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This set of web pages was originally intended for the lucky AGCS employees who
purchased Sun Sparc 20 workstations in the Sun lotto. Once you get
the machine home, you will discover that it is loaded with a really
minimal version of Solaris 2.5.1. Now what? It turns out there is
a fair amount of work to be done to integrate the machine into a
home network and many of the things you have to do fall into the
catagory of arcane knowledge. I will try to talk to some of these issues
in this set of pages.
Since these pages were started in the mid 90's AGCS
was absorbed into Lucent which has since become part of Alcatel-Lucent.
besides my normal software development duties, I have inherited all the
lab servers and workstations which were "turned over to the business unit"
by the IT department. I keep them running with parts from decommissioned
routines and have a area that looks like something out of "Sanford and Sons"
for all my stuff. As a result I have spent a fair amount of time with out of
date Sun equipment. I am removing the information specific to setting up the
Sparc 20's that were sold off by the AGCS and making the notes more general.
Doing all your work logged in a root is like wandering around an oil refinerery with
a lit propane torch. Sooner or later you are going to inadvertently do something bad
to yourself. You should probably set up a separate non-root account to do most things
and then su as root to do system administration. There are several
ways to add accounts to your machine.
You will very likely want to add extra disks to your Sun. A CD ROM would
also be nice and maybe more memory or a second processor. The
Hardware page talks
about some of the issues involved in adding hardware to your Sun.
Oracle/Sun Microsystems offers a
free binary download of Solaris 10 for Sparc and x86 processors.
If you have a Sparc Ultra 2 or newer, you can run Solaris 10. Ultra 1's can only run up to Solaris 9.
Sparc 20's are tested up to Solaris 8, but you can run Solaris 9 on them.
The Solaris
The 3 CD images total about 800 Megabytes, so you had better have a cable or
DSL internet connecton available. The page also contains the option to purchase
the CD's for $75.00 + Shipping and Handling. You will need to have a
CD attached
to your Sun to perform this install.
Installing Linux on your Sun Sparc
The Aurora project in Linux generates a Sparc version of Linux. Support of the
older S-Bus technology is limited. You may have more luck with newer Sun equiptment.
The best way by far that I have found for adding free software to use pkgutil.
The pkgutil program is a replacement for the pkg-get program which is a Solaris update program loosely based on apt-get.
It loads software as .pkg files which means that the normal Solaris commands
pkgadd, pkgrm, and pkginfo work with them the same as packages from Sun.
All files are loaded into /opt/csw (bin for the binaries).
The site http://www.opencsw.org/get-it/pkgutil/
has instructions for getting pkgutil set up.
Here is a critical excerpt from the page:
Sunfreeware
The site http://www.sunfreeware.com/ has a lot of
packages for Solaris that can be downloaded separately. This works well if the pkgutil
does not have what you are looking for. These packages generally get loaded into /usr/local as opposed
to /opt/csw. Note that sunfreeware is no longer updated. Instead they try to get you to go to
UNIXPackages.com which is a pay site. If you can get by with older versions the packages, you
can still download them from sunfreeware.
This set of web pages was originally intended for the lucky AGCS employees who
purchased Sun Sparc 20 workstations in the Sun lotto. Once you get
the machine home, you will discover that it is loaded with a really
minimal version of Solaris 2.5.1. Now what? It turns out there is
a fair amount of work to be done to integrate the machine into a
home network and many of the things you have to do fall into the
catagory of arcane knowledge. I will try to talk to some of these issues
in this set of pages.