[SunRescue] Solaris on older Sparc boxes

[Stephen Olson]

Well, I'm running Solaris 7 on an IPC.  It's got 48 megs of memory, that
helps.  I bought the computer so that I could have a dedicated Unix box, and
learn about Solaris.  I had some Linux experience, but I wanted to see the
real thing.  To date I'm very happy with the computer.  It serves it's job
as a learning platform very well.  I'm A Physics/Computer science dual
major, and most of my programing projects last semester were done using this
computer.  Currently I'm in the process of setting up Samba.  It should make
a nice little file server for my two windows boxes.

Here is some of the software I have installed on this box, along with how
good it runs.

It had a 2 gig drive and a cg3 when I got it, so I did a full install.  CDE,
everything.  I even put Netscape 4.6 on it.  It's "slow" but useable.  The
only problem comes up is when 2 or 3 Netscape windows are open and all
loading something.  The CPU meter stays pegged a 100% and the mouse stops
responding.  When Netscape is done, everything is fine.  I use this quite a
lot to browse the web.  It's no slower than my 28.8 modem was.

I tried installing StarOffice.  Don't do it.  It will load up, but the
response time is too slow to do any work.  It will occasionally seem to
freeze the machine, but it's probably doing the same thing as Netscape.
After an hour I just power cycled it. StarOffice seems stable from a remote
X terminal, but still too slow.

CDE and Openwin run about the same speed.  Take your pick, I like Openwin.

For general use, things are not too bad.  Lynx runs great.  Xterms are
responsive.  Man pages take a little while to format, but it's not too bad.
I downloaded an X game package somewhere, solitaire, mine sweeper, etc.  It
runs well.  I have not installed Emacs yet, but I suspect that it will run
fine.  If it is too slow, I'll try to build Elle (a striped down Emacs clone
common on Minix).  It works great for remote x applications.  25 mhz sbus
makes even a cg3 perform ok.

g++ is useable for normal student programing, but it takes a while to build
big things, like Emacs.  However, it's easy to find pre built GNU packages
for Solaris 7.  Java 2 works, but compile times are long.  Don't try
HotJava, it takes 10 minutes to load.  As Solaris user registration uses
HotJava, shut it off.  This will cut your login time in half.

Boot time is much faster than my 386 with Linux, and about the same as my
Intel pentium 166 with Linux.  Shutdown is faster than either.  Logging in
takes longer than either.  On Solaris's side, it has to start the desktop
environment on login, so that's not a good test.

I don't have top installed, but with 48 megs I don't hear any swapping.  If
you can fill 48 megs, it's probably too slow to use anyway.

As for upgrades, I might put a cg6 in it, just to see if it makes any
difference.  If I can find another monitor, the built-in bw2 frame buffer
can make this a dual headed box.

Sorry this got so long
-Steve

David Rouse wrote:

> Every so often I'll hear people say, when talking about older Sun boxes,
> that you don't want to run Solaris on that, it will be too slow.
>
> Without starting a war (really!): slow in what sense?
>
> I've got Solaris 2.7 running on an IPX (no X Windows) and a Sparc 10 (X
> Windows, GX framebuffer and 128 MB of RAM) at home and both seem fairly
> responsive. I haven't loaded any monsters like Netscape yet, but so far
> with admin tasks using Xterms, the file editor, and file manager in Open
> Windows the Sparc 10 doesn't come off too bad against the (early model)
> U5 I use at work.
>
> Note -- I'm not doubting anyone's word, it would just be interesting to
> know in what areas Solaris would be slower on an older machine and why.
>
> ---
> David Rouse
> Network Manager
> Goldsboro News-Argus
>
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