Martin wrote:
Its probably the filtering of available packages that sorts the wheat from the chaff. The code that is more portable is the better code.<snip> For what it's worth I've been using Debian Stable (3.0 Woody) for a while now (? a couple of year ? well I started with 2.2 and migrated when 3.0 came out) on Sun machines, including those in production environments and found it rock solid. It seems to be more stable than the same software on x86 but I suspect this is due to better quality hardware rather than anything about the software architecture. Cheers, - Martin
For the same amount of compute power UltraSPARC draws a lot less electrical power. This results in less electrical and thermal stress.
(The same could be said for PowerPC on which IBM support GNU/Linux via OpenPower.) What is missing though is those juicy viruses. Really what I miss is gfortran-3.5 and gfortran-4.0. I have gfortran-3.5 on my iBook 2.2. Sun in not helping maintainers with equipment have done themselves a disservice. IBM now have Linux across their entire spectrum on each architecture. I only have g77-3.4 on my SB100. I could not install this SB100 by just pressing 'Enter'. I had to read up on SILO, power cycle the machine and issue an appropriate command in SILO to run the right image. After running Solaris I get a VM exception even after a firmware boot -r. To help maintainers I could post a detailed bug either on SILO or kernel-image I was trying to boot on Solaris, but I am not sure and it would help more if Sun would help maintainers with reasonably current equipment. As I just run GNU/Linux the VM exception is no longer a problem and the machine boots reliably. > .--. .--. > |o_o | |o_o | > |:_/ | |:_/ | > \|/ ____ \|/ // \ \ //\ /\ \ > "@'/ ,. \`@" (| * | ) (| (`) | ) > /_| \__/ |_\ /'\_ _/`\ /'\_ | _/`\ > \__U_/ \___)=(___/ \___)^(___/ > Oops UltraPenguin BigEndianPenguin