SPARC Status (Was Re: Secondary Architecture Status?)

[Chris Adams]

Once upon a time, Stephen John Smoogen <smooge at gmail.com> said:
> [PS I actually miss supporting Alpha and Sparc even though I know they
> were less than 1% of the market.. they fixed lots of things.. but
> trying to get a hold of one and keeping them running is frickin
> expensive.]

I've got a couple of SPARCs at home, but one is dog-slow and the other
makes more noise than the vacuum cleaner, the washing machine, and all
my other computers combined.  I'll probably have an Alpha at home before
long as well, but all three systems will probably end up in the closet.

I'd like to get the good SPARC (SunFire V480 with 4 900MHz CPUs and 8G
RAM) running Linux and try to help, but Aurora crashed during install
and I haven't had a chance to try Fedora (or find a place for it where
the noise doesn't annoy the !@#% out of me).

However, you are right; for the average person hacking at home, the only
practical alternatives are 32 bit and 64 bit x86.  You can play with the
odd MIPS appliance, but you usually can't do much there (so not really a
target for Fedora even if somebody was trying).  ARM is the only other
possible target, but that's still not really a target the average person
can hack.

-- 
Chris Adams <cmadams at hiwaay.net>
Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services
I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.