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Sun will sell Redhat 6.1 Sparc version

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the this-is-good dept.

Sun has announced that it will sell Redhat 6.1 Sparc version in it online store. This is due to the customers interest in RH 6.1 for Sparc. I wish I had one of those UltraSparc machines.. (Credit for the news goes to Linux Weekly news)

1 of 156 comments (clear)

  1. Sun and Linux by krital · · Score: 5

    Over the summer, I had an oppurtunity to work with some very nice Sun boxes. In actuality, I was working as an intern for Sun in Europe. I got to work with a number of boxes, including 4-processor AxMPs, CP1500s, and an AXi. One of my tasks over the summer was evaluating how RedHat 5.1 (UltraPenguin 1.1) ran on the AXi. I have to say that installing it was a joy; it was as easy as it is on an x86 machine. In fact, everything was as easy as it was on x86. There were a few differences, mainly in the bootloader (SPARC boxes use SILO which I managed to only slightly figure out over the course of the summer, only enough to get new kernels running), but on the whole everything was the same as it was on an x86. Which, I believe, is one of the major selling points of Linux - having seen how transparent the hardware is to it is quite amazing.
    After a while of setting it up to perform various tasks that I didn't know how to do using Solaris (such as a RARP server, which turned out to be VERY easy, and UFS works beautifully; I had not one problem setting up NFS to read/write from the UFS partitions), I started using it as a desktop machine. I had a higher resolution on that machine, and so I preferred it for viewing web pages over the others. I ran X with enlightenment 15 for a long time, and I found it to be fairly stable, although I had many more problems with X unexpectedly crashing (happened about 10 times in six weeks) than the kernel itself having an error (which happened not once).
    Speaking of kernels, the kernels were a cinch to configure. There were a few options that I had never seen before, but other than that, compiling and running a new kernel was easily as easy as it was on an x86 box.

    Nontheless, I'm very happy to see RedHat come out with an updated version for SPARC boxes. Maybe when I return to Sun to work this coming summer I'll be able to test it out on my AXi...
    If anyone has any questions about running Linux on a SPARC system, I'd be happy to answer them (from what I remember).

    --
    -- K