Quoting Pasi Pirhonen <upi@xxxxxx>:
> For me, as who is crunching this together, it's matter of challenging
> myself to see if i can pull yet another arch from my sleeve. Solaris
> would work better and propably even faster on hardware i do have, but
> for me, and some others too, it might be just a set of features
> available which is driving towards Linux/sparc. Unified set of packages
> (at least mostly) among working, familiar, package management.
You made some really good arguments there. One of the reasons why somebody
would install Linux on Sparc box might be that there are huge piles of those
neat small 1U Netra boxes (such as X1 or V100) with dual ethernet ports that
would still work perfectly well as dedicated firewalls. And for X1 you don't
even need rails to install it into the rack (its small and light enough
to hold
on couple of screws at the front).
I used to run Aurora on one of my basement computers, a noisy
Enterprise 150. Until power supply died in the box (new PS would
probably cost more than entire
box is selling for on eBay, plus it was really noisy, so maybe it wasn't a bad
thing it died, at least my house is so much more quiet now).
Installing Aurora
is a bit awkward process. There are bootable CDs only for 1.0 (wich is
equivalent of Red Hat 7.3), than one needs to go through bunch of (sometimes
problematic) manual steps to get it upgraded to 1.92 (FC2 equivalent) using
yum.
I'm really curious about the sparc64 version of CentOS. Currently there are
only Debian and Aurora, with Debian being something completely different, and
Aurora not even having working installer for current version (only for RH7.3
equivalent version). Mandrake or Suse (not sure which one) also has sparc64
version, but not for free.
My guess is that you'll do only sparc64? There's probably not many
people that
still have sparc32 machines around (well, I have one, an SS5 box, currently
running OpenBSD, mostly because there's no decent current Linux distro for the
thing, primary use to burn some electricity and as monitor stand). Not even
sure if 2.6 kernels would run on the thing at all...
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