Subject: Re: Changing to NetBSD
To: Christian Baer <christian.baer@uni-dortmund.de>
From: David Brownlee <abs@NetBSD.org>
List: port-sparc64
Date: 10/23/2007 14:47:15
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 :)

-- 
 		David/absolute       -- www.NetBSD.org: No hype required --