FreeBSD on Sparc

I have some old Sun v240 Sparc servers that I want to re-use now that they are no longer in production, but I didn't necessarily want to use Solaris on them. I decided I wanted to use Linux for a project and having always had good luck with Debian on non-x86 platforms I started there.

Using the netinst CD of Debian 5 I couldn't even get the kernel to load, so I figured I was probably missing something important and downloaded disc 1. Disc 1 got me much further, except for a minor problem of shutting down and not allowing me to bring the NICs back online.

I stepped away from this for a couple weeks and decided to try FreeBSD. I hadn't actually used FreeBSD for anything for a while, but decided to grab version 8 and give it a whirl.

Success, I am now running a fully functioning Sparc server running FreeBSD 8. Could I have gotten Linux running on this box, probably, but I was impressed that FreeBSD just installed like it has any other time I have used it. Will FreeBSD be my first choice for a solution going forward, probably not, but it is good to have as a standby.