[rescue] My new UltraSparc 5's, also my first Sun stations

[velociraptor]

On 6/2/05, Mike Nicewonger <twmaster at twmaster.com> wrote:
> On Jun 2, 2005, at 12:36 PM, James Fogg wrote:
>
> >> I am using gentoo on my Sun Blade 100.  I tried a couple of
> >> other things (*BSDs, which were my first choice), but there
> >> are some little gotchas with various distros with hardware
> >> that I couldn't work around (work box, not sinking $ into it).
> >
> > If I understand Gentoo, it's 100% compiled-in-place. Compiling anything
> > on a U5 is an exercise in frustration due to the IDE disk system and
> > slowness. A lot of people dedicated to using U5/U10's install a SCSI
> > card and SCSI disk. I've heard good things about that conversion.

Yes, and no.  The initial install comes off of one of three stages,
and can be wholly or not at all compiled.

Upgrades and packages, are generally, compiled in place.  The
Sun Blade has IDE as well, and it's not what I'd call quality (some
of the problems installing other OSes are as a direct result of the
problematic DMA support on the SunBlade 100).

But, you can throttle the emerge system via it's config, to prevent
it from man-handling your interactive session.  I generally just
start it up before going home and walk away.  Like ports on Free
BSD, emerge generally "just works".

> In the case of the IDE controller in the U5/10 it should stand for
> "It's Damn Evil".

Ditto with the Blade.  If it was SCSI it'd be ever so much nicer,
even with the 128MB of RAM.

>  From personal experience a U5/10 with SCSI and >270MHz CPU is not a
> terrible machine. The cases still suck and the memory is expensive and
> odd. Still better than a Pentium <whatever> PeeCee IMHO.

Eh.  Just give me a U2 with 2 decent CPUs and a goodly quantity
of RAM.  Cheaper, and easier to find SBUS SCSI stuff.  Even now,
the difference in price to get an above average Sun PCI graphics
card vs. tossing Sun graphics, going headless  via using X on the
Mac is significant.

But yeah.   My PC is a game boxes for me these days and that's
about it.  Well, it's also the default "file store" for me at the moment,
too.   I have held off on migrating anything to the G4 I recently
picked up cheap until my copy of Tiger arrives.  The 80 GB in the
Powerbook just can't handle everything. :-)

=Nadine=