[geeks] Needed: A good sparc workstation

[Mark Benson]

nate at portents.com wrote:
>> I disagree about a $200 PC besting a free Ultra 60, unless you mean
>> unimportant things like how many FLOPs it can do.  No amount of power
>> savings can equal the cost to my soul.  Oh, and having Solaris JUST
>> WORK has to be something.  I see a lot of complaints about NIC and
>> SATA problems with PC using Solaris users.

OpenSolaris 2008.11 does 'Just work' on a $200 Atom system (ask mine, it 
seems happy enough), and for a few dollars that jankey fan can be 
substituted for a nice, smooth quiet one.

With a bit of playing, Solaris 10 worked just fine too, albeit with no 
sound or onboard LAN. If I really flt inclined I could have fitted a PCI 
Gigabit NIC. In the event a 3c905 worked well enough.

I never would pretend that a minimalist PC like that will ever hold a 
candle to the sort of quality hardware Sun turn out (or turned out at 
least), but it is a remarkably good, very quiet and fast Solaris 
workstation. Like Nate says, if you are willing to read the Hardware 
Support lists on BigAdmin, and work out what works and what doesn't, 
then you *can* produce a truly decent x86/64 Solaris workstation, or if 
you pay the right price you can just Buy one, from Sun HP, Dell or IBM 
(jury is still out on the Mac Pro).

-- 

Mark Benson
http://markbenson.org/blog
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