Eskimo North

Tonight I extracted a dead CD-ROM from a PC I had with XP on it, made the DVD a master so it could boot from it, downloaded a CentOS x86 ISO DVD image, and wrote it to a DVD, repartitioned the hard drive, and installed Linux on what was formerly an unused partition (now made into five partitions), and installed CentOS as a second OS so this is now setup for dual boot.

CentOS was one of the modern Linux distributions that supports a broad range of hardware, including Sparc and x86, so it is one that I am considering as a replacement for RedHat 6.2 which most of our servers are presently running. RedHat abandoned the Sparc architecture after David Miller left Red Hat (is back now), but CentOS is derived from modern RedHat less the proprietary artwork and documentation so it would probably be the easiest to adapt to. At any rate; I've loaded it on the PC so I can become familiar with it and see if it looks like it's something that will work.

The amazing thing to me was the ease in which it installed. I only had to download one file, an ISO image for DVD, write it to DVD and then it was so simple to install I was able to do so first try with zero documentation and managed to do so without creaming XP on the existing partition. The dual boot boot loader that it comes with works wonderfully booting either OS even though they're both on the same drive and so far Windows hasn't overwritten Linux or vice versa (I've had this problem in the past with Windows-98).

I think CentOS is a good choice for servers that are going to offer a wide range of services, because it can be easily configured to offer a raft of services securely.

There is a downside to CentOS on x86, and it may apply to Sparc as well... CentOS does aggressive hardware probing not only at startup, but also when some runtime heuristics are satisfied. Unfortunately this is a bad idea for a server.

It might be an interesting experiment to install CentOS for Sparc, then strip all the "Value Added" horrors from it and turn it into a home-grown distro by leisurely stages using stow in /usr/local. The whole thing could probably be accomplished in a 48-hour hacking session by a clever person with a surplus of adrenaline. Without stow it would be foolhardy, and take at least 10 times as long.

Value-added horrors:

selinux - totally braindead. proof that we have nothing to fear from the NSA.
any window manager other than fvwm (if you must run X).
hald - god, what a bad idea to run THAT on a server... gives me chills.
prelink - somebody was on crack when they thought this disaster up.

Pretty much I need a working kernel, libs, and development environment. If I can get that much the rest won't matter too much. However, CentOS Sparc distro isn't done even though their website says it is, so instead now looking at Aurora.

Does that mean that gcc and glibc won't build? That sucks. The good news is that gcc is, at heart, a cross-compiler, so it should be possible to build the Linux gcc and glibc targeting SparcLinux under Solaris 10 using the tools in /usr/sfw.

They don't have a completed distribution for Sparc yet, in spite of what the website says. So it's not possible even to boot.

I had so-so luck with CentOS on a Xeon.
I am sure that there is a Gentoo Linux out there for Sparc.

CentOS is one of many free Linux Distros. CentOS is based on the non-free, but open source "Red Hat Enterprise Linux", or "RHEL". RHEL is notable for it's inexplicably crippled video support. But I suppose it's safe to call it "Enterprise", since M$ has proved that you can get away with calling a rotting pile of spaghetti code "Enterprise" without getting challenged.

Other free Linux distros include Ubuntu, which is very easy for windoze lusers to migrate to, Debian, from which Ubuntu is dervived, and Slackware, which is the best choice for servers and software developers. There are about a hundred other distros targeting various user demographics, but the distros I am writing about here are all mature, stable, and usable... Which might not be the case for others.

If you've never run Linux before, you will do well to try Ubuntu, since it "guesses" configuration very well. Much better than windoze, in fact.

Since the version that we'll be moving away from is Redhat 6.2, it made most sense to look at OS's based on Redhat to minimize difficulties converting. CentOS is one, but they haven't completed the Sparc port, so looks like we'll be using Aurora which is specifically geared towards the UltraSparc platforms which is what we use.