Buying Sun Sparcs for Personal Use?

sid crimson asks: "I'm looking to add a Sun Sparc to my home setup so I can cut my teeth on Solaris/Sparc. Maybe there are slashdotters who would offer some insight as to which workstations might be best suited to a budget-minded someone wanting to learn SunOS 2.6 all the way through Solaris 7 & 8? Maybe some specifics as to the need for a 'framebuffer' and other options available for Sun hardware." If one is looking for a Sparc or Sparc Hardware, you might try looking at this earlier article which discussed online vendors that sell Sparc hardware. That article is a couple of years old, however, so I imagine the seller landscape has changed slightly. If anyone knows of other sites or shops that specialized in Sparc hardware that may not have been mentioned in the previous article, please share them here.

Comments

Any old sparc will do.

[Spit]

I'd suggest a 4m box like a 4/5/10/20/IPX/IPC, 4c boxes are too old. An ultra 1/2 would be ideal and are super slick running debian after you've been an admin for a few years and are sick of solaris. ;)

What you really want to learn is the trickery of sparc hardware which is basically all at the boot prompt, stuff like reconfiguring devices and single user mode.

After that, run up solaris on intel and learn the ins and out of it, basically the same as sparc as far as software is concerned.You'll have a much faster machine unless you want to buy an Ultra, and you can install OpenBSD(4c) or Debian (4m+) on your sparc and have a neat little system.

Try out the differences between sysv and Linux/BSD style systems like NFS, as well as things that are just broken out of the box. Read fixsolaris.txt.(!)

Learn that solaris is just a solid kernel with the basic tools, as with most sysv systems. Ignore the rest of the crap unless you really need it (gui tools). Learn low level commandline configuration and you'll be right (you can't get the disksuite gui up on a terminal). Other cool stuff costs money (veritas).