the most stable redhat version anyway.
Now, all that being said, Do you have an ss5-170? The turbosparc processor in a 170mhz SS5 is only partially supported, only in recent kernels, and is considered unstable. If you have a 170, you may be SOL. But that's just one version of one model of sparc.
2.4 does have some issues on 32-bit sparcs. It's coming along, they are working on this. 2.2 still works great.
If you have a 170, I completely understand not being able to install any linux distribution. If not, you're probably a victim of poor documentation.
I have linux running on an SS2, an LX, and an SS10 with dual SM51 cpus. Stuff still definately works.
This is just like television, only you can see much further.
NetBSD - the same whether on VAX, Amiga, SPARC, or Alpha.
I don't know what kind of crack the submitter is on if they can't get a shiney new Linux distro onto a Sparcstation 5 in under an hour. Debian for one has a very good sparc distro. They have for a long time. I had a Sun Sparcstation 5 with 2 gigs of hdd space and 32MB of ram running apache+ssl+php+perl, shell services, and even the occational X application. It took only a couple of hours to set all that up and worked perfectly. The machine was up for 418 days before someone accidentally hit the wrong remote power cutoff in the colo and rebooted it. At the time that it went down it was a completely up to date distro except for the kernel because it hadn't been rebooted. apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade is magical. I suggest that you do more research before accusing the community of lagging SPARC support.
IIRC, Open Firmware, the BIOS that is on PCI based Macs and other PPC based computers is based off of an IEEE standard that was derived from OpenPROM. The earlier Pre-G3 PCI Macs have some semifunctional to broken implementations of Open Firmware(OF). Many of those Macs have issues with OF like not having video drivers or having buggy video drivers for the built-in video hardware. The worst OF implementation is on the 6400 and 6500 models though. Those models refuse to deal with PCI bridge chips and won't boot off of the internal SCSI bus. This is probably a good reason for Apple not supporting them in Mac OS X.
That aside though, the ROMs in PCI cards for Macs are in Forth for Open Firmware. What I would like to know as a weird thing is, would a PCI card for a Mac would work in a SPARC or vice versa? Granted, drivers for the card would be another problem.
Impersonating Tycho from Penny Arcade since before there was a PA.
Most IDE hard drives you buy are meant to be cheap (i.e. the stuff in a CompUSA or BestBuy or whatnot). To make them cheap, the drives often contain some pretty sub standard components. Since SCSI drives tend to be expensive anways, they usually have much higher quality components in them.
Debian on Sparc works well. Of course there are issues in unstable and testing, but that is to be expected. And in general there isn't as much support for the Sparc port by third parties as for x86, but the Sparc port is in pretty good shape. For more general Sparc Port info take a look at the Ultra Linux site.
...
--
I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations
And I'd be a Libertarian, if they weren't all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners.
Berke Breathed
When you buy decent Suns (U2s, U60s, or better) you get exteremely good quality systems.
We have 500+ in my department alone, and the failure rates are miniscule compared to PCs. They also don't become obsolete as fast.
One advantage if you're using Linux too is that the hardware is much more static. i.e. you can make an image for Ultra 60 machines that's going to work with every U60 you buy. If you buy a PC from a vendor, you'll often get different parts inside, even though they consider it the same model machine.
- My favorite error message: xscreensaver, running on an old Sparc 5 w/ 8bit color: bsod: Couldn't allocate color Blue
It sounds like you're not too interested in other people using SPARC Linux, then. I for one couldn't have told you a good reason to use it until reading this thread. So now there's one more potential SPARC Linux devotee in the world.
Since the whole point of this article was about diminished support for SPARC, and it would be reasonable to assume that support has diminished because the user base has decreased, you're not helping yourself out by getting all offended when someone asks for good reasons to prefer Linux on SPARC rather than Linux on Intel.
Even if it was an ill-advised question for this article, that would make it "Offtopic", not "Troll".
Caution: contents may be quarrelsome and meticulous!
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Jeez. I thought it was just my hardware. Solaris 8 is slower than dir in terms of file IO compared to Linux, FreeBSD, and even Windows. Granted, this is a Dual Celeron 366 w/256Megs of Ram.
It loads slow. It responds slow. RC5 scores blow. The experience in general has been poor. I hadn't dipped too far into administration of a System V-style Unix much before, but.. Solaris really doesn't impress me at all.
rhadc
".I could go on for hours about why freebsd is superior"
Please do.
The Sparc 5s have wierd memory architecure that wasn't very well supported. This I read from RedHat's site with there 6.2 release and the 2.2 kernel.
I have had much success running it on Sparc 1, 10, 20, Ultra 1, 2, 10.
I have an old sparc10 with OpenBSD 2.8 on it. The box was running solaris in a previous life, and was just sitting in a corner since our ERP system moved to a cursed NT box. I never even considered Linux. OpenBSD made the most sense after only a little bit of research.
Secure by default baby!
-freq
"Tension is the great integrity" -- R. Buckminster Fuller
It has to be said that although support for other architectures is in existence, Linux is primarily an x86 OS. However I think if you asked Sun nicely it might be possible to get financial/hardware/web support for the Linux port and producing binary apps to run on Linux for Sparc. Why?, I hear you ask, surely Sun will be pushing Solaris and don't want this upstart anywhere near their nice boxes if they can possibly help it. IMO, there's a lot of reasons why Sun and other companies (HP??) should do this, and that is that by funding development of a Linux port for their particular processor, mere compilation opens their machines to a huge list of software, and people will buy boxes based on performance and stability, instead of buying a box 'cos it runs Windows. Linux seems to be the only game in town for kicking MS and Intel off the top of the PC market.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
One issue when running a server is speed.
Sparcs are designed to run very fast reguardless of the operating system.
Solarus compleatly ignores this issue. As a result Solarus is useless for everything I do.
Linux has issues with high end systems.
This makes Linux useless for a lot of people.
BSD isn't perfict eather.
The right tool for the right JOB..
Not one tool for everyone...
Just becouse a wrench makes an ok hammer and can drive in screws dosen't mean the hammer and screw driver are worthless.
I don't actually exist.
Actually I don't use a Sun Sparc. But if I could I would.
:) I'm in a happy mood and so I won't say anything insulting (and blatently false)
Here is why I use Linux. I've been dying for a chance to say this on Slashdot and not be flamebate
I do not have a lot of money. I have only enough room on my desk for one computer. I need to do everything I do on it.
I need a posix system.
I design and test my website on my computer.
I need a similer (not identical) environment to the one the server will have.
So I need a Unix or Unix like operating system.
I do all my own technical work and I want the option of being able to make changes to the operating system if I want.
This leaves me with BSD and Linux.
BSD pushes the optomised server direction Linux still chases "neat things".. TV cards etc..
Rember I only have enough room on my desk for one computer. That computer has to be my TV and radio also. This means a TV card and a radio card... BSD dosn't support this stuff.. Linux dose..
I know Linux going after drivers for TV cards means Linux isn't doing as much for stability as BSD is. But then let's rember the computer on my desk is NOT a production machine.
My server? I leave that up to the hosting service.. as long as they use Unix I'm happy..
If I had my hands on a Sparc and it could do what I wanted I'd use it.
Sparcs are designed top to buttom to be high end systems..
PCs are trapped in legacy.. It's a bit of a headake to have to deal with...
I don't actually exist.
By the time I've tweaked linux into what solaris does, I've lost any perfomance gains i may have had.
I always suspected it was an issue of Solarus features.
Solarus ships stacked to run ideal as web server or database server.
But if your not doing that wouldn't those features slow the system down?
You'll only see a speedup with Linux if you don't need those features..
I don't actually exist.
How is Microsoft to know you use Windows unliccensed?
Same deal..
I don't need to break liccens to use Linux for business
I don't actually exist.
People that think linux is the magic bullet to solve every computing problem don't deserve moderator points. Or to be taken seriously.
To a man with a hammer every problem is a nail.
Linux CAN solve every problem..
So can Windows.. MacOs, hay even Dos and CP/M...
I see this to often in ALL platforms.
Windows and Linux are the worst sence Linux users provide ALL Linux marketting and Microsoft sells Windows as all things to all people.
Hay Cp/m can run a GUI...
Hay Windows can be a server..
Hay Linux can be user friendly...
I don't recomend it...
Keep a full tool box.. a hammer may drive in screws and nails that dosn't mean you should..
I don't actually exist.
Solaris and SunOs aren't the same...
SunOs was free and did not conform to Unix standards established AFTER SunOs was created.
Solaris is fully Unix standard.
Sun eventually discontinued SunOs and focused on Solaris.
A lot of people refused to switch to Solarus becouse SunOs ran faster and to be honnest the whole point of using Sun hardware was to run faster.
As I understand it Solarus WAS hiddiously slow.. not so anymore..
I don't actually exist.
Well I personally would want to do this because I have a better understanding of how to maintain a Linux installation as opposed to Solaris. Also, performance wise, Linux smoked Solaris 8 on my Ultra 5. Now this may be because I have no idea how to tweak Solaris, so if you can point me to some material on how to make Solaris' file I/O not suck a big fat one I'd appreciate it.
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version: 3.12 GIT d? s: a-- C++++ UL++++ P++ L+++ E- W++ N o-- K- w--- O- M+ V PS+ P
I'd bet, is simply that there are zillions of people out there with x86 hardware, and very few with sparc hardware. Sure, some die hards like myself will purchase old sparc gear just for the fun of it....
But, without getting into a big architecture war ehre... there is no reason for joe average to spend a dime on Sun hardware; and in cases where there IS a reason, it's usually because the supported applications work on Solaris/SPARC.
It's not that there is no SPARC support for linux, it's just that there is 1000 fold more support for x86.
Ever heard of Free Software??, it's like a big bull with two great horns on top.
www.gnu.org
In order to remain (become?) profitable, RedHat must focus on the most popular, and money-generating platform: the x86. Granted, it's not the best chip out there, but everyone has one.
I just can't afford, and cannot justify using Sun hardware when x86 machines will do the trick!
As far as I'm concerned, that's exactly what Sparc's are used for... Solaris.
Cheers!
Is SPARC an acronym for something or is it just a catchy name?
Anyone know?
I'm running Potato on an Ultra1 and a SS5 right now and it is very nice on Sparc. My U1 desktop with 128MB could easily step into place as a production system here, and be as good as any Solaris system.
As far as binaries go, most free software available for intel is also available for debian sparc. One point being overlooked is that if you want to run non-free software, UltraLinux can run Solaris binaries...
POKE 36879,8
I Don't know what the story poster is talking about. I installed Debian on my sparc5 a year ago and it worked just fine. RedHat/Mandrake/etc suck at producing usable non-x86 Linux distributions. Stick with Debian.
What a waste of fine hardware
Yes, they are free dumbass
I can run Debian on my Macintosh SE/30 machines?
Yup. Debian is the only dist which still keeps M68k up to date.
Suse has ISO's up on their site for sparc. There are 4 cd's in the set. And they install very easily. I have it on SparcStation 10 and it runs fine but is slow.
Oh really?
As an example, over the last weeks or so, support for the new $1k Sun Blade 100 machine has come to fruition. Already, it performs better than any Ultra5 or Ultra10 running Linux (yay commodity hardware) and is cheaper as well. (This is not an endorsement for running out and buying one for SPARC/Linux... yet... it still needs a lot of work, but it on it's way).
Though admittedly much of the work being done to get Linux working on the SB100 (and the similar AX1105 and Netra X1 products) with hardware loaned by Sun, one thing that's a tad annoying is the lack of support from Sun... when compared to other vendors with a unique hardware platform. Compaq, IBM, SGI, HP, Intel, etc... they're all more into it than Sun is... I think that maybe only Apple is less enthusiastic about Linux running on their hardware (but then you have IBM to pick up the PPC slack).
Work on a 64-bit compiler to have a 64-bit userspace, glibc support, etc. is going well from what I know. Some people are playing with it and working on it. Hopefully this can become a reality once gcc 3.0 hits the net.
Also, you seem to completely count out SuSE... their 7.1 release is quite good, and has everything you'll need or want. I personally run Debian, which I'm quite happy with. If you have a thing for Slackware, it's maintainer (Dave Cantrell) is still actively working on it despite the recent layoff there.
Finally, there are several excellent resources for SPARC/Linux stuff out there... there's the UltraLinux page and all the mailing lists listed there. On OPN (Open Projects Network... if you're into IRC), you can find a #SPARC channel, where I'm sometimes around to answer questions. I hope this helps quell your concern... we definitely can use more people banging on things, 32-bit and 64-bit alike, but it's definitely not dead.
I do wish there was more Linux support for Sparc, but it's not the end of the world. Most people who have Sparcs already have an OS that makes them happy. It's not like Sparc-Linux is going away just because RHAT decided Sparc isn't in the best interest of their shareholders.
Nor is the Sparc platform going away. Sun4 architecture is elegant and well documented. Compared to developing Linux for Mac/PPC, developing for Sparc is a breeze. With Apple you have to reverse engineer it onto a closed architecture. With Sparc, the vast majority of the stuff is documented and based on open standards.
In a few years, 64 bit UltraSPARCs are going to start appearing on the surplus market in large numbers. Like the pizza boxes that us Sparc nuts use today, there are going to be a bunch of cheap Ultras available for geeks to tinker with. Continuing to develop all Sparc-capable OS'es is important.
I wish there was more Linux support for Sparc. A few distros losing interest in SPARC is not the end of the world. Most people who have Sparcs already have an OS that makes them happy (and that OS is not always Linux :-O!!!, so if that makes you upset as a Linux zealot, get off your ass and start working on SPARC-Linux! It's that simple ;-) Sparcs kick ass, they're really sweet, elegant machines. Get one off eBay and have fun with it.
Linux for SPARC is not going to die just because RHAT thinks Sparc isn't profitable. Debian, Slackware and others have good SPARC distros and they've attracted a base of smart, motivated Linux developers to keep things going
Sun4 (the 32 bit Sparc platform) is as strong as ever. The architecture is elegant and well documented. Compared to developing for Mac/PPC, developing for Sparc is a breeze. With Apple you have to reverse engineer it onto a closed architecture. With Sparc, the vast majority of the stuff is documented and based on open standards.
In a few years, 64 bit UltraSPARCs are going to start appearing on the surplus market in large numbers. Lots of folks picked up SparcStation 2's, 5's, 10's, and 20's for cheap from surplus sales or from eBay. Like those pizza boxes that us Sparc nuts use today, the Ultras will soon be very accessibly to hobbyists and do-it-yourselfers. We're going to need better support for all our OS'es on UltraSPARC.
NOTE: the phrase "OpenBSD" was excluded from this version of my post it order to keep it on-topic. Grahhh... moderators."
I have to say though that sun hardware is MUCH MUCH MUCH more reliable than PC hardware. I've personally owned lots of sun machines over the last 10+ years: IPC, SLC, LX, SS10, SS20, U10 and they have very reliable hardware. The machines have been left on for 24x7 and stuff just doesn't fail. I have pc hardware that costs less, but I've lost power supplies and hard disks. Brushless fans last about a month and I thought I caught on, but even ball-bearing fans on pc's don't always last.
I'd be interessted in hearing how people get their PC hardware to last...
Well, I upgraded them for faster machines. (faster is always a relative term) I still have the IPC, kind of as a keepsake. It ran from around 1990 or so until about 1999. By then it was REALLY slow and was maxed out on memory. It also has 207m of hard disk space. ha ha. The LX replaced it, and is still in service (runs as an ISDN answering machine, mail server, webserver, gateway, etc). The SLC I gave away (it was an alarm clock for several years - runs silent with speaker for sound and oclock on the display). No space. The SS10 became my desktop machine after the LX, then I sold it to pay for the SS20. I recently retired the SS20 (5 years?), just to try out a dual-intel machine. (after I figured out how to get a sun usb keyboard working with it - I like the sun open, close, cut, copy and paste buttons).
I have the ultra-10 here at work (paid for it out of my own pocket).
I use sun monitors with all my systems. They sync for PC's and you can buy 21" ones used for between
$250 ~ $500.
Now that I think about it, I had 3rd-party memory in my ss20 once and had to return it. I also had a scsi drive screw up in 92, when I accidentally cut power to the system and fsck errors diverged but I reformatted it and it was fine.
My experiences with PC hardware has been bad hard disks. I had an ASUS P2B-LS motherboard
fail (onboard ethernet died), Abit bh6 (ide #2 died), 2 diamond video cards (older), countless fans - case fans, power supply fans, cpu fans. Keyboards, cdrom(s), mice.
Also, when the suns lose power, they usually come back up afterwards. The pc stuff sometimes reboots, sometimes it doesn't. weird.
I wonder if comparing to some of those compaq proliant machines might be more apples vs. apples. I wonder how they do. Inside they look pretty robust.
ipx = sun4m
lx = sun4m
whoops, sorry I'm full of crap. ipx is sun4c. lx is sun4m. doh!
Sun makes and sells Solaris, but they do not actively support Linux. Period.
Oh, really? I guess you're just ignoring Cobalt, which has the leading market share in dedicated small linux servers. A quick visit to see rack after rack of blue slices at any convenient internet data center should convince you, if you must see to believe...
As an aside, I like Linux (a lot), but honestly, there is still not a lot of overlap in what Linux and Solaris are good for, although that's changing some over time. If you want a big SMP box, Solaris or True64 are far and away the best choices on the planet (although I'm a dyed in the wool Sun guy, I think Compaq has the best Unix anywhere right now). Linux has a LONG way to go before it's really able to do SMP with these big boys. (On the other hand, if Linux fits the problem, a single CMOS mainframe makes a lot more sense than all those silly Cobalt boxes, as more and more people are figuring out...)
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
Go buy Adrian Cockroft's book on Sun Performance Tuning. It's a wealth of information about how to make Solaris dance to a number of different tunes...
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
There is SuSE Linux for Solaris, and we all know that SuSE is a great company. ;) So, there is support for those who need it. Personally, I can't ever run Linux on my Sparc, I choose to run Solaris, and if it is a very slow machine like my IPX, I run something funky like NetBSD and OpenBSD.
------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
Have you actually ever used Linux?!?
I have installed, used and deployed Linux on Intel, SPARC, and alpha with massive amounts of success.
Linux runs very well on the Alpha and SPARC (and by SPARC the includes the UltraSPARC). Ask NOAA. They do weather pattern studies with a huge cluster of Alphas running Linux.
I'm sorry to go off on this rant but damn people. Does anyone here read anything other than slashdot? There are well documented benchmarks comparing Linux to Solaris on the SPARC architecture. There are many HUGE installs of Linux powered Alpha clusters. These are generally very well pubicised through the tech industry and the Linux "community".
This is slightly off-topic, but does anyone know who actually makes the Sparc? I know Apple outsources to Motorola for the PPC stuff, but I've never heard who does Sun's dirty work. I'm pretty sure it's not Sun, cuz I've they don't seem like the kind of outfit to have their own wafer fab.
- Rev.
Slackware-current has support for sparc, and if you wait (another month hopefully) for the next release, it will be official. yeah slack!
and redhat sparc 6.2 runs fine on my sparcstation 20.
NO. Solaris has ALWAYS been the minor number of SunOS.
have a look at my solaris 8 box :
> uname -a
SunOS darkstar 5.8 Generic_108528-05 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-4
SunOS has always been 5.x and the x is used for Solaris (which is SunOS+the desktop and stuff). think of solaris as the distribution of sunos.
Surely you mean a homogeneous network if everything is running Linux?
Yep, it is.
Sparc ISO's of 2.2r3
I need a sig.
I'm pretty sure the Debian Sparc devel tree is pretty active.
Maybe you should give that a try.
I need a sig.
He's not an idiot, he just picked the wrong Sparc to start with. The Sparc 5s, especially the higher-Mhz ones, have a truly evil memory architecture, and many have a built-in video system that is not fully supported. I love the old pizza boxes and lunch boxes, but the 4s and 5s I avoid like the plague. (By the way, this message passed through two lunchbox Sparcs on its way to the world - an SS10 running Mandrake, and an LX with OBSD 2.8.
What this really shows is how dangerous it is to make sweeping generalizations from a sample of one.
Everyone will start to cheer when you put on your sailin' shoes.
Don't say "This isn't a troll..." and then proceed to troll. The practiced trolls will see you as an amateur and lots of another people will be in the least convinced by a short post of generalitiies.
My 2.2.14 box (Mandrake 7 install, various manual upgrades) doesn't play nice with NFS at all. Previous uptimes in the hundreds of days, recompiled for NFS and switched on the server, now it goes a week without a panic if I'm lucky.
That's with one low-volume client (Vaxstation 3100 writing mrtg logs). $DEITY only knows what the thing would do under load...
Regards,
Tim.
SPARC's OpenPROM is really, really cool.
What an understatement. OpenPROM 3.x absolutely rocks. PC BIOS makers could learn a thing or two from OpenPROM. (Yes, it's command-line instead of a GUI. Deal with it.) Device aliases have saved my bacon countless times.
Embedding a FORTH interpreter in the PROM for the boot monitor ("BIOS" for those of you who have never journeyed beyond PC-land) might seem like overkill, but I've heard a couple of sysadmins who apparently had their bacon saved by the ability to run arbitrary FORTH scripts before an operating system is loaded (remapping devices and whatnot).
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
I am happily using OpenBSD 2.9 (snapshot) on a Sparc IPX with 64 MB of RAM.
I even have free space on the 500 MB HDD...
It's also well-known that x86 hardware is crappy at context-switching (i.e. it's really expensive), and isn't the Ultra 5 a 64-bit RISC chip? *Of course* it's going to be better.
BTW, you should try to phrase your posts a little better. Your post came off as something like a troll at first glance. ... What's a stack?
------
I'm an assembly guru
He's a C++ monkey. It's a stream operator that's overloaded with a counter-intuitive function that always returns true. ... What's a stack?
------
I'm an assembly guru
A partial list includes
ghostview/ghostscript
gnome
kde
gcc
netscape
emacs and xemacs
samba
cdrecord
screen
I didnt see teTeX, or the gimp, but a quick search around sunfreeware.com or freeware4sun.com should turn up binaries in package format.
file:
a) Why Linux sux and {*BSD,Solaris,Win2K} rox
b) Why Linux rox and {*BSD,Solaris,Win2K} sux
c) Which distro is best for SPARC
and they all miss the point.
Red Hat was the first to notice it, and perhaps other distro's will eventually, but the fact is that Sun doesn't *like* Linux. They don't appreciate Linux treading on their SPARC/Solaris turf, and they really don't like Linux being chosen over their own software for high-end installations. So, rather than play fair they play dirty. They give away their "tuned, high-performance" software to users with fewer than 8 processors in order to maintain/increase market share. Then, when your computing needs require more than 8 processors, you get to pay up (*cough*M$*cough*). This is happening to *BSD as well. Notice that NetBSD/sparc64 isn't as complete as it could be, and OpenBSD/sparc doesn't even support the UltraSPARC yet.
Consider:
Compaq makes and sells Tru64 Unix, but they actively support Linux for Alpha.
IBM makes and sells AIX, but they actively support Linux for S/390 (and, I believe, their RS/6000 series now).
SGI makes and sells IRIX, but they actively support Linux for MIPS.
HP makes and sells HP/UX, but they actively support Linux for PA-RISC and Itanium (well, at least they are starting to).
Dell sells Windows, but they actively support Linux for x86.
Sun makes and sells Solaris, but they do not actively support Linux. Period.
Go to http://www.sun.com/linux/ and you will see what I'm talking about. On the first page is an article on how to transition from Linux to Solaris. Dig deeper, and you'll find their page on UltraLinux, and at the bottom it says:
People are complaining about a lack of feature support or completeness in Linux for SPARC, and the truth is that there aren't enough UltraLinux zealots out there to overcome the corporate inertia or the free Solaris bait.
I'm sure Dave Miller can tell you all about the progress made with the Linux/MIPS port while he was working for SGI, and then how far it went after SGI lost interest (and I'm talking about the SGI of 1996-97, not the SGI of today).
And if you are looking for a guide on how to go about making Linux work inspite of a companies best efforts, take a look at the Macintosh versions of the Linux/PPC or Linux/68k ports. Apple never has released detailed hardware developer information for the old 68k hardware, but Linux and *BSD run on them anyway, because of the dedicated volunteers who chose to make it work.
UltraLinux isn't dead, but without Sun (or Fujitsu or some other large SPARC-based entity) showing some interest, then it's all up to a handful of volunteers, and they'll get to it when they get to it (unless you get there first).
Actually the LA on this machine generally hangs around 3~5. It's the typical thing, a webserver running apache+mod_perl+mysql, lots and lots of hits/day. The load is mostly MySQL handling CGI-sourced queries. I'm most impressed with the disk I/O I guess. Ever seen disks being worked, but the word "thrashing" never came to mind? The E250 is nice for that anyway, what with all the internal storage available.
I agree wholeheartedly that Solaris "ramps up" more nicely than Linux, though.
Don't sweat the petty things. But do pet the sweaty things.
Thrashing isn't necessarily that specific.
Thrashing might mean the head is dancing alot, doing unnecessary seeks... It could be multiple re-reads, as in the case of a pending hardware failure or poorly-tuned buffers... etc.
The Jargon File seems to agree with both of us.
Don't sweat the petty things. But do pet the sweaty things.
Put Linux on an E450 and compare it with Solaris on an E450 and you would get a much better comparison.
I admin an E250 running Linux, and in my experience, it blows Solaris (2.6 anyway) away on the same hardware.
Don't sweat the petty things. But do pet the sweaty things.
I installed OpenBSD 2.8 on a sparcstation 5 and am quite happy. OpenBSD is the sysadmin's dream, everything is transparent and easy to administer.
Lotsa people have been saying it - Slack on SPARC. Few have been saying why it might be a good way to go, though.
Slack, IMO, is much more like Solaris or SunOS than RedHat or Debian. Being Linux though, it would probably maintain any performance advantages typically found over Solaris.
It's also very, very clean and maintains very simple configuration methods. The Slack scripts are simply the most elegant I've seen (and I've used 5 or 6 distros) and are really easy to work with. No more hunting through the seemingly endless collection of dialog boxes in LinuxConf for what you want to change.
Finally, since there's also an Alpha and an x86 version, you can have boxes with different architectures that are configured and used in almost exactly the same way, which is a plus that any distro that maintains versions across several platforms has.
"Caffeine is not an option. Caffeine is a way of life."
My guess is that since the SPARC HW is so expensive (someone mentioned a 450.. have you PRICED a 450 recently?) that most guys that WOULD develop for it can't. And it's not like Sun is helpin' w/ the port....
-- You can't idiot-proof anything, because they're always coming out with better idiots.
Lack of support for an OS stems from a low user base. A low user base can be attributed to the lack of performance of a platform.
Last year, I benchmarked an UltraSparc 5 (400MHz version) and it's number crunching ability was about that of a Pentium II 300.
With these machines costing $3500 (Australian), it's no wonder most people are opting for the x86 architecture. Although, the people that refuse to trade reliability for performance would still choose the Sparcs.
I read many comments on the issue of pricing. Well, I think the new Blade workstations, with UltraSparc at 500 MHz, 128 MB RAM,100/10 Mbit ethernet, 4 USB, FireWire, PGX64 Framebuffer, CD and floppy at the price of less than one grand, is cheap.
Sigged!
Because Solaris 8 requires a sun4m architecture or newer machine. I just moved out most of my sun4c machines in favor of a handful of SPARCClassics (bottom-end sun4m). If you are willing to stick with Solaris 7, SPARC2s and the like are OK. If you want an evolving OS and you have an older SPARC (especially one with 64Mb), that's where *BSD and Linux come into play.
The first distro i tried was mandrake, it was miserable, it would barley run, there were library problems everywhere. Then i tried redhat 6.2, i was using the machine as a desktop, so redhat seemed like a good choice, i used redhat for several months, it worked fine, the installer sucked, it took several attempts to get it to install, but once it was running it stayed running.
After many months of redhat i decided to switch to debian, i made this switch for 2 reasons, one redhat had announced 7.0 with no sparc release, and two i had been playying with debian on my x86 boxes, and i liked it. SO i installed debian, i tried many times to get the machine to boot from the floppy, it didnt work, i later found out that an ultra5 will not boot linux from a floppy. Once i switched to trying to boot from CD everything worked fine, the install worked the first time. No problems. I have been using debian 2.2 for several months(im using it right now) and it works fine. It just seems to feel more mature, more tested than the other 2 distros i tried.
some notes about redhat:
1. redhat never said they were not going to ever have a sparc distro again.
2. RPMs are still built for sparc in redhats rawhide system.
3. Redhats sparc mailing list is still active, not as active as it once was, but i think there were 5 postings yesterday, so there are still definitley users.
-- free as in swatantryam - not soujanyam.
I administer 2 e450's one is about 2 years old, one about 1 year old. I have had one power supply go bad on me. (The server didn't go down until I shut it down to swap in the new PS, and it could have been hot-swapped.) The uptime on one of the e450's was 5 months 14hrs, when I checked it before I moved into our new bigger server room. No random reboots, no bad CPU's no bad RAM. I have been happy with the e450's, until I started getting some HP servers, an L2000 with 4 360MHz 2 MB cache cpu's, 4GB RAM abosolutly SMOKES the e450's with 4 400MHz 4MB cache CPU's 4GB RAM. Next to the HP's the suns just aren't up to speed.(HA!)
(I have an e4500 12 way too, now that is FAST, but I don't have an HP box to compare it to.)
If you voted for Nader, THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT!!
>>Hmmm Let's see...Oracle published Version 8.1.7 for Linux a year ago, where is the 64 bit sun version?
a ss-to-compair-to-an-e10K would it take to get as many transactions/second?? How much will all that hardware cost? What will each system cost you over 5 years? (Admin salaries, hardware maintainace, how many $$ you lose to downtime, office space, power, A/C, etc..)
Well I have it running on, 2 e450's, 1 e4500, and on 2 Ultra5's...
>>price/performance, Solaris can't touch it....
It would be interesting to see a cost/oracle-transaction break down when you start talking about enterprise servers. Say how many transactions/second can an e10k with 64 CPU's and about 1TB of RAM do? Now how big a linux cluster/pull-whatever-kind-of-x86-HW-out-of-your-
I don't really think that linux can even be compaired to Solaris in a case like this. Apples to oranges.
Of course I'm wasting my time responding to an AC who is just trolling anyway...
If you voted for Nader, THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT!!
good post... seriously.
--
--
"What do you want me to do? Whack a guy? Off a guy? Whack off a guy? Cause I'm married."
The SPARC port of Slackware is under active development. For more information and discussion about the SPARC port of Slackware, check out this link:
http://www.slackware.com/forum/list.php?f=6
I personally have used a development version of Slackware on a Sun Ultra 1/170E system running framebuffer video on a Creator 3D card, and it ran great. Fairly easy install too.
An Ultra 5 is pretty much just a PC with an UltraSparc CPU. Linux was designed with this kind of hardware in mind, Solaris is meant for bigger servers running SCSI disks and such. Put Linux on an E450 and compare it with Solaris on an E450 and you would get a much better comparison.
SPARC has the same problem as Alpha. Once you pay the premium for non-wintel hardware, the cost of a commercial OS isn't that much more. Unlike Linux for SPARC, Solaris for SPARC is well supported.
(We've had far fewer problems with Tru64/Alpha than with Linux/Alpha. Factoring my time in it's a no brainer -- Tru64 is much cheaper than Linux.)
One typically only buys SPARC or Alpha hardware because off the shelf wintel boxes can't do the job. And once one switches to thinking about "how do I solve my problem for the least amount of money" the commerical OS often makes sense.
--Andre L.
Why do you want to do this, why would someone prefer Linux to Solaris on SPARC? I'm genuinely curious
Well, personally, I just got a SPARCstation5 cheap. I'm actually going to put OpenBSD on it, but I would almost rather throw it away than put Solaris on it - it's not the speediest of OSes even on an Ultra5 - what do you think it will be like on a 110 Mhz SPARC? (And this is relatively high end, as old SPARCs go).
Just to let you know Slackware has a great version of linux that runs on sparc flawlessly for me so far. I'm a huge slackware buff so you know but still I would highly recommend it.
Smileyq ---------------------------- UNIX geek and proud of it ----------------------------
NetBSD.
Really, it now has full Linux compatibity (so anything compiled for Linux/SPARC should just run without complaint), plus it has full support from the NetBSD project (which has been ported to more different platforms than any other OS on the planet), and all the other nice features of modern BSD.
Recommended.
--
Brad Knowles
Brad Knowles
http://daily.daemonnews.org/ -- if you're not
Wind back to August 1998 - I tried originally installed Red Hat on an old Axil (that's a Sun clone, in this case of a SparcStation 20). It was an absolute nightmare as there weren't any easily-obtainable bootable CDs, and we ended up netbooting it. The thing panicked repeatedly, and as for compiling kernels we might as well have compiled using pencil and paper for all the good it did.
Now come to the present day. I use the Slackware SPARC port, which in my view is absolutely excellent.
Here's the rundown on what was good (and bad) from each distribution I tried:
- Red Hat: Admittedly not tried it recently, but seemed to suffer from quite a few problems including kernels not compiling. Last tried 2.2.0, I think it was RH6. Install was reasonably trouble-free once we got it netbooting, and installation using the console port was fine.
- SuSE: Ruediger will kill me for this, but I had no ends of problems with it. The console port is not supported very well for installs, so you have to connect a monitor up to it - which for most people won't be accessible. That said, it seemed to work fine once installed and screwed down. Installed via CD, taken from SuSE's website.
- Debian: Mostly my unfamiliarity with Debian let me down here, but I've got a nameserver box running it quite happily now. It's a SS20 with 32M RAM and it ticks along fine, coping quite adequately with huge zonefiles. Installed via CD taken from a local Debian mirror.
- Slackware: A newcomer, but I'm a Slackware whore anyway so I was pretty good with it. Disadvantage is that the ISO just installs the bare essentials, so you have to download the rest of slackware-current and install it later. Big problem in that it didn't detect the basic network card on a SS5, SS10 or SS20 for an NFS install, but seemed to work OK on an Ultra5.
I haven't tried any others, but I'm eagerly awaiting the final Slackware distribution.Linux on a Sparc copes wonderfully with lots of database transactions and loads of I/O, certainly better than an Intel box will. In my day job we've had really good success running MySQL on a Sparc, but we're now porting to Oracle on Solaris (but only really cos they haven't released it for Sparc Linux!).
Smegma.
..you don't use Linux...you eat, breath, shit, piss, live it
You make it sound like a venerial disease.
I got a Sparcstation IPX a few years back, and it included Slowaris 2.5.1. Unfortunately, /usr was on the external drive and I didn't have the necessary SCSI cable to hook that up and, in my impatience, I decided to just throw OpenBSD on it.
;) OpenBSD is also fairly simple to administer and maintain, but Linux is definitely the more 'compatible' operating system if you're looking to run lots of software on your box. I just ran fvwm, GTKYahoo, TinyFugue, and ircII on it for the most part, but even Netscape with Solaris compatibility was acceptable. Even KDE (back in the pre-1.0 days ;) ran at a usable pace.
Having run OpenBSD 2.4 and RedHat Linux (using the 2.2.x kernel if I remember right), I would definitely say that OpenBSD is much quicker than Linux on the Sparc platform. (Tiny factors get multiplied on that speed of a box.
If you have a fast enough box, though, and don't need the level of security and stability that OpenBSD provides (Linux may or may not be as stable as OpenBSD on sparc, but I have not used it enough to know for certain; and it's definitely easier to make OpenBSD secure than to make a typical Linux distribution that way), then Linux is the way to go. As to Slowaris, why bother when it's easier to make the fun applications (from GNOME or KDE to pingus to Mozilla to whatever) run under Linux and they run faster anyhow? Use Solaris if it's the right choice for your application, but don't use it if it's not.
Why not IDE? The mechanics are identical to SCSI and the electronics are no more failure-prone.
Your load is probably low. Solaris is dog-slow because it continuously defragments memory. When your server is maxed out and the load is 20+, you will find it handles better with Solaris.
There's a lot of older Sparc hardware out on the market, at reasonable prices (e.g. Ebay). SPARC hardware is in the hands of a LOT of enthusiasts and hobbyists out there. Plus a lot of companies have truckloads of older Sparcs lying around. The grim reality of the situation is that these machines are way too underpowered to run any recent incarnation of Solaris. I tried running Solaris 2.6 on my Sparc IPX, and let me tell you, having my teeth pulled WITHOUT novocaine would have been far preferable. However, RedHat/sparc runs perfectly fine on it, and it runs at a quite acceptable pace. So with Linux/sparc, companies and individuals could turn piles of dusty but perfectly working hardware into productive print servers, light web servers, DNS servers, what have you.
--
Yomigaeru Aiyan Geek!!!
OK, I am committing the cardinal sin of replying to my own post. So sue me. But I forgot one important.. I mean REALLY IMPORTANT... point: Linux is Open Source!!! This is a MAJOR reason why many people choose to run Linux on their Sparcs. Having the source code to EVERYTHING handy, and to be able to browse through it or even modify it if the situation requires it, is an absolute godsend. Just try doing THAT with Solaris!
--
Yomigaeru Aiyan Geek!!!
Why was this modded as a troll ?
It's a simple _question_.
People that think linux is the magic bullet to solve every computing problem don't deserve moderator points. Or to be taken seriously.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Heh.
:)
Your history of SPARC processors and sun machines is basically entirely off
the sun4c was _not_ the first SPARC architecture. The plain old sun4 was. As seen in the sun4/110 VME workstation, (first desktop sparc box).
The Sun4c was infact sparc V8, iirc.
Sun4m != SuperSPARC. The sun4m is a _family_ of processors, of which, SuperSPARC happened to be one member. There was also superSPARC II, microSPARC II, HyperSPARC (ROSS/Cypress) and probably others I am forgetting. the superSPARC specifically added larger e-cache and multiple execution units.
The ultras have been shipping since '95, iirc.
For those interested, the maunal for Suns C compiler gives the sparc arch version and so on for each of these processors, and you can target code at any of them specifically (in addition to specifying their cache configuration - hows that for an optimizer ?)
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
SPARC is hardly dead. It was just _very_ recently that Sun dropped support for sun4c architecture machines from Solaris (sun4c's are things like Sparcstation 1, 1+, 2, SLC, ELC, IPC, IPX..)
The Ultra is not so different. Its V9 of the architecture. Saying that SPARCs are dead because UltraSPARC is the future is like saying the PIII is dead because the PIV is out.
The UltraSPARC has been shipping for a _long_ time. Even so, many many places run production systems on sun4m (ss5, ss10, ss20, etc). Additionally, there are a boatload of clone manufacturers with Sun4m offerings.
I also disagree with the equivalency statement you make regarding OSes.
Solaris is unusable on an old sun4c. So is linux. I suspect OpenBSD is better, but cannot be sure. Incidentally, one way to really help these machines is to put fast modern disks in them (fast as in high xfer rate and very low latency)... perhaps the fs speedups checked into obsd 2.9 will breathe some more life into the older sun4c's..
On the other end of the spectrum, Solaris is by far the most feature rich of the oses you list. Linux is [cheerleader speak: on] _so_ not even in the same ballpark. Wheres the multi-pathing ? Wheres the kernel re-entrancy. Wheres the support for more exotic sun hardware ?
Hell, wheres NFS ?
IMO linux has no niche on the sparc - solaris beats it on the high end, and its too big and slow compared to {open,net}bsd on the lowend.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
At one glance, I can count Solaris (aka SunOS), OpenBSD, NetBSD, and Linux. All of them are generally equivalent. And the SPARC is a dead architecture. Sun is no longer creating SPARCs, they're only making UltraSPARCs (64 as opposed to 32 bits).
I personally use OpenBSD on my SparcStation 2.
"Evil will always triumph over good, because good is dumb." - Dark Helmet (Spaceballs)
Well, yes, our SPARC boxes sit on a fast LAN so download speed is not an issue (although a 600 MB iso image is likely to be limited by the BW of the source still)
Convenience is the real issue.
All through the early 1990's I would ftp to prep.ai.mit.edu and check to see if there was a new release of gcc or emacs or some other piece of free software that I would build and install.
Now, there are simply too many packages for me to do that. I can't help but compare the rich suite of free software on my Linux box at home to the Solaris server at work and see how much easier it was to install SuSE 7.1 on a 20 GB ATA-100 and have loads more functionality than I do on our Sun LAN. Things like teTeX, ghostscript, gimp, KDE and GNOME, etc. take time to build from scratch.
On a LAN, homogeneity helps.
That being the case, we don't have much incentive to try to keep a zoo of Solaris/SPARC and Linux/SPARC at the same time. It is sufficiently annoying for us to straddle Solaris 2.6 and 8 in the midst of a sea of corporate Wintel desktops.
Also, when looking for binary desktop software, such as Netscape or Acrobat reader, you'll see Linux/x86 a lot more than */SPARC.
The convenience of a plethora of prebuilt open software is compelling. The economics of the Linux/x86 (for which all binary apps are targeted) are another reason that we will probably be moving to Linux/x86 from Solaris/SPARC on our desktops sometime in the next year.
We'll still retain our big Sun servers, but the desktop Solaris solution is not as exciting as it was many years ago. It's the passing of another era.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Thanks for the valuable tip!
(Since I'm not root, I'll see if I can get my local overworked sysadmins to consider enriching my life this way and unburdening me of all this build/install by hand...
P.S. The web page gets extra credit in my book for its author's first name.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
The Ultra 5, when Solaris 8 is loaded onto it, runs in 64 bit mode by default.
/platform/sun4u/boot.conf :
How many 64-bit applications are you running? I'm guessing that it won't be that many.
I've seen some vast improvements when you make the kernel boot up in 32 bit mode.
Add the following ot
ALLOW_64BIT_KERNEL_ON_UltraSPARC_1_CPU=false
then run:
eeprom boot-file=kernel/unix
---- Windows Emulator for Linux: kill -9 $RANDOM
You've hit it on the head - there's lots of used Sparc-stuff out and about - check usenet and yahoo as well as ebay.
The issue, I suspect, is that few Linux users need the raw power a Sparc can provide - and with the older boxes, you are dealing with proprietary, expensive spare parts (though the newer ones do a much better job of using commodity parts).
It really comes down to "free-market".
Look around you, how many Sparc stations do you see? Now look again, how many Intel stations do you see?
Need I remind everyone about Wintel?
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Sig
abbr.
Karma stuck at 50? Add 2-5 inches.. err.. 2-5x Karmas Count to your pen1es.. err.. Karma all naturally and private
Your point is well taken, BUT, if the community at large can not get its hand on a SPARC system, this community will not be able to support it.
Keep in mind that Mr. Linus started Linux simply because he HAD a cheap Intel box and know that many others had it too.
---------------
Sig
abbr.
Karma stuck at 50? Add 2-5 inches.. err.. 2-5x Karmas Count to your pen1es.. err.. Karma all naturally and private
I've put Debian on my Sparc2, and used it as a webserver. Works like a charm. It's even got a nifty framebuffer preload that shows up when you start up X.
_sig_ is away
Spoken like a true slackware fan, I thought the same thing ;)
It pains me to admit it, but the market for Linux on non-x86 platforms just isn't as big. (I run Linux on Alpha, PPC, ARM, and x86 at home, Alpha nd x86 at work. Oh, and I work in the Alpha microprocessor group.)
One of the classic strengths of open source and free software is code quality improvement through peer review. The trouble is, most of the people testing and debugging are on x86. So you get better coverage, more bugs found, and more bugs fixed on x86 than on any other platform. Second tier platforms don't do as well because they have a smaller user base, and thus a smaller developer base.
In other words, support for x86 is less suceptible to bit rot, because the features get exercised more often.
Just one example is the kernel source. Virgin 2.4.3 fails to build on Alpha. (How exactly did Linus et. al. miss that?) While it built and ran on my PPC machine, it ignored keyboard and mouse input. (Aparently nobody noticed the ADB support for older machines was broken.)
Compaq literally shovels money, hardware, and other resources at RedHat to keep Alpha in its line of supported platforms. It's worth more to us to have it than it is to them.
IMHO, open source project leaders shoulds actively try to get their code tested on as many different platforms as possible. It shakes out additional bugs and improves the code. (And I don't just mean CPU architectures. If it works on x86/Linux, check it on ARM/NetBSD, Sparc/Solaris, PPC/MacOSX, and every other paltform you can get your hands on.) Unfortunately, that takes time, effort, hardware, and other resources that are usually in short supply.
CVS is teh suck. Use Vesta instead.
+++
+++
NO CARRIER
Bought an Ultra 5 last October. Had it running since then. Now machine was supposed to change places. Shut it down, moved from left desk to right. Tried to bring it up again. ZAP! - Machine dead. No boot device.
It turns out, harddrive is as dead as dead fish. The I opened machine; it's the same shitty Seagate Barracuda IDE drive in there that Seagate sells to people building shitty Seagate Barracude drives into their PCs.
So much for glorious Sun Hardware.
f.
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
I run SuSE 7.0 and (with the exception of the installer choosing the wrong keyboard map by default) I like it a lot. It's got new features, an up-to-date kernel (I'm not in front of the box so I can't give real specifics) and is quite comprehensive (4 CDs long, 3 binaries, 1 source). I was worried about SuSE's non-x86 distros after I played with a PPC beta that utterly stunk (nothing worked in X - just a server; couldn't even find crtl-alt-bksp to kill it because the keybd map was wrong) but SuSE SPARC is quite nice.
That's what FreeBSD is for.
WHich is why sunfreeware.com, and the "companion CD" exist.
For the former, use http://www.bolthole.com/solaris/pkg-get.html to make it even easier.
For the latter: It's important to know that sun seems to keep ADDING to the "companion CD". So the one that comes with later versions of solaris, have more, and newer versions of, free software.
does debian have a sparc port? I think yes.. Am I wrong?
No really. I'm not trying to flame. But you're an idiot. 5 hours to install linux on a sparc? It took me 3 hours to install linux on an iBook before the iBook was actually supported. (lots of hand tweaking). And I didn't know ANYTHING about macs back then.
original Sparc is the probally the 2nd best supported architecture for Linux, and Ultra(32bit mode) is a close 3rd. My personal SS10 and SS20s run SuSE(bleck) and Debian(It was easy). The only difficulty I ever had with installing linux was support for install via console port. (since I gave away my sun keyboards to my friends).
I'm not some sort of genius either. I'm just some dumb schmuck that bought a couple sparcs of eBay thinking it might be a cool challenge to run Linux on a non-intel. Well that "challenge" disappeared rather quickly.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Needless to say, the machine's tight on the outside withstanding such attacks, but also on the inside, if one of my users starts thinking he needs to act funky.
Try it! -> www.netbsd.org/Ports/sparc/
- Hubert P.S.: There's also support for sparc64, sun3 and sun2 hardware in NetBSD, if required.
Put Solaris 8 on and then compare. 2.6 is 3+ years old.
I've been running Linux on a variety of Sparc boxes (mostly SPARCStation 20's, but also on an E250.) I'm using RedHat 6.2 since I also use RH on PCs, and the fact that you could run the same operating system on different platforms is a big selling point to management. ("No, I'm not playing - I'm investigating seamless interoperability between our existing hardware platforms, boss." ;-) RedHat dropping support for Sparc knocked the wind out of that idea. (Yes, I could switch to a different distribution, but once you've learnt the ins and outs of one, changing to another is about as much fun as changing versions of Windows.)
The biggest stumbling block to using non-Intel platforms with Linux is application support. Look for Sparc (or Alpha) versions of Acrobat Reader, Applix etc. and you won't find them - sure there are "Linux" versions, but only if you're running on Intel platforms. Netscape was available for Sparc Linux (built by RedHat?) but it stuck at around 4.51 compared to the "current" 4.77. Given the prospect of explaining to my users why these applications aren't available, and Solaris seemed a lot easier despite the ridiculous licensing fees. (The DiskSuite RAID tools are very nice, though.)
IBM seems to be doing the right thing by providing a machine for Linux developers to try their applications on the S/390 - presumably this is also open to the likes of Adobe to build Acrobat Reader for this platform. I'm not holding my breath for Sun to follow suit... yet.
So that I can have a standard system around all the platforms I have. That's why I've linux on my USparc.
I think that always is too big of a word for you to understand. Solaris just recently switched to using the minor number of SunOS. The most popular version of Solaris around Y2K was Solaris 2.5.1 which was SunOS 5.5.1. Some people switched to Solaris 2.6 (SunOS 5.6), but our Sun reps didn't recommend it.
As the creator of the Sparc port I guess I ought to say something. To be honest, I work exclusively these days on the 64-bit port. UltraSparc is enough to take all of my spare time when I'm not working on the networking. And yu will note that at least in Linus's tree, UltraSparc tends to be the most uptodate non-x86 port, I send updates on an almost daily basis to Linus. I tried to keep 32-bit Sparc chugging along but I stopped wanting to give the impression that I could keep up, I simply couldn't do it all. I could have kept trying and doing a half-assed job on both the 64-bit and 32-bit ports. I'd rather concentrate my energy on one port and do a good job.
I never saw any reason to run Linux on a Sparc in the first place. Solaris is stable, robust, and easy to administer it's also written specifically for the Sparc platform by the makers of that platform. Linux on the X86 is a different story because there isn't anything better.
I think you're making his case for him. Sun is writing Solaris more for their high end stuff than their low end stuff, so somebody who happens to own a low-end Sun box may well be happier with Linux than with Solaris. Telling him to compare Solaris with Linux on an E450 isn't very useful if his box is an Ultra 5. He needs to compare them on the platform that he's going to be running them on. The fact that the Ultra5 is more comprable to a PC may be evidence that he should look at a PC instead of a Sun the next time he goes shopping for a new box, but as long as he's talking about current hardware he needs to consider what OS will get him the most out of it, which it sounds like even you admit is Linux.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Well, when a friend of mine worked at Carls Jr., they got to buy anything in the store half price during their lunch brake and before leaving. This was likely a move to save face. Imagine seeing people wearing Carl's Jr. uniforms walking into Burger King. I think Sun is trying a similar policy.
First, Sun has always bundled Solaris with their hardware to get people hooked (first one's free) and more recently, they are giving away Solaris on Intel and Sparc platforms, more or less to prevent Linux from taking over, and those Linux users looking for FreeBeer(tm) not FreeSpeech(tm) are likely to switch. Of course, if it wasn't for Linux, do you think Sun would be giving away Solaris? Or the Solaris source code?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Debian has a sparc port for stable / testing / unstable. See www.debian.org Try it, you may like it and even praise redhat for discontinuing sparc support. Yes I know, the more competitors, the better (up to some point), but one's first contact with apt-get or make-kpkg is unforgetable :)
!
^_^
Ditto this. We have three 420R's and one 220R and they've had a bad serial port (had to replace the motherboard!), bad CPU's (the dreaded cache problem), bad RAM, it's been one thing after another. We have over 30 PCs, and the only problem we've had with them has been one bad serial port knocked out by static and my power supply fan started making a lot of noise. Other than that, nothing. I don't think very highly of Sun's hardware anymore. It used to be good. Not anymore.
This is true, and not long ago I spent several hours attempting to get SuSE 7.1 to install on my SparcStation 20. Unfortunately, despite a reasonable amount of experience with linux on multiple platforms, I had very little luck.
The SparcStation has no CD drive, so I was forced to choose between booting from a disk or from RARP/TFTP. I was unable to boot from the disk image supplied because it was too large by a few k to fit onto a floppy, and the network installer seemed dead set on finding a file on the CD which just isn't there. In fact, because the installer provided such meaningless error messages, the only way for me to find out what file the installer was looking for was to run a sniffer on the machine I was serving the CD image from.
I was able to get rescue mode running on the machine, but because I don't have enough experience with SuSE, I was unsure of how to attempt a manual install.
Eventually, I just gave up and installed good ol' Redhat 6.2 on the box with no trouble at all. Sure, it's not quite state of the art, but since I later discovered that the machine only has an 8 bit video card, I'm not going to miss XFree 4 or the latest versions of Gnome and KDE too much.
Has anyone else had better luck than me with SuSE 7.1 sparc? Would you care to share some advice?
Speedier / lighter weight, at least on the older hardware (IPC -> SS20). Reminds folks of the good old SunOS 4.1.3 days :-).
My previous installs have gone OK. I haven't installed 7.1 before, though. I would guess that you probably needed to do your install through YaST instead of YaST2. You could probably get it going by typing yast from the rescue boot but I've never actually tried that so I don't know. Yast does make it easy to install over the network (lucky for you w/ no cd drive), all you have to do is change the installation media to the ftp site (or a mirror). In any case, I'm glad you got something working for you besides Solaris.
For the people asking why use Linux instead of Solaris? two reasons: 1) it's LOTS faster. 2) Free as in speech.
Politics, Culture, Food?
SuSE just released their latest version (7.1) for SPARC. It includes the 2.4 kernel and KDE2.
Politics, Culture, Food?
If you want bleeding-edge stuff, change "stable" to "unstable" everywhere it occurs in your /etc/apt/sources.list and upgrade at will. :)
--
--
We have fought the AC's, and they have won.
I can't justify $999 for a Sun Blade 100 to run Solaris 8 and SunScreen Lite firewall for my home systems. Have you run Solaris 8 on any Sun machine before the Ultras??
I get 100-150 touchy feely bastards poking around my firewall trying to exploit lpd, rpc, ftp and all of the Wintel backdoors each week. I'd gladly pay $80 for Redhat 7.1 SPARC rather than trying to make "Ultra" Solaris 8 work on my LX. I don't expect Sun to continue to tune Solaris for the old machines, but if I can't run a linux or a BSD variant, I guess I'll have to move to Wintel hardware for my firewall...
What options are there for Solaris firewalls that can be run on the "affordable" non-Ultra SPARCs?? I do prefer Solaris for a desktop, but haven't been able to get a decent firewall solution for Solaris....
1. fopen() in solaris is broken. Try running a perlscript with 253+ open files.
2. apt-get update ; apt-get upgrade is a much lesser pain in the *** than the solaris way of (security) updates.
3. smaller footprint, runs faster in some cases.
4. securing a box is easier if the box is in a network without firewalls.
Those 4 reasons are enough reason for me to prefer linux over solaris in some occasions.
It's not the ulimit command. It's a bug in the libc. Every file you open beyond the 255th gets closed immediately after opening it. The error you get is "Can't write to closed filehandle" instead of the "Can't open file"-error you get when your ulimit has run out. I still have to contact sun about it. I did some research, and this bug seems to be pretty old :)
Well, the point of this story was in fact that in some circumstances, the only thing that will get the job done on a sparc is by running linux. Most of the stories here tell otherwise. I don't say you'll have to choose debian over solaris, slackware or any other OS. The most important reason that I use debian on my linux boxes is because debian costs less time/work to manage than other distro's.
I've been running RH 6.1 on my sparc for the last 6 months. I have Solaris 8 sitting here doing nothing. I've downloaded Debian and Suse. For some reason the Debian and Suse ISOs I made won't boot.
The main reason I've been doing this is because solaris is a pain in the rear once you get used to all the gnu tools. I've also benchmarked many of the gnu utilities, the core of *nix as far as I'm concerned. Commands like sort, cut, wc and the like. The gnu utilities are an order of magnatitude faster than the ones that solaris has. I have no idea why. You'd think Sun Microsystems would have an advantage over the gnu utils in that they can write it specifically for their sparc processors.
At any rate, linux has a more consitant interface than Solaris does. Solaris by itself isn't very developer friendly. So, knowing that I'm going to install autotools, gcc, and its ilk, why start on solaris? It seems more like putting a ribbon on a pig.
I have used it on both an Ultra 5 and an Ultra 2. Very happy with the performance on both.
SealBeater
-- Its survival of the fittest...and we got the fucking guns!!!
Red Hat may have dropped their SPARC support but there's still plenty to choose from:
Debian has active ports for both SPARC/UltraSPARC with a 32-bit userland and an UltraSPARC port with a 64-bit userland. The 32-bit SPARC port is much more up-to-date and complete, and basically is at parity with Debian-x86. It has a stable, testing and unstable branch just like Debian-x86 and thanks to the clever Debian package management and development tools is kept up-to-date with the main x86 tree automatically. Due to Debian's widely-ported and volunteer nature the SPARC port is likely to be supported for quite some time.
SuSE is also widely ported, and again, has a SPARC port which is essentially at parity with the main x86 version - 7.1.
Slackware also has a SPARC port, but if you are used to Red Hat or Solaris it may be too much of a culture shock with things like its BSD-style initscripts and primitive package management.
All of these are modern, up-to-date distros, which (Debian especially) I prefer to Red Hat.
Try them out. You might like them.
I'd be interessted in hearing how people get their PC hardware to last... It's called good hardware. Asus motherboards. IBM, Seagate SCSI hard drives NO IDE Name brand ECC memory (like Crucial) Good enclosures (I use the SuperMicro 760)
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Ok. Say you have some open software you want to compile and run on your SPARC boxen (of which I have a truckload). Now suppose it hasn't been ported to Solaris yet and probably never will be. Now suppose there are some very good Linux ports of the software.
well for personal use. Anyway how are Sun to know if you're doing 'work' on your computer, anyway ?
Good thing Sun preemptively suspected Linus might call the next release 3.0 by renaming Solaris 2.7 as Solaris 7. Now Solaris 8 will be *five* better than Linux 3! Of course, Linus could get rid of the 2 as well and go from 2.4 to '5', which would only be three worse.
On a side note, Java 1.2 -> 2 and Solaris 2.7 -> 7 was one of the most obnoxious things I have ever seen Sun marketing do.
You are completely wrong. uname on Solaris 2.6 shows it as being SunOS 5.6, not as SunOS 5.2.6. You are also wrong about SunOS having always been 5.x -- 4.x releases existed. I am not sure how Solaris 1 releases synch up with SunOS numbering because I am too young (I started out with Solaris 2.5.1).
// new marketing!
Here is how the numbering of Solaris 2.x - 8 works:
if ((SunOS < 5.7) && (SunOS >= 5.0))
Solaris = SunOS - 3;
else if (SunOS >= 5.7)
Solaris = (SunOS - 5) * 10;
http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/binaries/downl oad.html
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Ehm, i think you guys are going on a sidetrack... Somehow this has become a dist war... And just a hint to some ppl, Afaik Debian isn't a linux distro... It just USES the linux kernel *temporarly*. The most intresting aspect of all this is that linux arch updates for sparc is slow and dosn't seem to join the main kernel tree untill much later. (or am i mistakend?) fx, There is a patch that makes 2.4.4 compile on a sparc now, but you need a some special sbus drivers etc etc so all in all it's quite a large download. And gennerally i have to say that i was very disapointed when i saw that linux had no support for the 'OpenPROM' built in watchdog... Heck ofa lot better than a sw watchdog... And i have also read that the scsi drivers leaves something to be desired and also about the mmu thing. And a funny thing about it is that it's being used as a OpenBSD/NetBSD strong point... Flames >/dev/null other, mail or reply, you'll underdstand how to use the email...
At first I had Redhat but after they stopped supporting it and it corrupted my Hard disk I moved to suse.
Twas ok but I didn't really give it a run. I had been meaning to try debian somewhere so when I saw they had a sparc port, I had to try it.
After the horrible install, its great. apt-get is great. It needed some work to get X going. Also getting it too boot at all proved a challenge. It deceided to nuke all my disk settings in the prom. But once going it is best. JM
My sparc2's (also LX's, IPX's, Classic's) run Redhat 6.2 (iso's are readily availible) - IMHO one of the more secure and stable linux distros. While it may not have the latest KDE whistles, who the fsck cares? Redhat still has updates for 6.2-sparc on their ftp server. Solaris is bloat on these old machines, but a well tuned Redhat install is hard to beat...
Really? Can I get your IP?
The list of patches that have been issued for Solaris in the past couple of months is pretty long.
Or are these run as honeypots?
they're actually starting to make more noise about their PPC and Alpha versions - I've even seen 'em in a store here, which surprised me slightly. Yeah, SuSe is quite alive and well - they're still the top distro over in Europe, last I heard. Just don't be surprised by the odd bit of German in the docs that the translators missed. :)
Oh yeah - for the curious:
d ex.html
http://www.suse.com/us/products/susesoft/alpha/in
Answer: Yes... If there are enough people who want it badly enough to contribute to the code.
Linux is not a product that you ask for and hope somebody will do it for you. It is a project that exists because programmers who care about it are working on it for their own use... anybody else who benifits from that work is just a pleasent bonus.
Those who do nothing other than utilize the "free" OS software, and can't even be bothered to submit the occational bug report... They can wait around for whatever the GNU/Linux damn well feels like writing.
In spite of the provacative tone I have chosen for this message, look into your heart and I think you will agree that I might have a point here.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Sun (mainly Bill Joy) is too busy creating JINI and JXTA instead of spending time enhancing SPARC and creating other business solutions their customers need and will pay for. Sell your SUNW stock as fast as you can. I love Java but, other than licensing fees and the JavaOne conference, how has it been additive to their revenues?
Not to nitpick, but hurd is a different kernel, not a hardware platform.
I use Linux on x86 because of the lack of another robust (free) Unix-y OS on that platform. I became aware of Linux before FreeBSD. Solaris x86 (assuming it could recognize my hardware) just rots.
Most of the Suns I'm used to dealing with start at the E420R and head up to the Starfire range. At this level, I'm not convinced that Linux can hold a candle to Solaris. If someone can prove otherwise, please enlighten me.
I truly believe that Sun can make a better OS for their hardware than the Open Source world can using Linux. I think Linux rocks on the x86 chips because we all have them and know them intimately. If we were all running Ultra5/10's, I'm sure Linux would rock on that too. Also, I have the willingness and the background to tune a Solaris box, so I'm not so concerned with performance. If I was, I wouldn't be using an Ultra5/10 anyway. I think my Palm Pilot Vx has more computing power...
there are no stupid questions, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots
Yeah, I did the same thing. I've still got the OpenBSD on Sparc stuck in read-only mode, which I was unable to correct in such short time. Hopefully I'll have time to play with it in the next few days. I was tired of RH6.0, although it's certainly adequate. People are often going to want the newest kernel and packages.
I raised a bug with RedHat about this. Their response? "I don't have any Ex000 systems, so I have no way to fix this. Sorry."
I later found out from "other" sources within RedHat that this was a major problem. Sun would just /not/ give them decent boxes on loan so they could solve issues like this one. Very next release, Sparc support disappeared from RedHat, Digital are getting my business that otherwise would have gone to Sun, and I'll think very hard before acquiring another Sun box, ever.. (or using RedHat for that matter).
. . .
There are still support for SPARC equipment. Like the other slashdotters here that have posted, there are OTHER solid linux support for the SPARC line of HW. I personally have 2 SPARC2s that are on my desk both running Debian. The longest I had them both running was around 180 days until I had to move cubicles. It compiles and runs lots of nifty network analyzer tools. Granted you won't find any binaries, but as long you have the source, and it's for the distrib of the linux that you have, in my case debian, it has always work and often just ./configure and ./make and maybe ./install and everything is history :)
Linux on x86 will be lucky if it survives another 5 years, and I say that in all seriousness - within that timespan, the PC will become a closed, black box unit, which will likely be illegal to "tamper" with, which will include loading "unauthorized" operating systems. (read: those that aren't in bed with RIAA/MPAA/TimeWarner)
The only legal OS will be Microsoft, which will be sold OEM with the box, and MacOS, if it's still alive.
Any OS which does not provide hooks for the entertainment industry is going to be declared illegal, mark my words.
No it's not. The Solaris OS can be downloaded for free. Sounds like about the same price to me.
yvan eht nioj
I personally find it offensive that the question was asked at all. If I pose a question I don't want to hear "Why do you want to do that?" I have my reasons and you don't need to know them. If you have an answer then fine. If you have a good argument against it, fine. If you don't have any useful information to share, shut the hell up!
yvan eht nioj
I'm offended that my offence was offended to.
yvan eht nioj
It has nothing to do with people being interested in SPARC Linux. The question was not asking why one would run linux on sparc instead of intel. It was why would one want to run linux on sparc instead of solaris.
There are good reasons to run either linux or solaris depending on your situation. I'm not saying one is best for all situations over the other. In the past cost would have been a huge factor in choosing. Now that Solaris can be downloaded it's not as much of an issue. However some people are simply more comfortable with linux and have no desire to learn Solaris. Why should those people that ask for support with Linux on Sparc put up with the stupid knee jerk question of "Why would you want to do that?" every time they open their mouths.
yvan eht nioj
Interesting.
We have 17 U5s are work, and every single one of them have been working reliably (24 x 7) since we got them 6 - 12 months ago.
Uptimes are in months.
People should not be afraid of their governments - Governments should be afraid of their people.
Don't upgrade?
Whatm, you mean don't upgrade the U5s? No real plans to.
Don't upgrade our E3500 and U60s? We're supplementing them with SunBlade 1000s and SunFires. No problems with any of our equipment so far.
--
People should not be afraid of their governments - Governments should be afraid of their people.
Slackware has a port to SPARC. I've never used it, but I've heard good things about it. I intend to see it in action soon, as a co-worker with a SPARC plans on putting it on his new machine, an Ultra 10. He is a slack fanatic.
Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day.
Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day.
Teach him to eat and he will fish forever.
dude, sun hardware reliability/quality is dropping quickly. The newer low-end ultras are built like shite, and they break and crash all the time. The uptimes are shite, everything about them is going to shite. Basically like really good PCs now, pretty much cause they just use commodity PC crap. I'd agree that sun hardware WAS much more reliable than PC hardware, but it's changing now. jeb.
don't upgrade.
Sun's sparc is just better! You can get better n-tier support then Sun..... my 2 cents
Does anyone know of a distro that supports SMP on the sun4m? sun4c? I haven't found documentation that says either way for debian or several others but I know none of the BSDs or slack do.
-nostradorkmus
with free binary licenses for Sol8 why would tru sparc fans not use that over Linux? If linux distro's get that same mindset they might as well focus their efforts in a larger market. I dont agree w/ this but it's just what I think
Upgrade to a PC.
:) )
Muahhaahahaaa (if this doesn't get marked flamebait....
They ARE out to get you simply because They are in it for themselves and they don't care about you.
Whoever has a SPARC is likely to have a better connection than a 56k modem, therefore one cannot make much money from "official" CD-ROMs. Whoever wants commercial support on SPARC can use Solaris. It's hard to compete with Sun.
Even though I run an old version of Solaris, 2.6, it's still .2 better than the latest Linux, 2.4.
So I suggest Linus take a move from the marketing people and call the next major kernel release 3.0.
I run NetBSD on my old SPARCs (IPC and SS-10). That's a sun4c and sun4m architecture. The NetBSD folks managed to do something that Sun never did: get a single kernel to run on both sun4c and sun4m architectures.
Anyway, NetBSD doesn't come with the massive amounts of pre-compiled applications that Linux distros do, but you can typically get a "pkg" for the applications you do want.
To my fingers, NetBSD feels a lot like SunOS 4.1.3, which I happened to like a lot. If anything, NetBSD 1.5 is speedier on older hardware than Sun's SunOS was.
Try Debian GNU/Linux. I run it on both MicroSparc and UltraSparc. Not the easiest of distributions to install and configure, but well worth the time to get familiarised with. Debian is stable and is well supported - loads of help on their website and there is also a very good O'Reilly book availible. Security updates are prompt and there doesn't seem to be any major bugs kicking around. It also seems very efficiant in its use of resources and you can get it to install in quite a small amount of disk space (though this is true for most distros if you take the time to install packages one-by-one!) The ethos behind the OS is also pretty cool.
.deb packages themselves. Older Suns (SS5 etc) will boot from floppy, but not Sun4u (UltraSparc) machines. Once you have the base install completed you can do the .debpackages via HTTP/FTP or whatever. All in all, you should be up and running within three or four hours to a single working day, depending on how you configure your box, security, packages, etc.
I don't think Debian is using the latest kernal yet (not for Sparc at any rate) and there might not be as many packages availible for Debian as other distros, but you should be able to compile most stuff you need without much trouble if it isn't on the 3 ISOs that are availble from many locations.
Best way of starting your installation is to boot from CDROM. When you have completed that, you instal the
I've tried most distros on Sparc over the last eighteen months and Debian is my fave hands down. You might also want to check out SuSE who released a Sparc port last month.
I might want to add that S.u.S.E. now has Linux for Sparc I'm tempted to give that a try when I get a spare sparc to play around with.
/*drunk.. fix later*/
I started this subthread. I was thinking; hmmm - is there commercial software of ANY sort for Linux/SPARC? Even Netscape? Is there a Java implementation? I like to buy stuff and do banking over the net; I need a working browser with SSL on any machine I use much.
Why do you want to do this, why would someone prefer Linux to Solaris on SPARC? I'm genuinely curious
Open source is beginning to take on characteristics of the commercial software industry, which is good, because OSS and commercial ventures must not be mutually sxclusive ideas, in order for OSS to maintain it's momentum. There simply isn't a large enough market for SPARC Linux distributions.
People will rant against commercial software, and promote open source, but in fact the two are coming together in ways that no-one ever imagined. OSS promotes a sort of social order and behavioral dynamic which promotes growth and inovation, (ragardless of what Microsoft might say about it), but OSS also seems to actually benefit from market forces relating to the 'retirement' of un-popular or niche products. Don't get me wrong - Linux support for SPARC, is a great thing, for those of us who use it, but we are few and far between. As a percentage of the Linux user community, we will account for less and less as the comunity grows, and PC hardware continues be converted to commodity status, becoming cheaper and cheaper, while SUN hardware remains proprietary, and achieves market penetration only in high end applications.
Open Source is benefiting (as a whole) from commercial market forces which microsoft seems to believe only exist in the treditional software market.
That said, I'm sad to see support for SPARC dwindling, although this is the great thing about OSS, if you want it, it's there for your use, and if you want to establish a support community for it, you are free to do so.
--CTH
--
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
These people should go run AIX. My first computer, 11+ years ago, was a brand new RS/6000 and it was in use until very recently. AIX is, in concept, more advanced than Linux and other Unicies. IIRC, it has a large protected data structure that stores system settings (a.k.a. registry). All admin could be done through one program, the SMIT. The hardware was crap though. IBM decided to initialize video last, or close to last. Therefore, a 3-digit 7 segment LED was installed on the front, which blinked numbers for 10 minutes during boot. It makes sense only for headless servers. You never want to deal with IBM's techs, especially those who worked in our "small" city. I'm looking forward to AIX 5L on Itanium.
In the time the port to sparc has proben to be stable and production ready, the only drawback of using sparcs with linux is that the 32b version has pretty bad SCSI drivers. but every thing else rocks. I only recomend Linux for old models like SS1, SS2 IPC, Classic, LX). for SS50 and up you will be better with Solaris and lot of ram). If you are plaining on using your sparcs as servers, well i recomend you OpenBSD. But in a way is true that kernel porting for spacs has low down a little (Miguel de Icaza just to be one of the main contributors). I think there are lot of people still contributing. The only driver i realy have isues with is the sunLance on my SS20, the nic part works but not the sound.
Good question. I often worry what will happen to my Alphas. As it is, M$ dropped Windows support for my AlphaPC a long time ago -- actually, that was a GOOD thing -- and I have never been able to get Tru64 Unix to load on it. I'm thankful that Red Hat still supports the Alpha. In fact, version 7.0 has proved to be excellent so far -- and Compaq has very graciously ported some of the critical Tru64 stuff (e.g., Netscape). However, the 7.1 upgrade is still not out, and I often worry when Red Hat will give up.
The best diplomat I know is a fully activated phaser bank.
The best diplomat I know is a fully activated phaser bank.
-- Scotty.
I absolutly destroy machines due to the heavy loads I place on them. I kill windows performance every day due to a high rate of task switching (not tough I'm afraid), and Linux generally just blew up in my face. Even my favorite x86 OS FreeBSD will begin to strain when I place my workload on it. But an Ultra 5 with Solaris 8.... DAMN! That sucker could keep up! I don't care what friggin' hardware they placed in there, that damn thing could multitask and I/O balance like nobody's business! I was running two different compiles, reconfiguring my system, admisitering our network over Citrix, running Netscape, and I kept hitting the damn StarOffice button! Did it slow down? Not for an instant! When it comes down to it, Solaris will kick high load ass any day. You lin-nucks people can take yur video games things elsewhere. ;-)
Just thought you might find a little anecdotal backup interesting.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Solaris is designed for UltraSparcs. The x86 version is more of a teaser. A dual celery isn't going to get shit for performance on an OS designed for chips with 8+ megs cache. Don't speak about what you know nothing about.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I've installed Suse 7.0 on my Sparc 20s (dual sm71s, 256megs) and its been all up time for both. Easiest install I've ever done, too. Redhat cuts.
"I'm the operator of my pocket calculator"
Does anyone here read anything other than slashdot?
Nope. No time. I get way too caught up feeding trolls and then *poof* there goes my whole day.
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
Might it have anything to do with suns prohibitive costs on hardware, when you weigh it out like that it's an e450 or a new car. Sure it's got I/O coming out of it's ears but I'd rather not have to refinance my house to get a "workgroup" server. I'm glad someone's supporting it though just in case I win the lotto or something.
I like Sun hardware, don't get me wrong. But, it is VERY expensive. That makes the market really small. Why spend 3500 dollars for your Linux box when you can get a pretty fast x86 or alpha system much cheaper. The cost of putting together a distribution, documenting, and marketing it for such a niche market does not seem profitable, if at all.
Before distros existed, people put this stuff together on their own. The first distros were people who did the work and shared it with others.
I'm not trying to recommend that everyone cobble together Sparc Linux on their own, but maybe if enough of us collaborate, we can keep something alive if we're willing to make the effort.
I use RedHat 6.0 for Sparc on my website (www.obsolyte.com), and I can tell you that, for an antique Sparc IPX, Solaris simply wasn't an option --- unless I used a version as out-of-date as the machine itself. That left Linux or BSD as options, and I was more familiar with Linux.
Want to know more about antique sparc hardware (and other vintage workstations/servers)? Visit my site!
And I'm willing to help out to keep a distribution alive.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Just because a bunch of hobbyists on /. prefer Linux does not mean that all flavors of all other operating systems, *BSD included, are dying. *BSD OSs are widely used by ISPs and by commercial ventures that prefer the *BSD licenses over GPL. If you choose your OS based on popularity, go for Windows 98. You would also probably like AOL as it is extremely popular.
I feel that the real issue is that free software support for the SPARC architechture "falls between two stools" so to speak. With the conventional x86 linux platform it has much in its favour: Millions of hackers around the world sitting at x86 boxes which all read pretty much the same 32-bit code. And a mass-market (?) for all the people who would love something with the reliability and fell of *NIX, but who, like the rest of us were sitting on there windows box a few years ago. This makes a real market with hard cash involved for distro publishers like RedHat, et al. To start with the SPARC platform already had a beautifully engineerd UNIX for it, compatible with its hardware from the ground up, (no hours of reverse-guess-hacking the soundcard for the ppl who brought a new "Windows-compatible" board), and one which is fully supported by its team of writers, which is something which most people wanting an easy-linux-ride can only dream of. In some way the linux-distros try to fulfill this for the x86 users, by providing a bundle of software, all the gizmo's, and in some cases technical support. The fact that this already exists pretty much for the SPARC architechture, kinda takes the wind out of the sales of any other distrobution. Sure some people want to hack together linux on their sparc, but as a normal desktop-tasks OS, SPARC already has what the disros have to offer
HENCE.... the disto market is very limited for SPARC, and i feel is probably destined for little commercial suport.
What your really calling for is for a hacker-maintaied distro, working on the same basis as the kernel is maintained, (ie non-profit, in ya spare time).. I wish you well, and what can I say - it can, and i think, will happen. but the risk is to bark up the wrong/commercial tree, for which the competition (SOLARIS) is just too damn stiff.
----- Dom
use Blunt::Instrument;
I have an older (sparcstation5) in my basement and unable to find some quality programs for it. Sparcs are like Alpha Proccessing machines, they are too expensive.
IBM does not sell software to any indutry that matters don't get out much, do you? There's plenty of 'industry' that IBM sells software to, I work w/ a large bank that uses tons of IBM software and hardware, and they don't matter? The last company I worked for was in the business of selling software for police/fire/ems dispatch, and guess what? All of it ran on RS6000's w/ AIX. Can you say they don't matter?
terradot, growing awareness
hell yeah, smit (or smitty) is by far the best admin tool I've ever seen/used for a unix OS. Beats the crap out of linuxconf, etc. hands down. I wouldn't say the hardware was crap, I was always amazed at how well it all worked, and the 3-digit led was a great help if you had the right books to look up the codes in (when it failed to boot, etc.). I found the hardware to be blazing fast compared to x86. I had a huge script that took right around 5 minutes to run on an x86 linux box w/ a 500Mhz cpu that would run in under a minute on an 80Mhz (or 85) RS6000...
terradot, growing awareness
Its quite hilarious how you can get something on Ask Slashdot, and every single post points out obvious answers.
What has happened to slashdot and its story standards?
BTW, if you really can't find anything on the market, why not go with a real old version of RedHat or something? Sure, it's old, but you can always patch the kernel and applications... *cough* apt-get *cough* ;)
________________________________________________
________________________________________________
suwain_2
De Bi An
www.debian.org
-----
Kenny Sabarese
Left Ear Music
AIM: kfs27
irc.openprojects.net #windowmaker
Kenny Sabarese
www.kennysabarese.com
This is only partially true... While Linux has been ported to PowerPC, SPARC, MIPS, etc, all of these ports were always treated as second class citizens to the x86 version. The only really decent non-x86 support going on in Linux these days is support for smaller systems (Palm/Pocket type devices).
Personally, I'd just run Solaris on a SPARC and just grab up all the familiar GNU tools...If I absolutely needed to run an open source OS to appease my conscience I'd use something that had more solid support for multiple platforms (*BSD).
Wroot
I hope everyone agrees that FreeBSD installer sucks.
In conclusion, after using IRIX for several years and Linux for over a year both at home and at work, I found FreeBSD to be somewhat backwords.
Wroot
There is hope for the future of Linux on Sparc! It's you. Oh, you're not up to the task?
Then all is lost.
No, there is another... *gazing towards the ceiling tiles*
Dancin Santa
One fact that seems to have been only lightly touched on is that Solaris is available free for home users. I've not used Linux for Sparc, but I feel that Solaris for SPARC outperforms comparable machines running Linux. I've recently purchased a used Ultra1 and plan to run Solaris on it. Why does the Linux community seem to take the attitude that you should *only* use Linux? Don't get me wrong, I like Linux and use it on my Tecra laptop. But I always thought it was best to allow people to choose what they want to use, instead of locking them into *any* software, be it Windows, Linux, Solaris, BeOS, OS/2, Office, etc. If the Sparc port is lagging, it probably means more people prefer to use Solaris. Let it go.
--- igiveup ---
When someone says a product (especially commercial products) is available "for Linux", they usually mean for x86 Linux. Sometimes they mean "for Redhat, though it ought to work with any x86 Linux".
Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's market forces at work. People who're trying to make money off Linux need to put their effort where the payoff is.
I do wonder why the non-commercial part of the Linux "community" isn't more active in supporting other architectures, though.
For that matter, what's so hard about supporting Sparc, anyway? I don't know about the newer models, but the computers that used to work should still work, right? Or are the people maintaining the Kernel and user applications totally clueless about maintaining compatibility?
The fact that something is more widely adopted frequently has little to do with its performance. Intel's Pentium is, of course, the most prevalent PC microprocessor around, but Sun's UltraSPARC (SPARC for Scalable Processor Architecture - it is scalable up to over 1000! Compare this to perhaps 32 for the Pentium) is (except perhaps for clock speed) a significantly more advanced, ingenious and open (the entire SPARC specification is open and licensable) microprocessor. (See here and here). Yes, the Pentium has more clock cycles each second, but the UltraSPARC frequenly does more computation per clock cycle. I actually had to do a comparative study for my graduate work on the Pentium, UltraSPARC, and Alpha microprocessors, so I have a bit of knowledge pertaining to all three.
The point I am trying to make here is that even though the SPARC is not as common, it is a very viable, valuable, and powerful processor, and I feel it would be extremely unfortunate if we overlooked it and dropped support for Linux on it. The fact that it is openly specified (many thanks to Sun Microsystems) is also a humongous benefit to the community.
With respect to who should support the development of Linux on the SPARC however, in my humble opinion, Sun is the best one for the job. They have shown their dedication to Free Software (They support Star/Open Office, they released the source code to their highly advanced Solaris operating system, and, as stated already, they released the specifications to the UltraSPARC), they know their microprocessor better than anyone else, they have the most to gain from Linux on the UltraSPARC (hey, it sells more hardware for them!), and, similarly, they have the most to lose from Linux not being on the UltraSPARC. We, however, must also be willing to understand Sun's hesitance to support Linux on the SPARC when, in Solaris, they *already* have an advanced operating system perfectly tuned to the SPARC. (A similar argument applies for IBM and their AIX OS.) Furthermore, though not under the GPL, Solaris is open.
In summary, I guess my real point is that it is very beneficial to the community at large for Linux to be supported on the SPARC. With the advanced and perfectly-tuned Solaris being open, its technology can also be more easily implemented in Linux. What could be better for the community than to have advanced and openly-specified software AND hardware? What a dream come true that would be!!!
A complete set of SuSE cds for the sparc availible for download here... user friendly too
Solaris is quite suitable.
Most people when they talk about wanting Linux for X really mean they want GNU for X anyway. You want that nifty colour ls, every command overloaded with useful features ('tar -zcvf' anyone?). Where I work, we put about 50 useful GNU utilities like BASH on our Solaris boxes, and to tell the truth, I don't miss Linux one bit.
Download GNU for Solaris and be content. Linux 2.4 doesn't even have proper disk accounting anyway and Linus et al don't appear to care.
Try typing "iostat" "vmstat" and "sar" on your Linux box to figure out why Oracle is going so slow. Yeh, I thought so. Install Solaris on your SPARC until Linux catches up.
--
fifth sigma, inc.
"why should Sun support your old hardware with it's new software?"
Because they are the vendor that you likely bought it from. Keep in mind that around the time many of the 32-bit SPARC machines appeared Solaris was one of the few, if not only, operating systems you could use. Back then it also wasn't free.
I do agree with your point that backward compatibility isn't always wonderful, but it speaks very well to volunteers that neither created nor sold such hardware to support it well and free. Linux as well as Net/OpenBSD have excellent support for 32 and 64-bit Sun hardware. Commercial vendors could learn a lesson from that.
-catpyss
I just installed Debian on a SparcStation10 this past Sunday. I run Debian as my home operating system, and noticed no difference between the x86 and SPARC versions. Everything worked the same
I do, however, take issue with the person who asked the question. Merely because Redhat dropped "stable" support (they still offer non-official support) for SPARC doesn't mean it is dead. If I am not mistake SuSE has now added SPARC to their list of supported archs.
The final thing to keep in mind is that SPARC hardware has a much lower userbase than x86. There are much fewer vendors and suppliers. Also, SPARC hardware is very pricey and is usually aimed at corporate dollars.
Still, hopping on Ebay to get an old SS10/20 is a good idea. SPARC's OpenPROM is really, really cool. I installed Debain on mine with no floppy, no CDROM, no keyboard, and no monitor. Try that with x86.
-catpyss
I have no idea where you get the idea that Linux support for SPARC is failing. It's stronger than ever - especially on Ultra's (just try it on a Sun Blade - you'll be very pleased).
Your problem is that you're sticking with a brand of Linux that's mean for the casual/mainstream/business users. Anyone who is installing Linux on a Sun box is likely to be an enthusiast. You really aughta use the Debian SPARC port. Or hell, even Slackware runs very nicely. The net install of Debian is particularly nice.
Reconsider here, OKay? It's kind of ridiculous that this would even get posted as an Ask /., but hey, it's something that'll fire people up and it raises what somebody appearaly *thinks* is a "controversial issue". It's not.
SPARC is the ideal Linux platform.
Why bother.
Unlike most of the other Sun boxes in the lineup, the U5 has an IDE disk interface and a bad one at that. Depending upon the age of your U5, it may be a 5400 RPM disk. I imagine that should explain your I/O performance issues quite well. I currently use a U30 with Solaris 8 and UFS logging enabled...the performance is excellent and the stability is flawless.
Yep Debian is still active on Sparc i run Debian on two Sparcstation 5's without any problem. Oke, when new .deb's are released u have to wait a week until they get released for Sparc, but u can always build them yourself.
C-Cube Microsystems makes "E4" chips for cable boxes (and DVD players, etc.); these chips are MPEG encode/decode engines.
E4 chips are SPARC CPU cores with special video DSP, video motion detection engine, and i/o on chip, and usually about 8MB RAM in the box with them.
What is everyone smoking? SuSE has a Sparc port which is on my SS5 and about 4 others here....SuSE Sparc is available for DL on their FTP in ISO form....geez, doesn't anyone know that SuSE has ports for a _lot_ of platforms and languages??? And is technically very strong comparred to RH IMHO Regards, Jon
Slackware has a SPARC port. (LINK).
I am not a lawyer. Do not take my words as legal advice. If you need legal advice, consult an attorney.
End the Ambiguity!!
Don't try to protect Slowlaris!
If they protect Linux at SPARC they would be the best Linux expert at that platform.
Sun don't parasite the Open Source (Free (as speech)) Community!
Debian supports i386, alpha, arm, m68k, PPC and Sparc. I doubt any other Linux distro supports this many arch's, NetBSD is probably the only "distro" that beats Debian in arch support. They're all supposed to behave the same on each arch, too, which is nice.
OpenBSD and NetBSD both have extremely stable, well supported Sparc bases and have for some time now. Suse has continued with it's support for the Sparc (including the Ultra platform) and slackware recently began it's sparc port. I don't think it's a "where" has it gone, just sounds like maybe you aren't looking in the right places.
...run *BSD or Solaris. Deal with it, life goes on.
This post is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Hey, why do you want to keep turning around with all the "american" distributions ??? Linux started in Europe, in Finland, right ? There is at least one good European distro, either for Sparc, as I use it on my Sparc ... try SuSE !!!
I did the same thing installing Redhat Linux 6.2 on my sparc 5 and it only took 20 minutes to install, from the console of the sparc 5 I had to just type in " BOOT CDROM " and went through the menu's and it installed....
Does anybody have a good resource comparing the speed of Sparc chips to Intel's? Subjectively, I've never felt a Sparc was a very responsive machine for use as a PC. (Nor, of course, was it designed to be.)
Thanks, you just motovaited me to play with Slackware's latest toy on my IPX. I just downloaded the boot and roots + netdsk. I'll post you later and let you know how it goes. As to Redhat, they probably don't see any profit in supporting Suns, they are a business,its just business, don't take it personally. (try to picture Marlon Brando saying that)
forgivness is easier to get than permission
hi, why don't you try Slackware. They have a Sparc version. I run it on two ultrasparc stations and they are working fine....
Life is like a game...you win or you lose
Here at work, we have two E250s, and one Netra t1 running SuSE 7.1 for SPARC. Let me tell you. Once you get it installed, its the best thing since Tang of the poon variety. Install is easy and compiles with ease. Raid works great and I would hate to see that go down. I couldn't imagine an FSCK on that bastard. Try SuSE for SPARC. I am telling you, it blows redhat away and it comes with all that SuSE offers on the Intel platform.
The Glass is 1/2 Empty Damn it.