[luau] SparcStation IPX

Dustin Cross dusty at sandust.com
Tue Jul 16 13:16:01 PDT 2002


ALoha,

OpenBSD does ftp install.  I have never had to do anything special to get
OpenBSD to work on sun hardware.  Never seen any sundisk lable problems.
You can download a boot.net floppy image from
ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/3.1/sparc/ (or one of the mirrors).  Or
you could get the latest snapshot
ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/snapshots/sparc/.

You could also look at LTSP on Sparc Hardware or SPARC-Linux Xterminal
Package (http://www.pucebaboon.com/SLXT/)


Dusty


> Dustin Cross wrote:
>> 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
>
> Can OpenBSD do an FTP/HTTP/NFS install?  I forgot to mention that in
> the  requirements as I lack an external SCSI CD-ROM drive :)
>
> I have no problem with using a BSD (I have an OpenBSD box that I tinker
>  with on occasion). In fact, as I mentioned, I was considering NetBSD
> (after all, it'll run on anything, right? :)  NetBSD caught my eye
> because I know it has an FTP install option.  The probelm I get into is
>  I have no idea how to make a Sun disklabel and their installer seems
> to  be only able to MODIFY a disklabel, not create one.
>
> Gentoo for Sparc I've considered (just redid my desktop to Gentoo,
> though still ironing the kinks out as me and package managers don't get
>  along well), though the install procedure isn't quite done yet (they
> mention using an already bootable Debian install, and of course there's
>  only room for one HDD in that small lunchbox case) and doesn't support
> X  on it apparently.  Also, Linux apparently has some issues with the
> Sun4c  archetecture.
>
> --MonMotha
>
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