Tag: solaris

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For no particular reason, a Sparc workstation is on it’s way

I was shopping for one of these on ebay:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARCstation_20

By Caroline Ford – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1504020

But then got caught up on the idea that an Ultra 5 with IDE disk support might be a better idea:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra_5/10

By Liftarn – https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2094130

After a lively discussion in the Facebook Vintage Unix Machines group about the pros and cons of older Sparcstations, Ultra 1 and 2, vs Ultra 5/10, I decided to shop for an Ultra 1 or 2. I made an offer on one but didn’t get it. And then I decided to go for an Ultra 60 since it was cheaper than anything else I could find, although in a unknown working condition, other than ‘it powers on’. So when it turns up it will be a learning experience to see if it’s actually in working condition or not.

I believe from photos from the ebay listing that there’s a SunPCI card in there, so that will be interesting to play with, and also the Creator 3D graphics card.

On my shopping list of needed parts:

  • a Sun Type 5 keyboard and mouse (with Sun mini DIN connector)
  • a 13W3 video to VGA adapter
  • an SCA SCSI disk
  • possible future purchase, a SCSI2SD adapter

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Installing Solaris 2.6 under QEMU

I’ve been looking at picking up a used Sun Sparcstation from eBay. It occurred to me that I’ve never installed an early version of Solaris before, so wondered if I could give it a try under QEMU since it’s emulates different hardware, including Sparc.

There’s an awesome step by step guide on Adafruit that takes you precisely each step to get Solairs installed un QEMU. You can follow the steps in their article here, so I won’t repeat all the steps here.

The key steps before you get to the install are creating a disk image:

qemu-img create -f qcow2 sparc.qcow2 9663676416

and then booting with the Solaris iso image as the cdrom and the disk image attached:

qemu-system-sparc -M SS-5 -m 128 -drive file=sparc.qcow2,bus=0,unit=0,media=disk -drive file=solaris_2.6_598_sparc.iso,bus=0,unit=2,media=cdrom,readonly=on

After this point it’s following through the steps in the install.

Here’s qemu booting up for the first time:

Here’s the Solaris installer starting up:

After the install had completed, here’s the rather impressive for it’s time CDE desktop:

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