Who has had luck with any distros on a SPARCstation 5 and what were the easiest to deal with?

I have a SPARCstation 5 with Solaris 7 something on it. The thing has a keyboard, mouse and an adapter to use with multi-sync monitors. I also have a Belkin Sun<->PC KVM adapter that I use with my Belkin 8 port KVM switch. It has a Parallax Frame Buffer (which I never see supported.)

Anyway, I have downloaded and burnt a Splack 8.0 disk as I dig Slackware on i386 (as close to BSD as a Linux can come.) Before I totally lose Solaris on this box though I just wanted to check around.

Oh yeah, one catch... it has no floppy or CD-Rom =] I have seen tutorials on how easy it is to use tftp/bootp/rarp to do a remote boot and then install over NFS but I've seen other tutorials that were full of bovine splatter also. I could throw a CD in there but I've heard it has to be a specific kind and I've thought about putting the disk in another machine and dd'ing to it but it is some screwy interface.

So, what say ye?

tpro

Well I wish you luck in installing Slackware 8.0 on a Sparc 5, especially since I know of no version of Slack 8.0 compiled to run a SPARC architecture, so it will most likely fail and not install.

Splack 8.0

Never heard of it, thought it was a typo, my bad.

After looking at it (Splack 8.0,) I reckon that it isn't really popular because people may have had my experience.

I burnt the ISO and gave it a try. The instructions say to run scripts that were not present, there were complete directories missing and it was generally not impressive (as in, uninstallable.)

Chances are I'll just throw one of the BSD's on it. I have an x86 linux box in the home rack already so I didn't need another one really. Another BSD besides FreeBSD and BSD/OS will add to my O/S diversity in the home.

tpro

How goes it in Biggs, I just drove thru there last December. Got family up north of you in Yuba City and Chico. (lets all start singing "its a small world" now)

I have succesfully run RedHat 6.2 on Solaris, there is also another distro out there but I am having a time trying to find it right now.

I take that back, I just found it and it isn't "another" distro, it is someone porting RedHat to Sparc. The address is auroralinux.org

I doubt this will be very BSD'ish to you though.

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Jeremiah

Actually Chico is North of me and Yuba City is South

I looked into this website a little while back but was unable to get anything downloaded. Maybe I'll give it a try again. If I could get a linux installed on it (the SPARCstation,) I may throw one of the BSD's on the x86 it would free up, and use that for my always on Samba/Proxy box.

tpro

Have a look at debian.They support sparc.But I don't know if it covers your machine.

The thing was, the question was really "Who has had luck with any distros on a SPARCstation 5 and what were the easiest to deal with?" I know that Debian and others "support" SPARC, but was looking for insight from folks who actually installed one or more and how they felt about them. Thanks anyway though.

I guess no thread here would be complete without a Debian plug though

tpro

To start with you could check with - ta,ta - the debian sparc mailing list archives.Or even post a question there.All those guys run Linux on Sparc.

Debian again

Hi, I have installed SUSE sparc on my SS20, which is very much like a SS5. I had no problems installing or otherwise, but SUSE does not support Parallax graphics. You can run it, but dont expect to be running an xserver (KDE, etc) I have a TXGX card that works perfectly. Just be sure that you have over 96Mb of ram, or things will run VERY slow with SUSE. Hey, at least its better than solaris...

Perdon, my friend, I think what you meant was that "it is different from Solaris", or that "it is not solaris".

I dont see how Suse could possible be better than Solaris on a machine that was designed for Solaris and Solaris designed for the machine.

It is all in the eyes of the beholder as to which one is better. To me, there is nothing easier to work with than Solaris, but that is because I have spent the last 6+ years working on it. If I had spent all that time working on RedHat Linux, then I would probably think that RedHat is the easiest. To you maybe that is Suse, to someone else, it is probably mandy, etc...

Suse really does run a lot smoother than Solaris on my SS20. Suse has shorter boot times, and loading Mozilla takes half the time Solaris takes. I do like Solaris, dont get me wrong, but Suse is much better than solaris on my machine. Its a dual supersparc II 75, 160mb ram, txgx video. One bad point about Sparc Suse, is that there are literally no third party programs that are compatable.

personally, i will always chose debian if i wanted to run something other than solaris on SPARC!

I ran it on my Ultra 1 for a while, but unfortunately, my ultra 1's NIC suffers from the "famous" Happymeal bug, as i therefore needed to patch my kernel. This is a very rare problem though, and as far as i know, only happens on *some* Ultra 1's.

Also, i have never seen debian specifying which SPARC machines you can run it on, so i would assume it works on Ultra 1's, right up to SunFire 15K's!