[geeks] Sun Ultra 1

[Joshua Boyd]

On Sat, Aug 07, 2004 at 10:52:39AM -0400, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> I picked up a Sun Ultra 1/170 for $10 from eBay.  It was a random bid
> for the hell of it.
> 
> It's one of the Creator 3D units, has 640MB of RAM, a Creator graphics
> card, and some kind of optical interface.
 
Very good deal.  I didn't know they could take that much ram.
 
> Have any of you guys run the 64-bit version of NetBSD?  I've got to
> decide between NetBSD and Solaris on this machine.  NetBSD is what my
> current Sun SS5 server runs, so it would be nice to stick with it.

I've used NetBSD/sparc64.  I've run into problems with PHP in the ports
tree not working, and the source code not building easily (I've since
found out and then forgot how to fix that, but I think it had something
to do with bad optimization flags).  That may have been fixed.

I've also run into problems with DEFPA cards under NetBSD/sparc64, but
obviously isn't relevent to you.

Otherwise, I think it's probably decent.

BTW, I think NetBSD/sparc32 will work on that machine, and it may be
preferable to do so on a U1 (though I probably wouldn't).

I keep wanting to do more with NetBSD/sparc64, but I never seem to get
around to it.  I intend for that to be my main hardware development
platform (USB, PCI soon, firewire someday), , but I haven't gotten that
far on any of my hardware projects.