Two great tastes....
(Yeah, I know, none of you care about this....)
I first heard rumblings of this a week or two ago, but now the announcement is official: There's now a Debian GNU/Solaris. (Unfortunately things aren't entirely open yet ( Read more... )
I first heard rumblings of this a week or two ago, but now the announcement is official: There's now a Debian GNU/Solaris. (Unfortunately things aren't entirely open yet ( Read more... )
Comments 2
I wonder if [Debian GNU/Solaris] will run on the old sun4c and sun4m shoeboxes I have in the basement.
Unfortunately not. Debian GNU/Solaris is based on OpenSolaris, which only runs on SPARC systems that are of the sun4u architecture and later (well, nothing newer than sun4u has been released, but Sun will soon be releasing processors with on-chip multithreading, the Niagra; this will be "sun4v", based on what I've heard). Also, OpenSolaris only runs on 64-bit capable sun4u systems. This effectively excludes all Ultra 1 systems and some lower-speed Ultra 2 systems due to 64-bit related bugs in the CPUs. You can get an 64-bit friendly Ultra 2 pretty cheaply nowadays (low hundreds; a lot better than when I saw people paying $15-$30k for them new).
Oh, Solaris/OpenSolaris also runs on x86 and x64, too. I don't know if the Debian GNU/Solaris folks are doing x86/x64 releases, as well.
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(I assume you got here via taokodr?)
Anyway, it doesn't surprise me that OpenSolaris won't run on the old machines, especially considering memory issues; even Solaris [2.]7 would struggle on them. It slightly surprises me that it won't run 32-bit on sun4u, but I guess that Sun 64-bit transition was a while back now. Tech time flies.
I would hope and assume that any GNU/Solaris release would include x86 just to keep a wide audience. At this point though it'll be interesting to see if the venture survives the licensing dispute with Debian.
Maybe I should get consider Debian or OpenBSD on those shoeboxes before there's nothing current left that runs on them. Though I still haven't come up with a good use for something that old and memory-constrained.
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