I think i should have the PGX64 chipset in this machine, but i am not
sure if it uses the correct driver. glxinfo tells me everything is
fine with direct rendering using llvm.
The Rage XL[1] is a fairly dated and limited GPU, but it has very good
2D driver support on Linux. I think it can even do Xv and most of the
standard 2D acceleration in X.org.
When i try to run glxgears, i get a bus error. When i try to run
extremetuxracer, i don't get into the game, the errors point to
unhandled calls in some asound library.
In theory, the GPU should have OpenGL 1.0 support (and thus be able to
run glxgears), but this may not actually help much in practice.
Practically nobody cares about OpenGL 1.0 any more these days. I don't
know why it crashes, perhaps some OpenGL libraries are missing. It's
also possible that hardware support was dropped at some point, or never
implemented properly.
Also i can't run any web browser. Midori and Epiphany crash or don't
open a website and the current Firefox or Firefox-esr are not
installable due to missing dependencies.
That is to be expected. The old Firefox version that is still on the
Debian Ports repo does not work with current libraries, and there are
still various build and runtime issues with recent versions. But I think
we are slowly getting there.
Is any of this current normal behavior or is my configuration
incorrect at some point and some of these thing are supposed to
work, albeit slow on these old machines?
Yes, this is (unfortunately) expected behaviour. The sparc64 still needs
a lot of TLC before it is ready for regular use.
Still, I wouldn't want to go back to Solaris. You will not be able to
run much modern (desktop) software on Solaris 8, and this is very
unlikely to change.