The past two days have been very interesting, and exciting. I was able to load one of the Sun Blade 150 workstations in our development lab with Debian Etch. It took a lot of homework, research, and fighting with the console, but I got it done. When I found out the chipset had some flaw with DMA on the IDE controllers, and more properly how to get around it, things turned for the better. With a little more struggle, I managed to get GNOME running.

I managed to stage a clone of our mediawiki web site there, and play with it. And by loading imagemagick (which isn't built for Solaris), I was able to start using thumbnails.

Well, anyway, after all this, it appears we will probably shoot for an x86 platform to actually stage our site. I will be giving back this Sun Blade console so others can reload it with Solaris. We will probably get some Dell Poweredge rack server. That being the case, I was going to look at loading Ubuntu. Our development lab has Internet access, but the target environment doesn't. I know you can get an entire CD set for Debian. What about Ubuntu? I will need a CD set to walk into our closed network for set up.

You can read more details at https://scifi.homelinux.net/mediawiki/index.php/Sparc