OT: Licenses on Sparc servers (wuz: Fedora on SUN Ultra sparc10)

[Lamar Owen]

On Tuesday 11 May 2004 06:06, leam wrote:
> Darn good reason to go to NetBSD! If you take Dan Greer's (sp?)
> suggestions about mixing up your environment you can get a great network
> services platform on some low-cost but good servers level boxes and then
> use Linux for desktop/major applications.

NetBSD and OpenBSD are not as mature on the UltraSPARCs as Aurora Linux is.  
In particular, the last I looked at OpenBSD for sun4u SMP was not supported.  
Linux on sun4u supports excellent SMP.  Many other things make Aurora Linux 
an excellent choice, and one that will at some point be a Fedora-based one.  
And this IS Fedora-list, right?  There are other SPARC Linux dists, like 
Debian and Gentoo, but this being Fedora-List we'll restrict ourselves to 
Aurora, since it is closest to the current Fedora of the bunch.

Now, on sun4c (ancient SPARCs, such as the IPC, IPX, ELC, SS2, SS1, and SS1+) 
NetBSD outperforms Linux by a wide margin.  But that question was about an 
Ultra 10, which is sun4u and is supported very well by Linux.

I am running ~20 UltraSPARC boxen here at PARI on Aurora 1.0+updates. My 
personal webserver (dev.ramifordistat.net) is running Aurora 1.0+updates, 
AOLserver4, PostgreSQL 7.4.2, and OpenACS 5.1 as my personal CMS box.  It's a 
Netra X1 (500MHz 640MB RAM 240GB in two 120GB drives).  It works extremely 
well, but I do look forward to some updates, in particular getting IPsec 
running with the 2.6 kernel, that will have to wait for the Corona (Aurora's 
version of Rawhide) beta tree to be uploaded.  Of course I'll test the 
updates on a spare Ultra 5 I have lying around before rolling the updates out 
to dev.ramifordistat.net, but anyway.....

The short answer: Fedora is coming to the SPARC RSN.
-- 
Lamar Owen
Director of Information Technology
Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute
1 PARI Drive
Rosman, NC  28772
(828)862-5554
www.pari.edu