[rescue] Ultra 60 memory

[Lionel Peterson]

>From: Patrick Finnegan <pat at computer-refuge.org>
>Date: 2008/03/09 Sun AM 01:04:23 CST
>To: The Rescue List <rescue at sunhelp.org>
>Subject: Re: [rescue] Ultra 60 memory

>On Saturday 08 March 2008 22:23, Curtis H. Wilbar Jr. wrote:

<snip>

>> What OS (Solaris in particular) would be fastest on the U60 hardware.
>
>(Un?)Fortunately, I've never been masochistic enough to try using a 
>SPARC box as a workstation.

Come on, it's not *that* bad (but admittedly, I rarely useone as a desktop myself ;^)...

>I think the main problem is that you're expecting a 10 year old machine 
>(I just looked it up on SunSolve, and the U60 was introduced in June 
>1998!) to be fast with modern (bloated) software.... :)

The real bottleneck on these older machines is the video display options - an UltraSPARC II running at 450 MHz with a similar CPU next to it (SNMP Baby!) and 2 Gigs of RAM makes for a very decent machine, but the framebuffers that are commonly available for those machines (Creator & Elite UPA) are only so good (esp. by modern standards). You can get better framebuffers (XVR-1000s can be had for $125-150 on eBay) that help improve the feel of the system, but use of the later (better) would dictate the use of Solaris as your OS. ("Not that there's anything wrong with that"[0])

>Pat (who runs Debian on his Ultra 60(s))

I recently threw Ubuntu Server 7.04 (*NOT THE LATEST*) on an Ultra 2 with pretty decent results, and supposedly you can upgrade it to be a desktop machine through a series of "apt-get install" commands. The reason I point out to use 7.04 and not 7.10 or the upcoming 8.04 is that support for on-board SCSI and networking was dropped after 7.04 (dunno why, they already have the drivers from 7.04)...

Lionel

[0] Sorry for the Seinfeld reference - http://youtube.com/watch?v=6WXabXHEpLI