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Grex Info Item 354: UNIX at Home
Entered by jbones on Thu Jul 24 12:55:04 UTC 2003:

I'm interested in setting up a UNIX box at home so I can mainly compile and
run C programs.  I've seen SUN Sparc-5 and 20 workstations dirt cheap on
E-Bay.  Would either of these be sufficient for my use?  I'd also like to
network the machine to PC so I can Telent code back and forth.  Any thoughts?
Thanks.

7 responses total.

#1 of 7 by cross on Thu Jul 24 21:53:45 2003:

Honestly, your best bet is to get a PC and run Linux or FreeBSD on it.
When it comes to Unix, I prefer the BSD's since they're a little more
`pure' when it comes to the C implementation.  Old Sun equipment is
underpowered and cranky, and I don't recommend it unless you've got a
a good bit of experience.

#2 of 7 by jbones on Sat Jul 26 15:51:38 2003:

I want to avoid an Intel/Linux setup.  I already have that on one computer.

x

#3 of 7 by kip on Tue Jul 29 19:23:44 2003:

Are you interested in a separate physical box, or would a simulator do?  You
mention that you want to compile and run C programs but want to do it on
something besides an Intel/Linux setup.  

Yes, a Sparc-5 or 20 would do, but they are a little underpowered to run
modern Solaris versions.

#4 of 7 by jbones on Wed Jul 30 11:26:22 2003:

I'm looking for a separate box (partly for nostalgic reasons - it can sit next
to my C64).  I was hoping to run Solaris 7 at the very least.  I'm not sure
if these machines are capable of running a version that recent though.  
 
-JB

#5 of 7 by kip on Wed Jul 30 13:43:28 2003:

It is my understanding that Solaris 8 can be installed on a Sparcstation 20,
just that it is a rather slow process.  I would imagine that Solaris 7 would
be possible as well.

#6 of 7 by phaza7 on Sat Aug 23 18:00:19 2003:

As mention above I would suggest using any of the BSD'S 
on a Intel/pc base. I not that experience with the Sparc
but, the BSD'S you will find a lot more friendly than the 
Linux's when it comes to code portable in my opinion

#7 of 7 by mdw on Sat Sep 27 03:34:31 2003:

Sparc-5's and 20's are 32-bit machines, SCSI, sbus.  They may come with
8-bit 1kx1k displays, optical mice & keyboard.  The mice work better
than mechanical mice.  The keyboard is slightly weird, and the monitor
big & heavy, but as long as you can live with a colormap, fine.  You
could instead forego the video, save some shipping and electricity, and
use the serial port as the console.  You need something available more
or less full-time for that, because a <break> will send the machine into
the rom monitor.  One of the good things about suns is the serial
console support - it makes all of the serial bios pc designs I've seen
look silly.

You could install solaris 2.6 or 8.  I don't think there's any reason
for 7, and 8 mainly has 64-bit support which won't work on this.  2.6 is
probably sufficient.  No version of solaris 2 ships with a free
compiler.  You either pay sun money for a license to run their compiler,
or you run gcc.  Gcc is readily available - I think sun even has
pre-compiled gcc for solaris 8 on their site these days.  Instead of
running solaris, you could instead run openbsd.  That should work fine
as well, and even comes with a working compiler.  Netbsd is another
possibility.

These machines are slow.  If you are used to recent intel hardware, you
will find yourself sorely tempted to make a cross-compiler for your
machine.  Netbsd will probably lend itself best to the cross-compiler
idea.  These machines are also big-endian and require word alignment of
word data.  This does pose a good test for code portability.

If you were looking for something a bit faster, you might look for an
ultra-1.  They support 64-bit code and should be just as cheap.  A
slightly newer yet machine is the ultra-5; it should be plentiful and
supports pci-bus and ide disks.

If you're looking for something a bit different, you might look at the
various macs.  The newer ones come with firmware that's quite similar to
the suns, and all come with 32-bit big-endian cpus.  The really old ones
are 68k based, which was an interesting series.  Among other things, the
68k is clearly closely related to the pdp-11 series which begat unix.
If you want to learn assembler, the 68k would be a good choice.  Newer
macs use the powerpc series, which is risc (sort of like the sparc) but
went down a slightly different path than sparc, mips, alpha.  So there's
an actual rotate instruction, and word alignment is less critical.
You'll want to pay careful attention to OS vs. machine, nearly all of
these machines can run some sort of Unix derivative, but what exactly
depends on rom revision and I/O bus.  Openbsd for instance will run on
the 68k series (as well as recent but not old ppc).  MkLinux will run on
the older ppc machines -- that's kind of interesting because it's
actually more microkernel-ish than macOS x.

If you're comparing speed, a 200 Mhz powerpc 604E is about the same
speed as a 270 Mhz UltraSparc II is about the same speed as a 400 Mhz
AMD K6-2.

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