Greg, I picked up one of these with Solaris 8 from my former employer and installed a demo version of Oracle on it with the intent of developing java apps. My complaints are: 1) it is noisy, especially with the external drives running. 2) it has 500 mb of RAM and Oracle uses every free bit. 3) it runs slowly compared to other workstation choices. MySQL on my Linux PIII-450 runs much faster. But Sun 21" monitors are great (and may cause hernia problems if you're not careful). I guess your choice should depend in part on what you want to do with it and the cost. For general use I would probably pick up a new or used AMD box and install Linux instead. Good luck! Dave -----Original Message----- From: koha-admin@lists.katipo.co.nz [mailto:koha-admin@lists.katipo.co.nz]On Behalf Of Greg Lambert/Amigos Sent: Friday, August 29, 2003 10:08 AM To: koha@lists.katipo.co.nz Subject: [Koha] Sun Ultra 1 - Good or Bad? Okay.... I have a person that is getting rid of about 30 Sun Microsystems Ultra 1 Creator 3D machines (5 years old). Anyone knowledgeable about these boxes to tell me to "grab 'em" or "run Greg, run!!!" ? They do come with some sweet 21 inch monitors.... ;-) -Greg Greg Lambert, JD, MLIS Project Manager Amigos Library Services, Inc. 5000 Gulf FWY Building 9 - Univ. Business Park Houston, Texas 77023-4600 713/923-2373 x225 office 877/707-1577 toll-free 713/923-2192 fax 281/433-9145 cell lambert@amigos.org http://www.amigos.org _______________________________________________ Koha mailing list Koha@lists.katipo.co.nz http://lists.katipo.co.nz/mailman/listinfo/koha

We've found them to be very reliable hardware. As others mention, noisy. The fan tends to go out sometime during the lifespan, though the machine will detect when it is overheating and shut down. The battery in the NVRAM can die if the machine spends long periods of time unplugged. These are available, about US$20 apiece I think. If you want to put solaris8 on them you will have to upgrade the boot prom, Sun provide a free patch for this. You will find out at this time if the NVRAM battery is dead. Much of the noise comes from the vintage disks. Replacing them helps, though they are scsi so will cost a bit more. The 21" monitors can be used with PCs running linux, you will need to buy an adaptor plug (US$50?). X works once you get the sync ranges right, but you will probably need to mess around with kernel framebuffer support to be able to see the text-mode console. The boxes themselves can run linux, I have not tried this. Debian linux has good support for the sparc architecture that is unlikely to go away. The installer probably will handle the framebuffer question for you. The graphics card can do 24 and 8-bit visuals simultaneously, which we find helpful. Not sure if this is supported in linux. They often come with the 'happy meal' combo card, 100Mbit/s ethernet plus external wide scsi connector, so you can plug in external disks for NFS service, etc. They are slow, but just run and run. Good for low-volume webservers, dhcp servers, printhosts, and Xterms. Very happy net-booting, so you may be able to run most of them diskless, which will be quieter. Do let us know how you get on. Vince