[rescue] Sun Blade 2500 OS options

[William Barnett-Lewis]

On Jun 10, 2017 02:14, "Jerry Kemp" <sun.mail.list47 at oryx.us> wrote:

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


Thankb you for the information. I'd discovered the x86 bias of Open Indiana
but not the lack of support for the 2500 in the current release of 11.  I
see that I can get a set of the Express images off of TPB so I'll probably
go that route.

Looks like I can stick a cheap LSI SAS card in to use cheap SATA disks for
storage though it won't boot from it.  Anyone know if I have that correct?

My goal is to eventually max it out - put in the second CPU & fan, 16 gb
RAM, & a nice  a big TB class drive for my user disk, perhaps a SunPCI
IIIPro & see if the S10 drivers will work under Express, and so on. A nice
reminder  of what Sun was.

William