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<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'>I just wanted to bring some attention to the experimental
build of CentOS that Pasi put together for sparc64 architecture. I
installed it for the first time last night on a Sun Ultra 5 (333MHz, 256MB RAM,
upgraded to 40GB hard disk).<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'>I installed it over a serial console as this is a headless
system. Install went flawlessly. After the install was done and it
booted up, I ssh’d in as root, and within 5 minutes had it participating
in my LDAP/Kerberos/NFS environment. Logged out, logged back in with my
regular user account with X11 forwarding enabled, and started firing up GUI
apps.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'>The box is a little memory starved, and I think with 512MB
it would be a lot better, but it is quite usable! App startup time is
longer than what my Athlon64 3700+ has me accustomed to but once the apps are
running, they are snappy & stable.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'>If you have an old 64 bit Sun workstation kicking around
collecting dust, I think it would be worthwhile to try this build out and post
your results to Pasi’s centos-sparc mailing list. With any luck, maybe
we can get to the point where this is an officially supported architecture.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'>Some apps are still missing, as is to be expected with a new
architecture. Most notably, OpenOffice.org is not there. I did run
firefox, gimp, thunderbird, and xchat flawlessly though. I can’t
comment at all on local X11 console support because my sun boxes run headless.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'>This is inspiring me to save up for a loaded Sun E420R or
E450 to run at home and replace my Duron-based web/mail server.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:
12.0pt'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
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