Stefan Schaeckeler wrote:
>
> hello folks,
>
> i want to install a "free" operating system on my ss2.
> it seems that i have the choice between sparclinux and 2 bsds.
>
> has somebody tried both can can tell me the pros and cons of both?
I've tried both RedHat 4.2/sparc and OpenBSD 2.3/sparc on an IPC.
Unfortunately, in 2.0.x implementations, linux and sun4c machines don't
seem to get along very well. That's too bad. 2.2 isn't that far off tho,
and if you're adventurous, 2.1 kernels are said to be quite fast. The
problem you will experience is a marked slowdown in userspace over time.
It's said to be problems in the MMU.
OpenBSD was pretty fast in userspace, and reliably so, although they
say linux, even with the slowdown problem, is a faster server.
Unfortunately, unless you really like BSD and you're hardcore into
using vi, OpenBSD is ugly like sin. It's the proactively secure BSD,
which means it's forever getting in your face about stuff it deems
unwise. The documentation for OpenBSD makes many references to "setup
programs" -- ie, it will say "run this program to configure such and
such" - Almost always, executing the command merely launches vi so you
can edit a file. Since I don't use vi, I wasn't very happy with the
situation.
In the end, I sent for a $10 copy of Solaris 2.6 from Sun, and
installed that. I've been playing with it for about a week. All in all,
Solaris is a pig. Memory use is nigh absurd. But still, CDE on the
CGThree with 36 megs of ram, though it's using almost all my ram, seems
slightly more responsive than AfterStep was under linux. This can
possibly be attributed to a better xserver.
The major problem I had with linux was that I couldn't find a linux
window manager, save TWM, that seemed at all 256-color friendly. the
window manager would always be using too many colors, or whatever, and
nothing seemed to work right. Solaris seems much smoother in that
respect. I believe the trend in window managers is to write them
assuming the user is going to be using 16-bit or 24-bit color, which is
rarely the case on Sun systems.
In the end? I'm not sure what I'll do. an IPC is only so useful. I also
have a copy of SunOS 4.1.3 here but I'm not sure if it's worth bothering
with. I'm not sure if the whole thing is worth bothering with.
If I were to toss the IPCs and buy LX boxes to go with the 17" monitors
and whatnot, then it might be a different story, but these are old
machines we're dealing with.
- Eric
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe sparclinux" in
the body of the message to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
