Dustin Cross wrote:
Aloha,
OpenBSD (http://www.openbsd.org/) is great on old sun hardware. Solaris is
real slow on an IPX and old versions of Solaris don't come with all the
great tools we are used to with Linux. If you were in Hawaii I could let
you borrow Solaris (2.5.1, 2.6, or 2.7, I don't think 2.8 dropped support
for IPX), but I think OpenBSD performs much better. Much less overhead, it
has X and works fine (but slow) with the CGSix graphics card. The only
problem with 8-bit color is everything in the background has crazy colors,
but the window in focus is fine.
If you want to stick with Linux, SuSE (download the ISOs here
ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/sparc/suse-sparc/) is the only up to date
distro, or you could try Gentoo for Sparc
(http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/distributions/gentoo/releases/build/1.1a/)
, it might take a year to compile, so I would use the stage3 install.
My opinion is that OpenBSD is the best on old Sun hardware. Plus you could
check out PF.
Dusty
Can OpenBSD do an FTP/HTTP/NFS install? I forgot to mention that in the
requirements as I lack an external SCSI CD-ROM drive :)
I have no problem with using a BSD (I have an OpenBSD box that I tinker
with on occasion). In fact, as I mentioned, I was considering NetBSD
(after all, it'll run on anything, right? :) NetBSD caught my eye
because I know it has an FTP install option. The probelm I get into is
I have no idea how to make a Sun disklabel and their installer seems to
be only able to MODIFY a disklabel, not create one.
Gentoo for Sparc I've considered (just redid my desktop to Gentoo,
though still ironing the kinks out as me and package managers don't get
along well), though the install procedure isn't quite done yet (they
mention using an already bootable Debian install, and of course there's
only room for one HDD in that small lunchbox case) and doesn't support X
on it apparently. Also, Linux apparently has some issues with the Sun4c
archetecture.
--MonMotha
