Sparcstation 20: Solaris 9 installs and runs ... but it's so Solarisy
I tried quite a few OpenBSD ports during my last run on the Sparcstation 20. None of them would build (Firefox, Seamonkey, Geany).
Curiously, when I ran NetBSD on the Sparc, the Firefox PACKAGE wouldn't install. Not a port that needed to be compiled, but a precompiled package built for the 32-bit Sparc architecture. That didn't give me a whole lot of hope for pkgsrc, which theoretically can be used to bring NetBSD packages into OpenBSD and other OSes. (DragonFlyBSD uses NetBSD packages, and that's a great way for the FreeBSD-derived DragonFly to have a huge package repository, and it makes me want to try it on my i386 hardware).
I spent the past few days installing Solaris 9 on the Sparc 20. (I got the OS super-cheap — $1 plus shipping — from eBay, unopened in the box).
Solaris is quite a bit different from OpenBSD and Linux. I'm still getting the hang of it. A lot of the trouble I'm having is due to my near-total unfamiliarity with it. I do have "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Solaris 9," which I found remaindered at Fry's for a few bucks, and it's a good resource. It's somewhat short — not "complete," but for the "complete idiot," which I am in this regard. There are quite a few other Solaris 9 books out there, including a "Dummies" book by Dave Taylor, who wrote a general Unix book I quite liked (here's everything Amazon has that he wrote).
Back to the Sparcstation 20 after the Solaris 9 installation: With 50 MHz of CPU and 128 MB of RAM, it's far from ideal. GNOME &mddash; which ships with Solaris 9 — is almost unusable, but the CDE desktop is pretty responsive. It reminds me quite a bit of Fvwm in OpenBSD.
StarOffice 6 is included among the many discs in the Solaris box. When I installed it as root, only root could run it, so I started over again in my user account. The answer to this mystery is probably somewhere in my "Complete Idiots" book.
I found a Firefox 2.0.0.20 package built for Solaris 8 at the great SunFreeware site. Again, installing as root meant only root could use it. Even after installing it through the user account with su didn't work all the way. I can still run Firefox as root, but I get errors relating to patches that I need to do when I try to run it as my user. I'll have to read up on Solaris admin and eventually find and install all the Solaris patches.
But I did get Firefox to run, and it's WAY faster than Netscape 4.7, which shipped with Solaris. Yes, I did just type the words "Netscape 4.7."
I could very well keep Solaris on the box, but one idea is to run OpenBSD and then try to use the Solaris binary packages for Firefox and OpenOffice (since none of the OpenBSD ports of Firefox or Seamonkey will install on the Sparc 20).
Running Solaris binaries in OpenBSD is supposed to work. And yes, OpenBSD is a better, faster OS, for my use anyway, than Solaris on this platform.
Sun Sparcstation 5 image from the OSIAH: Online Sun Information ArcHive.
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Steven Rosenberg aims to learn what he does not know. He writes about it here.
Steven Rosenberg aims to learn what he does not know. He writes about it here.
Hi Steve,
What do you plan to do with your Sparc 20? (application wise - or is this all play and once done you pass it on).
Reason I ask is I have a Sparc 5 and an Ultra 10, and they seem like worthwhile machines to still do decent work - web browse, etc. I just downloaded Solaris 9 from the Sun website. Like you said Sol 9 would have all the drivers for the hardware. Whondering on what you plan to use the box for and if you kept Sol 9 on it.
Thanks,
Garret
I'd love to have it as a general workstation with Firefox, a few good text editors, an FTP client, and either AbiWord or OpenOffice.
Right now in Solaris 9 I have StarOffice 6, which runs surprisingly well (I think Java in general runs great on the Sparc architecture), a Firefox 2 package that's not running so well (I'm missing a bunch of patches and have no idea how to bring the installation up to date), and all the furniture that comes with Solaris and the CDE desktop environment.
My preference is to have a fully updated Solaris 9 box with Firefox and the rest of the apps I want. But I don't know if that is possible.
I'll probably go back to OpenBSD and try to run Solaris binaries for Firefox that way. I don't have a lot of hope in that regard. I think the writing on the wall is that support for 32-bit Solaris is far along on the downhill side.
If I could get even a single OpenBSD port to build and run in Sparc 32, I'd be more than giddy ... but thus far that hasn't happened. I did find a few text editors I liked, including Nedit, but I really need a Web browser solution.
Yeah, I'd like to put the Sparc into regular service, but I don't know if it will happen.
It's been a fun project, but the future is uncertain at the moment.
While I've had fun with PowerPC and Sparc, at this point I can understand why many projects and distros focus on i386 and x86_64. That's where all the heat is.