We will post what we can about this Pilot Program here. Some "news" will start popping up here and there like this:

http://mountall.blogspot.com/2004/12/op ... pc_25.html



R&B

P.S. Thanks Matt and Sven for getting this set ML up!

Open Solaris will be a great boon to the Pegasos, of coarse, but moreso to the general workplace. Solaris has long been the standard by which all other Unix's have been compared. I look foreward to this with a great anticipation!

Dave

BTW, many years ago, the computer science department of the University of Bremen, Germany, got to use Solaris on PowerPC. Thanks to particularly good connections to both IBM and Sun, we (the students) had 20 or so PPC604 boxes available in the lab (made by IBM) that ran an 'early availability' version of Solaris.

The plans to productize this OS were subsequently canceled, so 'early availability' turned into 'special availability'. The first version of the OS was horrible, but the second version was already rock stable. It was an unusual platform, though, because from the looks of it, PowerPC Solaris was based on 'x86 Solaris rather than the SPARC version. The compiler would accept 'x86 specific command line switches, but it did produce PowerPC code of reasonable quality. (In fact, the 100MHz 604e machines were the fastest floating point boxes - for one semester.)

These days I'd suggest that Sun should seriously investigate going for GCC rather than hacking their own compiler on PowerPC. With the effort that IBM and Apple have put into GCC since then, it should be a better alternative than yet another reinvented wheel. Plus, Solaris/PPC would get AltiVec autovectorization 'for free'.

I think Solaris is still cherished by sysadmins far and wide (our CS network admins loved it; even the, erm, 'autodidactic security experts' among the students mostly praised Solaris for its robustness). The OS can only gain popularity if it is detached from the less than competitive SPARC architecture.

BTW, one of our sysadmins used to be the official maintainer of the Oberon System on Solaris/PPC, perhaps even on Solaris/SPARC, but I don't really remember that anymore.

hobold, would you like us to bring you into this project:

http://www.genesi.lu/press.php?date=20041217

We are nearly certain Sun would allow you to participate. Your Solaris-PPC experience could be quite valuable, especially when considered with your AltiVec skills.

Was the Solaris release you mentioned 2.5.1?

R&B

I don't remember the version number of Solaris. I believe that the university officially had betatester status, back when a long term partnership between Sun and IBM was seriously considered against the supposedly EPIC HP-Intel-cooperation.

There might even be marketing material from that period that mentions the OS we had; it was not a secret, it was just not ready for sale yet.

I am not sure I should apply for participation in the project. I have never been an OS person, so all I can tell you about Solaris/PPC is that it worked beautifully and gave me no hassles. Most code I write is totally OS agnostic and quite hardware specific. Furthermore, my time is already allocated to another big project, and I'd rather want to focus on that.

But I thought that maybe I could ask one of the sysadmins (the former maintainer of the Oberon System on Solaris/PPC) if he is interested in reviving the platform. I could borrow him my ODW for a few months, or he might dust off one of the old PPC604 boxes. Not sure what he would say, but if he were interested, he'd probably be a more valuable contributor than I could ever be.

...that is OK. You keep yours.

Check with your friend and let us know. Thanks!

R&B

It might be a while until I meet him again, but I'll do a few things that should increase the probability of an encounter 'by chance'. (I think it's better to talk face to face about this rather than via e-mail.)

With guys like Cyril Plisko and Blastwave's Dennis Clarke things should be moving soon. Check out Cyril's blogs here:

http://mountall.blogspot.com/

Dennis has started an album and diary and will have it up soon.

R&B

I met my mysterious friend today and we chatted for an hour or so. He was very pleased to hear that PowerPC Solaris is coming back, but he eventually declined to participate. He is swamped with work, and I learned that he currently manages five different ports of the Oberon System, struggling with compilers and platforms (not in every case as official maintainer, but for the university network).

In hindsight I can say that the surest sign of his lack of time is that he didn't already know about PowerPC Solaris. Now he wants to watch the project closely, though, and I suspect that he might still catch the bug later on when he can spare some time.

Are there any official project web pages, mailing lists, or unofficial sites and blogs? I want to equip him with a few good pointers, so that he doesn't have to spend much time searching around.

As of this point we cannot say much. We are a passenger on a ship that is headed to a destination. We are not at the controls. We are pleased to be involved. What we can say we have said here:

http://bbrv.blogspot.com/

R&B

so ....lets hope GlasDesktop will be ported to PPC soon.....its´s a amazing
3D dekstop..with OS.-X Killer instinct

maurix

Yesterday evening a mailing list for the new Blastware project was created. Please join the list, if you're interested.

https://lists.blastwave.org/mailman/lis ... re-discuss

R&B

There are many good things happening in this Pilot Project.

Hi All,

A nice article on OSnews about Open Solaris on PPC.
http://galaxy.osnews.com/email.php?blog_id=487


nels

Hi nels, try this:

http://metadistribution.org/blog/

Same information, but screenshots and the links...

There will be plenty of news this week.

R&B