It could be useful for a lot of things still, you can set up and run Sparc applications on it that don't need big performance. That can be pretty useful if you need a testbed to try something out on. It'd be potentially useful as a non-hosted compile environment too, you can load an OEM distribution on it and use it to compile sparc binaries, even if they're built for Sparc cpu's better than what you own. You may want to run them elsewhere, but it's still sort of nice to be able to not have to maintain a hosted environment.
A lot depends on what you want to do with it, but you certainly don't have to keep a head on it, or keep it turned on. You should at least power it up to update it to use for stuff like that. I keep several sparc machines around just to be able to do testing on. My testing though might be to have an environment that I can set up that's running Solaris 8 or 9 usually, but occasionally older versions too. If you mainly want to work with the newer stuff in SXCE/SXDE, going with X86 would be your best bet though for sure. You'll get access to throwing your other OS''s onto VM's, and that's worth doing. It's getting super-easy to do too finally. Thing is though, the more enterprise oriented stuff you are interested in, the less use x86 can end up being. That said however there needs to be some line between taking up space with hardware and it's real use, computing is fairly entropic after all. Tim This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
