[luau] SparcStation IPX

[Dustin Cross]

Aloha,

OpenBSD (http://www.openbsd.org/) is great on old sun hardware.  Solaris is
real slow on an IPX and old versions of Solaris don't come with all the
great tools we are used to with Linux.  If you were in Hawaii I could let
you borrow Solaris (2.5.1, 2.6, or 2.7, I don't think 2.8 dropped support
for IPX), but I think OpenBSD performs much better.  Much less overhead, it
has X and works fine (but slow) with the CGSix graphics card.  The only
problem with 8-bit color is everything in the background has crazy colors,
but the window in focus is fine.

If you want to stick with Linux, SuSE (download the ISOs here
ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/sparc/suse-sparc/) is the only up to date
distro, or you could try Gentoo for Sparc
(http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/distributions/gentoo/releases/build/1.1a/)
, it might take a year to compile, so I would use the stage3 install.

My opinion is that OpenBSD is the best on old Sun hardware.  Plus you could
check out PF.

Dusty




> I have an old SparcStation IPX that I've upgraded a bit (52MB of RAM,
> cost me $5; 2.1GB HDD, free).  I need some suggestions as to what
> flavor  of UNIX to run on it.  Linux seems a bit sluggish on it (it
> came to me  with RH 5.2 on it, not to mention RPM hell...), and NetBSD
> seems to have  trouble CREATING the Sun disklabel on the new 2.1GB HDD
> (has an
> x86/MSDOS partition from the comp the disk came out of, obviously this
> can be blown away).
>
> I'm thinking of Solaris/SunOS (older versions obviously) if someone has
>  a copy (obviously there's a liscense for this box somewhere as all Sun
>  machiens from that era shipped with SunOS) though I have no experience
>  with it really.
>
> Anyway, I'm just playing around with it.  A usable X server would be
> nice too. It only has a CGSix in it, but I have a fairly decent Sun
> branded monitor (not using a PC monitor on it) to I could at least use
> it as an X terminal.  Unfortunately the cg6 is only 8bit?
>
> --MonMotha
>
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