> 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?
Hi,
I have an ss1 and an ss1+, and I've run both Linux and NetBSD 1.3 on
them. First of all, I'm a die-hard Linux fan; I've run Linux on my PC
for over 4 years. The following are from my personal experiences.
RedHat Linux 5.2
----------------
RedHat is extremely easy to install. I had problems with earlier versions
of RedHat, but 5.2 went without a hitch. Nice menu-driven installation
program. The package management (rpm) is very easy to use, and the bonus
is that it comes with hundreds of packages and there are many many more
available from contrib.redhat.com. You can buy the distribution on a
CD or download it from the net.
Since the ss2 is a sun4c, you may be hit by the "slowdown" bug whereby
your system slows to a crawl after a few minutes, hours or days. The
solution is to upgrade your kernel to 2.1.x (or 2.2 soon).
NetBSD 1.3
----------
I found NetBSD extremely difficult to install. The installation program
itself was quite unfriendly, and partitioning the disk was almost a
nightmare, and I'm not exactly an amateur in these things. I finally got
it going though (I actually had to hack the installation script in order
to get the swap partition to go where I wanted it). The resulting
installation was every bit as stable as Linux. However, the bsd package
management system leaves a lot to be desired. Installing a new system
from scratch and then having to download and compile stuff like 'bash'
is a pain. Figuring out how to re-compile the kernel was a little
complicated, but that's probably because I had never done it before - doing
the same thing to the Linux kernel really isn't much easier, it's just
different and I'm used to it.
OpenBSD
-------
I couldn't get this to install and function after 3 attempts. Installation
seemed quite similar to NetBSD, which is why I was confused that it didn't
work. Oh well. It should theoretically run on your hardware.
Debian GNU/Linux
----------------
There is no stable, released version of Debian for the sparc, but it
appears to be close to freezing, or at least some kind of slush. I plan
on giving the current snapshot a go, but I've never used it on the sparc
yet. I run it on my PC and can say that while the installation is slighly
less user friendly than RedHat, I like the user-driven development model
much more than RedHat's. Performance should be comparable to RedHat 5.2.
Both systems (running RedHat & NetBSD) seem very stable.
The big difference, however, is speed.
NetBSD seems to be faster in almost every respect compared to Linux on
this platform (sun4c). I continue to use them both (one on each machine),
but my recommendation boils down to this:
Try RedHat. Since the ss2 is considerably faster than either of my systems,
you may find performance quite reasonable. RedHat is easier to install and
use. If speed is critical, however, you may want to consider NetBSD.
Hope this helps,
james
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