[Previous entry: "When misbehaving pilots land, they are asked to exPLANE themselves!"] [Next entry: ""That started after my first stroke""] A bloke in the US e-mailed me the other day after having seen a post I made to the UCC lists about choosing an operating system for our (then) new SunFire V480. In particular, he was interested in knowing whether Debian Linux would actually boot after the failure reports he'd seen strewn around the Web.

We never did try Linux on that particular machine, but tonight Nick, James and I gave it a shot at the UCC. After some wrangling with various kernel versions and booting methods, we came to this conclusion:

In February 2008, Linux does not work on the SunFire V480.

We only used Debian kernels, but tried CD booting 2.6.18 and 2.6.22, both of which failed shortly after loading the kernel with "Illegal instruction" error messages. Netbooting was unfruitful, simply freezing the system. (It's possible, but unlikely, that the netboot image switched to serial console for output.)

If you own a V480, stick with Solaris. You'll be much happier, and you won't have to employ a kernel developer to get it working.