FreeBSD on Sun SPARC 20

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> [mailto:owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org]On Behalf Of Matthias Buelow
> Sent: Thursday, January 06, 2005 9:59 PM
> To: madden at cms-stl.com
> Cc: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> Subject: Re: FreeBSD on Sun SPARC 20
>
>
> madden at cms-stl.com wrote:
>
> > I've got a Sun SPARC 20 collecting dust, and I was wondering if any
> > version of FreeBSD would run on my Sun SPARC 20? From what I can gather
> > FreeBSD only works on UltraSPARC.
>
> Maybe not FreeBSD but both NetBSD and Solaris work very well on the
> Sparc 20, and they're available for free.  (Well, actually if your SS20
> has more than one CPU, you'd have to get a commercial license for
> Solaris 9, and shouldn't use the free license, since that's only for one
> CPU but I mean, it's hardly stealing candies from little children, is
> it... and reportedly Solaris 10 will be "open source" anyways, so what.)
>

Sun used to give out free licenses for up to 4 cpu's.  He may have
registered
for one of these back when they were giving them out.  Even if not the
Solaris license nowadays is only a couple hundred bucks, much less than
Microsoft XP Server.

Also, with a Sparc 20 try to load a copy of Solaris 2.6 rather than a later
copy, it will run faster and Sun still releases patches for it.

Ted