Joseph Simantov wrote:
Hi everyone,
I have been following this interesting exchange, and I believe we must, first, agree on what are we finally trying to achieve.
Is our concern to manage by all means to make a clean Debian installation on SPARCs, or are we expecting to be able to put this combination to do something useful for the average user.
I believe we'll all agree that when it comes to reliability, SPARCs have a long
established reputation. You just have to boot once a SPARC server and then you
practically forget its existence...
The main problems appear when SPARCs must, for some reason, be used as
workstations with Debian.
Although a succesful installation on an older machine can be a rewarding
experience, we have to face reality and be aware that in the current industrial
context, people are not interested to know how complex and difficult an
installation was; all they want to know is if working on an older machine will
help them do their job fast, or more reliably.
Besides, at the current price level of new PCs, money-saving by keeping older
machines is becoming irrelevant; it's mostly a question of principle, of not
throwing away machines just because they happen not to be last-generation...
I personnally find the Xorg issues with U5/U10 and Blades quite frustrating;
could somebody among those who have managed to succesfully install (and
work...) with a Blade100+/Debian, spend some time in writing a summary
describing the procedure he followed? I'm sure all of us would highly
appreciate such a contribution...
And, in order not to appear grumpy, yes, I do believe in using Debian/Sparc!!
Regards,
Joseph
I definitely agree regarding the reliability of Sun hardware. There's
nothing I like better than installing a server and never having to touch
it again. Unfortunately that rarely happens but it's nice when it does...
As someone who deals with unix/linux servers around the clock for work,
not as a novelty, I definitely agree that there's still a place for
older Sun hardware. And, installing Debian on some of them can really be
a benefit from a porting perspective when the original development for
the application in question was done on a linux x86 box. Sometimes it
just makes more sense to install Debian (or some other flavor of linux)
than spending a bunch of time and effort porting the application to Solaris.
Now for a desktop workstation, that's another story... From my general
experience, trying to make use of Sun/Sparc hardware for desktop
productivity is less than ideal even when it works correctly. I've been
involved with Sun hardware since the Sun3/Motorola 680x0 days and I'm
having a difficult time thinking of any desktop related Sun hardware
that can't now be replaced by more modern/useful PC hardware for very
little cost. A few items that come to mind are the SunDials 8-dial input
device and some of the higher end PCI and UPA graphics cards, but
anyway, the point being - there really has to be a reason for wanting to
use Sun/Sparc hardware for desktop use (linux or solaris) and I'm hard
pressed to think of many. And, as Joseph mentioned above, I'm sure that
there are a great number of technical challenges that only someone who
is trying to make use of the hardware as a graphical desktop would
appreciate. Not sure if it's worth the effort (again, aside from the
novelty and educational benefits) unless there really is a user base for
sparc desktops that I'm not seeing/recognizing...
As I mentioned from a server perspective though it's great to have the
option of linux or solaris. I really appreciate all the effort that's
gone into Debian/Sparc and for server applications I'm sure we'll
continue to make use of all the effort put forth by the group here for
many years to come (i.e. stumbling into lonely Netras in phone closets
buried under wiring 8 years prior, still chugging away doing their job :-).
-Brian
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