[SPARCbook] Powerlite170 and Solaris 9

[Borgen_Gary]

Well, I am about to give up on running Solaris 9 12/03 on my RDI Powerlite
170.

I've run into several problems that I can't seem to find a solution for:
1.  Audio support for the sun4m arch has disappeared.
    I have done /reconfigure several times, yet no /dev/audio entry ever
occurs.  In addition, the audio entry is missing from the /platform/sun4m
directory.
2.   I am running DHCP and attaching to a D-Link router.  While I can get an
IP address and surf the net, I can never set the hostname to anything that
sticks.  I have run the hostname commad and set the hostname, set the
hostname.le0 file to read a proper hostname, but the system always reboots
to "hostname: unknown".  The D-Link does not have the ability to assign a
hostname.
3.  The system is dog slow under gnome and hangs when I try to have more
than two windows open.
    My Powerlite 170 has a 170 MHz processor, 128 MB of ram, and 6 GB of
hard drive space (512 MB swap).  I don't expect the system to be fast, but
crashes aren't good.
4.  I takes about 8 hours to do an install from scratch.
5.  Sun is threatening to drop support for the sun4m arch in future
releases.

I'm sure I could improve the speed by removing processes I don't intend to
use (i.e. sendmail), but I'm not sure if I could improve it to the point of
usability.

Before I reformat and try Aurora Linux, does anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks