On Mon, 2 Oct 2006, Stephen Ward wrote:
I'm looking at taking on a project that involves Linux on a SPARC machine. My only experience with Linux is on the x86 platform, and I have absolutely no SPARC experience. Being the adventurer that I am, I intend to pursue this despite my lack of experience. In order to tackle this project, I'm going to have to obtain my own SPARC machine. I've been looking on ebay for used machines I could pick up on the cheap. It isn't hard to find stuff for ~$500 or less, which is about what I'm looking to spend. However, I don't know what sort of hardware considerations I should make in finally choosing one. For instance, I imagine the SPARC processor has undergone some revisions over the years (a la Pentium, P2, P3, etc.); are there certain old processor revisions I want to avoid? If I want to add a hard drive, is it pretty likely that I can pop in a good ol' IDE drive, or would I more likely need to look at SCSI? Or does Sun generally use some other funky standard (note my mention of lack of experience above)? Are there other things I need to consider that I probably haven't? I'm fairly intent on using Gentoo as my flavor of choice unless someone can give me a pretty compelling reason not to. Thanks, Stephen
Now you ask. A while back I was trying to find a good home for my old SPARC Classic. I had installed RedHat 5/6 on it for testing purposes and it worked great. I tried mailing lists and universities and nobody wanted. My uses ran out for it so I finally threw it out. I was sad to see it go. If only we had connected sooner.
I know Gentoo has a Sparc install: http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/where.xml Other distros may as well. Regretfully, Jonathan /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
