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?

[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?

[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...