Message-ID: <006701c1c711$1c287730$1400a8c0@nicksgp7> From: "Nick Thompson" <nthompso@cae.wisc.edu> Date: Fri, 8 Mar 2002 21:21:24 -0500 Subject: [suse-sparc] SuSE is very good, thanks.
For a FREE product, the Sparc SuSE runs outstanding. Period. As with
anything that's 'free', there's usually a reasonable amount of man-hours
that may be expended solving problems. If you want absolutely trouble-free
computing, you're in the wrong profession.
I've been using Suse on my Sparcs since 7.0 (or 7.1?). I've been running it
successfully on SS5 (32Mb), SS20 (128Mb), Ultra 2 (768Mb). I'm not using
any funky add-ons, fiber thingies, or other less common hardware. Just
plain-jane desktop workstations w/ a mouse/monitor/keyboard. Couple of SCSI
disks, a OEM network card, and CG-3 graphics (ok, so the Ultra has a CG-6).
I only use Window Maker (because it's fast & simple) which I had to
recompile due to the distro version not working w/ 8-bit colors properly.
As with any Linux or other software, using the latest & greatest version of
any software is an invitation to stumble upon bugs or glitches. For those of
you who can't figure it out: Beta software is released with the intention of
others to 'feedback' bugs. It's not to invite complaints or other gripes.
I stick with my v7.0 or v7.1 disks and I don't have half the problems on my
32-bit machines that many are griping about. A suggestion I would have is
to have a 7.1 distro available on most SuSE mirrors for folks to use w/
32-bit machines (similar to the 486 versions of Mandrake & other x86
distros).
From myself & all the others on this list who remain silent (and satisfied),
I say THANK YOU to Thorsten and the others who spent their free time making
Sparc SuSE what it is today.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Thorsten Kukuk" <kukuk@suse.de>
To: <suse-sparc@suse.com>
Sent: Friday, March 08, 2002 4:29 PM
Subject: Re: [suse-sparc] Will there be a SuSE 8.0 for Sparc?
> On Fri, Mar 08, Paolo Marcheschi wrote:
>
> > This is a very interesting question, It seems there is a huge lack of
> > support here!! Where are the suse experts. I think There are a lot of
> > bugs in the distribution, Is there a SUSE staff person to speak with, in
> > this list ?
>
> What did you expect? That you get free support for a free product?
> There are SuSE employes on this list and if they have time they
> will answer questions. But even this form of support costs something,
> and if it is only our free time.
>
> Why do you think does Red Hat and Mandrake stop their SPARC support?
> You cannot refinance it over selling boxes. Remember how expensive a
> UltraSPARC is and which different hardware you need to support a wide
> range of SPARC hardware. No Linux Distributor has so much money only
> to give something back to the Linux comunity for free.
>
> The bad news: For 8.0, as in the past, I will skip one version.
> The good news: We will continue with 8.1, if I'm able to get more and
> faster UltraSPARCs (Hey, where are the people from Sun on this list?
> Since Sun mentioned SuSE Linux for SPARC in their Linux announcement,
> maybe they can start loaning me newer and faster hardware?)
> My few current ones are far to slow to compile current glibc/gcc and
> qt.
>
> But I don't think that 32bit SPARCs will be supported any longer:
> it is impossible to use our current installer with kernel 2.2
> and kernel 2.4 is still far away from running stable. It is possible
> to configure a minimal kernel which runs on most of the 32bit SPARCs,
> but this kernel misses to much important features. And I don't see
> a kernel developer looking at this :-(
>
> Now to the known, four bugs:
>
> - Some people have problems with missing SUN labels. As already
> written, at least twice, on this list: Use the expert partitioner,
> select "extra options", clear the boot block and reread the partition
> table. This always works fine for me.
>
> - ADSL support: I have some reports that it works fine and some that
> it does not work. Since I don't have the posibility to test it, I
> cannot look at it.
>
> - If you load the UK keyboard mapping into the X11 server, the machine
> crashes. I don't know what happens here, and the X11 developers are
> busy with other things and don't have the time to look at it at the
> moment.
>
> - On 32bit SPARCs the installer does not identify CD2-CD5 correct,
> a problem due the fact that I had to use the 32bit kernel.
>
>
> I think for the third SuSE Linux/SPARC release this is not so bad ;-)
>
> Thorsten
>
> --
> Thorsten Kukuk http://www.suse.de/~kukuk/ kukuk@suse.de
> SuSE Linux AG Deutschherrenstr. 15-19 D-90429 Nuernberg
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