Sparcs

[ShockingAlberto]

I've been having a look at some of the Sun hardware on Ebay, and it's mouth watering stuff. There's Sparcs at ~£100, and Ultras at less than 200. However, if i was to buy a Sun box, there would be a few things i'd have to use it for, and since i haven't seen any Solaris newbie guide, i thought i'd ask here:
Can you network Solaris boxen up with other OS boxen? I know you cna compile in the stuff to the Linux kernel, but what about Windows if i wanted to play games?
Could i plug a cable modem(ntl type one) into the Sun network cards, and have it working properly?
Would medium spec sparc(~60mhz?) be able to run as a router/firewall, and still be able to handle other tasks such as IRC and X?
What is Solaris like for software compatability? IE could i run my favourite X programs like XChat/Xmms/Gimp on one?
Would using a Sun w/Solaris compliment the knowledge of Linux i'm picking up?

Some of the hardware on there is liable to give one a hardon... And there's plenty in the UK for low P+P or collection... I know a guy in #linux.uk, MarkS, likes his Sun stuff, but does anyone else run Solaris?

 

[Summo]

The best Sun boxes are found here.

 

[ShockingAlberto]

:/

No actual help

 

[Embattle]

From what I've seen of Suns stuff it seems it requires quite a lot of work just to get stuff running on it.

Play windows games on a sun box?

 

[ShockingAlberto]

No. I have WIndows on a 4gig partition on my desktop - If i got another Box(a sun maybe), then i'd run a firewall on it, and have my net connectioned on it, and then i could boot to windows on my main box to play games.

Atm i'm on dialup, however hopefully i'll be looking to get a cable modem soon(same period i'd be looking to get a 2nd box really). However, as it is a 2nd box would be nice even for a 56k, mainly because my winmodem won't work on WIndows, however i *think* the Linux driver will actually wor on other unices.
I accidently agve Windows the wrong driver for my modem, and now when i try to give it the correctone thrugh the addhardware thingy, it doesn't work properly. Uninstalling the wrong drivers doesn't help, as as soon as i reboot, windows helpfully offers to install the driver for my hardware, and digs up the existing *wrong* driver from somewhere in its system folder.

The instructions with the modem driver claim that the only way to install the drivers is to let windows automatically find them on the CD. I find this hard to believe, however adding the hardware through the control pannel doesn't work, so maybe it's right. Either way, the only way i'll be able to install the driver the way Intel think i should is to format Windows partition again. However, there's only one game i want to play that i can't on Linux, so i'm not too bothered. However the presumptiont hat Windows knows which driver is the right one is rather idiotic imo, and i find it almost painful that it just installs drivers that _i_ know are wrong. Anyway, enough with my greivances with Windows. I would format the partition, and mount it as /usr/games as i'm a bit short of diskspace on my root partition, however such is the way of things, that i need Windows if i want to remain a gamer :/

But back to my point:
Would there be any issues with using a cable modem through a Sun network card to connect to NTL? They mention that their rented modems will work with Linux, however i think by the time i can afford to get a line(hopefully the enw 1meg ones ), i'll be able to afford to buy a cm, so compatability would proberbly rest with whether the Sun hardware, and Solaris work with Cms in general.
And the other i said. Allthough i've been informed that ``anything that has tcp/ip can be networked together...`` and that most X stuff will compile for sparcs. So i really i'm asking for oppinion on whether a Sparc/Ultra would do what i want well, and whether i'd benefit from using Solaris, bearing in mind that i feel very at home in a Linux shell now, and i tend to enjoy it when stuff seems to not work, or it takes lots of effort to get something working :/
Allthough the days when X refusing to start was fun are now over(i've realised that it's normally because i did something wrong in the config).

 

[Testin da Cable]

suns are cool*

a low spec sun will work just fine as a firewall/gateway thingy. linux and all the BSDs run on it. And Solaris [heh], but you'll have to buy that because only the i386 version of solaris is free [up to two cpus iirc]
if the code you want to run has a sparc branch in it's tree it should run just fine.




*not as cool as alphas