Sun SPARC and Solaris

Came across this article which describes the likely outcome if IBM buyout Sun, which is that AIX is underdevelped versus Solaris, and will likely lose out in the long run to Solaris, which has a whole plethora of enterprise features (of which ZFS is but one) - not to mention the fact Sun also own Java, OpenOffice, MySQL and so on.

I wonder if they would kill or keep the SPARC line of systems, since Solaris shares the codebase between its x86 and SPARC versions.

I really should fire up openSolaris one day - and give Solaris a more fair examination / appreciation. The temptation to go grab a Sun box off eBay, and slap a copy of Solaris 2.6, 7 or 8 on it was too easy, and I ended up with a whole range of machines from a Sun 3, a couple of Sun 4/330's, SPARCstation IPC/IPX'es right through to a very tidy little Ultra 5. All of which where really woefully underpowered for doing anything much, and the 2x SCSI cdrom install process was painful.

Still I persevered, and found that as a desktop environment, Solaris was really not that exciting, a drab corporate grey with a BBC Micro feel about the interface.. I just hope that the technological features do make Solaris really worth using, because those first few steps were uninspiring for me.

I was impressed by the way the Sun SPARCstations didnt have a reset button - a bold statement, and a prominent feature missing that I had come to depend upon, having been a mainly PC user for so long. (STOP-A takes you out of the OS to the hardware monitor, and unlike PC's, you could go and resume execution!)

The Ultra 5 was a favourite of many users, including me now, so I expanded its capabilities with a Sun PCI CoProII co-processor card, featuring a 733MHz Celeron, 128MB of RAM, USB, audio, VGA, serial and parallel ports! (regularly on eBay) - and bought another so I could expand it to 256MB RAM, filling 2/2 slots.

This drove me potty as the 8 bit colour-map switching sent everything psychadelic when in the sunpci window, so I added a 32bit Raptor gfx card.

I've even seen an Ultra 30 running Ubuntu ports.ubuntu.com/dists/,

I failed woefully at getting BSD onto my SPARCs. Perhaps one day I will have the time to try again, with BSD and OpenSolaris.


http://ezinearticles.com/?IBM-Buying-Out-Sun-What-Will-it-Mean?&id=2118836&opt=print

The collection

If you looked up my geek code, you may have noticed the h----(h++) comment. I built up a collection of a number of UNIX and PCs over the years (as a direct result of running a computer shop, and having access to eBay, mostly). The shop was underground, so it technically qualifies as a cave, and I think I counted 38 systems with around 52 processor cores total at one point - for personal use, excluding any systems built up as shop inventory at the time. A little bit giddy I suppose.

I wish I'd spent the money on getting a CCNA or something equivalent, but that wouldn't have been half as much fun, and besides which, if I was earning 10x what I was back then, I might have simply bought 10x as many machines!

So I decided to review the collection, get rid of some of the junk, and keep the better stuff. As this blog develops, I'll add photos, descriptions, and comparisons of the various machines, their good/bad points and as many links / resources as I can find.