Exploring Sun Solaris 7 for SPARC
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- čas přidán 19. 06. 2024
- Today, we're exploring Sun Solaris 7 for SPARC on an emulated SPARCStation 5. Solaris is an operating system with a very interesting history to say the least, and many of the innovations that we find today in modern Linux can, or was at least inspired by from Solaris. Sun Microsystems, as a whole, was a massive influence on the UNIX and UNIX-like ecosystem through the 90s, and remained a relevant player right up until it's purchase by Oracle in 20100.
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Blog: casadevall.pro
VirtuallyFun Article on Sun disk partitioning: virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/20...
TGCWare: jupiterrise.com/tgcware/tgcwa...
In this "NCommander's Season of Suffering", I unbox Sun Solaris, struggle with QEMU for awhile, then run through the original installation process before trying the very quirky web start installer, which involves installing an operating system with a Java Applet. Yes, an applet, you heard that correctly. After running both installers, we logged into the system for the first time, explored the strange history of Solaris's /export/home folder, with a brief interlude at NIS
After which, it was time to dive into the two other CDs, which were Sun Workshop 5, which I couldn't properly install due to DRM. That isn't that big of a loss, since it gave me an excuse to futz with GCC, get lost in a rathole, compile NetHack, and then carry of.
After coming back to air, I took a quick dive into Solaris SyMON, which was a system monitoring tool which def. left a bit more to be desired. After feeling the true disappointment, I continued on my journey through the Solaris system, making stops with XFrame for UNIX, as well as WordPerfect for UNIX. Finally, after a long discussion about Solaris as a platform, I discuss illumos, before suddenly springing Internet Explorer for Unix on you all! And yes, that was a threat to bring that back with Unity.
Chapter Marks:
00:00 - Intro
00:58 - Unboxing Solaris 7 and Machine Setup
02:50 - Networking and Hard Drive Problems
06:00 - Solaris Interactive Installer
08:14 - Installing Solaris with a Java Applet (Web Start)
10:45 - First login
12:20 - Explaining /export/home, NIS, and NFS
15:15 - Sun Workshop 5, tgcware, and GCC
18:45 - SyMON
20:45 - Solaris as Platform
22:50 - Closing Thoughts
Music Provided By Epidemic Sound:
- Deviation In Time - Johannes Bornlof
- Diamonds in the Sky - Yi Nantiro
- Puzzle Of Complexity - Jo Wandrini
- Incomplete - Gavin Luke
- Broken Pieces - Gavin Luke
- Progressive Progress - Howard Harper-Barnes
- In the Aftermath - Michael Rothery
- Valiant - Dream Cave
- Night City Movement - Farrell Wooten
- Prescient - Howard Harper-Barnes
- All That You Will Be - Gavin Luke
#Sun #Solaris #SPARC - Věda a technologie
"wrong magic number" geez now I feel better about my errors
Solaris requires you to be able to re-insert the magic smoke :)
@@NCommander Now that's a great comment!
Haven’t seen that error in ages!
Sun folded because it was entirely employed by warlocks and that's just not a tenable business model. I mean, once we figured out how to format a partition without goat blood, it was pretty much over.
It's magic, Joel!
There's just something magical and mysterious about "old" Unix operating systems. I've always had a soft spot for Solaris, AIX, IRIX, etc.
I definitely agree, I found these Unix systems really fascinating. Shame Linux kinda killed most of these lol.
I know what you mean, booted up PDP11 BSD and was impressed at how clean it was compared to what we have today, or even had on linux/minix from the late 90's. Even Plan9, which I love btw, even feels a little off comparatively.
Hats off to Kernighan and Ritchie the two who developed Unix OS as way back as 60s. Simply outstanding
@@sappudusappudu4329 Kernighan was involved, absolutely, but it was Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson who actually made Unix. Kernighan wrote an outstanding little book about it: "UNIX, History and a Memoir" it's called.
@@willemvdk4886 Thanks for the info and I believe Ritchie is still a visiting professor at the Princeton Univ
Ha! This was awesome to watch. I used to administer Solaris boxes around 1999-2001 and it kind of drove me mad. I remember wonder why the hell everything was stuck in the /export directory. (We did do any of the NIS/NFS stuff as these were only as servers.)
Obviously Solaris expected you to ship your data off; that's why it was in /export ;)
Adrian you ole stinkbutt, I was just thinking about you as I watched the Habs-Lightening game!
I think CDE was even more infuriating than the OS itself. :)
I started my IT career as a Solaris admin (well, actually my first real task was to upgrade our department from SunOS 4.1.4 to Solaris). This brings back so many memories. Glad to see that The vaunted Adrian Black have something in common. 😆
20 years ago I was in my early 20s and surprised how 40yo IT guys were just literally stuck to windows environment. LOL!! They had quite many reasons to do so. 🤣🤣🤣
I’ve had to set up this emulation for a company running it in production!! They have only SPARC binaries of some important backend processes. And it runs a lot faster through emulation on newer processors so you can imagine how slow HotJava was back then.
They called it HotJava but by the time it started all you had was cold!
I wonder if WASM will show Sun was just too early yet again.
Still have warm memories about Solaris. I LOVED my Sunfire. It kept my living room warm for many Winters and it made a fantastic sidetable
I mean, it’s in the name.
I used a SPARCstation IPX as a home router which doubled as a monitor stand for YEARS and loved every minute of it.
@@livefreeprintguns stuff you don't get with modern hardware any more. I wonder how much of that vintage hardware sits in living rooms as furniture these days.
We viewers of a particularly sadistic bent enjoy watching you do this kind of software necromancy. I can’t wait for that IE for Unix video, it promises glorious suffering.
"viewers of a particularly sadistic bent enjoy watching you do this kind of software necromancy"
CZcams success is giving my viewers exactly what they want :)
@@NCommander Software necrophiles forget that plastic cases degrade, and power circuits burn out. It is better to release the QEMU version of the hardware before the hardware itself comes out .... Well, according to the specification, you can re-release the hardware on FPGA.
@@NCommander I have a awful challenge for you..... Run doom eternal on Solaris or some other Unix (like hp-ux)....
So things to do: 1get steam running
2 enable proton and find a way to install the actual game (that will be a challenge because some of the files are bigger than 2 GB)
I was admin for over 100 Sparcs clients handing Medical Imaging storage retrieval 10 years from the late 90's until they were replaced by windows boxes. Ah, the memories !
Thanks !
Quite a downgrade :(
First learned Unix in 1999.
Managed a Software Lab for Tandem, Unix and Operations Manger for GST/ Time Warner Telcom, Senior Data Analyst for Nike.
From Sun OS to Solaris, HP/UX, TNIX, IRIX, BSD, ATT, SVR4, many other flavors of the 'Nix.
Loved my Sun Workstation, SGI Indigo. Best of the best...
When I first got a Sun Workstation on my desk I knew I had made it!
Geek from birth...
I worked in IT for a company in the early 2000s that was a major Sun/Solaris shop. One of network guys would set up some Linux servers to do some one off things that didnt warrant an expensive Sun server. The Solaris admins would say Linux would never take off...
dude, i'm Sun's fan...tell me everything! btw i would love to had Sun OS at home as now enjoy have a MacOS...omg I still thinking Libre Office(heir of Sun Office) is better than Ms Office! and omg Java is my love!
And then Solaris10 was released... firstly for free, then for subscription plan, then guys started asking what solaris was like... LOL. Well I can't refuse it was good for offline long running installation, but Web2++ quickly pushed it out of the internet and small enterprises.
I can't tell you how many times in my career I heard things like that from all the old UNIX dinosaurs...
@@livefreeprintguns To be fair, back then things werent as good as they are today. For example, we bought a Dell server certified to run Red Hat. However, we couldnt get something to work right on the the SCSI controller. We called Dell, who said that is Red Hat's problem, as they certified it. We called Red Hat, who said it was Adaptec's problem, as it was a driver problem. We called Adaptec, they said it was Dell's problem, as they dont support that feature under Linux. We ended up getting them all on the phone in a conference call and got nowhere. In the end, when we threatened to just return the servers, Dell decided to just send us different SCSI cards, that did support the feature, rather than lose the sale.
A Sun Ultra 5 running Solaris 7 was my daily driver at work for a couple of years. It had a SunPCi card, basically a full x86 PC on a card, to allow running Windows. I had a separate monitor hooked to the SunPCi card but it could also use an X window as the "display" for the card.
oh man, I'd love to show one of those off on camera
Yep! My Solaris 9 on the Ultra 10 with dualhead Creator 3D cards and SunPCI had the same thing. I loved the X window version that allowed me to see Windows 2000 inside Solaris lol! Too bad I sold my system shortly after! I had even figured out how to dualhead my system with CDE!
Have a fully configurated sun v890 with sunpci working, also managed to boot the sun from a brand new ssd
I have a bunch of those cards, versions 1-3. I should throw some on ebay.
Loved mine!
Solaris 7 was the first version of a "real" UNIX I came in contact with somewhen around 1995, and essentially the start of my career as a sysadmin. Sun handed out free copies of it at the Munich "Systems" trade show and I grabbed one for curiosity. (I had only dabbled a bit with pre-1.0 linux before that). Not much later I managed to find a student job as Solaris admin, and with the help of that company and my university started my sizable collection of Sun hardware. Now, more than 20 years later, I'm still reigning over a few dozen leftover Solaris machines, while Linux has become my main topic. It's a shame what Oracle did to that legacy.
NFS, NIS are simply fantastic. To get things setup initially some knowledge is needed but one setup auto mount and NFS was world breaking in the early 90’s we had it all working super smooth not just for sun machines but HP, IBM, Dec alpha and even Convex super computers. You could login ANYWHERE and you have all your files and all the shared software folder like /Usr/local/bin. Also all without central file servers. My home folder was on my workstation in /export/home and that auto mounted to every other Unix (and Linux) machine. On my own workstation it was also super fast as it simply mounted via the loop back device to the disk on my machine.
Yep, exactly my experience. It was awesome.
Not same good experience here, but I my clients where NIS+ on OpenStep on Next hardware...maybe that was the problem (ah, OpenStep on Sun, that was something!)
I remember when at Sun it came down the Solaris 2.7 would be renamed Solaris 7. It was late in the dev cycle and all the docs, at least from what I could see at SunSoft were all 2.7 all the time.
if you look closely, you can see quite a few places in the installer where it still says Solaris 2.7.
Thank you for this Video. I administer Solaris OS since 2001. Currently on 28 physical systems (T5,T7,T8,M7 and M8 and Oracle Superlcusters M7) with 428 virtual machines (LDoms) and about 100 Solaris Containers. I love Solaris as its one of the the best Unixes. I also like Linux systems too but when its about storage handling and cluster topics Linux is still a pain. Old fashion admins still recognize the A1000 Display and my profile picture.
i worked for Sun in the mid 2000s (when it was already going downhill) and the "mobile user" with your home dir being mounted over nfs worked flawlessly in my experience. we had it setup both at work (of course) but also in university where Sun sponsored a few computer labs back when i was a student there. and yeah, people really used it there, and it was great. regardless of which station you set at in the lab, your settings and home dir were always there. but by the time i started working for Sun full time every dev was just given a laptop and mine had Red Hat linux on it i think... so yeah - it worked, although nobody really used it :)
Nice!
Glad I stumbled on this. Solaris was so great to use when I was in college, and so confusing to maintain when I left.
Corrections:
It *is* possible to delete to the /export/home partition in the installer, although the behavior is non-initivative, you have to delete the line and the size, and then click on something else, and then the partition system will accept the part is gone. It's weird though ...
boss, 6:32 the "segway" subtitle is supposed to be spelled "segue"
segway is the thing your uncle drives in between office with a helmet in 2007
My desktop machine was a SparcStation 5 for many years - I think I finally upgraded and gave the machine away in 2007! By that time it was running NetBSD rather than Solaris, and compiling a new release of Firefox was an overnight job.
As for the Microsoft influence in the UI, that's because the look and feel of the Motif toolkit was developed by a group of companies including Microsoft. What MS learned from that project was applied to the look and feel of Windows 95 / NT 4.0.
I knew Microsoft specifically drafted parts of Motif, but the wizard design guidelines came years after Motif was a thing. Motif didn't have a "human interface guidelines" equivelent, so this was more Sun cribbing off Microsoft's notes.
@@NCommander There was a style guide for Motif, later expanded to encompass CDE. I had a copy of it back in the 1990s, as well as Sun's style guides for OpenLook (I still have the latter on my bookshelf along with the entire O'Reilly X Window programming series). The "wizard" concept may have novel on PCs, but similar interfaces had existed for years on other platforms such as MacOS.
@@chriswareham I'd have to dig into the Apple HIG, but I don't really remember Wizard style being a thing until after Microsoft popularized it.
I suppose the point I'm trying to make is that feels very strange on Solaris because it feels out of place. THere's no other area that uses the wizard UI like this.
Oh, yeah, they taught us Unix for dealing with Solaris systems when I was in the military. Absolutely ancient framework for some of the systems in my old career field. Forgot all about it but that was in 2014.
Symon was a good tool for administration of Enterprise servers where you could look at the boards and see failed components and disable them.
You can't expect it to work for emulated hardware.
The ugly part is something that an admin just have to get used to.
Love it since I’ve never seen Solaris before so it’s a great educational piece.
Thank you kindly. I didn't know how well Solaris would go over, but the reception on the whole seems pretty solid.
@@NCommander now I have some idea of where modern Linux and Mac get their underpinnings (UNIX)
@@WXLM-MorganNicole619 the history of early BSD is fascinating too!
@@kaitlyn__L while I necessarily don’t have the money or the hardware and software to get into these older systems and really learn them on a deeper level. Having videos like this one to at least give a history is a brilliant thing. I’d love to see a history on BSD as you just mentioned
@@WXLM-MorganNicole619 there’s a book written back in the early 90s called “The Cuckoo’s Egg”, it’s not really About BSD per se but includes a bunch of period experiences with using it, getting frustrated with remoting into more standard AT&T Unix installs, and more. If you read books you might enjoy it (what it’s actually about is the first digital honeypot to catch an East German spy).
Your videos make me feel nostalgic. Thank You.
Love the CDE pink. A nice monospace font choice in the terminal too.
Same here! I installed a Solaris CDE GTK theme. ^w^
You say "Cue - mm" and I've always heard my fellow Red Hatter pronounce it as "Queue Ee Em You" (or spelling it out) as I had also prior to joining.
wow, this brought back memories - Thank you
This is just a reminder of what a big change Linux brought into the proprietary UNIX space of the old days, both in terms of usability and features. I remember tinkering with Solaris 7 to 10 (and OpenSolaris in the end) and the more it added typical Linux interfaces and tools, the more user-friendly and actually usable it became. Great videos to go down memory lane :) !
"quum" is such a wonderful contraction for the Quick Emulator.
No. It sounds like a tropical fruit that gives you insta'rrhea.
I always pronounced it queue-emu. btw is there a pronunciation preferred by the authors?
@@gkcadadr There seems to be no definitive pronunciation, but a mailing list entry from 2006 mentions either that or "kwemu".
Key-mu? 🤣
Oh gods... I'm 2:30 into the video and it's already driving me up the wall. Make it stop!
Ah brings back memories from when I used to work for SUN testing disk arrays and servers. Sadly the boxes we were lumbered with on the shop floor for our day to day work (e-mail, SFE etc.) were so decrepit we had to make do with Openwin rather than CDE (and they even struggled with that at times).
Got version 9 running on Intel at home but its hellishly picky about what components it will play nice with, especially GPUs.
Nice trip down memory lane. I was a system administrator for SCO from 1996-2001. CDE was the default GUI for Unixware 2.1. It was also an optional GUI for Openserver 7. I thought it was a fantastic desktop environment at the time.
Ah yes, memories. Had several Sun Workstations some 10 years ago (SparkServer5, SparkStation5, Ultra1 and Ultra2). For what it was Solaris 7 was my favorite and OpenWindows my preferred desktop user interface. However I did use CDE on some of the more capable machines like the Ultra series. Great video.
Nice video! I love Solaris, and Sun systems in general. I've been messing around with my Ultra 5 lately with Solaris 8, and I just got two SunFire V100s a few days ago that I haven't yet been able to work on. Sun rules!
Hell yes, Solaris!
Oh god no! :)
fond memories - I remember having a SPARCstation 5 on my desk at work back in the day. Really enjoyed working with Solaris for many years from basic systems like the SPARCstations to giant E25Ks. I was also quite fond of the old HP-UX hardware before Itanium. The Itanic boxes were ok but it was clear even then that HP-UX was on the way out. Sad that Solaris has effectively been killed by Oracle.
why is the music so unfathomably epic while he's just unboxing an old operating system I'm fucking crying
I'd use the Rocky theme if content id wouldn't hate me :)
I had forgotten the days when it seemed like a good idea to have every home directory be a remote mount so you could work on lots of different machines around the building without constantly copying things through the network. Then we figured out that a centralized source control system on the network was all we really needed.
yeah...and you didn't have to compile on a NFS share which kept locking...oh the days of NIS / NFS...joy.
@@andyhall7032 You know what made that a real pain back then? System V R3 had the Big Kernel Lock which meant whenever the kernel was in a driver, every other CPU was locked out of the kernel. When everyone was using NFS the kernel spent *a lot* of time in the network driver which made our expensive four processor system as slow as a one processor system during builds.
@@scottlarson1548 wow...I was working with solaris 2.6 which was SVR4...I was using 6502 microcomputers when SVR3 was around !!
@@andyhall7032 There was an article written by some of the Solaris engineers a while back and apparently Solaris had that same Big Kernel Lock for what was apparently an embarrassingly long time.
Love it, thank you!
Oh that much amount of printed documentation is the opposite of underwhelming for me! Really exciting. Anyway, an amazing video. Lots of useful information for computing history and emulation enthusiasts. Just discovered the channel and I'm definitely subscribing.
If that amount printed documentation impresses you, that means you are from maybe the 1990s or later, then?
/me muses fondly about the VMS “orange wall” of 3-ring binders ...
Loved this video
Really interesting video about solaris 👍
I found NIS, NFS and Automount worked fantastically well on a distributed workstation network. My end users could literally login to any machine and get their home directory, apps and data presented in exactly the same way. When I first saw it working as a young sysadmin I found it to be a revelation. It's still great and I wish more end user computing and server platforms worked this way. For me running Solaris was a joy, provided you installed the open source repo from Blastwave, which gave you all the freeware tools you wished Solaris had out of the box.
Also, we had an Intel Solaris box running the NMR spectrometer in the lab I worked in during graduate school. I have a kind of fondness for Solaris as a result.
Heh, I used to work in a chemistry department and there was a myriad of weird hardware, first time I'd ever seen SGI machines in actual use (I had an Octane at home but didn't really use it for anything) and tons of Sun gear. This was around 2008 but I recall a lab getting a "new" Mac Quadra (?) with a whooping 128 Mb of RAM to run another piece of equipment. Those were the days 😅
This is a huge help for my newly acquired Ultra 5 and Ultra 10! Thanks for making the detailed video! At some point do you plan on uploading the software CDs to the Internet Archive?
This invoked fond memories of Ultra 1 desktop at my first ISP job, and hatred of overcomplicated Solaris environment.
The memories. I had a brand spanking new Sparcstation 10 on my desk on my first day of work back in the day then proceeded to empty a piping hout cup of coffee into the keyboard which the machine was not happy about. The sun tech came out and replaced the keyboard no questions asked.
I worked for a Japanese company in 1996. We had several Sun X terminals that developers used to connect to a Sparc Ultra 5 that was running Solaris 2.6 or 2.7 in Japanese and English. It was a good environment for doing X and Motif software development (including Tcl and Tk). We had all the Solaris manuals and the developer documentation installed on the system was very good. We would use the X terminals to login to the server. I loved seeing the login screen and the CDE and OpenWindows desktops again.
Cool!!!! I love old unix systems and hardware!!!
As a former Solaris servers admin I literally screamed at the screen “don’t choose DNS man!” 😅😅
This brings back great memories.. i used to work with Solaris and sparc for over 18yrs.. at my last project I upgraded our DB Rac running on M5000s and Sol10 over to T7-1s and Sol11. Solaris 11 is awesome if anyone gets the chance to work with it. Now Im at an all Windows and Linux shop running on Vmware.
Great that you're interested in learning about this stuff even though you don't work with it for your job. Enjoy reliving the early days of my career. All Linux on x86 since 2005 for me. I liked Solaris because, like Linux, all the configuration was just done in text files, AIX and HP/UX used annoying configuration databases. For future reference and not to be pedantic, but /etc is pronounced et-see. I've always heard qemu as cue-em-you.
Solaris always fascinated me when I started out in IT 20 years ago. Still have my original boxes of Solaris 9 and 10 proudly displayed on the shelf. I also have the official media kit for the Sun Java Desktop system 2003 which was Suns attempt to one-up compiz, back when translucent and wobbly windows were all the rage. Sun was a wild company, it’s a shame they’re no longer around…IT was way more interesting in those days. Now get off my lawn 😂
your videos are great!
My company still uses Solaris for legacy apps, so I picked up a Sun T4-1 server for personal use at home. When I finally got around to powering it up, it sounded like a jet engine in my apartment - what a beast!
I always had a fascination with Solaris, but that was quickly squashed when I finally acquired a SPARCstation 5 and a copy of OpenSolaris and promptly went back to running OpenBSD on it lol.
I went through several month contracts at companies on SunOS 4 and Solaris and HPUX with a remote home in the 90s sometimes staying logged in for the duration. You overstate the problems.
"Qume"Q-EMUlator, "sime-links"symbolic links. Note: Qume was a printer manufacturer.
YAST.. wow that's a blast from the past.
Ahhh SparcStations - takes me back to my Uni days. You had to get your karma high enough with the campus sys admins in order to be allowed free access to the labs with the Sun kit in. Until then you had to pleb it with the humanities students in the general use Wintel rooms. Happier times :/
A badge of honor even in business.
When got a Sun Workstation on your desk it was eponymous.
Nice video
Really Love this, have multiple Sparc servers at my homelab, but also bunch of x86 SUNs.
My best is the V890 with Sunpci and 8 sparcs,
One of my NAS is zfs on sparc with a sun t5120 equipped with sun flash array as cache.
What I really would like to do is render something sparc based like those days with toy story 1.
I have a huge collection of sparc bassed applications, downloaded most before Oracle came to kill it al. If you need anything specific i can search.
all these gcc, NIS/NIS+, localhost issues and many more was what I enjoyed about this Solaris. I have long since thrown my copies of Solaris 6/7/8 and 9 away but I am sure it came with another CD as well as sunsolve CD
Great Video! Need to see more of that Internet Explorer goodness...wait IE isn't good...maybe it was back then.
back then (at it's release) it was a reskinned Mosaic. a decade later, IE6 became famous for being out of date. it was never that good...
Back in 2006 I've setup an Apple Xserve running MacOS X Server; all went well obviously for MacOS X clients but when it came to the 2 Sun workstations the customer had in the LAN I resorted to that NFS share which provided speedy home dir access but with fairly poor permissions and group management; even that was better than smb share for the windows pc in that LAN
I love Solaris boxes.
I was running them in the early 2000s. But hell when something broke and happen offend enough.
I used to administer a Solaris lab and network at a university...fun times. The NIS config files were dozens of megabytes in size, very annoying to work with with thousands of users. We had a giant script to edit all of them and create home directories etc.
Fun fact, NIS commands all start with yp (ypcat, ypwhich, etc) which meant yellow pages. NIS was originally called "sun yellow pages"
I still have a SPARCSTATION 20 with Solaris 8. In its day it was a very stable machine and I used it to stream international radio into my home. Good memories, but I eventually moved to Linux on PC.
This video was so interesting, you could do some videos exploring Nextstep and first versions of MacOS ?
16:17 I'm not really an UNIX expert, and I am curious about what happened with HP's compilers.
Excellent
We used Solaris in the late 90's when I worked for a major auto OEM. We had it running custom / highly proprietary cataloging software and it was worth every penny extra Sun charged us. But the love/hate relation I had with Solaris outside of work let me to falling in love with RH around RH 7. It was so much cheaper and better.
I thought George Clooney did a good job but the Soviet original was amazing. Oh, and this takes me way back to getting a friend's older brother to burn a copy of Solaris 8 for x86 because he could download it with the University of Alberta's bandwidth when I was stuck at home with 33.6. Later I bought a SparcStation 20 with 2 x 90 Mhz CPUs, I don't remember if I ever ran Solaris but I recall heating my room with building gentoo stage 1 and then later messing around with OpenBSD on the thing.
Well, they clearly stated they had a sun inside :)
Heck yes Gentoo and OpenBSD
hardcore setting up bind for the bootstrap...could you not use a hosts file ? or did solaris not have that concept ?
I found the Sparcstation 5 firmware image, and it can be used in QEMU by invoking -bios [Path to where you put the file] in the commandline starting up QEMU.
Update: About the Solaris Web Start application: in my current experience, it will only start up if you use the default OpenBIOS firmware to boot with, not the Sun ROM.
In the early '90s I was highly-envious of the software engineers in the adjacent room who all had a new Sparcstation 5 and their own dedicated unix administrator, while in our mechanical design group we used DOS on cheap '486 PCs. But at least we had access to company-maintained network storage using NFS and our setup was cheap, reliable and efficient. But eventually I knew we had to upgrade since the boss was getting embarrassed when visitors came by. So when NT 3.51 came out I wandered over and asked the unix admin for his opinion. He cursed and said he 'hated everything Microsoft made'. So, based on that recommendation I ordered a new cutting edge Pentium Pro 150 with NT, which of course was a game changer. But, in later years I still was fascinated by mystique of the unix workstations and so collected six, which I still own, including two from my employer. The look on the head accountant's face when he realised how rapidly these things depreciated was priceless! I keep them all functional and maintained as collectables. The Suns run Solaris 2.5.1 (IPC and SSClassic) and 2.7 (the Ultra 1).
Yes Solaris all the way. Never disappoint.
im sure someone's already mentioned this but CodeWarrior IDE also used FlexLM. I immediately recognized it from there, as someone who owns a Nintendo NDEV system.
Ive worked with solaris on a sun 6500 enterprise server, it was high end stuff in those days ;-)
From the Web Start installer, you can open a terminal, and then start a web browser, from which you can then browse on "questionable" websites while you are installing Solaris at work... I have heard.
We used Solaris back at university (late 90s). Good times.
In hindsight I regret that I dismissed CDE so quickly due to a stupid misunderstanding. Because of that CGA colour scheme I always assumed it must be about twenty years old. Only much later did I learn that the Unix wars weren't in the distant past at that time.
While we used Solaris and AIX in class, for our personal computers we were all switching to Linux from whatever we were using before (OS/2 and Amiga, mostly), so while we were using Unix (and alike) throughout, its history didn't really come up.
I'd love to see more about CDE, both from a user's and a developer's perspective.
I have been running Solaris since SunOS 4. Have an unopened, sealed Solaris 1 box as well. Many sparcs. I kind of understood that Solaris had it's requirements on the network so I always let the installer (I ran it in console, never the graphical installer (or net install) do as little as possible and do the manual labor later (/etc/nsswitch.conf for dns, defaultrouter, etc etc). But, for me, this video was more about to see motiff and all these old stuff. Personally, I never liked Solaris 7. Of the 64bit versions, I preferred Solaris 2.6 (well, patched), 8 and 10. Fun to watch!
I used to run a network of some 200 Solaris workstations, in the 2003 timeframe. We followed the Sun practices around using NFS and NIS. With a very robust network and highly skilled network administrators, it very very rarely had a problem. We even integrated AIX and Tru64 boxen into the NIS/NFS infrastructure.
However, if the network is at all glitch-prone, you're screwed.
My workstation at my desk at that job was a Blade 100 running Solaris 8, which was much worse than the Blade 2000s and Ultra 60s that most users had. But, I had a QFE to connect me to multiple VLANs.
We also had SunPCi cards in all the workstations, all of the workstations were triple-monitor (2 for Solaris, 1 for Windows XP on SunPCi) with many being stereoscopic displays, and everyone had fibre channel HBAs in their workstations as well. Quite a mindblowingly good setup at the time.
8:15 Oh god, installing an operating system through a web browser running a Java applet? That sounds like a joke somebody would make about Windows 11... Some nightmares never change, I guess.
Is there any image editing and 3D software for this?
If I virtualize Ubuntu with VirtualBox or VMWare, is it possible to do the same procedure?
How did you manage to get the "un-stretched" image from QEMU?
You ever have plans to do a video on VMS or OpenVMS on Alpha hardware ?
The thing about openwindows/openlook was that it was initially made for NeWS which was a competitor to X10/X11.
It was alot more powerful than X but slower than hell. For a while it had a compatibility layer for X10 then X11 but it had issues and NeWS was dropped in favor of X11 around the mid 90s due to how popular x11 is.
I do kinda want to look at NeWS, if only to document that mess myself, but it's easier said than done. I know TME can emulate the Sun 3 systems, but I'll have to figure out the specifics to get NeWS working.
@@NCommander I believe that there is a project that brings OpenWindows and NeWS to Solaris 10...
Solaris on SPARC had been the primary platform for ORACLE RDBMS until 9i/10g when they started to favour their super secured RedHat Linux. ORACLE DB architectures on MS Windows OS always had been a "pain in the ass". In the last days of Sun, Fujitsu only manufactured their own SPARC CPUs and Servers.
Also been reading some of the comments. I guess all the people that really knew how to drive these things are now pushing up daisies or something. NFS did not deadlock if the network went away only the mount that could not be reached and if you used soft rather than hard mounts they could be removed. Adding uses was simply done putting a line in /etc/passed and /etc/shadow. These thing taught you how stuff really worked and not what GUI button to press in your admin tool.
Please, please, please try to run Oracle on it. That'd be the ultimate "the circle is now complete". Please.
I feel like this would be an WR any% DMCA takedown :P
Larry disapproves.
@@NCommander what?
@@NCommander why would it get taken down?
🤣🤣🤣😜
I really want to own one of those later sparc systems. Multi sparc processors, 4gb of ram.
i installed this on qemu too, setting up the hard drive's sectors and stuff was a major pain in the ass
I used to purposely use Solaris over Windows because it was the closest thing to Mac without having a Mac. I had a friend who worked there and was really into how Sun used solar type names for everything. SunSpots, Solaris, SunQuentin as their HQ looked like San Quentin Prison.
I remember my first unix was sunOS 1.4, not even solaris yet !
@NCommander what are your thoughts on OpenSolaris? Thanks for all your videos and the pains you go through just for our entertainment.
Was shaping to be a real contender to Linux and NT due to ZFS/DTrace, and then Oracle happened.
Illumos still exists, but a good chunk of its corporate support recently switched to Linux.
@@NCommander I think the reality is that Pony Tail boy happened and Sun had to bail to Oracle.
My copy was free from Sun, plus I got a t-shirt with it as well.
Is there not a step required to create a hard disc image before installing the OS? Did I miss this bit in trying to follow the process?
qemu-img is needed to make a HDD which can be attached with the command line. I may not have explicately shown that.
SOONER, YES
Has anyone gotten their hands on Sun Microsystems' Project Looking Glass? That would be cool to look at in high resolution video.
Any chance you could share that old sun logo wallpaper?
I am using Solaris 11.3 x86, its gnome desktop is great, n convenient.
If it provides updates (not upgrade) version, I am happy to purchase, I love this version.
I used Solaris as early as version 2.4 x86
Why not use free software instead?