Got my Sun machine working
Last month I bought (through eBay) a Sun workstation – an Ultra 5, which is a late 1990s machine. I really bought it for the nostalgia of using a “real” Unix machine like those at University on which I first encountered the platform. In between, I’ve used several Linux systems and (briefly) a few versions of FreeBSD, and (of course) Mac OS X.
Solaris 9 is only two years old (although a new version is supposed to be out in a month or so), and I’m amazed at how basic it is compared to any version of Linux or even BSD. It comes with the X-window system and Common Desktop Environment (and also GNOME, although an ancient version of it and not prepared unlike the versions which come with Linux) – compare this on the Sun with this on my Linux PC). There is hardly any programming software, except Java and Perl; there’s no Emacs editor – this is clearly not meant to be a hobbyist’s hacking machine, although there’s a whole lot of security software I’d never heard of. There’s also an old version of Netscape, but no Mozilla, and there is a noticeable slowness to it which I have not found in Unix Window systems before, even when there seems to be nothing much running.
What I found really unusual is having to configure my internet connection all by myself. I had to use my Mac to search for it on the internet and had to alter files by myself. Even so, I cannot find how to get DNS to work – DNS is the thing that converts website names (like news.bbc.co.uk) into addresses (like 212.58.226.40), and no, the words don’t correspond to the numbers individually. I can get the BBC news website to display (not very well, as Netscape is an out-of-date browser) by typing in http://212.58.226.40, but some websites (like this one) use a shared IP address with lots of other domains, and you have to know exactly where it is to make this trick work. Besides, it’s long-winded. And what’s the point of having a Mac in front of you to look up the number addresses, and then accessing them on the Sun machine? You might as well just use the Mac.
I’m not sure how long I’ll carry on trying to get this thing fixed up. I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to set it all up myself, or if I’ll just get another operating system for it (FreeBSD is available; Linux seems not to be), or just sell the whole system. A friend (who acquired a similar machine in the same lot) suggests using it to experiment with administering a Proper Unix Machine, which is really what I bought it for.
