What to do with an Ultra1 or Ultra2?

onre

SYS 64738
Feb 8, 2019
140
88
28
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?
 

Elf

Storybook / Retired, ex-staff
Feb 4, 2019
792
252
63
Mountain West (US)
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

SYS 64738
Feb 8, 2019
140
88
28
Toijala, Finland
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
 

onre

SYS 64738
Feb 8, 2019
140
88
28
Toijala, Finland
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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ghost180sx

Active member
Dec 13, 2019
144
55
28
The Great White North
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.

 

ghost180sx

Active member
Dec 13, 2019
144
55
28
The Great White North
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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