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I've been trying to find an answer to this, been on a wild goose chase.

Since UNIX and Linux have different system architectures. My question is on the differences between the drivers for the SPARC and x86. Say would a certain driver i.e printer,monitor for an x86 work on a SPARC machine?

I tried running the x86 script on the SPARC machine only for it to fail. I am no programmer/developer and my knowledge is limited for this one. Could the x86 driver be modified to run for SPARC and how feasible is it? Thanks for the input, and no I am not going to ask you to write the drivers for me. Thank you

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  • SPARC isn't an operating system; it's a processor architecture.
    – sciurus
    Oct 29, 2013 at 19:06
  • Thanks, sciurus. Let me rephrase my question, like I mentioned this isn't really my thing.
    – help_me
    Oct 29, 2013 at 19:31
  • The questions is still confusing. Linux runs on both sparc and x86. There are unixes that run on both sparc and x86. A driver that's a part of the linux kernel should work on both a sparc or x86 linux system. A driver from a third party may or may not work. You should provide more details about what you're specifically trying to do.
    – sciurus
    Oct 29, 2013 at 19:52
  • yes and this is why it makes things confusing. I'm not an expert myself, and my lack of understanding is causing this problem to sound more confusing then it already it. I basically want to install a Linux touch screen driver on a Solaris 9 machine.
    – help_me
    Oct 29, 2013 at 20:17

1 Answer 1

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x86 and Sparc are processor architectures. Code that executes on one will not execute natively on the other, also processors have no idea what a driver is or what to do with it.

UNIX and Linux are Operating Systems. They do know what drivers and, and drivers usually have to be specifically written for one OS or another. It's very rare that one driver can be use don multiple OSes, but it does happen.

You mention a script, scripts are interpreted languages. An interpreter which runes natively on the processor architecture and OS of the host machine understands how to compile a script and make it do something, but neither the OS nor the processor directly know what to do with a script.

System administrators don't write drivers typically. Usually a developer would do that.

In summary:

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