I actually used SparcLinux back then. It wasn't much to write home about. Pretty much everyone with lower end Sun hardware (meaning SparcStation 20s and below) preferred SunOS 4.x (retroactively renamed "Solaris 1.x") until Solaris 2.6 came out. 2.5 was okay. 2.4 and below were pretty awful.<p>For example, I worked at an ISP that originally set up a shell server on Solaris 2.4. People hated it since most opensource stuff wouldn't compile out of the box. We had to downgrade to SunOS 4.x.