They've got an IMP at the Computer History Museum on Shoreline in Mountain View that I saw a few months ago... not to mention a whole bunch of other really neat machines. Check out their site at http://www.computerhistory.org/... mouse over "Exhibits" and click on "Visible Storage", enter the exhibit, click on the 60's-80's link, the "Significant Machines" and then "Interface Message Processor" and you'll be treated with a (small) photo of it and a bunch of info.
As a side note, anyone interested in reading more about the history of the Internet should pick up a copy of "Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet" by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon. It was a good read that I recommend (and not just because I learned that three people who played a significant role went to the same high school that I did).
Actually, sparc32 as a whole (sun4, sun4m, sun4d and sun4c) lacks a maintainer at the moment. They're all a part of the same arch tree (arch/sparc/)... the only sparcs being actively maintained are the 64-bit UltraSPARC machines in the sparc64 port. This was mentioned by Dave Miller on sparclinux@vger.kernel.org the other day.
But yeah, sun4c is broken, but not too badly broken. I've tracked it to the point where it's trying to start init... it does a page fault, but stops after just the one and goes into the cpu_idle() infinite loop. Probably won't be too hard to fix.
I believe the problem is on sparc64 (and not sparc32). It's a trivial patch... just a few lines, so it's easy to have been overlooked.
Anyone using a SPARC/Linux machine that wants the latest and greatest should always turn to the vger.samba.org sparc/linux kernel cvs tree. It's always got the latest stuff for both 64-bit and 32-bit SPARCs (and networking as well).
That said, 64-bit SPARC machines should run fine with the recent kernels. For the 32-bit SPARC machines, I can only comment on the sun4m and sun4c machine. Currently, the sun4m machines should boot and be ok... the sun4c machines do not.
New bug and feature request
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Mozilla 0.9.5
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Anyone else notice a problem with 0.9.5 dealing with CNN's page? For some reason when I go there, the back button decides not to work. I then click on reload and I'm sent to the configured homepage. Might not only be CNN's page and it's not 100% reproducable, but it is reproducable.
I like the new CTRL-T tabbing feature. It would be nice if the right-click menu had an "open link in new tab" option. (Should be trivial to implement.)
The rumors of it's death have been greatly exaggerated. I work on SPARC/Linux stuff in my spare time... just one of a very few people that do. Some things are lagging (32-bit sparc support in the 2.4 kernel, for example), but plenty of new development is in the works.
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.
Yes, there's a very good reason for that. It's because none of the SPARC/Linux developers have had a chance to work with one yet.
For some reason, it seems the Sun Blade 100 group doesn't value an easy win scenario, where they can have us crank out Linux support _before_ a machine ships. Hopefully someday this will change.
I tried as well on the Sun Blade 100... got as far as you... when we get our hands on one more permanently, we'll do something about it.
Actually, no... this has nothing to do with Cobalt. Sun had similar machines to this before the Cobalt acquisition... this is just a continuation of that product line.
In all fairness, some places on Sun's website either say it has a "64-bit UltraSPARC" (vague) or an UltraSPARC-IIi (wrong!), both of which would lead to a conclusion of it working. The other thing is that unless you closely inspect the photo, you wouldn't notice the ALi chip. Honestly, if I didn't know better I would draw the same conclusion as you.
Either way, thanks for pointing out the Ultralinux website earlier... there is no better SPARC/Linux resource out there.
I am one of SuSE's SPARC/Linux developers. Currently, I don't think Linux will run on one of those machines. If you look at their Product White Paper, you'll see (from the description and pictures) that the machine has both an UltraSPARC-IIe processor and an ALi PCI chipset. The US-IIe, while probably easy to add support for, just isn't known to the kernel currently. The ALi PCI chipset is a new thing for SPARC machines. Also, the machine has USB ports that the SPARC/Linux port won't currently take advantage of. Support will, of course, be worked on... just have patience.:)
Yes, they can and they will it seems. I can't find it anymore, but there was something on solariscentral.com a while ago from a SUN engineer about Perl 5 shipping with Solaris 8...
Uhh... no, it has SMP support. I, for example, run it on my dual-SM71 SS10 (2 75MHz cpu's w/1MB of cache), and I get SMP without a problem.
Free Solaris is the complete package - not crippled in any way. Some dev. tools come with it (like ksh, sed, awk, lex, yacc, and it's public knowledge that Perl will ship with Solaris 8)... just no C compiler. That's easily remedied with a visit to sunfreeware.com...
And depending on what you want for system management tools, it's there, or available as a separate product (to paying customers).
Whenever I find myself on a bare Solaris machine, I snarf gcc and build a bunch of programs (essentially making my system into GNU/Solaris) before I'm happy with the user interface... I'm happy with what's under the hood right off the bat.
This really boils down to some of the biggest gripes about MS in a nutshell. It's a good business model (for them) in that they center things around the applications rather than the file formats... and that becomes the limiting factor. That's why when they release a new version of Word (with, to my surprise, the exception of the latest version), everyone has to run out and upgrade. New version == new file format... whereas a company that's out there for their customers will set a file format and only try to improve on the application.
My gripe for the day about them is their "Media Player"/"Netshow" product. I have some *.asf files that I want to play and only have Linux and Solaris machines. I remembered they had a player in beta a long time ago and came up with this link here... of course it's a broken link when you actually go to download it.:( After much digging, it seems that the Unix clients are no more. (Which, if any of you still have it for Linux, I'd be interested...) They don't standardize the format and keep it proprietary which is what creates problems for folks like myself. Of course if this format were an open standard, I'd just have to snarf the latest xanim bits and play away. Apple seems also to be making the same mistakes here.
I got a laugh about this when I saw this story a month ago where a MS drone pushes Open Standards versus none other than a SUN product... seemed a bit ironic to me...:)
Umm... you didn't look at Sun's site too carefully then... one click away from the lxrun page was this article on what was done, and in it, there's info on a read-only ext2fs driver for Solaris x86.
Hmm... if only the quality were better. The video is fine, but the audio is all screwy... seems like lots of the audio is missing and what's there is jerky.
I'll agree with that... I found there to be quite a few improvements from 2.0.35 to this one... but I also foound it to be quite unstable, even with upgrading to the latest versions of all packages. (X freezes completely, and a STOP-A boot is the only way of getting the machine back). I switched back to 2.0.35 for now... (don't really have the time to deal with it for now).
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Another one you might want to try is Rdio (available in the US and CA currently). Good interface and social features.
You kid, but there is a project:
OpenSolaris Project: Solaris PowerPC Port
I don't know where it stands, but there it is.
They've got an IMP at the Computer History Museum on Shoreline in Mountain View that I saw a few months ago... not to mention a whole bunch of other really neat machines. Check out their site at http://www.computerhistory.org/ ... mouse over "Exhibits" and click on "Visible Storage", enter the exhibit, click on the 60's-80's link, the "Significant Machines" and then "Interface Message Processor" and you'll be treated with a (small) photo of it and a bunch of info.
As a side note, anyone interested in reading more about the history of the Internet should pick up a copy of "Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet" by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon. It was a good read that I recommend (and not just because I learned that three people who played a significant role went to the same high school that I did).
Actually, sparc32 as a whole (sun4, sun4m, sun4d and sun4c) lacks a maintainer at the moment. They're all a part of the same arch tree (arch/sparc/)... the only sparcs being actively maintained are the 64-bit UltraSPARC machines in the sparc64 port. This was mentioned by Dave Miller on sparclinux@vger.kernel.org the other day.
But yeah, sun4c is broken, but not too badly broken. I've tracked it to the point where it's trying to start init... it does a page fault, but stops after just the one and goes into the cpu_idle() infinite loop. Probably won't be too hard to fix.
I believe the problem is on sparc64 (and not sparc32). It's a trivial patch... just a few lines, so it's easy to have been overlooked.
Anyone using a SPARC/Linux machine that wants the latest and greatest should always turn to the
vger.samba.org sparc/linux kernel cvs tree. It's always got the latest stuff for both 64-bit and 32-bit SPARCs (and networking as well).
That said, 64-bit SPARC machines should run fine with the recent kernels. For the 32-bit SPARC machines, I can only comment on the sun4m and sun4c machine. Currently, the sun4m machines should boot and be ok... the sun4c machines do not.
sun4m machines: ss20, ss10, ss5, ss4, lx, classic, javastations
sun4c machines: ss2, ss1+, ss1, ipx, ipc, slc, elc
Anyone else notice a problem with 0.9.5 dealing with CNN's page? For some reason when I go there, the back button decides not to work. I then click on reload and I'm sent to the configured homepage. Might not only be CNN's page and it's not 100% reproducable, but it is reproducable.
I like the new CTRL-T tabbing feature. It would be nice if the right-click menu had an "open link in new tab" option. (Should be trivial to implement.)
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.
Once we get one, give a little time and we'll have it workin'.
For some reason, it seems the Sun Blade 100 group doesn't value an easy win scenario, where they can have us crank out Linux support _before_ a machine ships. Hopefully someday this will change.
I tried as well on the Sun Blade 100... got as far as you... when we get our hands on one more permanently, we'll do something about it.
Actually, no... this has nothing to do with Cobalt. Sun had similar machines to this before the Cobalt acquisition... this is just a continuation of that product line.
Either way, thanks for pointing out the Ultralinux website earlier... there is no better SPARC/Linux resource out there.
I am one of SuSE's SPARC/Linux developers. Currently, I don't think Linux will run on one of those machines. If you look at their Product White Paper, you'll see (from the description and pictures) that the machine has both an UltraSPARC-IIe processor and an ALi PCI chipset. The US-IIe, while probably easy to add support for, just isn't known to the kernel currently. The ALi PCI chipset is a new thing for SPARC machines. Also, the machine has USB ports that the SPARC/Linux port won't currently take advantage of. Support will, of course, be worked on... just have patience. :)
Actually, I believe it was called "Freix"... I could be wrong (just a nit). :)
Yes, they can and they will it seems. I can't find it anymore, but there was something on solariscentral.com a while ago from a SUN engineer about Perl 5 shipping with Solaris 8...
Free Solaris is the complete package - not crippled in any way. Some dev. tools come with it (like ksh, sed, awk, lex, yacc, and it's public knowledge that Perl will ship with Solaris 8)... just no C compiler. That's easily remedied with a visit to sunfreeware.com ...
And depending on what you want for system management tools, it's there, or available as a separate product (to paying customers).
Whenever I find myself on a bare Solaris machine, I snarf gcc and build a bunch of programs (essentially making my system into GNU/Solaris) before I'm happy with the user interface... I'm happy with what's under the hood right off the bat.
My gripe for the day about them is their "Media Player"/"Netshow" product. I have some *.asf files that I want to play and only have Linux and Solaris machines. I remembered they had a player in beta a long time ago and came up with this link here... of course it's a broken link when you actually go to download it. :( After much digging, it seems that the Unix clients are no more. (Which, if any of you still have it for Linux, I'd be interested...) They don't standardize the format and keep it proprietary which is what creates problems for folks like myself. Of course if this format were an open standard, I'd just have to snarf the latest xanim bits and play away. Apple seems also to be making the same mistakes here.
I got a laugh about this when I saw this story a month ago where a MS drone pushes Open Standards versus none other than a SUN product... seemed a bit ironic to me... :)
Try about 350 miles apart... (I live in the SF Bay Area and recently moved here from LA)... I'll be at LWE... the last one was a blast. :)
Umm... you didn't look at Sun's site too carefully then... one click away from the lxrun page was this article on what was done, and in it, there's info on a read-only ext2fs driver for Solaris x86.
Otherwise, it's nice to see... :)
Seriously, though... this feature is something I've managed to use to convince a friend or two to install Linux with. Very smart for MS to do this.
I just forsee a sea of "bullshit"-coughing penguins when MS tries to lay claim for inventing this technology... :)
Awww... we don't want this guy wasting his money on top of it, do we? :)
I'll agree with that... I found there to be quite a few improvements from 2.0.35 to this one... but I also foound it to be quite unstable, even with upgrading to the latest versions of all packages. (X freezes completely, and a STOP-A boot is the only way of getting the machine back). I switched back to 2.0.35 for now... (don't really have the time to deal with it for now).