Sparc was needed
I still find myself messing around with this SparcStation. It is really a good thing to come along and has me interested more in config, setup and hardware again. Playing around with the Debian Sparc Port reminds me so much of where Debian x86 was when I started using it (the installer atleast). The hardware is very nice to work with and the whole Sun system. I think one of the things that is the most “I cant belive they did all that then”, is the fact the floppy drive is operated all in software. To eject the disk you have to tell it from the system. They still have a backup that you can get with a pin. It seems odd at first but cdroms have always done this. It also has support in a debian package sparc-utils. The case of the system is actually very nice to work in and has just the right room for everything. It could use a nice thumb screw on it though.
Right now I am working on making it a 2.4 kernel, as I need it to run some stuff I want. I was going to be all new school debian and install the kernel package, but after having to move to testing to get the kernel I wanted and being attacked for a hour with all those dependancy problems I just started working on my own. One important thing when doing this on a Sparc that I have found is vmlinux = bzImage. Meaning it is all basic x86 but replace those words. You also have to copy a few files around too, but this is all documented nice in the SPARC-HOWTO I also found the Installing Debian GNU/Linux For Sparc Manual to be very handy.