"Alexey Eremenko"
Actually, openSUSE is very good OS and is more convenient than Solaris.
So if you have powerful multi-CPU SPARC Server and want a convenient OS, openSUSE is the only way to go.
This way you can reutilize Sun Servers as Linux Workstations or Servers.
But this would require a very serious rebuild of the whole distro.
Question: How much time it would require for 1 Linux expert to port all openSUSE from x86 to SPARC ? (including installer & full FTP repository) provided he know both architectures & works full-time.
It's not that easy to give any timeframe. It depends on various issues, so let me give some commands based on my work getting SUSE Linux running on x86-64. The challenge is getting the base system running: * gcc * glibc * binutils * kernel The problem is that in these projects only a few folks take care of SPARC. I do not know whether current versions of these do run at all.
1 week, 1 month, 1 year ?
If the above is done, there are two challenges: * packages * yast changes yast changes should be only partitioning and booting, the rest should be generic. So, this is is something of a few weeks. With packages it's lots of time to rebuild everything (bootstrap) and fix problems. Since we already support i386, x86-64, ppc, ppc64, s390, s390x and ia64 most of the problems where packages are not portable (endianness, 64-bit) should be fixed already. The problems arise when packages are failing through the build. This is initially quite often a problem in the toolchain but could also be a non-portable package. So, this needs somebody that can debug bugs at a low level and fix them. If somebody has these skills, this is something of a few person months. Now comes the challenge: Everything above is with a non-moving target. Factory is moving forward every day, so a new toolchain and new packages come in - and you have to keep up with that and fix issues that arise if you rebuild with new packages. This is a couple of hours a week - and for rebuilding you need some disk space and lots of CPU power... Andreas -- Andreas Jaeger, aj@suse.de, http://www.suse.de/~aj/ SUSE Linux Products GmbH, Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany GPG fingerprint = 93A3 365E CE47 B889 DF7F FED1 389A 563C C272 A126