Anyone know if there is a SATA driver for Solaris 10 x64?

/*Anyone have a full version set of SunOS or Solaris CDS for Sparc, version 7, 8, 9, or earlier?

I've got one Solaris8 cd, which gets you a basic install, but I'd like to use more of the things feature.*/

I heard you could still get 9 from Sun for free. At least that's the impression I've picked up from a few other people. I haven't used my Sun account since I grabbed 9 before they released 10.

Also, there's usually older media sets going for pennies on eBay.

Out of curiousity, any particular reason can't you use the latest and greatest? Fixing up a pre-Ultra machine?

Use Linux instead.

Its a Sparc Classic (Sun4m-50mhz). The max ram for it is 256, but thats with 2 super-rare sbus cards and a hacked motherboard. I've got 72 onboard right now, and it ran redhat 6.2 pretty well...other than ssh...other than sftp...other than x...other than ftp...other than software. I've got a full set of Solaris8 cds, but they're all from different dates-no joy.

I had linux running on it, but I'd like to learn solaris. Its pretty old (14 hours to compile jpico) I guess thats what you get with a cacheless processor. I'd rather not download a bunch of cd images on my 256k dorm connection...I've visited the 56k wasteland too many times here.

Right now I'm formatting an external 10gig drive.

Your Classic sounds a lot like my SS LX. OSIAH says they're virtually identical, too. Nice find! I thought the SBus memory cards were only useful for caching NFS operations. I'll have to investigate that a little further.

Learning Solaris is a good idea, but I don't know if I'd try it on anything less than an Ultra or Blade of some sort with a ton of memory. Otherwise, you'll end up in one of two scenarios: learning a dated version of Solaris (these things shipped with, what? 2.5? 2.6?) or struggling to keep a heavier modern version shoehorned in dated hardware. Don't get me wrong--you can rip out enough niceties from 9 or 8 that it'll work, but I doubt many enterprise-class systems would be set up the same way.

I agree with gil here, it's probably best to use something else. For a toy workstation or small-scale server, you're not going to need the processor-sucking industrial-grade power Solaris provides. The only reason I can think that you'd want to keep it purely Sun is if you wanted to use the oddball hardware (ISDN ports, SunPC cards, etc.). Net/OpenBSD have always worked quite well on these machines. Linux and Glibc support and seems to be in constant flux (it's what my LX runs presently), but it's workable if you want a hobby. But, hey, if you want to run Solaris, it's your box. I'd definitely ditch Red Hat's old SPARC offering. There's far too many security issues with something that old, not to mention the library and compiler deficiencies.

As far SSH and SFTP, did you look at recompiling your SSL packages? V8 processors (including the sun4m) have a bigger set of math-related opcodes at their disposal. Rebuilding OpenSSL to take advantage of those *dramatically* speeds things up. I can't say that it would help with much of the rest of that list, though. There's only so much you can expect from old machines.

You can get a temporary bandwidth exemption from UMR IT. You basically give them a plan of what you want to download, how it's educational, and why you can't get it from them, and they should give you a time window to pull what you need. I don't know the exact details. You'll have to e-mail one of them to find out more.

I think the LX had a better sound card (16bit) and a CG6 video card-I think Classics had an 8bit sound card and a CG3 onboard.