Between 10:30pm and some time this morning I managed to get a functional copy of Gentoo installed on my Sun Ultra II. Why Gentoo? My first choice was Solaris 9, but it took forever to install and ran like a snail trying to navigate a pothole. Part of that fault lay with the fact that my Ultra's CPU is only 200MHz and it only has the minimum RAM 128. The RAM is of course proprietary, so I won't be adding SDRAM anytime soon.
I checked out Aurora, but it kept dumping where partitioning would occur. FreeBSD 6.x simply locked up. Finally, my Debian-SPARC disc was scratched. But all these obstacles were not the primary reason I chose Gentoo. The main reason was because it simply looked more impressive during the install phase. I know it's pathetic, but I love the colours on the command line. I also thought it would be great having the system better optimized for my hardware. So while I was dazzled by the pretty colours, the real reason was because I couldn't think of any other OS that might be more optimized for the hardware (other than LFS... but try LFS in a couple of hours...I don't think so).
There were a couple of bugs in my installation. Some modules did not load properly. I'm concerned because syslog-ng was one of the programs that didn't seem to be properly configured. The others were the sunhme, the cs sound driver, the flash module, and the openpromfs module. It's a bit puzzling, but I'm sure I'll figure it out when I get home from work 14 hours later. ;-)
In an effort to provide better audio quality for Kevin and my podcast, The Redneck Linux Podcast, I went out and smacked down $100CDN for a Sound Blaster Audigy2 ZS pcmcia sound card. I'm happy to say the Audigy2 ZS works well with Fedora core with the latest kernel. (mine is 2.6.15-1.1833_FC4)
