UltraLinux is the name given to the port of Linux the SPARCTM family of processors most commonly found in SunTM workstations and clones. It supports most workstations including the older 32bit SPARC processors and the newer 64bit UltraSPARC based workstations.
The port began in late 1994. Working with very little technical information about the hardware, David Miller, Miguel de Icaza and Peter Zaitcev had a reasonable stable system by the end of 1995. After that the development team grew as did the list of features and machines supported. (See People)
By October 1995 Red Hat had released its Linux distribution for the SPARC platform. In early 1996 Dave began to work on support of the UltraSPARC processors. Now Linux runs on almost all of various SPARC hardware and supports the majority of additional hardware available for them. A more complete history of the project can be found here
A lot of people ask why you would want to run Linux on the SPARC hardware instead of Sun’s Solaris, or instead of running Linux on an Intel PC. Here are some of the reasons:
- Linux has a smaller footprint memory-wise and therefore runs better on older Sun machine with limited memory.
- Linux tends to come with a much more complete environment as far as tools are concerned than Solaris.
- Availability of the source means people can fix bugs and add features very rapidly.
- Sun produces some very nice hardware which means although an Intel PC from 1990 is next to useless, a Sun machine from the same time can still be quite productive.
- It’s just a lot of fun.