On 05/15/22 22:25, Dennis Clarke wrote:
On 5/15/22 14:58, Chris Quayle wrote:
On 05/15/22 15:57, Chris Newport wrote:
On 15/05/2022 14:52, Dennis Clarke wrote:
On 5/14/22 17:52, Rick Leir wrote:
From folks who have tried? Sorry, no. If the info below is not
helpful, sorry and please just delete my message.
Is illumos or SmartOS an option? Info from Bryan Cantrill:
http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2017/09/04/the-sudden-death-and-eternal-life-of-solaris/
Following a few links from that article to
https://illumos.org/docs/about/distro/ , I see that
derived systems claim to have SPARC builds: Tribblix, DilOS, and V9os.
cheers -- Rick
Yep .. been there and read that. Even if any of those did work at
all we
are going in a circle and landing back on some Solaris thing. That is
not really of any value any more. It is beginning to sound a lot like
Oracle sold a whack of machines to people about ten years ago and they
are all dead pieces of trash and junk today. Nothing runs there any
more.
They should still run just fine on older versions of Solaris (8 or 10 ?)
and similar
aged Debian and BSD variants. Not trash, just stuck in their own time.
I have customers still running Ultra 60s and a few still on ancient
stuff running
SunOs 4.1.4, they still run the tasks they were bought for and will be
replaced
with modern kit when they finally die. The killer will be the SCSI
disks.
Been running Solaris 10 on an M3000 for 5 or 6 years now, for the home
lab server. Has a perfectly usable desktop with the addition of an
XVR300 graphics card and a pcie usb card, as the usb on the M3k is
not reachable from the host os. Forget the make, but just looked for a
usb card with a chipset supported under the sol 10 hcl.
Damn good machine and faster than any other Spparc ever run here...
It is a damn good machine. However it can *only* run Solaris 10 or maybe
Solaris 11.3 and in both cases you need an Oracle contract. Otherwise
good luck getting updates or access to the IPS repo.
Never bothered about updates, but what is the IPS repo ?. Could we
have a group buy for, say a V120 and share ?. Depends on the cost I'
guess.
As I keep saying over and over and over I wanted to run Linux on it.
If you dig around the Oracle site, there is an early version of Linux
Sparc, though development seems to have come to a halt. Have a copy
here, but never tried to install it as yet, but the sources might
be a help for other work, if available.
I gave up with Linux after systemd and run FreeBSD as far as possible
these days. No Sparc support since 11.2, but have 11.0 rel running on
both a V215 and T1405. No hardware framebuffer, but built between 2 and
300 packages to run an Xvnc remote desktop. At least on the V215,
it's plenty fast enough to do some real work. Still trying to build
Firefox, but so many dependencies. Seems very solid.
Solaris was taken out behind a chemical shed and killed five years
ago and yes Bryan Cantrill would know the truth :
http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2017/09/04/the-sudden-death-and-eternal-life-of-solaris/
Speaking as someone that was on the OpenSolaris governance board
there was nothing but deathly silence right up until the Lawnmower man
pulled the plug one night. No discussion. Just silence.
Dennis Clarke
I'm still sore about Sun as well. Early Sun 3 that got me started in
unix and have been running Sparc boxes for decades now. Also testing
Open Indiana Hipster on X86, but no Sparc version, sadly.
Have various Sun machines and parts if that would be any help to the
group, T2000, T5220 iirc and perhaps others, all bought along the way to
experiment with. In the UK though...
Chris
.
