Hi list!

I thought to write a little "feedback", perhaps some developers are 
subscribing this list :)

I recently got my hands on an used Sun Ultra 5, 128MB RAM and 270MHz 
Ultrasparc IIi processor. I was seeking the web for operating systems 
that support this hardware (as a long-term NetBSD user I already knew 
that it can be run on Sun Ultra).

One night with google: Debian and Gentoo were only decent Linux 
distributions available for sun4u, I don't like Gentoo at all and for 
Debian I couldn't find any bootable netinstallation cd-mediums (though I 
don't feel very comfortable with it neither:). FreeBSD is supposed to 
run on this, but I found couple of comments that it can only be 
installed over serial console - so I didn't even try it.

So I was starting with NetBSD 1.6.2... This was my first time ever with 
Sun hardware, so I wasn't familiar with the prom at all. I followed some 
instructions and tried to get it boot from cdrom, no go. Bunch of errors 
when it couldn't open boot disk, or loaded file doesn't seem executable, 
etc. One time I got sysinst to load but it crashed. I was quite unhappy, 
because only Solaris (which was installed when I got this) seemed to 
boot. I tried to change cdrom-drive, no go, but at this point I was 
digging deeper with prom and found some usable diagnostic commands - all 
of the IDE drives weren't recognized at every boot, so I started to 
suspect a HW problem. And so it was, my 300W PSU wasn't enough for this. 
Replaced a PSU with a quality one, and everything started to work 
smoothly :)

I had read on OSReview that this could be unstable port, the reviewer 
was experiencing crashes with sysinst, couldn't compile code and so 
on... BUT everything worked fine with this, no single crash, panic, 
compile problem or whatever. Compiled my own kernel, and have installed 
(compiled) a bunch of software from pkgsrc. No single problem. Was I lucky?

So the point of this very long mail, thank you very much for the good 
work done. I'm avaiting for an upgrade to 2.0 :)

But a little question, the default gcc seems to be 2.95.3 (/usr/bin/gcc) 
Also there seems to be version 3.3.4 (/usr/pkg/gcc3/bin/gcc). 
Suggestions, should I use the 3.3.4 as default? I think some programs 
from the pkgsrc used the newer version...

-- 
Juha