Sparcstation 5

Dave Andruczyk djandruczyk at yahoo.com
Mon Jan 19 10:54:58 EST 2004


--- JJ Neff <jjneff at yahoo.com> wrote:
> You can download Sun OS 7,8,9.  You have Solaris 7 (5.7). 
> 
> You can install any of them and the instructions are all online.  
> 
> I honestly don't know what the problem is with Linux.  I've installed Debian
> and Gentoo on SPARC workstations.  I understand Slackware is also SPARC
> usable.
> 
> Gentoo has a good IRC channel (gentoo-sparc ??)  and they are very helpful. 
> I
> never used the debian sparc channel.  The install instructions on the gentoo
> site are very good and walk you through.  If you decide to use gentoo be
> prepared for a 2 day install.  Debian is a few hours.
> 

His potential problem is that he has an oddball TurboSparc (170 mhz) sparc5
which has known issues with linux, due to its obscurity.  Also with only 32
megs
of ram, it's an utter dog speed wise (always heavy into swap), esp under slow-
waris.   The last sparc 5 (110 mhz more common model with 32 meg) I ran did 
run linux well,  but it suffered from low memory (always swapping).

If he is intersted in a significantly more powerful machine I have an Ultra30
with 384 Megs of ram, dual Elite-3d framebuffers and a PenguinPCI board
that I'm selling for $400.00 or best offer.  (The penguin board is an intel
processor (actually amd K6-2) with it's own RAM and video.  Sun made them 
so you could run windows and solaris atthe same time at full speed.  I don't
think there is any support for running the penguin board under sparclinux.)


=====
Dave J. Andruczyk

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