Help all?

[Zolzaya Kh]

Hello, all

I'm using Sun Blade 100,

But I installed Solaris 9 Operating system on our Sparc machine, Also this
OS is not good,

So I search another OS,

My question is :


- Which version do I need?

Help me?, Excuse me, I'm Mongolian, So my English is not well.

Cheers, Zoloo

[Jos van der Ende]

On Wed, 11 Mar 2009 17:01:22 -0800

Post by Zolzaya Kh
Hello, all
I'm using Sun Blade 100,
But I installed Solaris 9 Operating system on our Sparc machine, Also this
OS is not good,

A Blade 100, eh? I've two of those myself.

You can try Solaris 10 or OpenSolaris, both provided by Sun Microsystems, the manufacturer of this system. I've good experiences with Solaris 10, but I have not tried OpenSolaris yet. You can download both from here (free registration required):
http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/get.jsp

A second option is to run Linux on it. Aurora Linux, which this mailing list is about, is a version of Fedora ported to Sun Sparc hardware. Other distributions that run fine on Sun Sparc hardware include Debian and Gentoo. Several others as well but I have not tried those personally.

If you're looking for an easy to set up, out of the box version, try Aurora or Debian. Installing Gentoo is more complex and much more time-consuming, but is highly tunable and customizable. It's entirely up to what you prefer. (Gentoo is my personal favorite.)

Yet another option is NetBSD. I've heard good things about it, especially security-wise, but I have little personal experience with it. I've only installed it once, out of curiosity.

For all of those you will have to get the Sparc64 version. x86 or amd64 versions will *not* run on Sparc-based hardware.

[T. Ribbrock]

Second try - SPF didn't like my "From:" - grrrrrr....

Post by Jos van der Ende
You can try Solaris 10 or OpenSolaris,

OpenSolaris is still not available for Sparc.

I have Solaris 10 on my U60, but coming from a Linux background, I'm
still unimpressed - configuration and administration seems a lot more
cumbersome when compared to e.g. Ubuntu (or even Aurora). Just getting
some security patches installed takes a lot of patience and stamina...
(unless you do it manually via command line, in which case you have to
spend a lot of time pinpointing the correct patches). At least half of
those problems will be related to habit, of course, but coming from
Linux, it's not a straightforward transition.
The biggest upside of running Solaris on Sparc, though, is that some
applications are easier to get running, as "Solaris/Sparc" is better
supported than "Linux/Sparc" or "*BSD/Sparc" by non-OSS developers.
Things like Java and Flash used to be a problem there, if you need
them - though I have not checked whether that's still the case.


[...]

Post by Jos van der Ende
Yet another option is NetBSD. I've heard good things about it,
especially security-wise, but I have little personal experience with
it. I've only installed it once, out of curiosity.

And - for completeness - OpenBSD, of course. I've had Sparcs (IPX ->
SparcStation 5 -> U1 -> U5 -> U10) running as firewalls/webserver/fileserver
at home for years under OpenBSD. For that kind of task I have yet to see
an OS that is as straightforward (if you're technically minded and
willing to read documentation), welldocumented (the man pages of the
base system are a *dream* compared to both Solaris and Linux), stable
and secure.

For the desktop, however, I prefer a Linux-version, as in my opinion all
GUI-related things are better integrated (though I'm very certain some
OpenBSD-fans would want to argue about that... :-) ). Same goes for
patches/updates (of which more are needed if more apps are installed).

My EUR0.02,

Thomas

[Dennis Gilmore]

Post by T. Ribbrock
Second try - SPF didn't like my "From:" - grrrrrr....

Post by Jos van der Ende
You can try Solaris 10 or OpenSolaris,

OpenSolaris is still not available for Sparc.

actually it is. at least there are developer builds available for the next
release as well as Solaris Express Community Edition. (note ive not tried to
use them at all)

Post by T. Ribbrock
I have Solaris 10 on my U60, but coming from a Linux background, I'm
still unimpressed - configuration and administration seems a lot more
cumbersome when compared to e.g. Ubuntu (or even Aurora). Just getting
some security patches installed takes a lot of patience and stamina...
(unless you do it manually via command line, in which case you have to
spend a lot of time pinpointing the correct patches). At least half of
those problems will be related to habit, of course, but coming from
Linux, it's not a straightforward transition.
The biggest upside of running Solaris on Sparc, though, is that some
applications are easier to get running, as "Solaris/Sparc" is better
supported than "Linux/Sparc" or "*BSD/Sparc" by non-OSS developers.
Things like Java and Flash used to be a problem there, if you need
them - though I have not checked whether that's still the case.

There is no flash for Linux/SPARC but the Fedora 9 tree has openjdk 1.6.0 so
at least the java side now should just work.

Dennis