[rescue] Sun Blade 2500 OS options

[Jerry Kemp]

Sorry to modify your list but.....

Oracle Solaris 11 GA+ is not going to run, not without some hacking.  T-series, 
M-series and S-series boxes only for SPARC.

You can, however, run Solaris 11 Express on older hardware, such as your Sun 
Blade 2500.  Almost all the goodness of Solaris 11 on old hardware.

Don't remember off the top of my head what Sun's last Solaris 10 release was, 
but Solaris 10u11 from Oracle is a fine and stable release.

OpenSolaris is certainly an option, but long sense its last maintenance. 
Probably wouldn't make sense unless there was something special for you there.

There are a small handful of SPARC based Open Solaris based distro's, but 
unfortunately, OpenIndiana isn't one of them.  Small group of people doing great 
work, but bigoted towards x86/x86.

I'm a *BSD fan myself, but have never ran it on SPARC, someone else will need to 
chime in here.

If you run any version of Solaris 10+ or one of the current open source Solaris 
based distro's, I would definitely max out the ram, minimum of 4 Gb and run ZFS.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Blade_(workstation%)>

Referencing the Wikipedia page, it shows official support for 10 03/05 to 10 
1/13, where 03/05 was the original GA release of Solaris 10 to current.

Hope this helps some.

Jerry




On 06/ 9/17 08:16 PM, William Barnett-Lewis wrote:
> Ok, I have been out of the solaris loop since before the Oracle
> disaster. My last system running solaris was a Sun Blade 100 and
> Solaris 8. I'll soon be getting a one CPU Sun Blade 2500 Silver with
> an XVR-600 framebuffer. I believe it has 1 or 2 gb currently and I
> intend to drop an 8 gb kit into it shortly after I get it.
>
> The real question is, which OS do I put on it?
> Orace Solaris 11 - Newest?
> Sun Solaris 10 - last from Sun?
> OpenSolaris - Dead and buried?
> Illumos - ?
> OpenIndiana - ?
> *BSD - ?
>
> My current primary system is a Dell laptop running Xubuntu 16.04.4
> LTS, the Sun is for fun & old times sake and if it's got adequete
> perfomance, I'll probably use it as my GIMP machine for my photography
> just because this dual core Celeron isn't all that hot either.
>
> Thanks for any and all tips & advice.
>
> William