Peter A wrote:
Jason,
5 will run solaris 10 with a few initial issues. You may have to install 8 or 9 first and then do a firmware upgrade to get 10 to boot for installation. Also, 512MB max will restrict you in what you can do. ZfS boot is possible but slow and in general use, you want to reduce the size of zfs caches. Finally, depending on the graphics card, you may not be able to get a graphical login. But since you said your son wants to do cli f and knows all the commands already, that wouldn't be such a big issue.
indeed, since it has one slow IDE disk and 512MB max, I would likely just format it as one big UFS root, and a gig or two of swap/tmpfs ... I would not use ZFS on that machine.
If you do go the scsi controller route, and get two scsi disks, make one /export
OH, and I just remembered. the Ultra 10 uses the same memory board, but has a little more room in the chassis, and supports 4 x 256MB tall dimms of the right type, for 1GB. you can get away with this in hte U5 by hacking a bit on the inside. catch is, the low profile 256MB modules that fit the U5 are kinda expensive, http://www.memoryxsun.com/mx7039al.html (2 of these kits). oh, same vendor cheaper on ebay: http://cgi.ebay.com/NEW-512MB-2x256MB-Sun-Ultra-5-10-low-profile-X7039A-L_W0...
these tall ones will require a bit of kit bashing to fit, http://cgi.ebay.com/Sun-Ultra-10-Memory-1GB-4x256MB-50NS-X7039A_W0QQitemZ400...
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