[indiana-discuss] OpenSolaris on really old Sun hardware?

[James Cornell]

Fajar A. Nugraha wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 8:13 PM, James Cornell <sparcdr at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> przemolicc at poczta.fm wrote:
>>     
>>> I don't understand this approach - the slowest PC-like tower/desktop box
>>> can also have OpenSolaris installed on it but will be much, much faster then the old Sun workstations.
>>>       
>
>   
>> It has to do with culture and knowledge of being able to write programs
>> for SPARC and Solaris, which is held quite high to some.  RISC vs CISC,
>> and nostalgic reasons also, in addition to just simply knowing the
>> differences in implementation for the tool chains, from Sun Studio to
>> GCC and to other software as well.
>>
>>     
>
> I think what Przemyslaw is saying is that since opensolaris (including
> Sun Studio) is available for x86, most of the things (including
> software development for Opensolaris) is more cost-effective to  be
> done on x86 instead of Sparc.
>
> Personally I've tried different ways to resurrect "old" Sun sparc
> boxes (the ones with Ultra Sparc II or older CPUs), and to tell the
> truth the one that proved to be most useful (to me) was installling
> Ubuntu on them and use it as common, non-critical service : DNS,
> proxy, MTA, etc. Gentoo was also usable as long as I don't update it
> often.
>
> Regards,
>
> Fajar
>   
On the last Ultra 2 system I owned, FreeBSD was a workable solution,
with much better performance and at least acceptable support.  With
Ultra 80 systems, I still would go for Solaris 10, and in cases
involving developers certainly OpenSolaris SXCE with effort still is
workable.  I agree about Linux being a workable solution as well in
cases of dual socket or below SPARC tech.

James