SPARC Networking Failure (Was Re: [TriLUG] Debian Bigots (was Re: Noise))

Tom 'spot' Callaway tcallawa at redhat.com
Fri Jul 26 18:10:30 EDT 2002


On Fri, 2002-07-26 at 17:13, Tanner Lovelace wrote:
> On Fri, 2002-07-26 at 16:58, John F Davis wrote:
> > 
> > -- Ok first response after taking offense.
> > 
> > heh. what a macaroon.
> 
> Yep, that's what I thought about you. :-)
> 
> > Mandrake piggy backed itself onto Red Hat.  Red Hat quit supporting Sparc.
> > So, what's Mandrake to do about Sparc?  You think they port the code?
> > I doubt it.  They most likely get it from Suse (if Suse supports it) or
> > they get it from Debian.   For what its worth, Sun has pumbed money into
> > Debian.  The Debian server is a dual Ultra 60.

Since I arguably know more about Linux/SPARC than the majority of you,
let me jump in and clear the air:

Mandrake isn't getting anything besides the occasional fix from Debian
or SuSE. Besides, their distribution is several revisions behind current
(has not been updated since mid-year 2000). This would put it about in
line with Debian stable for SPARC. To allude that Mandrake (or Debian,
SuSE, Slackware, RedHat, etc, etc) is merely rebranding another
distributions work is mere flamebait. Mandrake seems content to claim
SPARC without continuing development on it.

There are several active SPARC distributions at this time. Debian
continues to support SPARC, although, they default to a 2.2 kernel.
Slackware has officially dropped it, but an independent project called
Splack is keeping it alive, although it doesn't look terribly active.
SuSE is slightly more active than Mandrake with regards to SPARC, but
not by much. Rock Linux has a relatively recent SPARC port attempt, as
does Gentoo and PLD. Red Hat has SPARC officially on "hiatus", although
there is a project currently porting the RHL 7.3 tree over to SPARC,
called Aurora (I'm the project leader).

Now, I'm not going to get into a flame war over which one of the above
you should use. To be frank, I don't care. If you expect me (or anyone
to care) which distribution you're using, you're missing the point. If
Debian makes you giddy, run it. If SuSE is your thing, go for it. If
Mandrake makes you ill, don't use it. Its one thing to say "I'd
recommend using Debian because its SPARC tree is much better maintained
than Mandrake", and another to troll on its topic. Mandrake is not his
problem.

Jeff,

Check your /etc/modules.conf, make sure that you have: alias eth0 sunhme

I've got a U10 running Aurora right here, I should be able to help you
debug this problem.

~spot 
---
Tom "spot" Callaway <tcallawa at redhat.com> Red Hat Sales Engineer
Sair Linux and GNU Certified Administrator (LCA)
Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE)
GPG: D786 8B22 D9DB 1F8B 4AB7  448E 3C5E 99AD 9305 4260

The words and opinions reflected in this message do not necessarily
reflect those of my employer, Red Hat, and belong solely to me.

"Immature poets borrow, mature poets steal." --- T. S. Eliot




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