Ubuntu On SPARC

[Thom Holwerda]

Hi,

I was wondering-- what chances are there that we'll ever see an Ubuntu 
version for (Ultra)SPARC? I have been shopping around for a decent 
Linux distribution for my UltraSPARC machine for ages now-- and nothing 
satisfies my needs. A short round-up:

Debian: installed mighty fine, all went perfectly fine. Performed well. 
Too bad it contains a showstopper bug: it uses Xfree 4.3.0, wich is the 
only X release that doesn't work well with Sun Type5 keyboards. So I 
had a messed-up keyboard layout. Not easy to fix by ie. switching to 
another keyboard; Sun uses proprietary connectors. I did get to play 
with Gnome 2.6 (or does unstable have 2.4? I'm not sure from the top of 
my head), and it performed very well for the old machine I have.

Aurora SPARC Linux: I'm currently running version 1.0 of this 
distribution, 1.0 is based off of the RedHat 7.x series. Aurora is 
currently at 1.92 (Fedora Core 2) but it's an RPM only release. The 
manual upgrade failes.

And well, those are the only two maintained distro's that one can 
easily set up as a desktop. There is Gentoo (not easy :P) and Suse and 
MDK and Slack have all discontinued their SPARC releases.

Seeing how well Debian already worked on SPARC: how much work would it 
be to make a useable SPARC version of Ubuntu? I am mighty satisfied 
with Ubuntu on my x86; however, I don't really like x86 :). I think 
Ubuntu could fill a major gap here.

Thanks in advance,

Thom Holwerda
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