Quoting Gary:
Hi Gary,Morning all, going off on something of a tangent, I was recently given a Sun SPARCstation 10 (2x50MHz HyperSPARC, 128Mb RAM, 4Gb HDD, 1x onboard 10Mb/s NIC and Quad 10/100Mb/s NIC) which I've decided to try and port SME to in the vein of Robert's rather excellent Alpha project. It's an architecture which I'm relatively unfamiliar with but I've already got RH6.2 loaded on it and have been having a good play about with it.For starters, can anyone (Robert?) let me know of any staringly obvious reasons why this won't work and is a waste of time, or alternatively, give me a heads up on any obvious problems I'm likely to encounter. I'll probably be looking to do an SME5.5 like system as that's well bedded down now...
The problem is that most Linux distributions are abandoning all architectures other than IA-32. Even the manufacturers of alternative processors are abandoning these architectures. I don't like that because I don't like monopolies, and this one in particular because probably 99% of IA-32 processors come with a Windows OEM license attached and thereby perpetuate yet another monopoly, but that's the way it is.
RedHat 6.2 was the last distribution that RedHat did for Sparc. They have EOL'ed this distribution. This means that no security updates will be released for it. That is not a good basis for an SME port. You could try and compile the updates yourself, and some will compile just fine and some may be relatively easy to fix, but what if you need a security update to glibc and it doesn't compile, yikes! And this doesn't even consider the problems you may encounter putting SME 5 on top of RedHat 6.2.
I was gonna recommend Sun's very own Linux distribution as a basis for a port, but whaddayouknow, it's for x86 only!
This leaves one Linux distribution only that you could use as a basis for a Sparc port: Debian. This will likely be the only option for me as well if I should want to continue my Alpha project. It would also be a good basis for a PPC port that I've heard some people on this list talk about. Porting to Debian is going to be a lot of work, though. It'll be more work than my Alpha port, which, as you may or may not have guessed, already required quite a bit of work. As I see it, this would only be viable if we port SME to Debain/x86 first and prove that it's stable and can be used by Mitel as a basis for their commercial product without any legal or technical hassles, and have them commit to the Debian port in preference to their current RedHat-based distribution. While I believe there are advantages to using Debian as the basis for the SME distribution, I don't realistically see this happening.
This is probably not what you wanted to hear, but it's my opinion and I'm open to debate on that opinion. To finish on a positive note, I do also have some positive advice for you and a consoling thought: get a Debian CD, install it on your Sparc, and learn the Debian way of doing things (that's what I'll have to do in the near future as well). I'm told that once you get used to Debian, you never want to use another distribution again ;-)
Robert
P.S. Did I mention that the iso for SME/Alpha 5.5 is now available in my contrib area at ftp://ftp.e-smith.org/pub/e-smith/contrib/RobertvandenAker/iso/ ?
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