[SunRescue] Recommend starter Sun?

[Scott Norwood]

On Mon, 19 Mar 2001, User Bobkeys BSD Bob the old greybeard BSD freak wrote:

> That is the first one that boots and loads fine, in my hands.
> It even came up well on my 4/300, after using the IPX to load it.
> OpenBSD, has always been, for me... insert floppy, boot, and 30
> minutes later it is loaded, from cd or ftp.

Agreed -- the OpenBSD install routine is pretty good on both x86 and
Sparc (can't speak for other platforms).  I've installed it on sun4c
hardware with both netboot and floppy boot without problems, although I
didn't find the OS to be all that stable...I would random get kernel
panics for no apparent reason.

Linux runs fine and is pretty stable on Sparc, too, but when I last
tried it, I was running the Redhat distribution.  I'm not a fan of
Redhat.  Apparently, there's now a Slackware port for Sparc, which I
suspect I would like substantially more.  Still, the Redhat version
didn't give me substantially better performance than Solaris 2.6 and
did give substantially worse performance than SunOS 4.1.4.

Still, Solaris seems to be the most stable OS that I've run on Sun
hardware, which I suppose makes sense for obvious reasons.  I have not
tried NetBSD on Suns, though, but it's fine on x86 hardware (but
doesn't have SMP support).

- Scott