[OT] Solaris 8 like free implementation

fluca1978

fluca1978

Hi all,
I have to do things on a few old Solaris 8 workstations (ultra sparc III) that I cannot upgrade (and I don't have a Sun/Oracle support agreement). I'm looking for a Unix implementation that is as much as possible similar to Solaris 8 (it would be great if it includes also CDE or its open version) to experiment with. OpenSolaris and its descendants are too up-to-date for the job!
Any suggestion?
 
I have successfully installed FreeBSD and OpenBSD on a SunBlade 1000.
The performance was amazing as to the workload it can handle. I use "was" because I am not able to use the machines right now.
I haven't used the SVR emulation for anything- as of yet- because I had trouble building it.

An option is to use another system to create a qemu image from the hard disk. SPARC(64) emulation is iffy.
 
Thanks.
While installing another operating system is the right choice, it is not an option in my case. Doing an image out of a real disk is an option, but I don't want all the stuff the system comes in, I would like to have something to test configurations on.
However, I guess the only option right now is to clone a machine into a virtual one.
 
I have had a basic FreeBSD setup with Xfce4 running on a V880 (2x 750 Ultrasparc IIIs.)

Worked quite well provided you tweak X a little.

The real problem with FreeBSD on Sparc right now is the lack of software (like web browsers and X apps) that compile and run on Sparc platforms. But on the server side, this box + FreeBSD is amazing. Remember that 64-bit Sparc isn't like amd64, 64-bit binaries are large, use twice the RAM, take twice as long to load, and most applications don't need access to more than 3gb of RAM anyway, except maybe a massive sql database. FreeBSD on Sparc is 64-bit only, whilst Linux is mostly (with the exception of Gentoo) 32-bit with a 64-bit kernel.

Might I also add that your kernel size is limited to 8mb on some Ultrasparc III machines!
 
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