We are retiring a Sun e250 at work, and I wondered if I could put it to any good use. Will I have any problems loading Linux as opposed to Solaris? Should I use any particular flavor of Linux that might be more Sun friendly? Assuming I manage to load Linux on this server, then what? Will it be useful for anything, or is it just a boat anchor? Feedback welcome. =)

It looks like Gentoo might be a viable candidate. I think I will download that and try to get this running. I have not loaded a linux OS in several years, and that was on an x86. I may be in WAY over my head here, but what the heck. This unit is slated for disposal anyway. =)

Gentoo recently dropped support for all sparcs but sparc64, so that might not be a good choice. That it had sparc32 support before says linux on Sparc is quite possible, though, and you can probably find one of their sparc32 livecds still hanging around somewhere on their mirrors.

The research I have done so far says the E250 is an ultrasparc, which is 64bit. Is this incorrect? Or were you saying you feel Gentoo will also drop support for the 64 bit sparcs?

Do you have another gnu/linux you recommend for this platform.

Thanks for your input.

You may be able to use Ubuntu Linux.

I did not know that Ultrasparc is 64-bit. If so, Gentoo's as good a distro as any... most distros are pretty inflexible with respect to processor but Gentoo covers nearly anything.

Thanks for all the input, so far. I decided to load x86 on a couple of spare computers I had lying around. One is a barebones laptop (no battery even) that I can use as a terminal for the e250. The other is a PC at home just for testing. Because I am a linux loser, it took me at least 6 attempts before I got the OS to load on the one at home. Even then, I have an installation that boots to a command prompt and not a GUI. I am on my 3rd attempt at loading this on the laptop. Since I am more familiar with the x86 architecture, it seemed logical to start here rather than on the sparc box. This will give me a chance to refamiliarize myself with the commands and the overall installation steps. I will let you know how it goes.