Which OS for a Sun Ultra 10

[odin]

I inherited an old Sun Ultra 10 from my previous job. It's a fairly tricked out machine. It's the 440MHz version, 768MB installed RAM, 2 20GB IDE harddrives, CD ROM.

A long time ago I was messing around with Solaris 9 (if I understand the versioning numbers right). I am able to boot to a Gnome desktop but for some reason the network interface isn't working, could be hardware, could be drivers.

I'm aware of the existance of OpenSolaris and found something called SPARC Auto Install which is what I'm downloading now. I assume it's a plain OpenSolaris installation CD. I guess I'm looking to find any information if there are any live CDs of some form available for this hardware platform so I can test that all the stuff inside actually works before installing a new OS on harddrive.

I'm also curious if I could add USB to this machine since I have a PCI USB card floating about gathering dust.

Any other legacy Sun tinkerers in here?

[LoadWB]

I am not well-versed in SPARC hardware, but I believe Solaris 9 should support your Ultra 10, including the network interface.  I have Solaris 9 running on a SparcStation 10 and a SparcStation 20, which I believe are more legacy than your Ultra 10.  I also cheated and added a SCSI/HME (100Mb/s) S-Bus card to each, so I rarely, if ever, used the on-board Ethernet.

As for the PCI USB, it should be an easy trip to the HCL on Oracle's site.  I only worked with one PCI-based SPARC system in my time, and it used some 3Com-looking card.  Sadly, I was not involved in its set up.

Good luck.

[kolla]

OpenSolaris? It's OpenIndiana these days. Oracle are being nasty regarding "Solaris".

[LoadWB]

Oracle are being nasty regarding "Solaris".

And MySQL, and Java...

[rzookol]

I have my university server on Sun Ultra 10 (444 Mhz na 256 mb ram).
I have lastest Debian installed here. Having linux has some pros and cons.

The pros are:
- newer packages
- easy to obtain overlay mode (to watching movies)

Cons:
- lack of SUN java and flash

I find ati rage 2 video faster and easy to handle than 13W3 so i dismount Creator 3d (ffb3) from it. Ati rage2 has only 3.5 mb vram so DRI doesn't work. Other graphics cards might work if there exists sun version of them (like permedia2). SCSI cards works better in linux than solaris. Ultra10 should support Solaris 10 but i have Sol 9 earlier too and i worked without problems.

[Fransexy_]

Now that you have a sparc powered machine you could make a sparc based AROS.Start compiling it hosted on solaris ;-)

[gazgod]

@odin

When you say the network interface is not working, what is the problem? Is it completely dead or will it ping the local network?
Setting up DNS in Solaris can be a pain if you haven't done it before.

If its completely dead I should have a spare Sun PCI nic here if you want it.

Gaz

[Dazxy2001]

I used to have a Sun Ultra 5 and successfully used NetBSD, FreeBSD and Gentoo linux on it.
Gentoo also have a live CD, details here http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/2004.3/handbook-sparc.xml?part=1&chap=2#doc_chap3

[Hattig]

I liked the pizzabox Sun systems. And the quirky Sun keyboard.

[TheMagicM]

start here

replace 'hme0' with your nic (use dmesg to find out the name)
 
http://adminschoice.com/solaris-network-configuration


If your interface is up, just no IP etc..start with something simple like DHCP..

ifconfig dhcp start

[odin]

Ta for the replies folks.

@kolla
Well, Oracle as a whole is just plain nasty. Stupid licensing rules for software running on virtual servers etc. I vote Oracle as the new Apple/Microsoft =). Didn't know OpenSolaris had been renamed Indiana, will look into it. -edit- Seems Indiana isn't available for SPARC yet.

Actually I was lying about the Ethernet not working. Apparently I have the same SCSI/Ethernet card which LoadWB mentioned. I wasn't aware of the mobo Ethernet port at the bottom of the case =). I plugged the cable into that and hey presto, network connection. But indeed Solaris isn't resolving anything automatically so I guess I'll have to config the DNS settings myself.

What's worse is that this thing doesn't have a dedicated graphics card, only the crappy mobo integrated output. Am I right in thinking that this is only able to output 8 bit graphics? I can't find any option to increase the colour depth of my session.

As for Linux; I think I'll try Solaris first for a bit. I already run Linux as a day-to-day OS.

Are there any major differences between Solaris 9 and 10?

[nicholas]

Ta for the replies folks.

@kolla
Well, Oracle as a whole is just plain nasty. Stupid licensing rules for software running on virtual servers etc. I vote Oracle as the new Apple/Microsoft =). Didn't know OpenSolaris had been renamed Indiana, will look into it. -edit- Seems Indiana isn't available for SPARC yet.

Actually I was lying about the Ethernet not working. Apparently I have the same SCSI/Ethernet card which LoadWB mentioned. I wasn't aware of the mobo Ethernet port at the bottom of the case =). I plugged the cable into that and hey presto, network connection. But indeed Solaris isn't resolving anything automatically so I guess I'll have to config the DNS settings myself.

What's worse is that this thing doesn't have a dedicated graphics card, only the crappy mobo integrated output. Am I right in thinking that this is only able to output 8 bit graphics? I can't find any option to increase the colour depth of my session.

As for Linux; I think I'll try Solaris first for a bit. I already run Linux as a day-to-day OS.

Are there any major differences between Solaris 9 and 10?

Well if you do decide to try Linux on it, this is the last version of Ubuntu for SPARC.
cdimage.ubuntu.com/ports/releases/lucid/release/ubuntu-10.04-server-sparc.iso

[LoadWB]

Actually I was lying about the Ethernet not working. Apparently I have the same SCSI/Ethernet card which LoadWB mentioned. I wasn't aware of the mobo Ethernet port at the bottom of the case =). I plugged the cable into that and hey presto, network connection. But indeed Solaris isn't resolving anything automatically so I guess I'll have to config the DNS settings myself.

Check your /etc/resolv.conf.  There is a manpage for it.

Are there any major differences between Solaris 9 and 10?

ZFS and Zones (virtualization, baby!)  (EDIT: Amongst a few other things.) I particularly like Solaris Zones.

[odin]

Weeeee. I'm not posting this from what seems to be the most recent version of Firefox available for SPARC Solaris 9. Thanks everybody. In particular thanks to b00zi for pointing out Blastwave.

But gods...is this machine slow...