More on the Ultra 2

It looks like the Ultra 2 is going to be an ongoing project. I may run a dual-boot system with Solaris and Linux on it, but I think I might revert to Solaris 8 in hopes the performance is slightly better on my low memory.

At the moment a broken version of Debian Woody is installed on the hard drives. (4% and 1% use on the 9.1GB drives - pretty slim!) I downloaded Gentoo, and while I found it a pain to install on my notebook, which is really my lifeblood of computer systems, I have the time to play with it on the Ultra, and I like the idea of rolling my own custom kernels on this unusual box. My only concern is what will happen when I add a second processor; I'm guessing it'll just be a simple matter of a recompile - no big deal.

I have to say that I am really impressed with what Gentoo looks like on the console of this box. I don't think I've seen prettier console colours since my days of running a Bulletin Board System. Another cool aspect of the Gentoo minimal live CD is that it seems to have detected the onboard sound AND the Sun Turbo GX card, which I had looked up in preparation for a more difficult install. And while Gentoo will probably be a lot more reading than a Debian install, I expect the result will be a much nicer system, better tuned to my resources.

I've decided to use the Ultra 2 to serve up a simple web site, and to learn Python on. At some point I want to start developing games using the pygame library. The pygame web site shows a lot of pretty cool looking games - look out Roberta Williams! This latest bout of programming euphoria brought about by the book Masters of Doom which documents id's rise to the top of the shareware, and retail gaming world.

Well, it's 5am, so I'm not adding any links - I really need sleep, big day ahead at 7:30!

Updates and Sun Ultra Enterprise 2 active

I took a Geek test today and fared slightly above average. I knew one of the l33t questions, but I couldn't even be bothered to google the ROT question.




And a quick note that I finally got a hard drive for my Sun Ultra 2 Enterprise, a 9.1GB SCSI drive. I put Solaris 9 on it last night - a very long install. More later this evening.