General - What are you running on your SPARC?

BillyBoy

There's been a thread around about what boxes folks have "Gentooed", but I'd like some idea of the things people are using their machines for. At a recent "company garage sale" we got rid of lots of Suns and I've put Gentoo on the ones I purchased. I have mine running Apache/MySQL.

What other things are you running on your Suns?

peaceful · Apprentice Joined: 06 Jun 2003 Posts: 287 Location: Utah

I was running irssi on a Sparc Station 10 (~1997 model) with its 20" monitor a while back...but the whining noise the machine was making and the amount of space it occupied became unacceptable, so now it's sitting on a shelf.

sblaineyuk · n00b Joined: 27 Oct 2005 Posts: 34

I run Gnome, OpenOffice, Firefox, XMMS, etc on mine and use it as a desktop workstation... Haven't yet found anything that I would like to do with it that I can't...

Drunkula · Posted: Tue Apr 11, 2006 4:39 pm Post subject:

I don't do much with my Ultra 2E except run Boinc/SETI on it. It's pretty slow for SETI so I may retire it from that use. If so I may just load Apache/MySQL and move my privoxy serving duties to it.
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mattus · n00b Joined: 01 Mar 2006 Posts: 6

I added a few pci NIC's to my ultra5 and had it routing my internet. I also had it running lighttpd, php, mysql and postgres, mostly as a playground for messing about with different databases.

Toady · Posted: Wed Apr 12, 2006 12:46 pm Post subject:

Up untill recently I was running my U10 as a home server, second PCI NIC (non SUN) and 2x 40gb IDE drives.

It had the usual - Apache, MySQL, Postfix, Samba etc etc etc on it, running Kernel 2.4.31
I was pretty happy with it, compile times were not that amasing (333MHz processor with the 2mb cache and 512MB of RAM) but perfectly adiquate for the amout of times I had to compile anything. What really let me down was the IDE speed.

That machine has been put away for now untill I can find my CF -> IDE adapter - then I will try and boot from the CF card and run a UDMA133 controller in it for better disk performance.

Untill then - its been replaced with a x86 box

The Ultra 2 I got for my dad hasnt been comissioned yet - but will eventually be running the same duties as above.
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Toady

Gentoo Laptop
3.1.10-gentoo-r1, Intel Core 2 Duo (32bit)
Gnome on the desk, Intel in the box, on-board everything, but it all works!

BillyBoy · Posted: Wed Apr 12, 2006 8:42 pm Post subject:

One of the bummers of running a SPARC is all the packages that are basically useless. Has anyone come up with a good way of looking for SPARC-able ebuilds? I always resort to some ugly grepping in order to find tools that I can use. (Shouldn't there be a way to tell Portage to install only my platform's ebuilds?) <sigh>

Weeve · Retired Dev Joined: 30 Oct 2002 Posts: 641

Do you think you could elaborate on "all the packages that are basically useless"? There are a lot of packages that are marked ~sparc or sparc and work fine. If you find something you're interested in using, the Gentoo SPARC FAQ even has a section on how to get keywords added.

P3SM

I've just installed Gentoo on my Netra T1 and I'm currently running Apache on it. As my previous system died on me (dual P3 Xeon) I'm moving all my apps to the Netra. I still need to add Samba, slimserver (MP3 streaming server) and MLDonkey.

As you guys are chatting about packages: does anybody have any experience with MLDonkey. I saw it is masked and I couldn't find any posts from people who installed it on a Sparc system?

Cheers, Peter
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Smaug: Sun Netra T1 105, UltraSPARC-IIi 440MHz, 512MB, 2*36GB 10kRPM; 2 Sun Netra D130: 6*36GB 10kRPM, swraid 0
Haku: Dual P3 Xeon 500MHz, 512MB; Sun Multipack: 12*18GB 10kRPM, hwraid 5
Falkor: Sun SparcStation LX, 128 MB, 2.1GB

gust4voz · Posted: Sun Apr 16, 2006 12:43 pm Post subject:

mldonkey doesn't work right, it runs for about a minute and then dies.
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Gustavo Zacarias
Gentoo/SPARC monkey

P3SM · Posted: Sun Apr 16, 2006 7:45 pm Post subject:

Thanks!
I'll go and check on the MLDonkeys forums to see if anybody is working on it!
/Peter
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Smaug: Sun Netra T1 105, UltraSPARC-IIi 440MHz, 512MB, 2*36GB 10kRPM; 2 Sun Netra D130: 6*36GB 10kRPM, swraid 0
Haku: Dual P3 Xeon 500MHz, 512MB; Sun Multipack: 12*18GB 10kRPM, hwraid 5
Falkor: Sun SparcStation LX, 128 MB, 2.1GB

chance2105 · Posted: Tue Apr 18, 2006 6:05 am Post subject:

P3SM -- If you're interested in P2P, check out Amule. It runs beautifully on sparc. It is the main portion of MLDonkey, and is full-featured.

I run XFCE and general desktop and devel duties on my U60. It does seem however to be getting a little long in the tooth (holy cow, recent versions of GTK have gotten to be an absolute kludge).

Well spec'ed Blade 2000's are getting pretty cheap on eBay these days ..

ThorstenHirsch · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 25 Sep 2003 Posts: 111

My U10 is a desktop with KDE, OOo, Firefox, ...
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i-right-i · Posted: Mon Apr 24, 2006 5:21 pm Post subject:

My U10 config is listed in my Sig. I have OOo and pretty much use it as a desktop. I could never get the sound working on it though. It has been a few months since ive messed with it, maybe I will get the bug to try again sometime soon.

i-right-i
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Gentoo on x86
Gentoo on SPARC

BillyBoy · Posted: Tue Apr 25, 2006 12:19 am Post subject:

ThorstenHirsch · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 25 Sep 2003 Posts: 111

@i-right-i: I could get the U10's sound working with the module snd_sun_cs4231
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i-right-i · Posted: Tue Apr 25, 2006 2:57 pm Post subject:

I have tried that before. I have even tried with it complied into the kernel instead as a module. Neither worked. It works fine if the box has slowaris on it, so I know that hardware is functional.

Just one of those things, right now I just don't have the time to mess with it. There have been a ton of thread with people have all kinds of weird sound issues on u5's and u10's. Each seems to be a tad different. This is all months ago, over a year in fact since I first built this sparc box. I just finally pretty much gave up on it.

I plan on revisting this if 2.6 kernel ever becomes stable for sparc.

i-right-i
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Gentoo on x86
Gentoo on SPARC

gust4voz · Posted: Tue Apr 25, 2006 4:00 pm Post subject:

Alsa with 2.6.15+ works well on u5/10 as long as you use the oss compatibility layer.
Native-wise (alsa output) some do good (arts for example), others sound pretty bad (xmms, audacious) - i think it's related to mmap()ing the alsa audio devices or something like that but i didn't look into it much.
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Gustavo Zacarias
Gentoo/SPARC monkey

krugger · n00b Joined: 14 Sep 2003 Posts: 10

Running a nice apache as webserver + mysql + php on a Ultra10.

chance2105 · Posted: Thu Apr 27, 2006 5:12 am Post subject:

i-right-i: I know you're not really interested in getting the sound working, but it's too easy to get it working now to not mess with it.

With a 2.4 kernel, you can follow the directions I lay out in this thread:
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-400827-highlight-sound.html

Since I've made that post, a few things have changed. One, there is now a audioctl boot script you can run so you don't have to worry about setting the default sound output every boot. Also, if you use XMMS the instructions suffice, but for me on the latest stable 2.4 gentoo-sources .. just using the OSS driver with Audacious works beautiful-like.

Also, 2.6 is pretty darn near perfect on PCI-based sparcs, especially uniprocessor ones. Go get a recent vanilla kernel or a 2.6 gentoo-sources. If you just compile in the support for the sun cs4231, and use OSS emulation for everything .. life is good.

chance

retroman · Posted: Wed May 10, 2006 6:22 pm Post subject: Ultra 60 SMP what toys do I use

Ive been using An ultra60 with gentoo at work for some time. Configured up an ultra5 with php apache2 mysql and postfix to pretty much run an entire warehouse. While the ultra5 has been replaced with a really big dell quad xeon. The ultra60 desktop remains.

I use.......

Kernel 2.6
KDE 3.4
Mozilla (complete)
XMMS - My MP3 player
GTKterm - great interfce for cisco routers done via a usb serial dongle on the back of the sun
Vice - Commodore64 emulator for fun
Gimp - image processing

I also have a revolving door or unstable software I install to test on sparc and report if I found it stable or not. I have at least several packages to my credit marked stable for sparc on gentoo.

Jordan

hw-tph · Posted: Mon May 22, 2006 8:07 am Post subject:

I am using my Ultra10 as an experimental server with lighttpd and MySQL. Unfortunately my machine has only got 128MB of RAM so it is no speed monster, and the IDE interface is killing me. Fortunately I have a Promise UATA controller on the horizon and there seems to be some hope after all. But if you want to give me u5/u10 RAM I would be a very happy camper.

Håkan
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w.hill · Posted: Mon May 29, 2006 10:40 am Post subject:

I've got an Ultra 5 running Apache and bind (Primary DNS).

I've also got two SunBlade 100. All three have GNOME and Firefox running. They all are running Seti / BOINC. Not fast but they go.

recupero · n00b Joined: 25 Jun 2006 Posts: 26

Hi great guys!
My sparc runs another distro because I had some difficulties with gentoo.

Many of you do great things with Ultra10!

I get very good installs, but never went beyond twm.
Would some of you post xorg.config and maybe some hints for X which are not in the Xorg doc ?

spiralvoice · Apprentice Joined: 09 Mar 2004 Posts: 238