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Re: Seems I have bad timing with Debian on SPARC.






On Wed, Oct 2, 2013 at 4:36 PM, u60 spitfire <u60spitfire@gmail.com> wrote:
Just signed up for this mailing list; had spent a good amount of time
over the last week getting my Ultra 60 up and running again.  It's
mostly OK...heh...execpt the part about having to reprogram the darn
NVRAM every time I turn it on.

I got jessie installed (Didn't get far in the stable release; first
thing I did was try to open iceweasel and it hit a bus error --
unaligned mem access maybe).  Working on getting the framebuffer going
and whatnot now, went to the Debian forums and figured I'd try this
mailing list after no responses there.

After checking the posts for the last few months (only a handful!),
they seem all about "Hello....anybody out there using/maintaining
this?"  or "Hey if anyone's using driver X y'all need to maintain it
yourself 'cause you're the only one using it", heh.


Linux on SPARC is very niche. Think of yourself as...frontiersmen. Consider the cases though: you go to Oracle.com and cheap server is $20K. So you can either use:

a) 100% supported Solaris 11.1, 24x7 phone support, deep virtual machine support, apps/libraries optimized for the HW, etc.
b) Linux, which may or may not recognize your disk controller and may panic while booting the kernel on really new machines.
 
So, realistically*, what's the deal?  Any point in trying to get this
to work or should I cut my losses now and move to some other
distribution or OS?  I had thought that maybe there was some interest
in the architecture since OpenSPARC was published/available for some
time.  Anyhow.

I think Debian/sparc is probably one of the better distributions for SPARC, but it can be quite rough, yeah. I run it and I don't have too many problems. I run it on an Ultra 80, E420R (Ultra 80 but with diff case IIRC) and a Blade 2500. Neither gives me problems, but running Sun-branded components is really hard -- Sun was never very forthcoming with HW specs and even if they had now, there would be little interest in pre-2000 HW to actually fix the drivers. You can try Solaris 10 if you have a lot of memory, but you're going to need to customize it, because for playing around, you probably don't need all of the stuff it installed.

I personally enjoy Linux on SPARC more than Solaris on SPARC because I can mix cheap PC components in the PCI slots to get some flexibility, so long as it isn't critical for booting the system [e.g. disk controllers]. I ran an Ultra 10 with an NV GeForce4 for example and was able to play Quake III. Not all drivers work that well though, and I've filed a few bugs and other times just written off the driver as "meh" (for example, some SPARC sound drivers -- why bother if you can replace with $10 PCI sound card?)

So I guess, I'd say stick with Debian. I think your experience with the Ultra 60 should be pretty decent overall, though if you need a new NVRAM battery, yeah, going to suck a bit. :)

If you're having some issues, posted here, and I missed it, I'm sorry. I try to help when I can. Please let us know what they are and let's see if we can't work them out.

Patrick


Advice appreciated in advance.

thanks



*Yes, I'm not being terribly realistic running anything on this box to
begin with.


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