On Opensolaris 2009.06 SPARC

Thu, June 18, 2009 - 10:39 AM PST

There was a day where the release of Opensolaris (I mean the Project Indiana stuff - not just SXCE) for SPARC would have gotten me downright excited - sadly, that day would have been about 5 years ago. Oh well. I'm still interested in it nonetheless. Anyways, it's out now, and I was considering just now installing it onto my Ultra80 this weekend - which although about 10 years old now, is still more than a usable workstation.

A coworker, who coincidentally is about 5 years younger than me, has a Sun Blade 2500 that he loves to toy with similarly to how I used to be with my u80. He recently took it upon himself to install Opensolaris on it - and didn't have the best of experiences. He tracked it down to some trouble with the version of openfirmware he's got and more or less came to a standstill. That sucked. I didn't quite pay attention to the crap that he was going through to get the install to work though - but after looking at the site this morning, I'm nothing short of bewildered by Sun. Get this - to install Opensolaris 2009.06 onto a Sparc system, you first have to download the x86 release and use that on a supported piece of hardware to start the installation on a Sparc. That process then involves netbooting the Sparc.

So you're telling me that my Sun system - which has a DVD drive as well a CD burner in it along with USB and Firewire - not only has to be booted via the network (which by itself is fine, though sometimes a little painful) but that I have to use an x86 box also booted into Opensolaris to do it? Are you kidding me? I don't have an x86 system with an optical drive, but I do have a half-dozen Sparcs. I guess I'm out of luck without borrowing a laptop or dragging the machine somewhere else.

On one hand, it's impressive that it's even supported to install onto a system that's end-of-life. But on the other, this is Solaris on Sparc and it doesn't "just work"? Oh, how the mighty have fallen...