SPARC port (was Re: Technical Board decisions)

[Fabio Massimo Di Nitto]

Caroline Ford wrote:

>> Both 6.06 LTS and 6.10 do provide a SPARC SMP kernel.
>>   
> Ah - the installation guide says we don't!

The installer does automatic detection and install the appropriate one for you.

>>   
>>> We need to ship a SPARC cd with X on. Many of the supported machines are 
>>> workstations not servers. Leaving the user with the command line is A 
>>> Bad Thing too.
>>>     
>> There are good reasons why SPARC is a "server-only" port for Ubuntu.  The
>> desktop stack is not well supported on this platform, and furthermore very
>> little is available in the way of testing.  There's much more to providing
>> an ISO than creating the image; each of these need to be properly tested and
>> certified before being released, and our resources are better spent
>> elsewhere than on GNOME and KDE for SPARC.
>>
>>   
> Fair point - SPARC on the desktop will have even less users than 
> PowerPC... Rather nice machines though imo - and old ones are pretty 
> cheap now.

Even if we don't support X on SPARC we still provide cd images for adventurous
people (1). Note that X autoconfiguration is far away to be optimal so you will
have to play with it yourself, but as community, we welcome patches to make it
better.

Fabio

1 - http://cdimages.ubuntu.com/ports/daily/current/ to try the latest crack.
Note that this image is totally untested.. might work, might not.

-- 
I'm going to make him an offer he can't refuse.