UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi,

I'm looking to get hold of a sun machine capable of running Solaris 9 to help me learn unix. I've been advised to look on e-bay, but am not sure of what to look for.

The below seems quite good.....
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.d...707567514&rd=1

Has anyone got any tips?

Cheers,

Cath

I would go for a Sun Ultra 5 or ultra 10 if you want to be able to do something usefull with the machine..

The sparcstations are just to old

/PEter

I agree with s93366 that you should try to get something slightly faster if you can, though the one you're considering will run Sol9, which meets your objectives. It just won't be very much fun to run anything on it, and if you want to use CDE or something, it's really going to suck.

Also, I don't know how the prices go in the UK, but with shipping and the asking price, I think that's a little expensive. I was going to pick a 170Mhz model with a 20GB drive and 256 MB RAM for somewhere in the ballpark of $30. USD. Admittedly that was cheap, but you should be able to get something better than that for ~45 quid.

I agree, you need at Ultra 5 or 10 (or something newer) to run Solaris 9 acceptably. Don't waste your time with an old sparcstation. Plus, the Ultra 5 or 10 will work with your vga monitor instead of needing special adapters, uses IDE hard drives instead of SCSI, and so on. It is much easier to work with in other words.

BUT, if your main objective is just to learn Unix have you considered running Solaris 9 X86 version on an old PC. That way you might not even need to buy hardware. Just check the hardware support lists on Sun's website to make sure what you have will work if you decide to go that route.