Solaris on a Sun Blade 150

[KB3SDS]

Here's a fun project i worked on this weekend.

Some one had given me an old Sunblade system with a locked out OS on it. I rummaged through my disks and found a copy of Solaris 10 from '06 on DVD. Found an old DVD drive i pulled from an old PIII gateway and installed the OS.

Now that it is on there i noticed it performed horridly. It runs like Windows XP on a 486DX2 and 16MB ram. The initial login screen is slow to respond, about 1.5 second delay from key stroke to display. The only interface that will load before the computer goes into sleep (more like a deep coma it wont wake up from) is the "failsafe" that gives me nothing but a console, BUT is quite responsive.

The specs:
Sparc IIi 550MHZ (i got it to run at 650)
128mb PC133
40GB Barracuda

I was thinking RAM, but i've seen these for sale with the same specs and OS on them.

Any idears? It runs like a machine with its CPU cache disabled lol.

[N0SYA]

Hi
I would say ram. 128 is not much at all for any 32bit os these days. I mean 2k, nt, 98, or some of the light linux distros would do, but I suspect 128 is barely going to get the box up and running on solaris. There are pc based firewalls that run more than 128! A pared down linux or bsd would be fun to mess with on that system, but if you can get solaris running well that'd be sweet.

[KB3SDS]

Hi
I would say ram. 128 is not much at all for any 32bit os these days. I mean 2k, nt, 98, or some of the light linux distros would do, but I suspect 128 is barely going to get the box up and running on solaris. There are pc based firewalls that run more than 128! A pared down linux or bsd would be fun to mess with on that system, but if you can get solaris running well that'd be sweet.

I could see it running sluggish, but this pretty much does not run. It slowly renders the graphics line by line down the screen.

I will try ram if i can find any that it likes. It seems to be picky.

[N0SYA]

Hmm. Have you tried another vid card or vid driver? Is the vid being rendered in software?

[KB3SDS]

Hmm. Have you tried another vid card or vid driver? Is the vid being rendered in software?

That's what it looks like, but i don't have any other that will work in there. Its an old ATI Rage chip set so i would think the OS should support it natively.

[N0SYA]

I agree. Most all os in the last ten years should have native ati drivers, zillions and brazillions of server mobos were made with the rage chip onboard. I guess the thing to do is find out how to determine if its just frame buffering to the screen or if hardware is enabled.

[W6TMI]

With 128mb and Sol10 you're trying to do any kinda graphics?



If you just want to run Sol10 try setting runlevel to 3, or whatever the non-gui runlevel is. Used to do that with /etc/inittab but Sol10 does it different.

[W9GB]

Some one had given me an old Sunblade system with a locked out OS on it.
The specs:
Sparc IIi 550MHZ (i got it to run at 650)
128mb PC133
40GB Barracuda

Sunblade 150 Specifications:
http://www.sun.com/desktop/workstation/sunblade150/

Clock Rate : 550 MHz or 650 MHz UltraSPARC IIi

Cache per processor : 512 KB L2 on-die cache

Main Memory : 2 GB maximum, error correction SDRAM with four DIMM slots, PCI33 168-pin DIMMs (256 MB and 512 MB DIMMs)

Internal disk : 80 GB, 7200-rpm Enhance IDE disk drive

Operating System : Solaris 10, Solaris 8 (5/03) and Solaris 9 (4/03) Operating System or later (Solaris 10 and Solaris 8 pre-installed)

Sun Java Desktop System : Sun Java Desktop System software pre-installed

PC Interoperability : Optional SunPCi IIIpro coprocessor card allows you to run Microsoft Windows applications at native speeds alongside Solaris Operating Environment applications.
===

1. IF you are serious in using this Sun with Solaris -- put the 2 Gb of RAM in it.
2. With only 128 Mb of memory (and modern OS) -- it likely was used as a Java workstation or dedicated processing point (assigned one task on network, like NTP).

DIMM (RAM) Installation Guide
http://dlc.sun.com/pdf/816-5370-11/816-5370-11.pdf

Sunblade 150 - Service Manual
http://dlc.sun.com/pdf/816-4379-10/816-4379-10.pdf

REVIEW of the Sunblade 150 -- When NEW (2002)
http://www.osnews.com/story/2299/Rev..._Sun_Blade_150

Overall, I feel that Solaris 9 SPARC is a great Unix; it works well and it is very stable.
But I would't recommend this machine (and especially not it's smaller models which are much slower mostly because of their even slower graphics card)
to people who want to use Solaris on an everyday basis with Gnome2.
If you are willing to use CDE instead, this machine can indeed serve you well. But with Gnome2 on it... I just can't see it flying. -- Eugenia Loli-Queru [OS News]

w9gb

[KB1JCY]

The Sun Blade 150 barely has the computing power to run Sol10 with the Java Desktop Environment. That was my main workstation for a few months when I was working at Sun and the Sun Blade 150 was really slow. Adding RAM did improve it a bit but not dramatically.

[HK2LS]

is the primary CPU doing the graphics work as well?

Maybe changing the resolution to something very low or turning off windows all togther and using it in init 3 (multi user character based)..

Years ago I was running INN for usenet news on a bunch of Sun machines and they were great with a bunch of SCSI drives with small clusters.