Hans Witvliet wrote:

On Thu, 2005-01-27 at 16:26, Sid Boyce wrote:

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Fergus Wilde wrote:

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Is the SuSE SPARC port officially dead?

Certainly looks that way, Aurora based on Fedora seems to be the only port still alive, for the big stuff, Fujitsu was working on a port, but I don't know if they still are, I shall have to ask my ex-colleagues about that one. Meanwhile Sun are promoting Solaris 10 like crazy - the most advanced operating system there is, Sun haven't heard of Z/OS of course. My first install of beta-63 SPARC didn't excite me and I'm now downloading beta-72 to see if it's really improved. Regards Sid. -- Sid Boyce .... Hamradio G3VBV and Keen Flyer =====ALMOST ALL LINUX USED HERE, Solaris 10 SPARC is just for play=====

Hi Sid,

One of the biggest problems, perhaps THE biigest problems, is the support for the older 32-bit machines, SUN-4M.

Solaris-10 and fost of the linux-ports runs fine on Ultra machines, but don't install latest solaris on a sparcstation. On my Ultra5 it definitely runs faster than Solaris 8 or 9. The main disappointment was gnome which seems to be little more than a wrapper for the joke called CDE and there were a few things I couldn't do under gnome.

(And if you suffer from hyper-activity, just start Open-Office on a regular Sparc-Station-4: that will learn you the true meaning of the word patience...)

Downloading it now to try it on the Ultra5, but the overall feel is that it's snappy, out goes the old Sloaris tag I reckon. They've also beefed it up with more GNU utils.

And for a very, very long time, kernels were broken for 32-bit machines. As people at home tend to have older hardware, so linux support for them is essential, just for 64-bit machines won't do.

These days you can pick up Ultra 5's and 10's for not very much, I got mine from work, somebody stole the Ultra10 I was supposed to have and I regret not targetting a E3500.

That's why it takes such a long time between aurora release 1.00 and 2.00 (currently 1.98)

Hans

Perhaps they are not too few developers coupled with Sun's lack of interest. Before happily being accepted for layoff/retirement I was planning on installing SuSE 7.3 SPARC on a partition of a Fujitsu M2000 (better than an E10K) I had all to myself, but I was just too busy for a few years. Sun hardware/Solaris sure was a good money earner, better for that than a mainframe which we could have crated in at 08:00, spend up to 2 hours in the pub at lunchtime and have the customer up and running by 16:00. Regards Sid. -- Sid Boyce .... Hamradio G3VBV and Keen Flyer =====ALMOST ALL LINUX USED HERE, Solaris 10 SPARC is just for play=====