as I've come into the ownership of quite a few Sun4m SPARC32 machines
in the past few weeks, I've gotten an old install of Sarge with a 2.4
kernel running on one and have been painfully compiling some necessary
files to get newer programs working on the old and crufty system to be
able to play nicely with it.
So far it seems the only alternative to using an older version of
Linux is OpenBSD, and although I've tried that, there hasn't been much
luck with getting things to compile properly on it, not to mention
that half the packages in their repos are MISSING! Sparc64 has them,
i386 has them, but there's essential files like glib2 and other misc
packages just plain MISSING. so this ends up in a day and a half
compile that just segfaults with a core dump... not the happiest
thing.
I've already seen at least one person successfully boot a 3.1.5 kernel
on my exact machine model I'm trying to do this on (SparcStation 5)
back in 2011 on a built-from-scratch Gentoo installation... so why not
Debian? is there still any interest at all anywhere from anyone to get
even an unsupported Sparc32 port going again? it's a crime it's not
already, since even GCC still supports Sparcv8 as a compiler argument
so to stay compatible with the Leon and OpenSPARC cores-- this should
make an unsupported port by the right person work out somewhat well,
I'd think.
so, I'm calling anyone out... anyone at all, willing to do an
unofficial Sparc32 port of Wheezy or Jessie to the long-abandoned,
closet-dwelling dusty machines that should actually be capable of
something instead of sitting around just getting more expensive on
auction sites... if they're that valuable, they should be actually
able to DO something! even if the port goes ahead and targets only the
OpenSPARC and Leon cores, it's still a good start!