Re: teething probs with Sun Ultra 10 & Solaris 10

On 14 Aug 2006 16:27:48 -0700
thick_guy_9@xxxxxxxxx wrote:


Stefaan A Eeckels wrote:

I tried to upgrade the memory in a PIII/750 system from late 1999.
Unfortunately, it only takes 3 128MB SIMMs, and there's no BIOS
upgrade for the motherboard. I cannot upgrade the Slot 1 processor
either(*). The BIOS only sees a fraction of a 120GB disk drive. It
runs Gnome painfully slow. I could not consider using it as my
desktop system.

I think we are talking about 2 different things here. Upgrading an old
hardware / any old hardware is a hassle. We've all faced that.

But for an OS to SUPPORT an old hardware - that's what is being
discussed here. BTW, I installed/used Slackware/FreeBSD/Debian Sarge
on a 1998 PC {200Mhz, 256MB & 40GB} and it was usable. {I am not a
fan of GNOME/KDE/OOo/Mozilla etc}.

All the Sun hardware that is still remotely useful is supported by
either Solaris 9 or Solaris 10. In addition, binaries compiled for the
earliest versions of Solaris 2 (and SunOS 4) still run Solaris 10. I
have Solaris 9 running on a 167MHz Ultra 1, and Solaris 10 on an Ultra
60, and both are quite usable (JDS runs quite well on the Ultra 60).

What llothar wants is for Sun to add boot support for newer hardware
(like SATA) to the OBP of EOLed machines. No hardware supplier does
that.

It is quite possible to use new technologies on older Sun kit. I am
using a USB 2.0 card in my SB2000, and have no problems using DVD
writers, external USB disks, and memory sticks even though these things
didn't exist when the SB2000 was designed. I use a cheap Netgear
Gigabit Ethernet card in the Ultra 60 running Solaris 10.

Perhaps, future releases of Solaris can/should decouple the core OS
from the apps like evolution/JDS/Star Office/Mozilla.

That is already the case. It's far easier to install Solaris 10 without
JDS, than SUSE without KDE, or Fedora without Gnome.


Take care,

--
Stefaan A Eeckels
--
"There's nothing wrong with Java - well actually there is, but we won't
intrude on private grief here - except that it is pretty presumptuous
and demanding, and shows clear signs of fixation at the anal stage: it
doesn't just throw exceptions, it throws tantrums." --Steve Blinkhorn
.

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