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SuSE Businesses

SuSE Announces Linux Version For SPARC 102

Posted by Hemos from the the-lizard-marches-on dept.
riggwelter writes: "SuSE has announced a version of their distribution for the Sun SPARC architecture. It's available as four ISO images from their FTP site and mirrors. This mean s that SuSE now supports PowerPC, Alpha and SPARC in addition to i386. Anyone with a SPARC knocking about the place fancy reviewing it?."
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SuSE Announces Linux Version for SPARC More

SuSE Announces Linux Version for SPARC

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  • The ISO's have been availible for several days at linuxiso.org. I have been checking the SuSE ftp server frequently while waiting for the 7.0 ISO for i386 to become availible and I have seen them for a while.
  • you can actuly get an adapter to covert a standard monitor to the wacky plug. You can get it from sun for about $45
  • Slower sparc boxes with lower amounts of memory should benifit the most. This is due to the fact that Solaris or even SunOS has/had fairly high requirements. This is just a reason I am thinking of.
  • Try $150 if you are lucky, for an IPX. If you want one with a cool monitor and a decent configuration, +$100

    Often wrong but never in doubt.
    I am Jack9.
  • Sorry, but I just don't get too excited about trying to find drivers for, well, ANYTHING under Solaris i386...
  • How about this: love the bulletproof hardware, not so crazy about the cardwalloper OS or the locked-up-tight architecture?

    I know a little bit about AS/400s -- had to work with one a while back. They're pretty good machines (after all, the AS/400 has managed to outlive the VAX, its only real competition in that niche), especially for legacy shops that still use old mainframe apps but need more performance. The only real problem is that they *are* legacy boxes -- IBM updates the hardware, but sandboxes the users in a virtual machine. You can't see the hardware at all, even on the instruction set level. The hardware being actually pretty good, you might find that trusted C/Fortran/Cobol compilers writing to bytecode is maybe a bit too restrictive for your purposes. Thus, Linux/400.

    It's about choice, you know? Rock-solid and guaranteed to carry you over? Go out of the box. You actually want to USE your hardware? Linux.

    /Brian
  • True, so true..

    I keep copies of AS/400 V3R7 'Hardware Troubleshooting and Upgrade' and 'OS/400 Reference' on my desk. Every time I get pissed about the shoddy design of some clone I have in for testing, I'll jerk 'Troubleshooting..' out and read about the right way to do hardware. Or when Windows NT pisses me off, I'll grab 'OS/400' and thank god I don't have to deal with THAT!

  • Visit http://www.ultralinux.org/faq.html [ultralinux.org] for details about what hardware the Sparc 32/64 kernels will and will not run on..

    Oh, and it will run on an IPX, and supports the full range of normal IPX hardware.
  • I thought Sun Solaris 2.7 was already a full fledged unix. Oh well, I guess it's about the same type of thing as LinuxPPC: freedom of OS choice. I chose Windows 2000 for my system; since I'm running a regular home machine and not a server and it's nice and stable, it's perfect for me. Now, don't get started on the bugs; I haven't been hit hard by any of them (unless you count the Aureal soundcard drivers; damn lazy underfunded (well, actually bankrupt) software engineers!)
  • I bet you were using the CDE window manager with lots of services running? Install linux on a 386 and try to run X. Come back in 5 mins and it might load. Use the olvwm window manager and watch what serviced load and you'll be fine. Don't forget Solaris was designed specifically for the hardware. Linux was hacked to run.

    Back during kernel 2.0.34 sun4c architecture had a mmu slowdown bug that rendered the machine unusable after one day. Do you know how long a kernel compile took on an IPC with this bug? 6 hours! I installed OpenBSD 2.4 and have never looked back. Linux used to give scsi bus reset errors at least once every bootup,not the case with OpenBSD. Let me just say that OpenBSD has *NEVER* crashed. Not a single lock up or crash of any kind, other than the usual netscape segfault.
  • SuSE completely reaffirmed my hope in linux on SPARC. I have several old Sparc Station 5's at work. The best thing that I have been able to install on them was Debian 2.1. That would take hours to install tho. RedHat 5.2 was next just another long slow install, with out of date packages (even tho I think rh5.2 was the best RH released but that's just me). Red Hat 6.0 and Red Hat 6.2 both have some sort of bugs that lock the install as it's installing the packages... and I tried over and over and over again to burn a good RedHat 6.1 CD but to no avail. Upgrading from Debian 2.1 to 2.2 was a BEAR! There is a circular dependancy between perl, libc and the kernel. And for some reason a strait install over the network would not work (I was doing all this so I could hook up our cd burner that, after a year of perfect service, windows decided it wouldn't burn a single good cd. So unless I had these distros on cd already it was a network install). Then I searched for other distros that supported SPARC. Lo and behold, there it was: SuSE of SPARC. I spent 3 hours installing debian 2.1 on it, just so I could burn SuSE to a cd. SuSE took about 20 minutes to install, reboot, setup and was up and running. It was absolutely amazing. It was just a wonderful feeling. I only wish that the company that I'm contracted to wasn't so cheap and only bought the 8bit framebuffers for these SS5's.
  • excellent? solaris? you're kidding, right?

    it gets the job done, i suppose, but i wouldn't use the word 'excellent' to describe it.

    different strokes, i guess.

  • as the subject says, I just installed this two days ago.. Took me about 5 trys to get it right (damn sun partion table/cant boot a partition above 1 gig)

    Out of all the multi-cd linux installs I've ever seen/used, this is the ONLY one that ever called for the second disk. It was funky.

    Once I got it booting, it was pretty much typical suse. I've got it running my web site now (plug, http://www.meatbarn.com) Hopefully I can keep all the bugs ironed out :)

    Oh, and for those interested, its a SparcStation 10 nabbed via ebay. I never thought 50Mhz could go so fast :)

    (Ok ok.. fast is an overstatement... but its cool)

    -paul
    ---------------------------------------
    The art of flying is throwing yourself at the ground...
    ... and missing.
  • I don't see why anyone would want to use Linux for Solaris.

    Scale and fault-tolerance. Solaris can scale from a 4 year old, single-CPU Ultra-1 to a 64-CPU E-10k. Also, with the E3000+ machines, Dynamic Reconfiguration allows for hot-swapable drives, CPU boards and memory. I don't really see Linux making those kind of strides in the next few years.

    This is because I in general find Linux much more pleasing to work with. The gnu utilities are in general, far superior. KDE/Gnome beats the crap of CDE any day of the week. The ability of Linux to work in a heterogenous environment (i.e., so easily work with smb shares, nfs, etc.) is great.

    I'm writing this on a Solaris 8 machine running Helix Gnome on one monitor and KDE on the other. I have all of the GNU tools I need to use installed, and I'm running Samba....so your argument on lack of applications is groundless. Yes, CDE and Suns compilers suck....so don't use them.

    I find Solaris, while not unpleasant to use, definitely not as pleasing on a day to day basis. I am also amazed at how poorly it performs sometimes. I know Solaris is supposed to perform well, and I just don't understand it. I do operations on fairly fast hardware, such as removing many files, etc., that I _know_ my little linux box could do faster. I don't administer the Solaris boxen though, so it could be our sysadmin just doesn't know how to set them up efficiently? I don't know.

    Some Sun hardware, (the E3000-E6000 especially) is not designed to run at blazingly fast speeds, but to keep running at repectable sppeds under extreme load. I have a E3500 with 40,000 users which seems to run everything at the same speed if there is 1 user or several hundred logged on at the same time. Linux machines (although, it could be the intel arch.) tend to run very fast with a few users, but lose processing power as load is applied.

    I really don't see Sun or Solaris going anywhere for a long time. Current Intel-based machines do not scale and are at nowhere near the level of fault tolerance that is required for most large applications, and Beowulf-type clustering is not satisfactory for many applications.

  • free os vs paying a buttload for a licence

    hmmmm, such a hard decision

    -paul
    ---------------------------------------
    The art of flying is throwing yourself at the ground...
    ... and missing.
  • In fact NetBSD or OpenBSD would be a better choice for an IPC - Linux still has problems with the sun4c-MMU. See the Ultralinux [ultralinux.org] or NetBSD [netbsd.org] FAQ or Redhat's Ha rdware compatibility list [redhat.com].
  • What Industry Standard benchmarks????

    A 480MHZ US-II(100-120MHZ Frontside bus) outperforms a 1GHz pentium III(with pc800 800MHz frontside bus RDRAM) in Floating point CFP2000 benchmarks.
    ------------------------------------------------
    int: base 225 peak 234
    Fp: base 274 peak 291
    HARDWARE
    --------
    Hardware Vendor: Sun Microsystems
    Model Name: Sun Enterprise 450
    CPU: UltraSPARC II
    CPU MHz: 480 MHz
    FPU: Integrated
    CPU(s) enabled: 1
    CPU(s) orderable: 1 to 4
    Parallel: None
    Primary Cache: 16KBI+16KBD on chip
    Secondary Cache: 8MB(I+D) off chip
    L3 Cache: None
    Other Cache: None
    Memory: 512MB
    Disk Subsystem: 2*9.1GB(7200 RPM)
    ------------------------------------------------ -
    int: base 407 peak 410
    Fp: base 273 peak 284
    HARDWARE
    --------
    Hardware Vendor: Intel Corporation
    Model Name: Intel VC820 (1.0 GHz MHz Pentium III)
    CPU: 1.0 GHz Pentium III processor
    CPU MHz: 1.0 GHz
    FPU: Integrated
    CPU(s) enabled: 1
    CPU(s) orderable: 1
    Parallel: No
    Primary Cache: 16KBI + 16KBD on-die
    Secondary Cache: 256KB(I+D) on-die ECC
    L3 Cache: N/A
    Other Cache: N/A
    Memory: 256 MB PC800 RDRAM non-ECC
    Disk Subsystem: IBM DJNA 371800 ATA-66
    Other Hardware: Diamond Multimedia Viper 770 Ultra TNT2 AGP

  • You left out the 1.1 ghz athlon:
    fp base 311 peak 331
    HARDWARE
    --------
    Hardware Vendor: Advanced Micro Devices
    Model Name: Gigabyte GA-7ZM motherboard 1.1GHz Athlon processor
    CPU: 1.1GHz AMD Athlon Processor A1100AMT3B
    CPU MHz: 1100MHz
    FPU: Integrated
    CPU(s) enabled: 1
    CPU(s) orderable: 1
    Parallel: No
    Primary Cache: 64KBI + 64KBD on chip
    Secondary Cache: 256KB(I+D) on chip
    L3 Cache: N/A
    Other Cache: N/A
    Memory: 256MB PC133 SDRAM CL2 Non-ECC
    Disk Subsystem: IBM DPTA 372060 ATA-66
    Other Hardware: Savage S4 video card
    --Shoeboy

  • SUSE? (Score:2)

    by cybe ( 92183 )
    I already have my OS of choice on my old Sun, a Sparcstation LX (50MHz sun4m, 32MB ram):

    [root@sune:~]# uname -a ; uptime
    Linux sune 2.2.15 #1 Wed Jun 7 12:30:24 EDT 2000 sparc unknown
    8:45pm up 85 days, 7:54, 1 user, load average: 1.00, 1.00, 1.00

    --
    DEBIAN POTATO POWERED :D

  • SuSE was my first distro, actually. It's pretty decent as long as you don't mind sorting through multiple gigs of extra packages and fluff.

    Nice to seem them supporting Sparc. I'd test it, but my box already runs OpenBSD just fine. :P
    --

  • Convenience (Score:4)

    by Brighten ( 93641 ) on Thursday September 14, 2000 @08:57AM (#779352)
    I used to have a Sparc 5 running Solaris, and it was a great underlying OS -- never crashed on me. But after I switched to LinuxPPC [linuxppc.com] on a G4, I noticed a big difference in how convenient it was to install software. Not only does Solaris not come with as wide an array of software preinstalled (c compiler, a nice window manager, etc.), but it's not as easily available on the net in package form. And when compiling software myself I usually ran into more problems.

    There are Solaris package archives available, such as the Solaris Package Archive [ibiblio.org] and Freeware4Sun [freeware4sun.com], and Freeware for Solaris [sunfreeware.com]. And if you really want to get something compiled and running, you can do it. But overall, my Linux software install experience has been much more convenient.

    On the other hand, if I were in the high-end-server market rather than the geek market, there would probably be many apps I could run better, more conveniently, or only on Solaris. And I guess that's the market Sun is mostly going after.

    Another issue is that Solaris is more bloated (in terms of disk usage) than other free Unixes, in my experience.

  • Why are people interested on running Linux on SPARC rather than x86? From a price/performance point of view I think x86 machines are a much better value; unless you are running Solaris. Linux still isn't quite where Solaris is when it comes to stability and scalability so it seems the main reason to buy a SPARC computer from Sun is to run Solaris on it.

    Besides, a lot of the software people buy Sun Workstations to run aren't ported to Linux yet (such as HSPICE and Cadence).

    Is running Linux on a Sun really that much better than running it on a PIII?

  • Exactly where the heck is the ISO image for the i386 version?

    Isn't it jsut a *little* odd that they eagerly advertise that their Sparc version of 7.0 is posted on their FTP site, where there is no i386 ISO image for 7.0? Does this have anything to do with them offering a Personal and Professional version of the Intel variety?

    Just curious.....

  • Re:What's the point? (Score:3)

    by Shoeboy ( 16224 ) on Thursday September 14, 2000 @09:06AM (#779355) Homepage
    Obviously industry standard benchmarks are no match for an AC who claims to have a rendering package, but look here [spec.org]
    --Shoeboy

  • Yuck, no FTP install (Score:3)

    by Kartoffel ( 30238 ) on Thursday September 14, 2000 @09:07AM (#779356)
    Looking at SuSE's ftp site, I can see one directory with individual packages, and another one with four (FOUR?!) iso images. Where are the boot floppy images?

    One thing about Sparcs, _bootable_ 512-bytes-per-block scsi cdrom drives are hard to come by. That's why many people with secondhand Sparcstations choose to do FTP or NFS installations, e.g.:

    attach monitor + keyboard, or serial terminal, then power on...
    *beep*
    Sun SPARCStation OpenPROM 2.x.xx blah blah
    insert floppy
    >boot floppy booting . . . . welcome to $OS_SETUP. press [space] to configure networking. configuation ensues. . . select FTP site . . . download . . .

    How simple is that?
    --

  • You can buy a personal solaris license for about $20 all together. $10 for the media and $10 shipping, manuals and everything.
  • Just be sure that your monitor offers synch-on-green capability before using the vga to 13w3 adaptors. Many multi-synch monitors today support synch-on-green capability. Cheapie monitors won't work with your SUN machine.
  • The main merit of SPARC Linux is that it means that it gives you something to run on some of the Hordes of SPARCs on eBay [ebay.com] that are priced as low as a couple hundred bucks, but which likely don't come with a Solaris license.

    Such machines won't be challenging the Distributed.Net "Keys-per-second" benchmarks, but if they allow you to put in place a web server on hardware actually designed for serving rather than the sort of absolute trash you'd get in IA-32 hardware for $100, that's certainly worth something.

    I doubt many will be using SPARC Linux on a spanking new E10000 Enterprise Server; but watch out, since as Linux improves, while it may be less featureful than Solaris, the differences are likely diminishing over time.

  • Recently released Debian GNU/Linux 2.2 runs on x86, PowerPC(most powermacs and some RS/6000) Sparc/UltraSparc, m68k, StrongArm, and Alpha. S/390, MIPS, and HP PA-RISC ports are under development as well.
  • But not everyone who buys Sun buys big boxes. There are plenty of people stuck with Sparcstation 4's, 5's, 10's, Ultra 5's, and Ultra 10's with a measly 32 or 64MB of RAM. Solaris is a memory hog, and you can't even use inexpensive PC memory. Sun plain out just sells desktop machines that don't have enough memory to run their OS well. Not even from the day they are sold. And when your system is thrashing, all the advantages of Solaris disappear.

    If your only choice was Solaris, you'd have to just throw those old computers out because you're not going to spend money Sparc 5 memory. Hell, even the Ultra 5's and 10's require memory that costs twice as much as PC memory today. But why throw them away when you can get a free OS that makes your computer useful again?
  • Their site seems designed to discourage everyone from downloading their distro. I guess they figure if people are inconvenienced long enough, they might just give up the cash. Not me, I'm a student and I'm cheap.
    I'm not advocating legal action against these people, but it really seems like a violation of the spirit of the GPL. If I weren't a Linux moron I'd start a "Free SuSE" distro that would basically take all the SuSE packages (they do have a list) and put them up on FTP sites in ISOs. Ah well.
  • This also means that Debian GNU/Linux STILL supports alpha, i386, arm, m68k, ppc, AND sparc.

  • Well, anyone who's read their sci-fi classics (2010), should already know there's water on Europa. :-)

  • I have an ultra10 440Mhz lying around. I'll check it out. Give me about a week.
  • I've been running the Sparc port since it was posted August 11, and my feelings are kind of mixed. First, let me say that I use SuSE exclusively on the Intel platform, and have been for a couple years. Before this port, I had been using RedHat on my Ultra5 workstation and my AXi servers, not something I enjoyed.

    First off, yast2 is not complete for this port. It evidently isn't using the fbdev X server, as it came up full GUI on one machine, and in some Really Ugly text-based menu system on another. Definately boot yast1.

    Second, it gives you all the options for using reiserfs, but as some of us know already, reiserfs only works on x86. I don't see how this one got past the beta-testers.

    Third, it ships with kernel source that won't compile. The SuSE modified 2.2.16 will not compile on architectures other then x86. Best idea: upgrade to 2.4.0-test8, which finally seems to work on Sparc again.

    Next, one of the big things I was looking forward to, KDE2, seems to be included in spirit alone. Haven't tried Gnome, but kde1 works just fine.

    Beyond these issues, it seems pretty solid. They have a couple major updates you should get on thier ftp site, but thats a no-brainer.

    I highly reccomend this to any UltraSparc users. SuSE is way more friendly then Solaris, and Linux itself seems much faster on the same hardware.

    With Sun selling Ultra5 workstations (fully loaded! on Ebay on the cheap, this is a great way to break free of "lin-tel" and see how good 64bit can feel!

  • Why do you think Sparcs are useless, I am typing this on a seven year old SparcStation 10 with 1 85 mhz SM-81 processor and 176 megs of ram, I running netscape, playing MP3's with Xmms, downloading the 2nd Suse iso image, and chatting on IRC using xchat, sure there are faster machines out there, in fact I even own one, but how fast do you really need, and if I need more speed I can drop in a second SM-81 processor. Ike
  • >Looking at SuSE's ftp site, I can see one directory with individual packages, and another
    >one with four (FOUR?!) iso images. Where are the boot floppy images?

    SuSE usually has boot floppy images on the installation CDs. So maybe you first have to download the CD images to get the boot floppys :-)
  • I have a Ultra 5 w/ a 270Mhz USIIi in it and I had linux on it for about one day. For usability Linux ran as usual but I can say w/ Seti Solaris 8 crunched packets about 4 hours quicker than linux. But this might not mean much because of compiler differences, then again it may.
  • Yup, I run Linux (RedHat 6.2 beta originally) on an Ultra 10 w/ Creator 3D and it sure blows Solaris' performance out of the water, and the ease of compiling/installing etc is greatly improved.

    The main problem with Solaris was its phenomenal memory usage - I've got 256MB and that wasn't enough for it. I agree with others that Solaris is probably great for a server OS but useless as a desktop.

    I originally got it for Java work, thinking Sun's JVM on their own OS on their own hardware would probably outperform the Linux/x86 one, and possible even JView/Win32. I was very wrong.

  • Unless things have changed recently, you'll probably be better with NetBSD on an IPC. There are many reports that memory management in Linux
    on 4c-class machines is less than optimal -
    certainly NetBSD feels more responsive on my SS1/SS2s than RedHat did when I tried it.

    Regards,
    Tim.
  • For a box that's not on your desktop, a bloody good reason to get a Sparc (or other grown-up computer) is simple: serial console, from the PROM stage upwards. This is a *major* failing of PeeCee hardware for non-desktop work; you must have keyboard / monitor attached to interact with the BIOS or anything before at least the first-stage boot-loader. (I know you can do serial consoles from within Linux - that's not a help if the machine is halted with a 'duff CMOS - press F1 to continue' style message).

    Also, and bear in mind this is subjective, the Sparcs I've used feel much more responsive under load than equivalent or even slightly higher spec PeeCees. I don't know if there is some difference in the CPU / supporting chipset design that is better optimised for a task-switching environment than Intel's (any CPU design gurus here?), but a high load average seems to bring my Pentia to a crawl much worse than the Sparcs. I don't generally run just a single benchmark task on machines, so that's quite useful to me ;)

    Regards,
    Tim.

  • There is a machine on my network:

    firestoneup301+13:34, 0 users,load 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

    It's running Debian/Sparc and it's been up continuously for over 300 days.

    Debian isn't for beginners. No serious Linux user that I know has ever switched away from Debian, although I have seen several switch to Debian.

  • I don't think anybody's going to be installing SuSE on an E10K anytime soon, though..

    I don't see why not. I used to run Red Hat on an Ultra Enterprise 4000 at work a while back. The E10K has a different internal architecture to the rest of the Sun Ultra Enterprise line, but the support's already there in the Linux kernel. See arch/sparc64/kernel/starfire.c [innominate.org].

  • Hmmm, maybe my old 4/75 will run it. :)

    1Alpha7

  • One question: Why? (Score:4)

    by Trevor Goodchild ( 187368 ) on Thursday September 14, 2000 @08:34AM (#779376)
    I love Linux and all, and I guess it's good to have it available on even more hardware, but why would you throw out an excellent OS like Sun's in favor of Linux? What benefits are there to Linux that don't already exist on a Sun?

  • Sure! (Score:3)

    by zpengo ( 99887 ) on Thursday September 14, 2000 @08:37AM (#779377) Homepage
    Yeah, no problem, I've got one right h....Oh, wait, you said *SPARC*...sorry I thought you said 286.

  • bah! (Score:1)

    by mrmud ( 219198 )
    forget those COMMON chipsets.. i'll be impressed when they come out with dual MIPS(with arc!) support.

    *goes back to kicking the big ass paper weight at his house*
  • Solaris is availible for i386. Linux for Sparc. What a day to be alive!
  • Now to just find which hardware they actually support.
    i.e. SparcIPX?

    Vote [dragonswest.com] Naked 2000
  • Umm... the GPL ?? Just guessing.

  • cool (Score:4)

    by bubbasatan ( 99237 ) on Thursday September 14, 2000 @08:39AM (#779382) Homepage
    Now I can trash that copy of RedHat for Sparc that I had been saving. I think this announcement highlights what the earlier story said about RedHat kind of losing ground to companies like SuSE. SuSE is in the midst of a strong push to loosen RedHat's stranglehold on the US Linux market, and I wish them the best of luck. I've been using SuSE for years, and have always preferred them and Caldera to RedHat. Does anyone know the processor limitations on SuSE's Sparc release? Since most Sparc based boxes I know are multiprocessor boxes, it would be nice if SuSE was accomodating.

  • wow. (Score:1)

    by gonar ( 78767 )
    as much as i dislike M$ products, this story amazes me.

    This morning I submitted a story about M$ releasing Win ME and the astoundingly uninterested press coverage even from MSNBC (who called it a waste of time for most people), and it was rejected in minutes.

    suse adds a support for a port that has been out for a while and its front page news...

  • What's next. NEXT?
    Yep. [zabbo.net]
  • Linux has a lot of little features that I'd miss otherwise, even on a Sparc.

    Probably the biggest one for me is virtual text consoles. I know the Sparc has *a* console, but it sucks! (furthermore, people generally configure it to write some error messages there even in X! That's really stupid...)

    Also, the threading should be slightly faster. At least gcc has improved somewhat as well, 'cause it used to really suck on the Sparc platform. (or, for that matter, most non-x86 platforms....)

    Of course, Solaris does have some features of its own; I'd happily stick Linux on an Ultra 10, especially if I could get the 3D acceleration to work. But heck, the Ultra 10 is basically a glorified PC with a Sparc processor in it; you can find them with PCI buses and IDE hard drives!

    However, on huge, enterprise-level Sparc boxes, of course I'd keep Solaris on there. Heck, the support contract alone is enough to make you do that, much less the superior multiprocessing support, and any other native hardware support they have...
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
  • When will be a suse version for HP ?

    Any chance ?

    OverLord

  • One answer: Speed (Score:3)

    by stype ( 179072 ) on Thursday September 14, 2000 @08:42AM (#779387) Homepage
    If I had somethin nice like an ultrasparc I'd prolly keep solaris on there just cuz it works real nicely. Its a great OS. but unfortunately I have a sparcstation IPC (25 mhz). It came with solaris on it and it was slooooow. I threw red hat on (bad choice...too big) and it at least doubled in speed.

  • yay? (Score:1)

    by option8 ( 16509 )
    well, now i have an excuse to pick up one of the surplus SPARCstation workstations at the local surplus sale. before, i was too worried i wouldn't know enough about solaris to do much with the little bugger, but if i can pry it open and squeeze a decent (and SuSE is that, at least) linux distro on it, i can likely make good use on my LAN..

    of course, i'd have to pick up one of the sun monitors to go with, the one with the wacky plug that doesn't fit any other computer on the planet.. but i'm used to that - the rest of my network is macs :)

  • Solaris-linux migration in science. (Score:3)

    by aardvaark ( 19793 ) on Thursday September 14, 2000 @09:16AM (#779389) Homepage
    I'm a regular user of both Solaris and Linux for scientific applications.

    I don't see why anyone would want to use Linux for Solaris. In the future I think we will be using mostly big multiprocessor x86 machines running Linux, with workstations being PCs running linux. Solaris boxes will be relagated to the really large multiprocessor machines, and the ocassional one around for legacy apps.

    This is because I in general find Linux much more pleasing to work with. The gnu utilities are in general, far superior. KDE/Gnome beats the crap of CDE any day of the week. The ability of Linux to work in a heterogenous environment (i.e., so easily work with smb shares, nfs, etc.) is great.

    I find Solaris, while not unpleasant to use, definitely not as pleasing on a day to day basis. I am also amazed at how poorly it performs sometimes. I know Solaris is supposed to perform well, and I just don't understand it. I do operations on fairly fast hardware, such as removing many files, etc., that I _know_ my little linux box could do faster. I don't administer the Solaris boxen though, so it could be our sysadmin just doesn't know how to set them up efficiently? I don't know.

    I would greatly look forward to running Linux on them instead. Unfortunately, the only reason I'm not doing research on a x86 box is that many of the programs, libraries etc. I use in my research are Solaris specific. They aren't ported to Linux yet. However, this is changing quickly, and I actually only need one more vendor to support linux and I can drop Solaris. Its ironic, because in every other way, the application base for Linux kicks the crap out of Solaris. Running windows emulators can even get me Windows apps (for those damn word attachments etc.).

    I recently set up a little linux farm for a colleague of mine who is starting up a lab at a major university. He had previously used no other Unix except solaris. I set him up personal linux work stations, and a solaris enterprise for the main number crunching. His statement after using it for a week was "I love it. Anybody else who isn't using this setup for research is stupid." He now has colleagues interested in using a similar setups.

    My analysis, as far as the world of science is concerned, is that Sun is in big trouble. I can get pretty impressive PCs nowadays. The workstations and servers of the future will be running Linux and fast/big PCs. Sun will be relegated to the very high end, big multiprocessor machines, although people are gradually going beowulf too.....

    Sun has a little breating room until Linux can get better SMP support for many processors, the journaling file systems become more robust, PC hardware becomes larger scale (Can you even easily get, say a 4 or 8 processor PC?), and more applications kick in. After that, I forsee Sun and Solaris getting dropped like a hot rock.

    Anyway, just my take on it.
  • I have a sparc 20 that I can put it on and toss up what I notice (good and bad) compared to the red hat that runs on it currently (and the solaris that had been running on it, and the mandrake that I *tried* to install, but that's another story), but what would you, you the /. populous consider to be good parts of a review for this platform?

    If you offer up suggestions about what you'd like to know I'll look into it. If you offer up suggestions - and direct commands to do this all the better... but the question is, what are some general topics that would make a good reivew?

    PS, what I usually look for is the KISS - does it work, was it horrible to use.... but I'm sure others would like to hear more and I'm willing to do this.
  • It should work on an IPC.
    There are plenty of cool operating systemst that will run on an IPC. I probably haven't thought of them all, but your options (besides Sun) might include:
    • Mandrake: nice, but overkill for for such an old machine
    • RedHat: also overkill, but not quite as nice
    • NetBSD: "of course it runs NetBSD"
    • OpenBSD: Refined and actively developed on SPARCs.

    --
  • As someone who uses Solaris regularly at work, here's my observations:

    On an Ultra, you're better off with Solaris. 64-bit architecture o/s designed for the hardware it's running on UltraPenguin just doesn't have the background that the Sun engineers have put into Solaris. Linux runs well here, its just that you already have a very mature o/s to compete with here.

    I have been very impressed with the way Linux performs on IPX's and IPC's, etc. This 32-bit Sun architecture really crawls with Solaris. You really notice the difference with Linux, especially with X and X apps. Good Lord, I could go wash my car waiting for CDE or OpenWindows to fire up on an IPX.

    Linux = Great on non-Ultra
    Solaris = Great on Ultra

  • I'll second your opinion... I've used Linux on a wide array of Sun hardware (IPC, IPX, LX, Sparc 5, Ultra 1, Ultra 1 Creator series) with as little as 12 Megs of RAM up to 128Megs of RAM. For non-Ultra hardware, Linux on Sun is the only way to go for performance. However, the Ultra series machines seem to do just as well running Solaris 8 as Linux, and I've had a couple Ultras not behave properly running Linux.

    At any rate, Linux is nice to have as an option for those of us who don't like to use/admin Solaris.
  • > What benefits are there to Linux that don't already exist on a Sun?

    Price - I bought a used Sun SparcStation 10 that did not come with an OS on it. I was not about to pay big bucks to Sun to get a new copy of an OS when I could get a Debian Sparc CD for $3.00 from CheapBytes.
  • The Transmeta chip runs the x86 version. Or weren't you paying attention when that was explained 15 million times when they first announced the chip?
  • "lying around"??!!

  • jesus christ, bad enough that the domain is span.net, do you REALLY have to do it?! rojo jones sheep go to heaven
  • I've been talked to people at slackware and there is port of slackware being worked on for sparc. The last I heard, most everything we done, there was no installer yet and the X stuff still needs work.


    THAT will be a happy day. My classics will pee themselves.

    rojo jones
    sheep go to heaven
    goats go to hell
  • I'm not advocating legal action against these people, but it really seems like a violation of the spirit of the GPL.

    It's not. Everyone they distribute their stuff to gets all the sources and can redistribute under terms of the GPL. So what's your point again?
  • Short answer: not everyone likes Solaris. Why might that be?
    • Solaris uses the bloody awful CDE gui. Sure it's not too hard to

    • ditch that in favour of something else, but if you're in the business
      of replacing things, why not move to a distribution that does these
      things already.
      • Sun's idea of what is reasonable to preinstall is way way less

      • than anyone elses. I don't know about the recnt OS's, but for the
        longest time they were the only commercial UNIX that didn't
        automatically come with a C compiler. Sun is the Microsoft of the
        UNIX world: always trying to sell you new products that everyone else
        bundles for free.
        Sun's OSs are a major pain to code for. All of their libraries
        come without header definitions.
        Sun forced the awful C shell on the UNIX wordl, for which many of
        us will never forgive them.


      Sure there are nice things about Sun's. For example their hardware
      is made for SMP, so you get performance to die for. And, ... well, I
      can't think of anything else.

  • Linux = Great on non-Ultra
    Solaris = Great on Ultra

    Actually, I'd say that Linux is great on UltraSPARCs too. It's just that on large SMP machines, Solaris currently scales better. On a single CPU UltraSPARC, Linux has always been faster than Solaris for me. I suspect that up to 4 CPUs, Linux will hold its own quite well, but above that, Solaris rules (for now).

  • I removed SunOS from an old Sparc 2 here at work because quite frankly SunOS sucked.

    Lots of the things Linux has to offer many people take for granted. Right out of the box you have X, Netscape, a C compiler, a Fortran compiler, an up-to-date Make, M4, etc, etc. Compiling from source on an something like an ancient Sparc can be an absolute nightmare. You will wind up compiling EVERY single little package that is required to make the program you wanted originally.

    I'll take my Linux on a sparc 2 over SunOS any day.
  • Well, if you want to do SMP, you don't want to use an x86
    architecture, and it's fundamentally much easier to write code for an
    SMP target than for a clustered target. There's a lot of work being
    done now on trying to make Linux perform better for SMP, but whilst it
    is so x86-centric I can't see them providing much of an alternative
    for the power hungry Solaris user.

  • It all depends on the application. Solaris has much faster networking code, but Linux has much faster task switch/process spawn. If you are running a web server then serving static pages or PHP or pages from builtin apache modules then Solaris is much faster because the networking is the bottleneck, but if you are running lots of external CGI programs then Linux can win because the bottleneck is spawning processes.

    On ultra 5s and 10s then Linux can be a better choice because it handles IDE better than Solaris, but when you move up to an Ultra 60 then Solaris is a better choice because its SCSI handling is better than Linux's. The default Solaris install can be pretty bare, compared to Linux and if the person installing it is not familliar with it then it can be daunting, however if you are doing lots of installs then Sun's jumpstart is easier than Redhat's kickstart and creating Solaris packages the way you want them is easyer than creating custom RPMs(YMMV).

    In short, know your tools and pick the right one for the job.

  • SunOS/Solaris libs have "more functionality" than equivalent libs on other unixes. I don't know if it's more functionality or bloat, but it's there. A program linked on a SPARC running RedHat will probably be smaller than the same program linked running SunOS/Solaris.
  • Took me about 5 trys to get it right (damn sun partion table/cant boot a partition above 1 gig)

    Not quite true, it's the firmware that can't handle it, not the partition table. Remember how old the SS10s are, if you read the documentation from those days it says things like:

    "support for large disks (ie. over 310Mb)"

  • I don't think anybody's going to be installing SuSE on an E10K anytime soon, though..

    I just did!!!
    It didn't really work all that well..... well....ok....it didn't even boot after installation.
    Dang they're gonna be pissed
    On a completely unrelated note, is anyone hiring?
    ---CONFLICT!!---
  • offtopic but... Cari Lekebusch, nice one.... Little bit to hard for my taste though. check out the Jump label, or Soma

  • No, you obviously didn't read all the crap that came out at the time. It's an EXACT x86 clone.
  • Is that a fact? Last time I went in looking to get a new OS for an Ultra 5 it was something more along the lines of $75 for the license and $75 for the Media. This was for Solaris 8, so I figure, fine, Solaris 7 (which Sun was selling for like $20 or so) would work... but no luck. Sun won't sell that anymore. I could check out these figures, but I am lazy.
  • Yeah, we ordered 3 or 4 of them and haven't put them all to gd use, yet. We have a testing lab of sorts here.
  • So Debian not only has sparc support, it uses it internally.
  • Errm... sorry.

    I'm not /that/ impressed by the uptime of a system that is obviously idle most of its time...
  • But do we really need another dist ported to sparc? IMHO, for higher end sparc's the best OS is a finely tuned Solaris, 2.6 or higher. Now it may well runn better on older boxes but for any real production work, on a big box, solaris is still the king regardless of whether you actually like the OS.

  • Re:One question: Why? (Score:3)

    by jslag ( 21657 ) on Thursday September 14, 2000 @08:43AM (#779415)
    What benefits are there to Linux that don't already exist on a Sun?


    Plenty. If you're used to developing on / administrating the Linux way, Solaris is different enough to slow things down a bit. Linux also seems to perform quite a bit better than Solaris on most of the older Sparcs (I don't believe this applies to Ultrasparcs, though).

  • I don't really understand why anyone would want to run linux on sparc.
    Sparc's are pieces of shit. The USII has the dubious honor of being the only *performance* risc cpu that gets hammered by the IA-32 in both integer and floating point.
    The only reason to buy a sparc is to get services, support and software from sun. If you want a decent processor, check out the alpha.
    The amazing thing is that instead of using an aggressive OOO design for the USIII, sun decided to stick with an in-order cpu. It's like they aren't even trying to produce a competetive CPU.
    The reason sun sells boxes with 64 procs in them is that it takes that many to compete with 32 proc offerings from HP, Compaq and IBM.
    --Shoeboy
  • Go over to eBay and look for IPCs and IPXs they're probably going for $10 each, with memory.

    Vote [dragonswest.com] Naked 2000
  • You don't have a ton of time to waste installing Solaris. Solaris (at least 2.6) does not install non-essential things like traceroute, a c compiler, top, etc. Installing these things wastes alot of time. Also, some people just like Linux better out of the box than Solaris.
  • The question is when will the chips be in the market (I know I know very soon). Whatever happened to what Linus was working on at Transmeta? when is that going to be ready?
  • Sparc, Who cares. I want ULTRA dammit. And I HATE mandrake. Who uses sparc's andymore anyway, they are as useless as a 386. Seriously I could care less, that's not news. Oooh Linux ported to Atari 2600 or Intelivision, dual processor VAX, some other useless hardware that's been burned, thrown away, abandoned or urinated on. What's next. NEXT?
  • I love Linux and all, and I guess it's good to have it available on even more hardware, but why would you throw out an excellent OS like Sun's in favor of Linux? What benefits are there to Linux that don't already exist on a Sun?

    Because the older Suns don't run Solaris very well anymore. (The whole Linux-runs-well-on-lesser-hardware argument). I for one am considering putting SuSE on my SPARCstation 10, because Solaris 7 *crawls* on it.

    I don't think anybody's going to be installing SuSE on an E10K anytime soon, though..
  • Cool, I've been wondering about SuSE for SPARC since a friend is donating an old IPC to me. Already running it here on various x86s and have a PPC machine and SuSE PPC in a box just waiting for me to get a chance to bring them together :-)

    (Oh, I've tried and like other distros but settled on SuSE, and AFAIK Red Hat (the only(?) other distro with wide cross-platform support) doesn't support PPC.)

    (And yes, I'm too lazy/have too little time to recompile everything in a distro for another platform myself.)

    No, no, no. It ain't ME babe,
    It ain't ME you're looking for.
  • When will we actually see a Transmeta chip?
  • Right on! This is exactly why Linux for SPARC is a cool thing. Geeks love esoteric hardware. SPARCstations may not be terribly fast, but they're cheap, very functional, and cool.

    but if they allow you to put in place a web server on hardware actually designed for serving

    Yup. They make great servers. Or, get a happymeal and set yourself up a decent router/firewall box. kart.dhs.org has been running on an old SS10 ever since I registered the name with dhs.org back in May.
    --

  • You don't really need a wacky Sun monitor. It's possible to install *bsd on a sparcstation with just a serial terminal. Once you've got it set up, you don't need a monitor anyway.
    --
  • Well yes, there's the BSDs, of course. I tend to prefer Linux. Not sure why, maybe it has something to do with a traumatic experience with a VAX and BSD 4.3 (or was it 4.2?) in my youth... :-)

    No, no, no. It ain't ME babe,
    It ain't ME you're looking for.
  • ....and you don't need a monitor to do an install with Linux, either. I don't know about SuSE (although that's easily my distro of choice), but I put redhat 6.2 on a sparc10 in the basement without a monitor or keyboard. Wasn't even that hard! But warning: these boxes make great DNS servers or Kerberos servers, but that's about it.
  • I believe it runs a modified X86 version. Otherwise, why all the development put into it.
  • I think the conventional wisdom is that Solaris/x86 is dead-end tech anyway.

    /Brian
  • What benefits are there to Linux that don't already exist on a Sun?

    Well, I am sure many will disagree with me on this one, but Solaris is a pain in the ass to use as a desktop OS. It took me about a week to get all my "must have" tools installed (gcc, Gtk+, Enlightenment, etc...) Even after all that, It's still a crappy workstation because the version of OpenWindows that ships with Solaris 7 has shared memory bugs that cause all kinds of chaos with imlib. Solaris is perfectly wonderful as a server OS... it kicks major ass, but as a desktop workstation? It's a major pain in the ass unless you are content to stick with the windowmanagers and applications it ships with. (Motif anyone?)

    Since I am not content to deal with low quality windowmanagers, I end up being very frustrated by Solaris as a workstation. Good thing my current employer is not very stingy, I get to have an Intel box (for Linux) and a Sparc station (for testing scripts that I write for our servers) side by side on my desk! I would install Linux on the Sparc, but the whole point to having a Sparc workstation is so I can do local testing of how my code works with Solaris prior to sticking it on the servers...

  • SuSE supports more platforms (Score:3)

    by HeUnique ( 187 ) <hetz-homeNO@SPAMcobol2java.com> on Thursday September 14, 2000 @08:46AM (#779431) Homepage
    SuSE also has Linux for:

    * IBM's S/390 and soon - AS/400
    * IBM's RS/6000
    * Soon - Linux for X86-64 (AMD Sledgehammer)
    * IA-64

    As you can see - if someone is very good as porting Linux to - it's the SuSE guys

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