Thanks for all the excellent answers to my rather vague question. The sparc in question is already running Mandrake. As noted below, most sparc distributions will not load on a 170 MHz mainboard. They *will* run if loaded on a slower system and the drives transferred. Go figure. I received it loaded with Redhat, running reasonably well in a server configuration. I must assume it was loaded following this procedure. I have not been able to get SUSE or Redhat loaded directly. I have verified (by doing) that Mandrake will load and run on my 170 MHz SS5.