Re: Debian SID on Ultra-30
On Thu, Oct 22, 2020 at 6:31 PM John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
<glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de> wrote:
>
>
> > 3) Using the Sparc keyboard with the console, the first three characters
> > I hit seem to be buffered and not immediately displayed, then everything
> > works as expected. For example, if I log in as root, I don't see
> > anything entering "roo", then "root" is displayed when I type the "t".
> > This seems to happen only once, and it's also minor. I tried running
> > agetty instead of getty on the console with the same result.
>
> I haven't observed this issue but again, I'm not using a framebuffer on
> SPARC.
>
I can confirm this behavior on a Sun Blade 100 and Ultra 25, but like
you, it is neglectable to me, compared with the other issues on sparc.
While i really appreciate the effort to keep this port around, i found
it a few inches away to really be usable as a reliable desktop system.
For server software without framebuffer, it might work well, but most
desktop programs aside from the basic desktop environment like lxde or
mate will bus error/segfault or be not installable due to not
available dependencies.
You can go and fake a few packages to get stuff running and also use
snapshot.debian.org to install dependencies and eventually get a
firefox 50 running.
To add options, you can use third party software kits like pkgsrc of
netbsd to successfully build and run quite many packages on debian
that error out or are uninstallable in their debian provided version.
I guess the main problem is the vanishing userbase of sparc, and it
feels like each distribution has only one member left to look out for
the port. Not many people test and report bugs it seems. And possibly
there is also less interest in fixing them upstream.
For now i am dualbooting (plugging harddrives) between netbsd and
linux on my sparc machines. While i found the linux kernel is more
stable, sometimes debian seems to corrupt the filesystem and needs a
reinstall. And on the other side, the netbsd kernel is more unpolished
and will crash from time to time, but the system has a little more
software running and a firefox 52, which is still bad. but as recent
as possible for now.
Regards,
Connor
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