Anybody run Gentoo on Sun v880 or v880z systems?

[nbittech]

I just bought an old Sun v880 system (4 Ultrasparc IIIs, 8gb RAM) as a project/toy for the shop. Has anybody run Gentoo on this, is it even possible at all, and if so, is it a better option than OpenBSD/Solaris. I'm sure that this will be an interesting adventure, and at the very least I will probably have a cool space heater for my shop (and a significantly larger power bill!)

Also, what can it do? I'm not talking sql-backend or thin-client stuff here, I'm talking will it run X well (ati-rage card, yes it sucks, I know) and what can I expect from this as a normal workstation (video encoding, package building, cross-compiling with distcc, and other resource-intensive tasks?) Or is it just a power-hungry Pentium III?

I'm not a big-iron, data center tech, I'm a small business, home, repair tech used to an office with 2 or 3 servers and maybe 20 PCs, and the occasional Apache/Sql server setup.

I hope I'm not wasting the real IT people's time here, (I know that you guys have real uses for these things) but I would like to become more comfortable working with this type of hardware, and I feel that this is a good place to start.

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Was it cat-5 or cat-6? Well I dunno, but I do know that I need a new LCD screen on my laptop now.

[nbittech]

Yes, I know Gentoo will run, and particularly well at that, I was just wondering what kind of performance I would have compared to x86 (Xeon) arch. I am mostly just looking for feedback as well as other people's adventures and tales in running Linux on these monsters. I have heard that the stability is otherworldly compared to x86. But I've also heard they have some weird quirks.
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Was it cat-5 or cat-6? Well I dunno, but I do know that I need a new LCD screen on my laptop now.

[Alaric]

I've not run it on an v880, but I don't see why it can't be done. As for your other questions, you could do a plethora of stuff with it depending on what you wanted. You could do some cross compiling, maybe some video encoding (might have to do some coding), you could run X (altho it might suck, lol). I really wouldn't use it as a workstation.

The best I could say is try it. Part of breathing new life into these old beasts is the real fun. Once you get gentoo running on it, then start offloading what you want to it. My U80 has become a firewall, chat server (for the house), mysql development bed, and general perl sandbox. The only outage I ever experienced is when the power at the house goes out. The definitely will run forever.

**edit** I used to use my U80 as my workstation, but honestly, x86 has just gotten easier/faster. So for day to day work, I changed to an x86 box for workstation, and have been offloading server tasks to the U80 where dependability matters.
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SPARC Ultra 80, 4x 440mhz, 4 gigs ram, 2x Creator 3D video card, 36 gig SCSI, SCSI CDROM, running Gentoo 2.6.21.