What to do with an Ultra1 or Ultra2?

onre

SYS 64738
Feb 8, 2019
150
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Toijala, Finland
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?
 
Edit: With apologies, I no longer wish to have involvement with SGUG or SGI communities in general,
and have also chosen to remove all of my content. Many things have changed since I co-founded, named, and ultimately
then left SGUG. There are many good people around, to whom I apologize for frustrating by removing these things, and
also many petty people that over the years whittled down both the enjoyment as well as sense of obligation I used to
feel to anyone else regarding what was ultimately just a hobby. Unfortunately one of the latter now writes the rules
and so it is time for me to take my things and go.

This message will replace all of my previous forum posts because deleting threads that I started would have removed
other peoples' posts.
 
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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. :p
 
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.

 
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onre, did you get a chance to take some snaps?
I was browsing for what's possible with Linux on ultrasparc. I noticed debain has an active port for sparc64. It might be worth looking into if you have time to kill and want to help out!

Years ago I ran gentoo on an Ultra 10 around 2004. It was slow to build even then but worth it. I used the machine for a scholarship to hang out with the grad students at my university and I wrote a mini research paper. It was good times.

 
great to know Mike! I tried using OpenBSD 5.9 on my Sparcstation IPX but it kept panic'ing. I assume it was due to the age of 5.9 and the rarer Fujitsu SPARC chip I had in mine compared to the more common Weitek.
I will try to throw OpenBSD (latest) on my T3-1 then!
 

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