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Red Hat Software Businesses

Red Hat Abandons Sparc 246

Posted by CmdrTaco from the and-all-three-sparc-users-get-mad dept.
Mike Dubreuil writes: "When I went to download Red Hat Linux 7.0 for Sparc I was disappointed to learn RH is dropping support for the sparc processor line. They are claiming that there is a low demand for sparc versions This may be a major blow to the Linux community because Red Hat is the top vendor for commercial copies of Linux. Not to mention that they have the support in place to handle what large companies demand." Update: 10/02 09:43 PM by CT : Bernhard Rosenkraenz wrote in to say "It is true that we will probably not release Red Hat Linux 7.0 for sparc. However, this does NOT mean there won't be a Red Hat Linux 7.1 or 7.2 for sparc. If, at some time, we decide to discontinue commercial sparc support, we will turn Red Hat Linux for sparc into a community effort."
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Red Hat Abandons Sparc More

Red Hat Abandons Sparc

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  • Now that is ironic, isn't it?
  • Great, Don Kool is here.
  • Try Debian/Sparc, if only to see apt in action.
  • Solaris does come with the machine, but the OS supported compiler doesn't, neither do most of the other things that Sun sell to run on Solaris.

    /proc is a very good way of exposing the state of a system without complicated API calls. Yes, in theory you can do it all through IOCTL calls, but it's easier to have a file you can read.

    Incidentally, /proc is older than linux. I first used it on SVR4, where it had simply the memory image of each process.

  • got Sparc? get Debian (Score:3)

    by Lycestra ( 16353 ) on Monday October 02, 2000 @04:02AM (#740386)
    Debian still supports Sparc systems, so no big whoop.

    "RedHat files anti-trust suit against fellow Linux distributor Debian"

    We can't make money off of people when these freaks are giving it all away for free. Not only that, their logo looks better. He felt we had to do *something*.

    .... mmm. no...
  • When I looked at the licensing agreements for the "free" Solaris 7, it was only free as a non-commercial license; if you wanted to make money using Solaris, you had to pay Sun the Big Bucks
    --
  • Sparc has the same problem as PPC. Both are primarily controlled by proprietary vendors, Apple and Sun respectively.

    PPC is not primarily controlled by Apple. IBM uses very similar, if not the same processors in their RS/6000 machines.

  • I know that my SPARC isn't and even if it did run RedHat I wouldn't have bought it from redhat.

    And why wouldn't you, if one may be enlightened to know?
    --

  • I would tend to disagree!

    Sun's business is hardware not software, same as Macintosh.

    So linux running on sparc does not take away from Sun's market. Why do you think sun is welcoming linux ?
  • I have done all of 1) above, and to be honest, I'd rather do Sparc/Solaris than RedHat/Solaris.

    Solaris is not the ideal OS, it's /proc is primative compared to Linux, it's obviously more expensive. However, the advantages of having the manufacturer support their own OS are obvious. I KNOW all the drivers will work. I know that the X server will have decent performance.

    If Linux was mainly hosted on Sparc, it would be different. But if I'm going to use Sparc hardware, I'm going to choose the OS which is most commonly used on that hardware.

  • chuckle. that was nicely put.
  • Have you read the typical license agreements that most commerical software companies put out? They pretty much say that even if the program erases your hard drive, you're just out of luck.

    I'm surprised they don't add a Bwahahahahaha! just for grins. :)

    The whole "we need someone to sue" argument really is a load of crap.

    More like an imaginary security blanket. It allows big-wigs to sleep at night.

    James

  • ALG wrote
    The LAST THING the Open Source community needs right now is a major player dropping support for anything.

    There are three things that might happen to "the Open Source community" as a result of this.

    1. Nothing.
    2. RedHat loses some mindshare among "the community"
    3. SPARC loses some market share among "the community"

    These are listed in my estimate of decreasing likelihood. Most of the people who would care about RedHat dropping a marginal platform use some other distribution or operating system (which is why it's a marginal platform) and most of the people who run SPARCs are probably not running Linux.

    In no case does anyone outside of "the Open Source community" even notice that this has happened. I'm sorry, but I just can't see this particular decision damaging Linux's reputation with the people who don't already use it. I believe that this is definitely a teapot-sized tempest.

  • SuSE for sparc is much better than RedHat for sparc, and SuSE provides quality support.

  • First of all, the article is plain wrong.

    Second, if we decided to drop sparc support commercially, we'd also try to get a community effort on keeping the port alive going.

    Third, this has nothing whatsoever to do with releasing a closed source version. Doing that would do harm to the entire community.

    Dropping a rarely used port would hurt a part of the community, but actually benefit others (all the engineering time we're currently putting into fixing up sparc would go to other projects).
  • Oh, you mean the same Linuxcare that was GOING to have an IPO in June, but decided not to because of "market conditions"? This may or may not be the real reason - and it's a perfectly legitimate reason. But it doesn't sound like a support structure I'd want to depend on for mission-critical systems.

    When companies invest time and hardware in a service or operating system, they expect to do BUSINESS with a BUSINESS. The idea of freedom is antithetical to the entire idea of a business, and as such, they don't understand or like it (as a general rule). When you buy Windows, you are doing business with Microsoft. If you have a problem, you call Microsoft. When you buy RedHat, you are doing business with RedHat. If you have a problem, you call RedHat. When you download and install (or buy a copy of from CheapBytes.com) Debian, you are NOT doing business with Debian. Debian isn't a business. When you want support, you call some third part that had nothing to do with creating the OS? This may make sense to some people. This makes sense to people who understand the OpenSource ethic. This does not make sense to businesses.

  • Maybe the people tht are using SPARC machines just aren't using redhat... I know that my SPARC isn't and even if it did run RedHat I wouldn't have bought it from redhat.

  • Have you read the typical license agreements that most commerical software companies put out?

    Yes, but when you buy a suppourt contract (which is really RedHat's product, not the distribution), you're basically buying an arse to kick.

    You can buy suppourt contracts from M$, but they're not great (and terribly expensive).

    The software you buy as an end user, and the software you buy as a corporation are the same. It's the level of suppourt (and liability) that the vendor gives you that's different.

  • Personally, with the Linux-based solutions I've rigged up, I've always gone with a rolled-my-own home-brew distro or at least a heavily modified Debian. Trimming down and configuring Red Hat started taking too long ever since the 5.X days.
  • Look at it this way:

    There's a Linux for Cisco. There's a Linux for Palm. There's Linux for S/390. There's always going to be a new Linux port for something. SuSE has Linux for SPARC. The current trend is to make Linux run on everything imaginable (if you had a toaster that had been hacked up, you could run Linux on that), and I doubt, with the amount of people owning SPARC-based machines that Linux on SPARC will die with Red Hat not supporting it.

    Red Hat is a commercial entity. They make money off of Red Hat on x86. That's their plan. If SPARC ports don't make money, they cut it. However, I doubt that suddenly, because of this, the SPARC platform will be forgotten.

    Time to move on, and try something different. My wife runs NetBSD on our SPARCstation 10. When we get a copy of SuSE for SPARC, we'll probably give it a go as well.

    No harm done. Just a different path to take.

    Long Live The Alternatives!

  • Dude, you need to try out some other distro's. RedHat sucks bigtime. I would suggest Caldera or Mandrake.
  • "Redhat is obvisoul not making any money from their sparc version...", Yes, but are they lossing money, and if so how much? Must they make money from everything? How about giving a little free stuff back to the community? Must everything they do be about making money? I didn't buy Redhat sparc cuz it sucked, I downloaded the first iso, was the installation a mess!!! Crashed 10x times, tried it on various sparcs, IPX, sparc 5, and 10. On the other hand, I am happy with debian and SuSE for sparc.

  • 1. Have you managed solaris? Have you developed for solaris? Have you run solaris? Looks like you have not...

    2. The biggest problem of RedHat is QA. Quality assurance. They have tons of bugs all the time. As Sparc is the only BigEndian RedHat platform (alpha is little endian under linux) it will be the first one to bite the bullet if someone in redhat's management looks towards decreasing bug fix tunraround times and improving QA. It is the obvious decision, but it is wrong. Guess why... Because auditing for endianness bugs gives an additional run on general bugs and solves them.

    3. And another important factor is that there are very few people that will have both Sun kit and low bandwidth lines. Most of them do not pay for CDs. They do not need to. They can download an entire distro while going for a coffee break.
  • Uh, I'd question that statement, RedHat have always struggled with support, to date the web support is adequate, if you don't mind waiting a week or so for answers to your questions. Looks like usenet is still the best place to go for Linux support...
  • It came out this week, so maybe not such a big idea. But I am NOT reloading my OS again, Mandrake 7.1 is where I stay for now.
  • You can sue Microsoft but you lose becouse of the liccens agreement..
    But people think if they can pick a target they can sue. So what targets dose Linux have?

    If you use RedHat then you sue RedHat...
    If you use Debian then you sue the Debian organisation.
    Etc..

    Alternitively you may sue the Free Software Foundation (As most of Linux is GNU software anyway and comes from the FSF).

    All that asside.. If you sue any of thies organisations.. You'll lose..

    Sue Microsoft... You'll lose...

    Same deal.. diffrent group.. and there IS a target to sue.. So your legal team can look like dopes..

    In the mean time...
    Sence like the early 1980s software companys have included a shrinkwrap liccens that says they are libal only up to the ammount you paid for the software...
    Thats right... I could never sue the people who wrote most of the software for my old Commodore 64.

    But I had targets...
    So for people who want targets.. Yes they exist.. sue the Distro... or alternitivly the FSF.
    Not that it makes any diffrence.

  • I'd just like to point out, we're talking about RedHat. I assume Linux support for Sparc is going to continue, it's simply that there will not be any more official RedHat releases for Sparc.

    The university I am at has started using Intel based machines for most things, including running Solaris for the honours students. I beleive this decision was based far more on cost than anything else.

    Basically, if people want to run Linux, they'll probably buy Intel. If people are buying Sparc processors, there's a very good chance they wish to run Solaris.

  • Of course RedHat isn't the only distro but the point is that they are the only known distro by the mass public. when newbies think of Linux they look at redhat. sure that is wrong but that is how it is. Alodda people when they see redhat not supporting sparc will say ok linux doesn't support the sparc so I'll stick with (some other crap) they won't "make thiere own" or goto debian
  • IIRC, Mandrake is based on Red Hat. I bet we'll see Mandrake drop SPARC support in the near future.

  • Re:It isn't true. (Score:3)

    by Mr.Phil ( 128836 ) on Monday October 02, 2000 @08:56AM (#740412)
    that's quite possible, but it doesn't say that there will be no support for SPARC in 7.1 or 7.2

    think back, 6.0 didn't have support for ALPHA or SPARC that came in 6.1

  • Yes, I know, Debian (being the cool people that they are) has compiled a version that runs on sparc. And in the sense that they support the rest of the Debian distributions, the sparc version IS supported. But who is going to be the primary sort of people that run sparcs? Big companies perhaps?

    The fact of the matter is that Debian simply does not have the same kind of real tech-support that RedHat does. You can't call someone at the Debian corporation and demand to know how to get Apache to stop segfaulting. You can't call Debian and ask for a recommendation between web-traffic analysis programs, or credit-card-verification systems. You can't call Debian at all - it's a collective. There is no real responsibility, because no one person is doing anything. There is no headquarters. Instead there are consultants who agree to give Debian advice. Tech support is an IRC channel. This isn't how a big business prefers to do business. There's no culpability, and above all, no one to sue when it all goes south. Debian's form of support is GREAT when they're dealing with individual users - heck, I'd even venture to say it's the best out there. But for a company, they don't want to have to rely on IRC (where someone can just sign off without answering any questions). They don't want to have to rely on consultants with no real tie to the COMPANY that provides the Debian service - and especially not when they charge a minimum of $100/hr.

  • Exactly. If a company's going to shell out tens of thousand dollars for *each* SPARC server kit, they're not going to balk at paying a few dozen thousands for Solaris, so it will be supported by the original vendor.

    Who this hurts, of course, are the individual owners of SPARC kits. Of course, these people who own the kits will probably not be buying their copy of RH at places like CompUSSR....


    --

  • Re:Well.. Solaris is better on Sparc.. (Score:4)

    by spankenstein ( 35130 ) on Monday October 02, 2000 @05:14AM (#740423) Homepage

    From ultralinux.org...

    Faster is a very relative term. UltraLinux takes a smaller amount of memory to start up, so for machines with a small amount of memory it will tend to seem faster. For most low level kernel functions UltraLinux is faster as you can see from these benchmark results...

    Here [ultralinux.org] is the link....

    Really people... This took 5 seconds to find. Don't make up stuff as you go please.

  • Re:Debian Isn't Unified Enough (Score:3)

    by afc ( 12569 ) on Monday October 02, 2000 @05:15AM (#740427) Homepage
    Good rant. Now step away from the keyboard and think for a moment: who is going skip the SunOS thingie that came with the box and install Linux on it? If you think that happens vey often at a Big Company [TM], well think again. People who are going venture installing Linux on a SPARC machine are generally the sort of people who can do away with tech support or find the ropes on their own. Their bosses are probably from the same ilk, so it's highly unlikely that they would shy away from Debian, IMHO.
    --

  • Debian supports sparc, of course (Score:3)

    by DavidNWelton ( 142216 ) on Monday October 02, 2000 @03:49AM (#740429) Homepage
    as well as Alpha, ARM, m68k, PPC, and sparc64, with work also being done on MIPS and PA-RISC. See http://www.debian.org/ports/ [debian.org]

  • Red Hat is NOT the only distro... (Score:4)

    by B00yah ( 213676 ) on Monday October 02, 2000 @03:51AM (#740434) Homepage
    As long as there is still the other members of LPI6 and the other major distros, ie Mandrake, Linux will still be able to support all that it needs to. Just because Red Hat changes something, does not mean that it will affect the rest of the distros..


    öööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööööö

  • Of Course They Dropped It (Score:3)

    by zpengo ( 99887 ) on Monday October 02, 2000 @03:51AM (#740436) Homepage
    The biggest problem with Red Hat is also their best quality: They're the spiffiest, most commercial Linux distro available. They're all about the money, and while that benefits us in terms of support, etc., it can also result in them dropping projects like sparc support because they aren't profitable enough.

    It's the nature of the beast.

  • Sun's Planning (to) Acquire Redhat Computing? Sun's Pretty Angry (at) Redhat's Cancellation? Sun's Petty Architecture; Redhat Cancels? Owwww.

    EMUSE.NET [emuse.net]
  • If you have a SPARC system, how exactly did you get it? Through Sun, right? I thought this was the only way you could get a SPARC machine (correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I know, there aren't any mom and pop computer stores which build SPARC systems.) This plea for SPARC Linux is almost akin to the anti-Microsoft movement. Dell makes great x86 servers and still bible thumpers complain that they only ship with either Windows 2000 Advanced Server or RedHat; they want it to have BSD or Debian. Sorry to spoil your /usr/lib/bible/thump moment, but that's the way the computer business goes: components (hardware and OSes alike) are provided by the lowest bidder. VIA makes chipsets which crash the operating system; RedHat makes driver modules which foul up the hardware.
  • Migration from the latest and greatest Redhat to the equivalent Debian (woody) is quite painless and effortless, at least on a PC workstation, and speaking from personal experience. I never ran Linux on a SPARC, but I can't see why the conversion shouldn't be as smooth on them.

    And with Debian you get all the nice auto-upgrading features that RedHat is just starting to add, for free.
    --

  • My roommate and I have an Alpha Station 200/233. We went through hell getting Linux on it. (Yes MILO is a BITCH) I think this has to do with the fact that MS wrote the ARC firmware.

    FreeBSD with the SRM firmware was a breaze to install. It was just like the i386 install--easy. No dicking with the ARC firmware was great. Just "boot dka1" (that's my cd-rom drive. Type "show d" at the SRM prompt to get a list of your devices.)

    FreeBSD (I've since tried NetBSD and OpenBSD, with similar success on older alpha) seemed to be much more polished on that architecture than other OSen.

    Hope this helps.


    -Peter

  • I don't mean to dis the hardware you obviously love--I like it too. I'm also not trying to say you (and the other Alpha Linux gurus) aren't doing a good job. I'm just saying that you don't have the critical mass needed to absorb very many news users at once--which keeps your numbers low in a viscious circle. With more users you get more questions and then more answers. Further new users doing searches find those answers and can jump in easily.

    When I search for the answer to a problem with Intel Linux, I eventually find the answer among the hundreds of hits. When I search for the answer to a problem with Alpha Linux, I often don't find the answer among the dozens of hits.

    As a datapoint: I've been using Linux for 4-5 years on Intel. I'm very comfortable installing it. I've been using Alpha Linux for 6 months and I've installed it on 3 machines (multiple times on 2 of them). On all 3 machines I struggled for at least a day (and in one case multiple weeks) trying to get Linux installed. Yes, I did eventually get it, with many thanks going to the efforts of the AlphaLinux people (and mailing lists). But it's still nowhere like as well-documented as Intel.
    --
  • I tried it out last week. Wasn't very impressed. The install finished with neither Backspace or Delete working (All that worked was CTRL-H) and JDK 1.2.2 segfaulted every time I used javac or java. With JDK1.3 for Linux still in the pre-release state, and my primary use is for Java development, I had no choice but to abandon ship and go to Mandrake 7.1...

  • Re:Companies are using other platforms (Score:3)

    by Mike Quin ( 15827 ) on Monday October 02, 2000 @04:15AM (#740458) Homepage
    *If* you really need Sparcs and *if* you can afford them, I don't see why you'd run Linux on them. Solaris seems to do just fine in that case!

    Becasue there's a lot of sparc32 hardware out there going cheap (take a look a Ebay sometime), that Sun have dropped support for as of Solaris 8. If you want up to date software (IPv6 support, for example) on your IPX, you have to run something other than Solaris.

  • Re:Debian Isn't Unified Enough (Score:3)

    by DavidNWelton ( 142216 ) on Monday October 02, 2000 @04:15AM (#740460) Homepage
    This is the same silly argument people used with Linux for a while. There are a lot of people, however, who sell tech support for Debian, including my employer, Linuxcare [linuxcare.com].

  • Exactly, this is a good time to repeat the mantra, "Linux is not Redhat." I mean seriously, it might be inconvient for people who run Linux on Sparc, but it will not be a deathblow. As long as there is a userbase development of Linux will continue. These days you can probably find a version of Linux for your toaster, I really hope we don't have to worry about an established port of Linux.

  • I've read recently that Linux-Mandrake has overpassed Red Hat, at least in retail sales for the USA... I can't retrieve all the informations, but there is still this PR on the Mandrake website... http://www.linux-mandrake.com /en /pr-numberone.php3 [linux-mandrake.com] [why Slashdot doesn't advertise this kind of infos? they're just... hot!]

    By the way, does anyone here has the latest figures from PC-Data?

  • The truth is, Redhat has always been unable to DELIVER for the sparc platform. I bought 5.1 and 5.2 for sparc in the store. When 6.0 came out, I called to order it, and it was not available and they would not take pre-orders for it. By the time 6.1 came out, 6.0 for sparc never showed up. Even today, no more sparc versions have showed up.

    I also asked for a sparc version of their secure web server. I would have bought it if they had it. But they didn't, and even said they had no plans for it. I called again later and ask for it again, and they said no one wanted it when in fact they keep no records of demand at all.

    The fact is, Redhat is not interested in supporting other than the one largest platform. As Microsoft is to all operating systems, Redhat is to Linux; they are the "big guys" and as such, they can do, and ignore, whatever they please. The sparc platform isn't in their business plan because their business plan has changed to pursue big corporations (which probably is the right thing to do for their stockholders). They should just tell the truth and say that sparc is just too small a market for their grandiose plans.
  • there's a lot of sparc32 hardware out there going cheap ... If you want up to date software (IPv6 support, for example) on your IPX, you have to run something other than Solaris.

    I hear this kind of reasoning a lot. I just don't get it. An IPX was a kick-ass system for it's day. Now, it's the rough equivalent of a P90 with much poorer support available for video, scanning and many other hardware periperals where under Linux for X86, you have all of the above plus the average P90 is going for even less than that IPX! Why would you waste your time?

    The only reason to run Suns is 1) you have a broken application that cannot take advantage of multiple systems and so you need to build it a big old E10k pile of iron to run on (don't go Linux in that case) or b) because your management won't accept that Intel-based systems are "enterprise ready" (in which case they won't accept Linux for roughly the same non-reason).

    If you're looking to build out high-capacity infrastructure you go with a large farm of identical 2u Linux or BSD systems (e.g. VA/Linux' FullOn 2xxx series which I have had nothing but good luck with) and you parcel them out as needed. For storage, you probably go with Network Appliance who have the baddest network-attached storage in the business (you'll never go back after taking your first snapshot... 200G of disk... backup time?... 5 seconds).

    So, for the home enthusiast Sparc loses. For the the business user this is not even a question, as your constraints are likely pretty simple.
  • Linux must, well, run anywhere. That is it's strength.

    So RH didn't sell that many copies. Oh, waaaah! As if it costs them anything. (If they've got the machines to do the builds now, then they'll have the machines to do the builds tomorrow. Builds can be scripted, so time = money is irrelevent.)

    This isn't about money, folks. If they can't afford to mass-produce, they can always produce in low-volume batches and charge the extra.

    So what -is- it about? Beats me. Looks more like a decision made to stir up controversy than one made on sound business or programming reasons.

  • I've only got a lowly little old Sparc5, but I've tried Linux, OpenBSD, Solaris 2.6 and Solaris 7 on it. Guess which one I kept? Solaris 7. It's the fastest of the bunch. They were all equally stable as far as I could tell. I recently got a copy of Solaris 8 for it, but haven't even bothered to install it.
  • I see what you're saying, in that the corporate mentality wouldn't understand Debian, but to make out that there's no-one in charge is a fallacy. How could you possibly create a something as large as a whole operating system without some kind of leadership. Debian isn't just a bunch of hippies smoking dope whilst typing in lines of C, they're more like a charitable organisation with people in charge of various projects.
  • I would conjecture that it is in the interests of Red Hat to leave Sun with an appropriate niche, if they are to forge a mutually beneficial alliance in the future. This is only conjecture, of course, but business-wise it makes more sense for Red Hat to not press Sun on "sacred ground".
  • Concerning MILO, were you trying to do it from SRM or from the ARC? (AlphaBIOS on later machines)... It is much much easier to get it to boot from the ARC. I have installed it on a multia, an Alphastation 233, an Alphaserver 300, an Alphaserver 4100, and even got to play with it for about 3 days on a new GS140 (8-way goodness).

    I totally agree with you about support for platforms other than Intel. Most people have little to no experience with any other platform from the Intel norm, which makes trying to get help with a problem on an Alpha (or Sparc or MIPS or...) a total pain in the ass. Much of the documentation is outdated on these platforms.

    However, the truth of the matter in the case of the Sparc version of RedHat is that I am sure it probably didn't sell well, if at all. Most businesses with Sparcs would probably run Solaris on them. I would guess that most of the Sparc Linux users are individuals who either are using Linux on Sparc workstations at work, or are using it on Sparcs that they own and run at home. The number of people running a Sparc in their house is significantly lower than people running PPC or Alpha, and is definitely miniscule in comparison to the number of x86 users.

    RedHat is *not* Linux... true... but many people see RedHat as the representation of Linux, especially the PHBs. When they see something like this happening with RedHat, they assume that it is true for all Linux. That is where this is truly a tragedy for the community. RedHat is the leading distribution (usage-wise, I'm not wanting to start a distro flame war) of Linux. Until that changes, RedHat *is* Linux is the eyes of most of the public (that even know what Linux is).

    My 2 x 10^-2

  • Sueing software companies? (Score:3)

    by Jerky McNaughty ( 1391 ) on Monday October 02, 2000 @04:26AM (#740492)

    There's no culpability, and above all, no one to sue when it all goes south

    Have you read the typical license agreements that most commerical software companies put out? They pretty much say that even if the program erases your hard drive, you're just out of luck. The whole "we need someone to sue" argument really is a load of crap.

  • We have a lot of Solaris machines where I work. The main UNIX guy gave an old pizza box to another one of the IS team to learn about it. He had a hell of a time getting Solaris installed on it.

    So I suggested Linux. The UNIX guy overheard that and said that he would take the box back if the guy wanted to run Linux on it. "If you want a linux box, use a PC, that's what it's for."

    With that kind of attitude, it's no big wonder that they're not selling very many.

  • Or nothing at all, since Solaris is now free for less than 8 processors.
  • Huh? Microsoft's support is fantastic and it's roughly the same price as what RedHat has to offer.

    But yes, a corporation generally spends more and expects greater support for software. A support contract for say Oracle might be $150,000/year and for that you get 24 hour access to an engineer.

    Actually Oracle does it in a rather interesting way, since they have offices world wide, if you call at 2am midwest time you may very well be connected to someone in the United Kingdom.
  • Oh, you mean the same Linuxcare that was GOING to have an IPO in June, but decided not to because of "market conditions"?

    If you would have taken, say 30 seconds or so, the time to check any of the brokerage houses out there, you would have seen that many dozens of privately funded companies chose to delay an IPO.

    But it doesn't sound like a support structure I'd want to depend on for mission-critical systems.

    What difference does it make if it is a privately owned company or a publicly traded company?

    {snip] they expect to do BUSINESS with a BUSINESS.

    Since when is a private business not a business?

  • Acutlly Tatung and Ross made clones.

    You gereally buy from a resleer instead of Sun directly nad get a better price.

  • I gereally buy from a resleer instead of Sun directly nad get a better price? Isn't that illegal in 6 states?
  • While I like to own stock in companies that do the right thing (and I consider Red Hat to be one of the most visible companies of such a sort), as a shareholder I certainly hope you will put some effort in to concentrating on money. Also, as a person who runs Red Hat on several machines, I'd love to know which code in there is actually Red Hat (beyond the installer). Almost every bit I've looked at is actually someone else's BSD/GPL/Artistic-license code, to which you can claim few if any rights (legal or ethical) to NOT continue to participate in the Free Software/Open Source manner. In reading the annual report, I did not notice that unit sales of CDs containing Linux for any processor was intended to be a major revenue driver. In fact, it seemed that having a distribution was largely hoped to be a strong support for selling consulting services, support, and being considered an authority on Linux (which will help sell classes, trainings, and certifications). As such, I support the decision to discontinue distribution versions for Sparc processors. Those machines appear to include Solaris for free (at least the few workstations I priced out did) and there are at least a few other Linux distros for Sparc. Besides, I would suspect that this decision was made after comparing downloads and purchases of Red Hat for Sparc and considering that it is not considered the simplest install, a total lack of support calls for that platform. If there does not appear to be interest in Red Hat for Sparc, then by all means, stop doing it.
  • Linux-Mandrake 7.1 is available for several weeks under the name "Corporate Server 1.0" for Sparc and UltraSparc. This is the most amazing version of Linux running on UltraSparc that I have ever seen... You feel like having a playstation on your Sun and I've ran it for weeks without any glitch: very very stable indeed. There were only a few things were a bit buggy in the configuration.

    [By the way, the mirrors are here: http://www.linux-mandrake.com/e n/f tp.php3#usparc [linux-mandrake.com]]

  • RedHat drops support for Sparc; millions switch to Debian!
    On i386, alpha, arm, m68k, PowerPC, sparc, and even Sparc64, Debian is still the breakfast of champions. Once you get past dselect, that is. But they're working on it! That's what apt is for.
  • Right. Red Hat is simply trying to fill their wide market, they're not trying to fill every niche. There's also no Red Hat support for non-x86 handheld platforms, but that's not stopping Linux from being there.
  • This happens all the time. With RedHat 6.2 the alpha version was released later than the x86 version. I think most Linux distro's show the same behaviour: develop & release for x86, then patch up & release the "weird" ports. The x86 version is the one that brings in the $$$. Give them some time...
  • True, true, but once you have it you can install it on as many platforms as you like. And, in Suns defense, there are something like 10-15 CD's in the package - I have it and it comes with two full booklets of CD's, plus assorted multi-linugal install manuals, etc. Not a bad deal.
  • Judging the entire Alpha line of boxen by it's first incarnation (the jensen) is not a fair comparision. Jensens are totally different from any other Alpha. It's the equivilent of a 286 in terms of age. There is a great step by step howto on installing RH on a Jensen at alphalinux.org, it was just updated recently for use with aboot-0.7 and all supporting files updated as well. http://www.alphalinux.org/docs/jensen.shtml .

    All other Alphas (except maybe ruffian) are a breeze to install linux on and the documentation is plentiful.

    Regards,
    Peter
    --
    www.alphalinux.org
  • RedHat made the decision because obviously spending more time on development for the other platforms that they support is more profittable. When a company makes a stategic move, it isn't a blow to the community, unless it's like, massive layoffs and closing their doors. RH is doing fine...

  • Ummmm... (Score:2)

    by mosch ( 204 )
    No offense, but I don't think it's a matter of not profitable enough, I think it's a matter of it being a timesuck that distracts them from an OS that people actually use. I mean, if you spend 5% of your time on a product that 0.02% of your subscriber population uses, well, that's dumb.

    You, and all the people who are agreeing with you are either
    1. not in the real world
    2. independently wealth (see above)
    3. dumb
    I say cheers to RedHat for being bold enough to support Sparc in the first place, and again for being smart enough to drop said support. I hope they are able to improve the core capabilities by removing Sparc from their support, design, and testing.

    Besides, I'm sure that nine out of ten of you whiners don't even own a Sparc and are just upset in principle, that you're no longer getting something for free.

    "Don't trolls get tired?"

  • For a good corporate-suported Free UNIX on sparc, NetBSD + Wasabi Systems http://www.wasabisystems.com/ [wasabisystems.com] would seem to fit the bill. I've always had much better results on non-x86 hardware with NetBSD, too. It Just Works [tm] instead of being a constant uphill battle because most kernel coders, distro maintainers, etc. don't use that hardware.

  • There's more to Linux than Redhat (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 02, 2000 @03:52AM (#740540)
    Both SuSE and Mandrake offer Sparc distros, and both, though especially SuSE, offer excellent support for businesses. Linux isn't about RedHat and a motley crew of hacker distro's. There are several large commerical and professional organisations willing to help.
  • The hardware producer manages to put out a decent OS of their own (Solaris, heard of it?) so its not as if the hardware was descending into the Windows arena no is it...
  • Of course NetBSD has supported Sparc for a verry long time and will continue to.

    Maybe RH is trying to work some deal with Intel? Maybe it's because Solaris is mostly free and has full driver support for all hardware?
  • It may not be a major blow, as more and more companies are using Intel processors in their servers (whether this is a good idea is another matter :-)
    Can't blame them, since they're generally cheaper...

    So it does not say anything about Linux usage, more about Sparc not being a competitive offer (I think/guess)
    It is a pity however, the more platforms supported the better, ofcourse!

  • There may be others, but.... (Score:4)

    by Esqueleto ( 37526 ) on Monday October 02, 2000 @03:55AM (#740553)
    While those people posting with the "but there are other distros..." have a point, they're missing the primary concern. Redhat, actually provides support, which seems to be a sticking point with big business. They want someone to yell at when everything goes to shit....Redhat is that someone.
  • you have Solaris 8, its FREE up to 8 CPU's, and for SPARC is the best choice.

    Yeah, if you have a Sun4M model CPU or better. Most people out there running Linux and SPARC are doing so to get productivity out of older SPARC hardware that Solaris(tm) does not support. Sun has always had a very nasty habit of dropping old hardware compatibility with new versions of their OS.

    Of course is a pity RedHat no longer support SPARC, but like someone already said, you have many other distros with SPARC support, and in my opinion better than RedHat.

    Both true and false depending on which OS distro you side with. For my money NetBSD seems to run much faster than Linux on older SPARC hardware and Debian has broken pieces but still holds together despite all.

    Linux in general is probably more "app" compatible than most BSD based 'nix. (Caveat: That last statement may not be true now, I haven't looked recently - no flamebait meant.)

    Regardless Solaris is not the choice for older SPARC hardware - unless you never want to be up to date... ;-)


    The Tick - "Spoon!"

    NEO - "There is no spoon."
  • The issue is far more complicated than what either of you make it out to be.

    These benchmarks: What exactly are they measuring? No information is given about the hardware other than it is a 50 Mhz system.

    My suspicion is it's a Sparc 10 with an SM50 processor card?

    If so, the benchmarks aren't measuring 64-bit optimizations that exist in either Solaris or Linux. Perhaps on the UltraSparc 10 this other person has, Solaris does run better.

    The benchmarks do clearly show that disk access is faster under Solaris than Linux. This is a very important aspect of total system performance.

    What about dual-processor performance? It's relatively easy to add an extra SM50 processor to that Sparcstation 10. How does Linux fare compared to Solaris in that capacity?

    I also read the comments on why linux is faster than Solaris. I wouldn't be too sure of that either, over the years the Linux kernel has become more and more complex and has adapted a lot of the same overhead that exists in commercial OS to solve the same problems.

    Over time, who is to say that they won't look the same just Linux taking the long road to get to the same point?

  • It isn't true. (Score:5)

    by bero-rh ( 98815 ) <bero AT redhat DOT com> on Monday October 02, 2000 @06:14AM (#740560) Homepage
    The article's subject should be "Red Hat Linux 7.0 possibly won't be released for sparc".

    The sparc machines are still part of our build system, and we won't just drop it off.

    If we ever decide to discontinue sparc support commercially, the sparc port will be turned into a community effort.

  • Sparc support may be back in 7.1 (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    People should keep in mind that RedHat 6.0 didn't support Sparc or Alpha (I don't remember which) either. They didn't have the time to get everything cleaned up and ready for the .0 release. But Sparc/Alpha support reappeared in 6.1, after all the other changes had time to settle.
  • Red Hat is one of the best companies I've ever seen in terms of not taking advantage of anyone. They really and truly do have their customers' best interests at heart, and I think for that reason alone they will ultimately be wildly successful.

    The conspiracy theories are just flat unlikely. It's a HELL of a lot more probable that they stopped supporting the platform because there were about 12 downloads of Sparc Redhat, and those were all the mirror sites.

    It's not a popular platform for Linux. Aren't they being smart by re-allocationg their Sparc guys to some other project that will benefit more people?

  • I think this is going to be the beginning of a trend where companies begin to specialize on what they're going to support. RedHat obviously wants to concentrate on x86 and its associated derivites. This leaves a market hole for someone to step in and support the existing Solaris installations as well as market to companies that may be looking at Solaris boxes and want to get Linux on them. It's a prime example of the marketplace at work. Plus I have a feeling that Sun is going to turn itself into a heavy-hitter in the Solaris/Linux market.

  • So? (Score:2)

    by trcooper ( 18794 )

    Apparently no one wants support for the SPARC version. So why would any company want to provide support for a product that has no market?

    RedHat decided to do this so they wouldn't have to throw money away, they do have a commitment to their shareholders now to make money. You know, if you see this as an un-claimed market, you could start your own company and support a SPARC version of Linux.

    But, alas, it's a bad choice to pursue linux on SPARCs.

    1. Solaris on SPARC is a stable and mature OS. Linux doesn't give you a lot of advantages.
    2. Why spend the money on a SPARC. Most companies have found that clusters of x86 boxes give more bang for your buck.

    I'm guessing the major demand for a SPARC version of linux comes from people who have aquired old sun boxes and just want to fool around. These people don't purchase support.

    But, keep in mind Linux != RedHat. RedHat may be considered the premier distro for companies who are looking for support from the vendor, but Debian, SuSE, et. al. are in many folks minds (and for many purposes) as good if not better than RH.

    So, this is not a blow to Linux. If anything it should allow RH to put more effort into their x86 distro.

  • "but I'm sure there are a lot of people who appreciate having a distro they can stick on some old SparcStation."

    Which is precisely the reason they're dropping it. Of the small fraction of Sparc machines running Linux instead of Solaris or the ancient SunOS, I'd hazard a guess that most of those are old recycled hardware.

    The open-source aspect of Linux is certainly nice given Sun's tendency to leave certain Solaris bugs unfixed year after year. But few people are going to buy new Sun equipment and reload it with an OS that makes mediocre use of the latest hardware.

    No, I suspect Sparc Linux is what gets loaded on machines too old and underpowered to run the recent versions of Solaris well. Linux is a good way to get a modern, up-to-date *nix running on all those old 125 MHz Turbosparcs.

    And if you're still updating 125 MHz Turbosparcs, you're probably not spending money on packaged OS media and support contracts.

    For another thing, why run Linux on new Sun hardware? You're paying a premium for hardware that doesn't run optimally under Linux. Linux can't do SMP as well as Solaris, and you're giving up things like hot-swappable processor support and so forth. Next, you're using this fancy hardware to run what? Apache, MySQL and BIND? It would be nice to be able to run big, scary software like Oracle, DB2, Domino and WebSphere on that fast hardware, but none of those commercial apps are available for Sparc Linux.

    Phooey. If you run Sparc Linux, you're unlikely to have been paying for support anyway. Why should RedHat pay people to build and tune Sparc versions of their distro? You're free to grab the RH7 sources and compile them yourself, or put together a team to do so, or switch to something like Debian, Mandrake or SuSE.

    For an example of a low-demand OS's demise really disrupting things, consider OS/2's death, officially taking place in the summer of 2001. It may not be in wide use on desktops or even on network servers, but it's got a large market share in the voice-mail systems industry.

  • how can something with (Score:3)

    by Bad_CRC ( 137146 ) on Monday October 02, 2000 @03:56AM (#740579)
    no demand be "a major blow to the linux community"?

    Do you ever notice how everyone thinks their own needs are the most important?

    Redhat is obviously not making any money from their sparc version, and is making the smart decision to drop it. If people were buying it, they would certainly keep producing it, it's a business decision, and a good one.

    My question to the person submitting this article is, did you buy the sparc version, or did you download it?

    ________

  • Consider this: With the exception of those of us with old Sun IPX boxes lying around (*grin*), Sparc customers tend to be people who need "big iron." I.E. 8, 16, or more CPUs and oodles of memory.

    Solaris is well tuned to this sort of hardware environment, and the needs that produce demand for that kind of hardware. Linux still has some deficiencies in this area. Consider Linux's 1-1 thread/process model. Linus considers this to be a Good Thing(tm) and just wants to reduce the cost of a context switch as much as possible. Cetainly admirable but Solaris's 1-m thread/process model tends to be the Right Thing(tm) for this type of environment. Our MySQL server running on a Solaris E4500 is serving 4,500 active connections at any given moment during peak usage hours. It would probably need more but that's what we have our MAX_CONNECTIONS set to right now. We're considering upping that as high as 6,000 in the not too distant future.

    Between the relatively high cost of a thread on Linux (in terms of spawning and context switching primarily -- I'm less concerned about the 16KB or so of overhead per thread since that's actually quite reasonable) and the remaining coarse-grained kernel locks, plus the somewhat flawed I/O in 2.2 (ladder-I/O starvation anyone?) Linux isn't quite ready to handle 8+ CPUs in a high demand environment just yet.

    But even when Linux *does* get to that point (and it *is* getting there -- the kernel team is doing an incredible job with 2.4, and with companies like IBM helping out at the high-end they certainly have a lot of information at their disposal...) you must consider that usually Sparc hardware comes as a bundle with the software and support. This provides a strong disincentive to use Linux -- you've already paid for a generally excellent OS and top-notch support for it.

    This tends to relegate Linux/Sparc to older castaway Sparc hardware which has the distinction of not being cost effective to keep up anymore. Performance vs. space and the cost of maintaining one more box (read: TCO) tend to make it cheaper to replace two of those old Sparc machines with 1 brand-new Intel machine.

    Personally, I'm more interested to see Linux on IBM's NUMA-Q based machines with 64 processors... IBM is investing a HUGE amount of energy into making Linux *the* OS for such machines. *drool* (Yes, I'm aware that Linus thinks NUMA is fundamentally the Wrong Thing(tm)... It's still VERY fast though... :>)

    -JF

  • Who uses it? (Score:3)

    by OlympicSponsor ( 236309 ) on Monday October 02, 2000 @03:57AM (#740582)
    "Not to mention that they have the support in place to handle what large companies demand."

    And ONLY what large companies demand. Of those large companies using Linux, how many are using it on Sparc? Few to none, is my guess.

    Furthermore, it's easy to see why. Linux on Intel is easy to install and find support on the Internet for. But I've done a few Linux on Alpha installs, and let me tell you that once you leave the warmth and light of the x86 world you are on your own. This isn't to say that AlphaLinux is no good--far from it. I like the hardware and the software. But the support is hard to come buy--if the mailing list doesn't respond or doesn't know you are pretty much toast. Sparc Linux, being even more rare is probably 10 times worse.

    I'm sure to be marked as "flamebait" unless I include some examples, so here we are:

    Installing on a Jensen.
    Using MILO (I've read and re-read the howto and damned if I can figure it out)
    The many many (many) patches and updates you need to install after getting a distro (say, RedHat) installed (system clock date to 2020, net-tools, etc).

    Again, I'm not saying the above problems make Alpha Linux bad--I'm saying that the poor documentation of the above problems makes Alpha Linux scary.
    --
  • The link didn't contain any information more than the writeup (same information in fewer lines), but scrolling down a bit, it looks like SuSE picked up support for sparc architecture just two weeks before Red Hat dropped it. That's just a bit ironic, I think.

    I suppose this isn't the time to mention my own preference for Debian, which has supported sparc for a while and will continue to do so...

  • I run a few machines with sparclinux, and have been involved with it for quite a few years (as a lurker). Its painfully obvious that SUN don't provide the same levels of support for their hardware that you can find from any other vendor (eg. Digital{now Compaq} providing Linus with an alpha, coding efforts within IBM and SGI...)

    Yet, SUN are happy to gain news inches on the back of linux.

    Looks like I'll have to move to debian or suse though...
    and of course, if the sparc based machines have to move then my intel ones will have to follow.

  • Wonder What IBM Had to Do With That? (Score:3)

    by quakeaddict ( 94195 ) on Monday October 02, 2000 @03:58AM (#740590)
    Wonder What IBM Had to Do With That?.....Seeing as how *they* compete with Sun alot more than Redhat does, and IBM is a major partner with Redhat.

  • Oh yes, and one thing I forgot:

    *If* you really need Sparcs and *if* you can afford them, I don't see why you'd run Linux on them. Solaris seems to do just fine in that case!

    Not that it wouldn't be fun, I'd just not do it myself (on producation machines at least).

    And if you're just trying it for fun, you'd as well go through the hassle/fun of downloading/compiling it yourself anyway, why use Redhat?

  • Re:how can something with (Score:5)

    by Patrik Nordebo ( 170 ) on Monday October 02, 2000 @06:15AM (#740596)
    You can't blame Red Hat for not giving back to the community, because they do. They pay Alan Cox, Stephen C. Tweedie and Ingo Molnar to hack the kernel (probably more people too), they funded a lot of early work on Gnome, they bought Cygnus and freed Source Navigator, not to mention that they release all the software they as part of their distribution as free software. These are just a few of the things Red Hat has done for the community.
    Claiming they don't give free stuff back to the community is ridiculous. Though personally I prefer Debian to the Red Hat distribution, I am grateful for all the things that Red Hat has done for all of us.
  • They're all about the money

    Untrue.
    If it were true, we wouldn't have GPLed our code and allowed others to simply copy Red Hat Linux and put their label on it.

  • Re:Of Course They Dropped It (Score:3)

    by c_chimelis ( 120443 ) on Monday October 02, 2000 @06:22AM (#740601) Homepage

    After all, anything you can do on an expensive Sparc, you can do faster/better on an x86 at a lower cost.

    I disagree with this type of statement when it comes to comparing just about any other architecture to x86 (and I've heard this kind of thing from countless x86-centric people). First off, contrary to popular belief, there are still uses for "big iron" in today's world. Understand this, not everything is a desktop-class system, and I haven't seen a good large-scale server come from Intel since they were first experimenting with their Hypercubes. Uses of big iron include data warehouses (which are big within larger corporations, mostly), scientific research, meteorological research/prediction, etc. For some of these uses, using Beowulf technology can work well using what Intel likes to refer to as "servers" as nodes (usually, these are just desktop or workstation motherboards with increased RAM capacity and a bit more cache), but in many cases, big iron is still the way to go. Ever try to bring up a 10TB data warehouse server under Linux using x86-class components? Good luck.

    Compaq and Sun have MUCH more experience with large servers than almost any PC manufacturer. Unfortunately, in the case of Sun equipment, Solaris is the only choice if you need to get a large-scale system running in a very short time. Compaq (and partners) are improving Linux for their Alpha servers to make sure that it can handle such tasks. It may not seem too profitable to do this, especially since they produce a "competing" product in Tru64, but the marketing issues skew a bit when the hardware manufacturer is the same company as the primary OS manufacturer. To Compaq, selling hardware and support contracts on that hardware is #1, Tru64 is a close second, but offsetting R&D and fab costs on hardware is often much more difficult than it is to recover OS development costs. Unfortunately, Sun drops the ball in this regard. They have not given enough to the Linux community for them to entertain the same favour amongst the Sparc-Linux users as Compaq has with the Alpha-Linux users (granted, quite a few Alpha-Linux users still have tenuous relationships with Compaq, but it's not as bad as those with/against Sun). This is sad, but true. Had Sun been more forthcoming, both on an informational level as well as a pricing level, they could've enjoyed more success with Sparc-Linux. So, IMO, it has nothing to do, though, with the quality or speed of their hardware, though, that RedHat hasn't seen great numbers out of the Sparc releases. I mean, NOBODY can tell me that there aren't a ton of sparcs out there...

    So now that we've established that Sun is partially to blame here, let's talk about RedHat's shortcomings in this situation and how it will affect the future of both their distribution and Linux in general. First off, I think that RedHat dropped the ball on this as well and could have enjoyed much more success with the sparc release than they did. Anyone that knows anything about the average Sparc customer knows one thing: they will not buy a server without a support contract on the hardware and the OS component...end of story, no discussion. After all, corporations are Sun's biggest customers and corporations not only cover their ass, but also the rest of their body with armour when they purchase something computer-related. Now, we all know how much crap RedHat has its hands in now (seems like every week, they're releasing PR about acquiring, agreeing with, or partnering with SOMEONE). I honestly think they've diversified too much for their own good, but that's neither here nor there. The point is, if they're going to work on/with all of these other companies, why not try to get in bed with Sun? A small contract and perhaps a small personnel exchange could've easily made a deal between the two that allowed Sun to only focus on Solaris, while deferring the Linux question to RedHat (which would allow it to be nurtured by someone other than Joe User). RedHat could also allow Sun to sell Linux support contracts on Sun equipment and just kick back some money to Sun for the administration involved in doing the sales (this kind of deal is made every single day in the IT industry...it's just contracting out for a support service). RedHat and Sun could've practically owned the Sparc OS market (sorry, BSD folks, you do count, but the research shows you're still in the vast minority).

    This all should seem easy to come up with for any marketing person or corporate executive, and it really should be that easy (hell, I came up with it and I didn't even finish college), but let's face facts: non-x86 archs are practically shunned by the core Linux community, especially the corporate side of Linux. This is a shame because there are valid contributions that could be made to the kernel and the distributions by listening to the other-port folks. Sure, you don't find tons of large-scale servers in the hands of most kernel programmers, but there are people out there that have access to these systems and have valuable scalability issues that should be addressed by the Linux community as a whole. Also, I feel that Linux should present on a unified front and say collectively that "Linux doesn't equal x86-only". If you want to drive people and corporate software products away from other archs, treating ports the way that they are now is a good start.

    Marketing and logistics are too often cited as being reasons for dropping ports like sparc, but I think that those issues are not to blame for the situation. The problem is that RedHat (in this case) is using traditional business models and isn't trying to forge new (additional) revenue streams. They seem to love jumping onto the hot issues of today (like embedded systems, etc), which are guaranteed money-makers, but won't attempt an alliance with a company like Sun for some reason. IMO, they should've done this before even releasing a sparc port. I mean, why release a product for a few cycles, then drop it? corporate image can be more important than income reports somtimes (ask IBM) and they're only serving to alienate the users of that port (many of whom are probably also x86 RedHat users). RedHat: do your research BEFORE releasing the port.

    But, at any rate, don't be so quick to write off Sparc or any other non-x86 arch just because your applications run faster/cheaper on them. Obviously, there are customers for these other architectures and they buy them for a reason. Not everyone's problems can be solved on an x86. For many of the consumers in the non-x86 market, though, prices of software can be huge because it's over-and-above the higher cost of the hardware, which makes Linux a nice alternative for some of those folks. So, don't assume that practically nobody uses the sparc port (or any other) because the native OS is just too indiginous to be ousted. Besides, Linux is beginning to replace MS, who was the odds-on favourite for awhile simply because of their huge install base. But, until someone like RedHat seriously tries to make it profitable to support a port like Sparc, it won't happen. This is not Field of Dreams...if you build it, but don't advertise it, they won't come.

    Personally, I'm kinda glad RedHat is slimming down their product offerings. I've watched the quality control drop drastically on non-x86 platform releases. Maybe now they can turn some attention towards improving the ones that they still support.

  • That's really unfortunate, because my primary computer at work is a Sun Ultra 1 running 6.2 and I absolutely love it. Once you take the hour or so to tie it down (change out wu-ftpd, close up inetd, install ssh, etc. etc.) it's pretty damn cool. Even X is pretty speedy on it. It's by far one of the best "work computers" I've ever used.

    Oh, by the way, I'm also a Windows NT administrator.

    Too bad Red Hat dropped the ball.
  • *If* you really need Sparcs and *if* you can afford them,

    Geez people.... before you go on and on about the price of a SPARC machine... at least look at store.sun.com. A little more pricey than a PC but still not a horribly bad price.

  • I've been using Sparc Linux for about 5 years now, and Red Hat bringing out a Sparc distribution was one of the things that legitimised the platform in the early days. Now, of course, there's Debian, SuSE and probably others, but I like Red Hat. I'll be sticking with RH on my Sparc for now, with kernel upgrades as appropriate. As major upgrades become necessary, I'll probably recompile stuff myself from now on. It's not really surprising. Everyone that has a Sparc has a lifetime license for Solaris, so the incentive to switch to Linux is much less than for other platforms, and there really isn't a good business case for continuing to support Sparc. I wonder how that'll affect RH emplyees like David Miller and Jakub Jelinek, who still use Sparc as their primary development platform, AFAIK. Obviously, the Linux/Sparc effort isn't going to die, and Sparc support in the kernel will continue indefinitely.
  • Uh I hate to burst your buble, but Mandrake is usually a supped up version of Redhat. If you look at the times that Mandrake comes out, it is usually after Redhat releases. They take the Redhat distro, and add extra programs to it. Then they add some more updates and make it pretty. If there is no sparc version put out by redhat, Mandrake may drop the support of it also. This culd change as Mandrake grows, but I have not seen any reason to think that mandrake would go out of there way for sparc Linux.

    On another note, if you are a large company buying sparcs, you are very doubtful going to put Linux on it. As a user maybe, but as a company it is not in your best interestes. Usually when you buy hardware that comes with an OS you get a warrenty. Sun is partcularly good (if you spent enough money) about giving you good support. I know I worked for a company that had then in every other week. Good contract we had.

    I don't want a lot, I just want it all!
    Flame away, I have a hose!

  • Re:Sun would love this (Score:3)

    by wbb4 ( 60942 ) on Monday October 02, 2000 @04:01AM (#740620)
    (1) RedHat isnt the only Linux based OS on the market that has/does support Sparc.
    (2) Linux isnt the only kernel on the market that supports Sparc.

    What about Debian? What about all the other Linux distros that run on sparc?

    Both the NetBSD and OpenBSD ports to the Sparc architecture are quite good.

    If you have a sparc, I would think you would be running something other than RedHat anyway.

    Just my 2 cents.
  • This is not what I have been told. I've received an e-mail from a RedHat pre-sales staff member (Kathy, I believe) who stated categorically that there will be NO support for SPARC in RedHat 7.0. Could you please clarify what your statement means? I'm pretty irritated about this myself, as we often run RH6.2 on older SPARC systems for workstations.

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