“The Ubuntu team is proud to announce the release of Ubuntu 6.06 LTS server for SUN Sparc 64bit architecture. This release is an Ubuntu distribution for your servers, with a fast and easy install, regular releases, and a tight selection of excellent packages installed by default. Other packages and applications are available from a global network of mirrors, and professional, commercial technical support from Canonical Ltd and hundreds of other companies around the world.”
So is this just for the “regular” SPARCs, or is this also meant for Niagara?
Niagara is regular UltraSPARC, sometimes referred to as SPARC64. This release does NOT work on the 32bit, pre-UltraSPARC machines (which are like 15 years old anyway).
Edited 2006-06-16 15:19
Okay, let me rephase my question, is there anything special about this release that takes special advantage of the T1’s more highly multithreaded architecture. I know that it is compatible with Sun’s previous chips, but I was just wondering if they’ve don any thing special, or is is just a rather gereneric version of Ubuntu that happens to run in SPARC.
Okay, let me rephase my question, is there anything special about this release that takes special advantage of the T1’s more highly multithreaded architecture.
Ehm… which part of “Niagara optimizations for gcc, glibc and kernel available by default” is not clear ?
As stated in the announcement:
Highlights of this release include:
…
* Niagara optimizations for gcc, glibc and kernel available by default
…
This is what I found on:
http://us.releases.ubuntu.com/releases/6.06/
“For Sun UltraSPARC computers, including those based on the multicore UltraSPARC T1 (“Niagara”) processors. This is an unofficial release, but testing and feedback are encouraged.”
So is this just for the “regular” SPARCs, or is this also meant for Niagara?
Don’t you know it’s uncool to refer to products by their internal codenames long after they have been released
It’s called the UltraSPARC T1.
It’s really cool to see this done. Great work, and best wishes to everyone involved.
Now, that out of the way, Sun really needs to think long and hard about what it’s doing. While some argue which is “better” so to speak, pretty much everybody will admit Solaris is a great server OS. Well, as far as the kernel/technical stuff goes. It’s a usability nightmare. Even for a server – sorry – this isn’t 1980 – why am I still compiling by hand to have up-to-date software?
Ubuntu does pretty much all the things right that Solaris does wrong (nice up-to-date gui, up-to-date software, etc.) I know Sun has this “we don’t update so we’re sure it’s stable standpoint” but Ubuntu really does have some pretty stable software, maybe a bug or two here and there, but overall stable. Fixes for the bugs come out quickly. Like most things, within a month or two of its’ release, it’ll be rock solid. Not only that, but *reasonably* up to date. I can’t say the same thing for Solaris/included software.
So, what is Sun going to do? The current model they have isn’t going to work. Nobody except masochists, die-hard Sun fans (me), or Sun-based developers would even consider running Solaris on a desktop. I don’t, it runs like dog-poo as a desktop on all the systems I’ve tried it on, AFTER I’ve had to go edit the hell out of config files because it didn’t setup PATH, hosts don’t get entered properly, etc. I won’t even get into the mess that is installing software newer than 5 years old.
Now, I run Solaris on my servers. Guess what though, #1 – I have to keep a few FreeBSD boxes around, because I can’t maintain a whole bunch of software via hand compiling it/keeping up with security updates. I keep trying to get rid of them, so I can only maintain one platform, but it’s not going to happen. Blastwave doesn’t do it for me, simply because if Dennis and the other hardworking people involved someday decide to do something else, I’ll be stuck in a software back alley. I want something supported by Sun, that’s why people pay for support contracts (Sun’s supposed new bread-and-butter.)
Sun needs to figure out what it’s doing. I’m gonna hit the OSOL lists with this too, but like most things, we’ll probably see a bunch of “yes that’s great yes we’re working on it” type posts, but then observe no changes for the next 6 months. Something needs to be done now, while Sun has a *little* momentum, and something drastic needs to be done. The old software model isn’t working, somebody with the power to make decisions in Sun needs to finally come to realize this. Solaris the kernel is rocking, Solaris the user-land stinks. Hurry up and join 2006 with the rest of us…
Is there a JVM available for Linux on SPARC64? I mean something other than gcj.
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AFAIK the Blackdown Project would be the best source for J2SE on Linux. I think the lastest J2RE and J2SDK for SPARC is 1.4.1-01, here’s a link to the download mirrors:
http://www.blackdown.org/java-linux/java-linux-d2.html
To append my previous post…I just scanned through the Ubuntu multiverse repository info for SPARC and it looks like Sun Java 1.5.0_6 is included, haven’t tried to install Ubuntu on SPARC yet to confirm, but here’s what I was looking at:
http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/dapper/multiverse/binary-spa…
> Niagara is regular UltraSPARC, sometimes referred to as SPARC64.
Correction, UltraSparc and SPARC64 are different things. UltraSparc is Sun processor implementing sparcv9, SPARC64 is sparcv9 compatible Fujitsu processor developed and designed completely independently from Sun.