Yanni Jew <yanni at rogers.com> wrote:
> goran.hultgren at bluefish.se wrote:
> > 
> > This is off topic. I just got an offer for two more or less new Ultra
> > SPARC IIe workstation (8Gb Ultra-ATA disk, 128Mb RAM, 32xcd, Rage Pro)
> ...
> > And... does it run Linux/Squeak good? I assume Linux is good for it -
> > would I face any obvious problems getting Squeak running on that? ;-)
> 
> A while back, I ran Linux/Squeak on a SPARC-20 (~50MHz SuperSPARC),
> and got about the same, or slightly worse, micro-benchmark score compared
> to a Pentium 180. Since the box is headless, I had to run it remotely
> over X11, and the screen re-draw was just barely tolerable.
> 
> RedHat no longer provides a pre-compiled version for SPARCs, that
> I could easily find on their site. I've been meaning to switch the
> machine over to some BSD variant, which I hear is more finely tuned
> for SPARC than is Linux.

Ok - it seemed to me that OpenBSD or NetBSD might be good choices too.
Personally I love Debian so I think I will start there.

On the other hand - Gentoo Linux has also started a SPARC port, and
Gentoo is really squeezing performance out of the hardware - in Gentoo
you compile everything yourself fully optimized... It is quite an
amazing new distribution actually.

regards, Göran