Joseph Simantov wrote:
Hi everyone,I have been following this interesting exchange, and I believe we must, first, agree on what are we finally trying to achieve. Is our concern to manage by all means to make a clean Debian installation on SPARCs, or are we expecting to be able to put this combination to do something useful for the average user.I believe we'll all agree that when it comes to reliability, SPARCs have a long established reputation. You just have to boot once a SPARC server and then you practically forget its existence... The main problems appear when SPARCs must, for some reason, be used as workstations with Debian. Although a succesful installation on an older machine can be a rewarding experience, we have to face reality and be aware that in the current industrial context, people are not interested to know how complex and difficult an installation was; all they want to know is if working on an older machine will help them do their job fast, or more reliably. Besides, at the current price level of new PCs, money-saving by keeping older machines is becoming irrelevant; it's mostly a question of principle, of not throwing away machines just because they happen not to be last-generation... I personnally find the Xorg issues with U5/U10 and Blades quite frustrating; could somebody among those who have managed to succesfully install (and work...) with a Blade100+/Debian, spend some time in writing a summary describing the procedure he followed? I'm sure all of us would highly appreciate such a contribution... And, in order not to appear grumpy, yes, I do believe in using Debian/Sparc!! Regards, Joseph
I definitely agree regarding the reliability of Sun hardware. There's nothing I like better than installing a server and never having to touch it again. Unfortunately that rarely happens but it's nice when it does...
As someone who deals with unix/linux servers around the clock for work, not as a novelty, I definitely agree that there's still a place for older Sun hardware. And, installing Debian on some of them can really be a benefit from a porting perspective when the original development for the application in question was done on a linux x86 box. Sometimes it just makes more sense to install Debian (or some other flavor of linux) than spending a bunch of time and effort porting the application to Solaris.
Now for a desktop workstation, that's another story... From my general experience, trying to make use of Sun/Sparc hardware for desktop productivity is less than ideal even when it works correctly. I've been involved with Sun hardware since the Sun3/Motorola 680x0 days and I'm having a difficult time thinking of any desktop related Sun hardware that can't now be replaced by more modern/useful PC hardware for very little cost. A few items that come to mind are the SunDials 8-dial input device and some of the higher end PCI and UPA graphics cards, but anyway, the point being - there really has to be a reason for wanting to use Sun/Sparc hardware for desktop use (linux or solaris) and I'm hard pressed to think of many. And, as Joseph mentioned above, I'm sure that there are a great number of technical challenges that only someone who is trying to make use of the hardware as a graphical desktop would appreciate. Not sure if it's worth the effort (again, aside from the novelty and educational benefits) unless there really is a user base for sparc desktops that I'm not seeing/recognizing...
As I mentioned from a server perspective though it's great to have the option of linux or solaris. I really appreciate all the effort that's gone into Debian/Sparc and for server applications I'm sure we'll continue to make use of all the effort put forth by the group here for many years to come (i.e. stumbling into lonely Netras in phone closets buried under wiring 8 years prior, still chugging away doing their job :-).
-Brian