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Hello,

On Oct 23, 2007, at 09:47, David Brownlee wrote:

> On Tue, 23 Oct 2007, Christian Baer wrote:
>
> [...]
>> I need to be able to run the following apps:
>>
>> - Firefox & Thunderbird, both 2.x
>> - Keepassx
>> - mutt
>> - slrn
>> - tin
>> - inn
>> - some IM client (either Pidgin or Kopete)
>> - LaTeX
>> - OpenOffice
>>
>> on *all* of the platforms (currently only i386 and sparc64). Not  
>> all of
>> the machines will actually run all of the software but I don't  
>> really want
>> to choose what computer I want to use for what (yet). Do all of  
>> those apps
>> run on both (all) platforms? On FreeBSD I had problems with  
>> Keepassx and
>> Pidgin, Firefox and Thunderbird have been broken for a while now.  
>> I didn't
>> try inn, LaTeX, tin and OO on sparc64 yet.
>
> 	For the sparc64 boxes you're likely to hit 'big endian 64bit +
> 	alignment' issues on many packages, so one option would be to
> 	run NetBSD/sparc port (which ships with an UltraSparc kernel).
>
> 	I've been running NetBSD/sparc64 on servers for a while now
> 	without incident, but I'll leave it to desktop users to comment
> 	on that side of it (CC'ed reply to sparc64 to poke for comments :)

KDE stuff Just Works(tm) most of the time ( it's far more of a memory  
hog than a CPU hog ), firefox works fine, I've never tried  
OpenOffice. Generally gtk1 stuff usually works, but there are  
problems with gtk2 stuff and gnome. Gtk2 has some glitches on  
graphics hardware which uses ABGR pixels, like Creator boards -  
apparently recent Cairo re-introduced a bug that occasionally swaps  
the red and blue channels in anti-aliased text. Otherwise it works  
though. If you depend on gnome apps you'll get into trouble, numerous  
libraries it depends on ( dbus for instance ) are still not 64bit  
clean so you'd get crashes or assorted weirdnesses all over the place.

have fun
Michael
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