Re: [PLUG] Linux on SPARCstation 1+

["Michael C. Toren" <mct@netaxs.com>]

> Has anybody done it?  I'll be acquiring the use of one of these machines
> as a personal server.  I've not seen it yet, so I don't know how much
> RAM and disk it has.  More than likely it'll have SunOS/Solaris already
> on it, but I want to run free software on it.  My first thought was,
> "Well, NetBSD surely has a port."  Upon further inspection, it appears
> that OpenBSD and Debian do, as well.

I haven't tried with a 1+, but I've put Debian (2.1) on an IPX (which
essentially, but not exactly, is a Sparc 2 in a shoebox-style case).
I've found that the Linux 2.2 kernels are much faster than SunOS 4.1.4.

I recently (a week or two after the freeze) tried putting Debian Potato
(2.2) onto a Sparc 10, but there were simply too many bugs.  From the
discussion I see on the debian-sparc list, most of these have been worked
out, but I'm still not sure I'd recommend it before the 2.2 release.

> Anybody had any experiences with this?  Any thought, comments, etc, as
> to which OS is the better choice?  I've heard Very Good Things about
> BSD's TCP/IP stack (not to mention OpenBSD's security).

Unless you're planning to push more than a few mb/s of traffic (in which
case you probably wouldn't be using a Sparc 1 :-), the TCP/IP stack issues
won't come in to play.  But yes, I hear that they are still exist.

{Open,Net}BSD have had good Sparc support for a very long time now -- much
longer than the Linux port has had it.  But, I'm running Debian on my IPX
not so much because of Linux, but more so because of Debian's packaging
system.  Your personal experiences may differ.

> I'll be able to look at the machine and find out more info in about a
> week (this assumes that I don't pester the gracious individual with
> questions in the mean time).  :)

http://www.sunhelp.org/ is a great resource, by the way.

-mct