[Sunhelp] Sol8 on SS5-110

[ward at zilla.nu]

Welp, I just installed Solaris8 on an old SS5-110 (from Data Instruments; top 
notch folks).  You can read about Sol8 everywhere else, but nobody seems to be
installing it on old sun4m hardware.  I decided to give it a whirl.

The installation had problems.  First, you boot from the installation CD, which
copies a miniroot to your hard drive.  It boots from the hd, then fires up a
rather clumsy java installation 'kiosk.'  Unfortunatel, mine would tell me that
it was 'extracting' and display a spinning disk for up to 48 hours before I hit
exit.  Hitting exit was exactly what it needed, as it continued into the
installation process.  I was also able to hit exit after 10 minutes the next
time I installed (first CDROM drive was bad).  I considered removing the AFX
card and doing the serial console installation, but things worked out in the
end.

While it's kinda slow, it's quite useable, even with CDE.  It's noticeably
slower than 2.5.1 or even 2.6 on this box, but it's not THAT bad.  If I weren't
using it as a desktop, I wouldn't mind it at all.  The machine has plenty of
RAM, so I'm going to play with Xinerama (multihead single display) soon, just to
see how much it slows things down.

Reagen

-- 
"Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat." 
	-- John Lehman, Secretary of the US Navy 1981-1987