I've briefly experimented with NetBSD/SPARC in the past, but last Friday I
decided to load the latest NetBSD/SPARC snapshot on one of my SPARC 2's at
work, upgraded to -current, and really test it out.  X11R6.1 worked
beautifully (but see note below), in fact the responsiveness was MUCH
faster than even my SPARC 20 running Solaris!  Similarly, no problems with
GCC 2.7.2 (GCC 2.4.5 was one of my complaints with the earlier versions),
and I was particularly pleased with the robust and compatible SunOS
compatibility mode (MUCH nicer than Solaris).  I like to think that
FreeBSD on x86 is a "better Linux than Linux", now I can truly say that
NetBSD is "a better SunOS than SunOS."  Netscape worked great (with Java,
plugins and sound!), so did XAnim, and every other SunOS program I threw
at it.  Amazing!

One minor problem:  I built X11R6.1 straight from the X Consortium
distribution, and there is no keyboard repeat in the X server, even though
xset says that it is turned on!  This is very annoying.  X11R6.1 includes
the XKB extension, which correctly detects the Sun-4 keyboard I am using
(even prints a nice little Postscript picture of the keyboard!) but none
of the keys repeat.  Does anyone have a fix for this?  BTW, I am using an
ITAC trackball with this system, which is a really cool trackball, but for
some reason does not work with the Sun-5 keyboard on my SPARC 20 (perhaps
it is too old;  it has 8 pins on the cable, instead of 4 like the Sun-5
keyboard).  Any Sun keyboard experts to answer this?  :-)

Also, we have two SPARC 20's and a SPARC 10 that are currently running
SunOS.  I've been hesitant to upgrade them to Solaris, even though they
are powerful enough, because of the huge investment in time, training the
users, and more importantly, the investment in older software, especially
custom FORTRAN programs which refuse to run under Solaris, and which our
group doesn't have the source code.  If, after further testing, I
determined that NetBSD can support all of our existing SunOS software,
what do you think about migrating one or more of these machines to NetBSD?
Has anyone used NetBSD/SPARC in a production environment to replace SunOS?
More importantly, how is the stability of NetBSD-current on the sun4m
architecture?  Any problems I should be aware of vs. NetBSD on sun4c?

Thanks for all of your help!

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|Jake Hamby| Ask me about Unix, FreeBSD, Solaris, The Tick, Motif, or NT, eh?|
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"Hi, can I interest you in buying some meat over the phone?" -Lotus commercial