Re: [PLUG] Which distro for non-intel machines

["William H. Magill" <magill@mcgillsociety.org>]

On Monday, November 4, 2002, at 03:47 PM, Bradley Molnar wrote:
> This is an odd question, but, here it goes.  In an effort to have a
> reasonably up-to-date version of something on some alpha and sparc 
> machines,
> I have decided to ask the group for what people think is a good distro 
> that
> is kept up to date and will also (most likely) continue to support 
> both the
> alpha and sparc platforms.

You are basically out of luck. Neither SPARC nor Alpha being supported 
(new version ports) into the future unless Sun or HP respectively pays 
for the ports. I had some fairly in depth discussions about the future 
of non Intel architectures with the RedHat engineers on Sunday. They 
basically confirmed what I was previously aware of from other vendors 
-- both SPARC and Alpha have virtually zero commercial support other 
than from their vendors. RedHat has no ports planned for either in the 
future.

On the Alpha, at least at the moment, SuSE has another version in the 
pipeline. However, even though the Alpha is much more popular in 
Europe, they currently do not have plans for release next+1.

Personally, I prefer SuSE on my Alpha to RedHat. Probably because they 
supported it "better" in the past. However, no version of Linux runs 
"well" on the Alpha, if you are looking for anything other than a 
bare-bones operating system... sans environment. The biggest problem is 
the lack of drivers for almost anything.

I don't know the SPARC distribution, but from the way the RedHat guys 
were laughing, it doesn't sound "well supported" either.

What this means is that in terms of support, you are basically on your 
own.

By the way, I assume that you are aware of the linuxalpha.org website 
and the axp mailing list at RedHat.

William H. Magill
magill@mcgillsociety.org
magill@acm.org

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