A Sun-SPARC puppy

What features/apps/bugfixes needed in a future Puppy
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TheProphet
Posts: 174
Joined: Mon 18 Feb 2008, 06:22

A Sun-SPARC puppy

#1 Post by TheProphet »

Cause on account of I've been blessed with a salvage computer which is a Sun-SPARC, Panther mainboard, needs a propietary video adapter (maybe) and has abso-damn-lutely no native USB, IDE or SATA support but plenty of 60-pin SCSI.

So, who's up to writing a Legacy OS puppy for Sun-SPARC? Don't be shy, gentlemen and ladies.
You know deep in your hearts you wanted to do that all along, right?

From what I've heard (you know, "THEY" say... whoever "THEY" really are) the Sun grafix cards are kind of minimalistic or at least for that series of boards although, THEY say, there's a 3dfx card which was licensed to Sun.

It of course has no onboard grafix. Or sound. Which once I get whatever OS I can snarf for it installed, I'm not even worried about it because I want to run it headless, kind of like a router


...only, a router with dual processors and a gig of RAM and an OS that can run them efficiently.

The chassis for this baby is built like a soviet tank, very heavy. So I switched it into a regular desktop/short tower case. I've heard of people using it, designed more as a server really, as a desktop. You know the ones... people like me who are gluttons for innovation and of course the mental anguish that comes from it.

Sun was very little help, it's an OEM board built for a Canadian outfit which has since gone under.

Oracle doesn't seem to want to acknowledge any Sun product older than like 2008.
And they bought the company so it really is exactly their own business.

There's a Debian distro but this is like turn-of-the-century, maybe 2001 hardware.


Just gnaw on the idea for a while, like I said, these things were built like a tank and are legendary for being stable (THEY say) and since they're unsupported now by the manufacturer.
Thus a perfect match for the Legacy OS geniuses.
He who skydive without parachute, jumps to own conclusion.

amigo
Posts: 2629
Joined: Mon 02 Apr 2007, 06:52

#2 Post by amigo »

Forget it -not gonna happen, now or ever.

starhawk
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Location: Everybody knows this is nowhere...

#3 Post by starhawk »

Hate to say this, but that box of yours dates from about the era of stone wheels and flint arrowheads.

It's not likely that anyone's gonna go through the trouble to make a puppy for something that antique.

That said, if you wanna do it, go for it, I wish you luck (really!). But I don't see it happening from the rest of us.

TheProphet
Posts: 174
Joined: Mon 18 Feb 2008, 06:22

#4 Post by TheProphet »

starhawk wrote:Hate to say this, but that box of yours dates from about the era of stone wheels and flint arrowheads.

It's not likely that anyone's gonna go through the trouble to make a puppy for something that antique.

That said, if you wanna do it, go for it, I wish you luck (really!). But I don't see it happening from the rest of us.
Aurora is the Debian/Ubuntu distro written for it. Which I've got but haven't tried yet, due to the grafix cards being propietary, expensive and generally unavailable. And I live in the town where they used to make them. And it would greatly help to look at what I'm doing while installing the OS.

It's a future project. I do occasionally toy around with the museum pieces. I had a nice run with an IBM p/s2 which worked until 2004 when I lost it during a move/eviction.

That would be the one that was all Microchannel. It hit a very large brick wall called "Proprietary" though, even though IBM abandoned the entire architecture they hold the specifications in a Death Grip. It did all right for having 32 megs of RAM and a 25Mhz processor.

And a good part of my journey through computers.

If it appears that I'm taking a Zen approach to computer science it's probably because I am.

There's a place called "Way too relaxed" but I haven't found it yet.
He who skydive without parachute, jumps to own conclusion.

amigo
Posts: 2629
Joined: Mon 02 Apr 2007, 06:52

#5 Post by amigo »

Linux *will* run on sparc, but probably only debian has a working port. You could start with that and try to add whatever 'puppyness' you like to it. Good luck!

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