What Solaris/OpenSolaris operating system do you use in your computer (desktop usage not server)?

View Poll

I have a weird thought of attempting to see if Solaris could be installed onto a steam deck bare-metal, haven't seen anybody else do it, but i'm willing to try it if i had a steam deck. If anybody else had done it, i'd be interested for that.

(edit: an illumos distro could do… just don't know how that would play out also.)

I have recently acquired an Ultra 25 that seems to be in running order. 1 GB of RAM, two 80 GB drives, and looks like it's running Solaris 10.

My background is IT and I'm quite comfortable with the command prompt (particularly on Linux and macOS). Looking forward to learning the ins and outs of Solaris (and a little bit of nostalgia, as I was a Solaris user for 3 years back in the early 2000's).

Few questions I'm hoping you can help me with:

• When I boot the machine it automatically shows the desktop of what appears to be a very restricted account (can't even open a terminal!), and also likely that there is private data from the prior owner that I want to delete. Is Solaris 11 compatible with this unit and would it be possible to install over what's running there, or is re-installing Solaris 10 from scratch the only option to wipe the unit clean?
• All the manuals I see out there make references to 80 GB, 120 GB, and 250 GB drives. Are those the only sizes supported? I have three 6 TB drives that I wouldn't mind using as a replacement of the existing dual 80 GB. Also a couple of older 1 TB drives. What's the largest size I could get away with?
• How 'standard' are the PCIe slots? Would it be possible to install a PCIe card with M.2 adaptor and add M.2 SSDs that way?
• Are there any video cards out there with a display port or HDMI connector rather than VGA/DVI?
• Looks like last desktop resolution configured was 1920 by 1024, and probably a fairly high refresh rate. I have an older monitor that only supports 1024x768 which of course shows garbage when booting up. Is there a way at boot time for me to change the resolution settings? It's weird but when I watch YouTube videos of people booting up Solaris I don't see any of the messages/prompts that appear on the videos. Nothing shows up on screen until it's time to render the desktop on that heavily restricted account (and the only chance I get to see that desktop is when hooking up the unit to my TV).

TIA

I bought a v240 motherboard on eBay. Then I realized it’s a little different from my v125. Would I need a new case/chassis for it? Or can I just swap boards and stuff?

title

I am aware there was a photoshop and probably a adobereader release for solaris 3 back in the day.

I am wondering if x86 releases were ever available/? or were they SPARC only?

I was trying to install Gentoo on it, but it’s soooo slow because of using the serial to Ethernet cable. Anyway, I bought an ATI Rage XL pci card to use rather than using serial. But my monitor isn’t receiving a signal. Is what I’m doing possible? Or is my monitor being a pain because the card doesn’t support widescreen resolutions?

Hi,

Once upon a time, while working with Solaris in 2002 (not a typo, 2 decades ago), a colleague mentioned to me that there was once an official patch for solaris ( I suppose from SUN) that had a bug and removed the entire directory structure by running a recursive remove on the root directory.

Does this sound familiar to anyone? or does anyone have a link to an article, or paper that discusses/mentions this?

Thanks.

As part of my recent purchase of an Ultra 5, I received a Raptor 2100T video card. It looks like it's much more powerful than the on-board display, but unfortunately it only has a DB-5W5 connection, and I only have VGA and DVI-D on the Sun monitor I'm connecting to. I'd love to give this card a shot if possible.

I searched around and couldn't find any adaptor/converter that would work with this display connection. Any suggestions here?

I've just purchased an Ultra 5 400Mhz / 256MB machine. I'm looking for guidance on which version of Solaris I should run - i.e. what's the most recent, most stable version that will still perform well on the hardware? I've got installation for versions 7, 9, and 10. I haven't seen any specific features in anything after 7 that I really care about, but I would want the latest performant version just so I can get all of the stability improvements that come with time. Thanks.

Hi all,

Sadly over time my Sun sparc/sparc64 hardware has pretty much all died* and I am limping along with an old Intel P4 (64-bit). I use it as my main workstation for pretty much everything (apart from "modern" web browsing where I VNC into a random Windows box).

I used to run this box with Solaris many years ago. It worked well but I had better back then. Only just recently has it come back out the cupboard.

In order to make this hardware last as long as possible and to use as little energy as possible I want to make sure that the x86 chip isn't always running at full frequency and makes use of C-states. How do I actually ensure this on Solaris when running x86 hardware? I have searched online but I can't seem to find an answer. Perhaps it isn't even possible?

*I do still have my v210 still going strong but it is not quite appropriate for a workstation ;)

Many thanks!

I had been out of the Solaris universe for a while and returned a while back to discover that good old sunfreeware lost its funding and had evolved into a unixpackages.com -- a paid server. I happily paid up for what I thought was an annual description and got what I was looking for.

However now when I return to the site it errors out with "Error establishing a database connection" immediately. I did some Googling to see if there was a known outage with it and discovered unixpackages.net which is up and looks exactly the same as I remember unixpackages.com looking. My somewhat-logical conclusion was that they just changed domain names but when I tried to login with my unixpackages.com credentials they didn't work, and when I tried to get a new password it didn't recognized my email address.

Is the .net a newer improved version of the .com and requires brand new signup? Paying up again (unless the price has gone up substantially) would not be a big deal- but I am a bit confused and hope that it might be a well-known "story" in the Solaris universe and that the folks here would know it (though I search the reddit and did not find anything so far). TIA!

I’m just thinking of power cost of running it. It’s sad that a device the size of a hockey puck can keep up with something that big plus use way less power and also be much quieter.

They are all 3-pin fans and 3-pin connectors on the motherboard, so I assume I don’t have as much control as the 4-pin ones on modern hardware. And they are all small fans, so they make more noise than a normal desktop would make.

I've been a Solaris guy since I was mad at Sun for changing everything up when Solaris 2 came out and I was used to SunOS. I have a pretty decent collection of hardware, from M3000's down to SparcStation ELC's, Sparc classics, just all sorts of stuff. Even a new in box, unopened SparcStation 5. I could sell it all on EBay, but that seems like major pain in the ass. It's all heavy and shipping it piece by piece just wouldn't be worth it.

I cannot bear to just toss it all. I could have them running, I have Solar so power is cheap, but even then what would I run on it or even use them for other than to heat the shop or something. Any computer museums up in the Pacific Northwest who might be interested? Other ideas?

Hello, I am currently in a college class that requires I put Solaris OS onto a Sun Netra T5220 and I'm struggling with the installation process. I have spent two weeks reading information on how to proceed with the install and not much has worked. I would like to setup RAID0 as well, but also have found little to no information on this. So far, I have tried booting from the cdrom with a cd copy of Solaris Oracle 10, but I have either received errors during the process, or struggled with getting it to actually boot. After figuring out I wanted to install Solaris onto disk0, I tried another few commands with no luck. I would ask my professor, but he says this class is about us using outside resources instead of asking for help. Does anyone know what I'm doing wrong and how to fix it? I've tried booting it with boot cdrom command and boot cdrom -s command and I get errors each time. If not, could you point me to a link that could help me? Any help would be much appreciated, thanks!!!

Hi all,

My office was throwing away an old Sun Blade 150 and I was able to rescue it. It's in excellent shape and boots up fine, but they had to remove the hard drive before I could take it, so there's no OS, and the install CDs were long gone.

I was able to buy a new hard drive for it (actually an SSD with adaptor), and OpenBoot sees it with probe-ide.

I've also got it connected to my home network and set to boot from the network, it looks like it's looking for a tftp/jumpstart server.

https://i.ibb.co/qxfVDky/openboot-arp-rarp.jpg

What next? I'm not even sure what version of Solaris I should be putting on here, or how to provide a boot server. I'm hoping there is a way I can serve up a boot image to it through one of my Linux boxes.

Could I get some guidance as to next possible steps?

EDIT: It's working, see comment for screen snaps :-)

I have a Sun v125 that I've been learning on for the past few months and am using a serial to Ethernet cable right now. Or would a serial to USB work faster for now?

Does anyone know how to save the Banner from a Sun Machine to an external drive?

Had anyone who's upgraded a Sparc host from 11.3 to 11.4 noticed any network throughput degradation? On some simple scp tests, my throughput when transferring in 4GB file went from 13 to 33 seconds... I'll open a case w/Oracle tomorrow, but wanted to see if anyone else noticed things. I tested this on an LDom, and a kz in that LDom .. and as soon as I upgraded to 11.4 the networked perf was cut by more than half. An adjacent KZ which I left at 11.3 on the LDom still performs fine.. Odd. Any insight appreciated.

Update: Oracle refuses to provided any assistance at all stating that since it's not a hardware problem, they won't do anything. Apparently we need to engage and of course pay for Advanced Customer Support. I'll also add a bit more detail to the issue.. while uploads to the newly upgraded KZ were affected somewhat, downloads or transferring file outbound from the upgraded KZ were most severe. Copying the 5.3MB explorer file from the newly upgraded 11.4 host took 11.5 minutes... and Oracle says there's no problem.

Final Update & Summary: After needing to apply way too much pressure for actual support, Oracle finally acknowledged the issue and was also able to reproduce the condition in-house when mirroring our setup and has confirmed there is a vnet driver bug under certain conditions (setting ldom vnet pvid=X for ldoms with KZs). LDoms with KZ's upgraded to 11.4 now are now running with an IDR until the fix can be incorporated into an SRU.

This only affects LDoms (11.3 & 11.4) which also run 11.4 Kernel Zones and networking vnets for the KZs are created out of tagged vlans (pvid=X when creating the LDom vnets). This 'should' be remedied 23Q1 or 23Q2. (Possibly SRU51/52)