[OpenIndiana-discuss] oi or hipster for ultra5?

[Peter Tribble]

>   Is it feasible to install Hipster or OI on such a meagerly appointed
> machine?  I don't even have a dvd player; just cd.
>
> SunOS beep 5.11 snv_65 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-5_10
> Memory size: 256 Megabytes
>

That's a sparc box. You aren't going to be able to run OI
(any version, including hipster) or most of the illumos distros.

You've really got 2 options. OpenSXCE or Tribblix.

http://www.opensxce.org/
http://www.tribblix.org/download.html

Now, the Tribblix iso should fit on a CD. (Although to be
honest that's largely accidental as I haven't built most
of the packages for sparc yet.) As should the OpenSXCE
text iso.

The really hard part is going to be booting the CD in that
small amount of memory. The root archive on the Tribblix
iso is currently 200M, and that gets loaded into memory -
you really don't have any space left to breathe. (I don't
know offhand how big the OpenSXCE boot archive is,
but it's likely to be pretty similar.)

This isn't a truly fundamental problem - the root archive
ends up being pretty large because it has support for
everything in it by default, and it should be possible to
produce a custom iso with a much smaller root archive.
One of the things I'm interested in is minimal-footprint
configurations, so doing that (and any other work to
improve efficiency and reduce the footprint) is on my
agenda, but it's going to take time. (And it's difficult
for me to test, as I don't personally have any sparc
hardware left that's that old or small. On x86 I think
I managed to boot a custom iso in 400M and run in 256M,
but there I can fiddle the settings in a VirtualBox VM.)

Another way would be to use the existing OS to install
a newer distro in an alternate boot environment.

In any event, you're likely to be in for a modest amount
of work and you're off into the weeds; the population of
illumos users working on sparc is pretty small.

-- 
-Peter Tribble
http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/