[rescue] Ultra 60, looking for CPU's, OS advice

[Jerry Kemp]

Specifically for OS advice, you probably recall that we have recently had 
similar discussion(s) for others regarding pre-T series and pre-M series boxes.

Solaris 10u11 is available (and still supported) from Oracle.  If you're a big 
OpenWin fan like myself, the OpenWin packages from your Solaris 8 CD/DVD's still 
easily load and run here.

Illumos releases - Martin has OpenSXCE for SPARC.  I believe that Sonicle and 
XtreamOS also have SPARC releases. I recall a couple of the other "OpenSolaris" 
based distro's have SPARC releases, but their distro name is escaping me right now.

Solaris 11.x from Oracle.  You are probably already aware that pre T and M 
series SPARC CPU support has been pulled from the OS.  I haven't really looked 
at exactly what would be necessary to re-add that.  I can say that Solaris 11 
Express should run fine, and from my perspective, has 99% of the goodness that 
Solaris 11.x GA has.  YMMV.

BSD - don't recall the exact distro, but thing that others were successfully 
running NetBSD on SPARC equipment.

Good luck, please post a follow up on what you end up with.

Jerry


On 12/ 1/17 02:07 AM, Walter Belgers wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I recently rescued a bunch of Sun stuff, some shoeboxes, IPC, JavaStations, and
> an Ultra 60.
>
> What OS can you recommend for the U60? Solaris 10 is a bit old, 11 does not work
> AFAIK. I came across Tribblix, but that does not recognise the onboard HME
> ethernet. I've tried FreeBSD but there's no packages and a could not install X
> from source (it needs gcc5 which is broken on sparc64). I've tried OpenBSD but
> the X server puts the video card (Creator3d) in a weird mode. What OS would be
> best suited? I want the X Window System and things like ZFS would also be nice.
>
> I am trying to improve the U60 a bit. Swapped the 2 9GB disks for 72GB disks and
> put in an additional GB of RAM for a total of 2. But there's only 1 (360MHz)
> CPU. A pair of 450MHz CPU's would be nice, and they are cheap on eBay but not if
> you also need to pay shipment to the Netherlands. Does anybody have a pair lying
> around they'd like to get rid off?
>
> Another thing is that the NVRAM died. I saw that on alibaba you can cheaply buy
> these timekeeper chips. I wonder if they are old stock with dead batteries or
> newly produced. I'm considering buying 10 of them to check them out..
>
> Walter.
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