A general note to everybody thinking of making hardware donations. On Wednesday 28 December 2005 21:23, Milan P. Stanic wrote: > I could try to arrange donation of one UltraSparc machine to Debian > project. I think that the transport would be to complicated from > Serbia to anywhere (because of our laws) but I can connect it to the > Net for DD's to use it.
The fact that you think of Debian is of course very much appreciated. In general though, there is really no demand from "the project" for older hardware for porting efforts. When it comes to build daemons or machines for developer access, "the project" needs relatively heavy and up-to-date systems. Also, the Debian System Administrators have fairly heavy requirements when it comes to hosting and network connectivity for official project machines. You may of course make an individual developer very happy with an older system and there will probably be quite a bit of interest if you have fairly recent hardware on offer (like sunblades for Sparc). So, if you have older hardware you wish to donate, please offer it to individuals who work on Debian rather than "the project". That also means that offering to host it is in general irrelevant. Shipping is in general the biggest issue when it comes to donations to individuals, so much depends on where you are relative to the individuals interested in taking over a system. There is of course another way you can help the project with older hardware: keep it, try installing it sometimes from scratch and report any issues. If you have the skills to trace a bug and suggest a fix for it, so much the better. The issue threatening the Debian Sparc port is not so much lack of hardware (and certainly not older hardware), but rather people who spend time on hunting down and fixing (kernel) bugs and working on architecture specific packages like silo. Thanks again for your kind offer though. Cheers, Frans Pop P.S. I myself was "donated" a Sparc Ultra10 in this fashion and that system has since seen some very useful usage for the project. I'm still very grateful for that donation.
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