What to do with an Ultra1 or Ultra2?

[onre]

Got a couple Ultra1s and an Ultra2 with a Creator3D card of some sort at the garage. Got one monitor, too. All power up, some have disks. Any idea what to do with these?

 

[Elf]

Probably start with installing Solaris 7 would be my suggestion
(Winworld link, although I have discs if that doesn't work)

Then there is Unix packages (formerly known as Sun Freeware) and OpenCSW, although I am not sure whether their up to date packages will run on Solaris 7.

Solaris 7 still has OpenLook which is fun.

 

[onre]

Now that's a completely solid idea. The monitor I've got is huge and I suppose I could get the Ultra 2 up to some rather nice spec. Now if only all my mice weren't the type that needs the special metal mousepad to work...

To think of it, I could finally put my RPi to good use by running the browser over X11 forwarding on that.

 

[onre]

I did install Solaris 7. It has some interesting quirks I had forgotten about, such as no system-provided entropy. Overall, it's rather snappy and nice to use. The Ultra 2 display adapter is a double-buffered 24 bit thing, which is reasonably performant. I actually used the HotJava browser to fetch packages for the system.

The first commercial Unix system where I had root was an Ultra 1 running Solaris 2.5.1 at my first job, early 1998. We upgraded that system to 2.6 later, and my first own server was an IPC running Solaris 7. I haven't touched Solaris of this era since then, but the commands and file locations came back to me as I configured the system. Slightly weird, albeit nice, feeling.

Also, sunfreeware.com had turned into a subscription-based paid service, but there's a gentleman out there providing readily-built binary packages for Solaris 7.

Index of /tgcware/sunos5.7_sparc/stable

jupiterrise.com