Hi, Gregory Edigarov wrote:
if I want to build a non-wintel system with commodity running OpenBSD without problems, what are my options? preferably something non-apple also, which i will be able to connect display, mouse, and keyboard, and hopefully run X, etc.
since we don't have Raspberry support, then your choice for reasonable (albeit almost all obsolete) platform restricts to ultra-sparc (old sparcs are fun, but slow by any means and also the CPU support is for OpenBSD hit and miss... 2 of my SparcStations are unstable), PPC (some Amiga boards, older Macs) and... nothing else. PA-RISC is fun, but I never tried X there. And, if you think, the only other machines that could do are Itanium and Alpha.
For most of these, you will notice that base OpenBSD stuff works pretty well (as does NetBSD and to a lesser degree Linux) but several bigger application prove quite buggy! Browsers, mail clients.. everything is tested on i386/amd64 only. SPARC and PPC seem to me more crashy when bad programming happens, which is actually a good thing and a reason to keep computing diversity alive. But I fear it will become worse, the only thing that has a chance is ARM which is used little-endian. Or embedded PPC, which is used also LE. Big Endian will perhaps not even taught at school in 10+ years.
On Linux I have Firefox running on PPC, but I read that others have issues with it on non-intel. Be prepared to find more bugs than usual. We at GNUstep take quite some care that things work on PPC, SPARC and ARM, but because I love them :)
Riccardo
