[PLUG] gentoo-sparc impressions

Paul Heinlein heinlein at madboa.com
Fri Jan 2 10:25:02 UTC 2004


I installed Gentoo on my Sun Blade 100 (500MHz UltraSPARC-IIe) a
couple weeks ago. This is about the fifth different OS/distro I've put
on this machine; it's had Solaris 8, Solaris 9, Debian, OpenBSD, and
now Gentoo.

Solaris is too proprietary for my taste. Debian was OK, but it just
didn't feel good on the sparc (though I'm satisfied with my Debian
installations on an Alpha and Celeron at home). OpenBSD is very
conservative -- it still runs gcc 2.x and older libs -- and some
crucial ports like ntp never worked well. Plus, the curve for
mastering the OpenBSD security-level stuff is fairly steep, and I
needed a production box sooner rather than later.

Gentoo is the first Free, well behaved, and up-to-date distro that's
really felt good on this machine, which serves as my network gateway,
mail server, and web-development server. In the latter capacity, it's
running MySQL. I think it will soon be my LDAP server as well, but
there are some sticky replication issues that need to be ironed out.

Here are some impressions:

*   The installation documention wasn't included in the CD ISO. How
    wierd is that? The installation instructions are split over a
    dozen or so HTML pages, so I had to pre-download them before
    proceeding.

*   I did the compile-the-whole-thing installation rather than go with
    the pre-compiled stage3 packages. It took about a day to get the
    basic system up and running; most of that time was spent compiling
    glibc and gcc.

*   I've encountered two package hiccups:

    1. A recent silo (sparc bootloader) upgrade left my system
       unbootable. I had to boot from CD and downgrade the package. I
       haven't had time yet to follow up on this.

    2. The sendmail and ssmtp packages don't work and play well. The
       vixie-cron ebuild requires a virtual-mta package, which is
       supposedly supplied by sendmail, but portage insists on
       building ssmtp, which stomps all over sendmail.

*   I've been able to lock the box up completely on two occasions by
    reloading some iptables rules. This is almost certainly not a
    Gentoo issue, but I mention it just for completeness.

*   I communicate with this box over a serial console and ethernet.
    There's no keyboard or monitor -- and I haven't (and probably
    won't) install X -- so I can't report on using its graphics
    subsystem. Ditto for USB and FireWire.

    The great thing is that everything, from boot to full system, work
    flawlessly over the serial console. The only concession I had to
    make was to remove the consolefont and keymaps init scripts from
    the default boot runlevel.

*   The kernel that ships with the boot ISO and the kernel I ended up
    building both had no trouble at all using the built-in GEM
    Ethernet controller and an add-in Intel EEPro card.

    Also, Gentoo ships with dhcpcd instead of ISC's dhclient. That's a
    great choice. I like dhcpcd soooo much better.

*   Most of the core ebuilds are kept fairly up to do for the sparc
    platform -- but many that aren't as central to the system aren't.
    The default SpamAssassin for sparc is 2.4x, which is way, way out
    of date (so I just grabbed the latest from CPAN :-). Inexplicably,
    the DocBook stuff is also quite old.

*   Other than SpamAssassin, I also had to build MIMEDefang and
    Dovecot by hand, but the builds went without a hitch.

*   The init scripts are wierd.

*   /etc/conf.d == /etc/sysconfig

*   rc-update == chkconfig

*   It was very helpful to me, a long-time rpm user, to install the
    'epm' package, which makes querying packages/files much more
    familiar.

*   I dropped this script into /etc/cron.daily to give me a nightly
    report concerning newly updated ebuilds.

    #!/bin/sh
    EMERGE="/usr/bin/emerge"
    GREP="/bin/grep"

    if test -f $EMERGE
    then
      $EMERGE --quiet --nospinner sync 2>&1 | $GREP '^>>>'
      sleep 10
      sync
      $EMERGE --pretend --nospinner --update --deep world
    fi

*   The Sun Blade 100 has a known problem with its system clock
    running too quickly. Sun released a Solaris patch to address the
    issue, but afaict there's no Linux patch for it. Still, ntp is
    able to keep the clock in fairly good shape.

-- Paul Heinlein <heinlein at madboa.com>




More information about the PLUG mailing list