[SunRescue] IPC

[James Lockwood]

On Mon, 7 Jun 1999, Shad  GUNDERSON wrote:

>     I subscribed sometime ago, as I have recently acquired a Sun IPC. 
> Please forgive me if this is off topic, but what OS can I run on this
> little guy?  Is it possible to get copies of SunOS still? Does it
> support recent versions of Solaris? Does *BSD/SparcLinux run faster on
> this hardware? 

It really depends on what you want to do with it.

An IPC will run everything up to the current revision of Solaris (7) but
Sun has stated that it will probably not be supported in future releases.
It's a slow machine by modern standards, but the biggest problem you will
likely have with it is memory.

If you want to use this as an interactive workstation, don't think about
Solaris unless you've maxed out the memory (48mb).  If you don't require X
and just want to play around with it as a small server on your network,
then 32mb would be fine.

If you've got less then I'd advise going with NetBSD/OpenBSD.  SunOS 4 is
substantially out of date and no longer under active development.
SparcLinux still has some problems on older hardware and is less mature (I
was using NetBSD/SPARC in production environments 4 years ago).  Solaris
is not universally slower than *BSD and Linux (in fact, in many areas it
beats them both out) but it has a much larger resource footprint.

Play around and find out what you like.  Try them all and see what you
think, they are all fairly easy to install and set up. 

For what it's worth, I used a comparable system with 40mb RAM running
Solaris 2.4 (a dog compared to Solaris 7) as my main home workstation for
over a year.

-James (BTW, anyone got a pair of SS20 TZX/Aurora-2 side vents around?)