On Saturday 30 July 2005 06:37, Johnny Hughes wrote:

On Fri, 2005-07-29 at 21:15 -0400, Adam Breaux wrote:

...

Is this in the works, planned, or never going to happen?

It depends on access to reliable hardware long term.

I am working on obtaining some sparc machines. What the technical issues will be if and when I get the machines, we will have to see then.

Do you need physical access, or is remote serial a possibility?

See http://www.lamarowen.net/pgallery/album?album_id=2236 for a look at what I have here at PARI. I'm running our production mailserver on Aurora 1.92 right now, and a have a small buildfarm (of admittedly lower grade boxes; Ultra 30's at 250MHz aren't terribly fast).

I personally have a pair of Ultra 10's (both 360MHz, one has 512MB RAM the other has either 256MB or 384MB, don't remember). The one that has 512MB is using the quad-sided DIMM's, meaning only two of the four slots are used, and meaning you can add another 256MB (or another pair of the quad-sided DIMM's, if you have them) to bring it above 512MB. The Ultra 10 can take up to a 120GB IDE drive natively, and up through 300GB with an add-on ATA133 card. Also have a pair of Ultra 1's, and I think two Ultra 5 chassis (good spare motherboards for the U10's, since the 5 and the 10 use the same motherboards). None of the 10's or 5's have hard drives in them; they use standard IDE drives, both hard drives and CD-ROM drives. One of the U1's is diskless, and the other has a pair of drives, not sure of capacity. I also have some spare CPU modules of various speeds, I think 333MHz and 270MHz are my spares. With the U10's are either one or a pair of Elite3D framebuffers; need a 13W3 adapter to make a stock SVGA monitor work with them. Yes, a U10 can have dual framebuffers (the UPA Elite3D or Creator series UPA, and the PCI ATI Rage), and it should work for the most part.

Oh, a 'quad-sided' DIMM, for those who have never seen them, is a two-sided DIMM card where each side has two layers of half-thickness chips; they look pretty odd. I paid over $200 for the pair to get 512MB on the first Ultra 5 I had; I was given the U5, but it didn't have any RAM (or drives at all) with it, and I built it up and installed Aurora 0.32 on it a few years back.

Those machines are available for CentOS use if you want to pay shipping. The Ultra 10 has an ATI framebuffer with a standard 15 pin SVGA output, so you don't need a special monitor. You do need a Sun keyboard, but I have a few of those too. If you have hardware you want to trade for them, or want to count them as a donation, or whatnot, we can work something out.

Having my mailserver running CentOS would be very nice; using the donated SPARC hardware in this way is nice, too.

What other sort of help is needed?

On 7/30/05, Johnny Hughes mailing-lists@hughesjr.com wrote:

On Fri, 2005-07-29 at 21:15 -0400, Adam Breaux wrote:

...

Is this in the works, planned, or never going to happen?

It depends on access to reliable hardware long term.

I am working on obtaining some sparc machines. What the technical issues will be if and when I get the machines, we will have to see then.

So, if machines are available then we will move forward with this arch as well.

I want to caution that it may take some time to get the CentOS code base working on sparc. Aurora ( http://auroralinux.org/ ) is probably where we will start the compiling.

Thanks, Johnny Hughes

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