Raymond Lillard wrote:
Dear Shrike-list,
At the risk of showing the bad taste of replying to my own post, and upon further googling, I found the following link which answers my original question regarding the availability of RH9 on sparc.
Ans. I ain't happening.
It won't be easy any way. An it probably won't be very usable.
Grab the last Sparc release (RHL-6.2) and install it. Then get the rpm updates for rpm-4.
Not you can start building the packages for 7.x for the SRPMS.
Most still have sparc option in the spec files, though it might take some tweaks.
Once you have 7.x up, you can do the same for 8.0 and 9.
I'd stick with a minimal system with devel tools at least untill you have the base for RHL-9 (kernel, glibc, gcc). Then you can start adding extras. GNOME and KDE will be too slow to use, but X with fvwm, or mwm is reasonable. Also GNOME and KDE don't do well on 8bit framebuffers either.
I ran RHL-6.2 on a sparc20, and it was rough. Dog slow, and the 8bit framebuffer was unbearable.
-Thomas
