[OpenIndiana-discuss] New to the list + SPARC & OpenSolaris

[Magnus]

On Jan 11, 2012, at 6:03 AM, Bryan N Iotti wrote:
> 
> Now, I have recently acquired a Sun Ultra 5 (with SCSI disks! ;-) ) and an Enterprise 250, dirt cheap. I have an original box with the Solaris 9 CDs and all the systems work fine.
> I use them at home to learn more about this OS and its underpinnings.

I have both of those machines at home. They have their uses. I fear this is not one of them.

Memory limitations on the Ultra 5 make any ZFS-based OS impractical. Luckily, yours has been upgraded to use SCSI disks, which is a good thing, because the IDE controller on that model is dog poo. 

The E250 is marginally less bad. Marginally.

Honestly, if you really must use machines this old, I'd suggest looking at OpenBSD. It runs exceedingly well on this vintage of hardware. It's also maintained quite well so you're not stuck running old unpatched software. You won't get ZFS, but then your hardware isn't really good for that.

This is a bit of a stretch, but if you had 1 or 2GB of RAM in the E250, you could run FreeBSD 9.0 (which was just released this week) which is also running zpool 28 but is pretty well supported on a number of architectures. I say it's a bit of a stretch, because there is no getting around the fact that the hardware you're looking at using is very old, very slow, and will not be pleasing to use. The E250 will, at least, warm up the room for you. Not a bad feature this time of year if you live in the northern hemisphere.

If you want to learn about *modern* flavors of Solaris-y OS's, you're really better off with hardware made in the 21st century. It doesn't have to be exotic or expensive.