LA_MERC_MadMAX
February 14th, 2009, 04:39 PM
We had an "IT Cleanup Day" yesterday, and IT got first dibs on everything "found". Our telecom admin knows how I am about "Unixy" stuff and asked me if I wanted this Sun workstation that was at one time part of a system the monitored, and recorded the support Phone calls - it's a Sun "SunBlade 150" - it actually just looks like a "Desktop" PC (Remember the kind the monitor sat on) - well, here is a pic: http://us.st11.yimg.com/us.st.yimg.com/I/anysystem_1970_38499598
Anyway - just wondering if there are any Sun guys here... It was running Solaris 9 w/ CDE when I got it, but I didn't know any of the passwords, so I downloaded the SPARC version of Solaris 10 and loaded it (with both CDE and the "Sun modified GNOME" called the JAVA Desktop)...
It's kinda neat - it has a 40GB HDD, 1GB of RAM and a 650MHz UltraSPARC IIe CPU. It seems to be running Solaris 10 pretty well actually - I know that SPARCS are kinda like PPC in that the MHz doesn't really line up w/ what you'd exepct from an x86, but I don't know how the ratio would work out.
It seems this machine is from 2003 and was considered a "workstation" - so I'm guessing it would have been competing agains P4 1.5-1.7GHz systesms and/or AMD AthlonXP/MP based systems - not sure it feels quite that snappy - although it could be Solaris which has always been dog slow for me (on x86)...
I might try loading Linux - I know Debian has a SPARC port, and I found out about Aurora SPARC Linux which seems to be a Red Hat SPARC port...it does look like Linux on Sun SPARC can be a little tricky -but I might give it a shot. I think this little box would be far more useful to me running a CLI only Linux install (headless) that I can SSH into than running Solaris, but we'll see...
Oh - Henry (M@L) - do you think I should bring home PRAXIS? Dean is threatening to throw it away...I kinda want to save it...James wants to put it in the Datacenter as a "conversation piece" for client tours - kinda like - this is what we started with - this is what we have now kinda thing...I'm thinking if it's gonna get chunked though, I'm gonna bring it home...
Anyway - just wondering if there are any Sun guys here... It was running Solaris 9 w/ CDE when I got it, but I didn't know any of the passwords, so I downloaded the SPARC version of Solaris 10 and loaded it (with both CDE and the "Sun modified GNOME" called the JAVA Desktop)...
It's kinda neat - it has a 40GB HDD, 1GB of RAM and a 650MHz UltraSPARC IIe CPU. It seems to be running Solaris 10 pretty well actually - I know that SPARCS are kinda like PPC in that the MHz doesn't really line up w/ what you'd exepct from an x86, but I don't know how the ratio would work out.
It seems this machine is from 2003 and was considered a "workstation" - so I'm guessing it would have been competing agains P4 1.5-1.7GHz systesms and/or AMD AthlonXP/MP based systems - not sure it feels quite that snappy - although it could be Solaris which has always been dog slow for me (on x86)...
I might try loading Linux - I know Debian has a SPARC port, and I found out about Aurora SPARC Linux which seems to be a Red Hat SPARC port...it does look like Linux on Sun SPARC can be a little tricky -but I might give it a shot. I think this little box would be far more useful to me running a CLI only Linux install (headless) that I can SSH into than running Solaris, but we'll see...
Oh - Henry (M@L) - do you think I should bring home PRAXIS? Dean is threatening to throw it away...I kinda want to save it...James wants to put it in the Datacenter as a "conversation piece" for client tours - kinda like - this is what we started with - this is what we have now kinda thing...I'm thinking if it's gonna get chunked though, I'm gonna bring it home...