# [OT] Solaris 8 like free implementation



## fluca1978 (Jan 30, 2013)

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?


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## sossego (Jan 31, 2013)

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.


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## fluca1978 (Feb 1, 2013)

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.


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## nbittech (Feb 4, 2013)

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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