Re: Debian Sparc 7.10.0 Install Problems
On 06/09/16 06:50, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
Hello Chris!
Debian Wheezy is already no longer supported, except for the LTS
branch which deals with i386 and amd64 architectures only.
Thus, any issues you may have that are related to bugs will never
be fixed. Plus, since Debian Wheezy, we have fixed a large number
of bugs which affect both sparc and sparc64. In particular, kernel
development has been very active in the past 12 months since Oracle
decided to release their own distribution called "Linux for SPARC".
Warning, long reply, may need coffee :-)...
I know Debian 7 is unsupported on Sparc and that bugs won't be fixed,
but I don't care. Once the OS is installed and stable, I really don't
need or expect support or patches. Apart from adding a few packages,
nothing is likely to change. All i'm looking for is a stable
OS to run on Sparc h/w, with a gui. I would be quite happy with Sol
10, but Oracle support licenses are too expensive.
Old it may be, but even Squeeze is pretty stable. Just wanted to try
out a later version and afaics, 7.10 was the last supported stable
release. Also sans systemd. I know there are different priorities
for developers and maybe this is the wrong place to ask, but 7.10.0
must have been tested at some stage and really would like to have
it working for evaluation, without being sidetracked into other areas
i'm probably not ready for at this stage.
Ok, one reason for looking at older versions is that i'm not happy
about the current Linux direction. As an engineer, efficiency is
important and mainstream Linux becomes ever more complex and
interdependent. Debian has been the favourite Linux for
years, but the last straw was the systemd saga. If they wanted
a good model for system service management, they could have done a
lot worse than look at the Solaris svcadm, svcs etc, which in the
main, coexists with the existing OS functionality, rather than
making everything else, including non system stuff like gdm,
subservient to it. It's what dec used to call "layered software".
svcadm etc is also transparently easy to use and retains most of
the underlying init and logging structure that we are all familiar
with.
Oracle do have a free Linux / Sparc, but it's still a reference level
design and correct me if wrong, nothing seems to have happened for
some time. Not clear if they are really serious about it. Really
good if they are and it would be a valuable contribution to the
rapidly diminishing Sparc OS gene pool. Hardware is useless without
an OS and it's good to have choices.
That depends on what you want to do. Whether it's kernel development,
Debian packaging or improving other upstream projects such as GNOME
or KDE. You need to be more specific.
I guess package building might be the best place to start at newbie
level. There seems to be a lot of infrastructure to become familiar
with before getting into the deep end of kernel development, for
example.
32-bit SPARC hardware is completely unsupported these days. I think
support for that was even dropped in the Linux kernel. You are welcome
to perform test installations on your hardware with the ISO I have
provided and report back any feedback. But we don't need any additional
old hardware. What we need to make "sparc64" an official supported
port in Debian is actual new hardware. This is one of the requirements
by the Debian System Administrators (DSA) as they don't want to deal
with old hardware breaking apart when building packages for a release
architecture.
Adrian
Debian may not need the older machines, but have just given a couple of
V240's + configuration help to a FreeBSD developer. Afaics, they have
no plans to drop support for any 64 bit Sparc. Understand that you
have to concentrate efforts with limited resources, but if it doesn't
run on generic 64 bit Sparc, what's the point, unless you are
just aiming at commercial users ?. Heck, i'm still looking for a cheap
M3000 on fleabay, but later machines (ie: supported by Oracle) are
still very expensive. V series machines are more than adequate
for things like software development and are economical or free for
the average enthusiast / hacker. As for reliability, meh. I've had
uptimes of years from U and V class h/w, many of which are still less
than 10 years old. Sun built h/w from that period is very reliable,
with properly designed ventilation and conservative component rating.
They may or may not burn in the boards these days, but far better than
you get from the average cheap pc.
Anyway, thanks for putting up with the post. So how do I get the 7.10
issue resolved and replies to the list to thread properly ?. I see a
mirror of this list on nntp.aioe.org, but seems read only. Is that
correct ?...
Regards & Thanks,
Chris
Reply to: