[H-GEN] Sparcs

[BRAND, Frank]

The following is a snip from information from a friend installing Solaris.
Might be of some interest to some of you.

Sorry for the double message about AUI but when I send from work, delivery
to Humbug can take 6 or 8 hours. I thought that the original message did not
come through and resent.

<SNIP>

I dropped the installation of Solaris 2.6 last night, and ran up 2.4.  Apart
from a few annoying problems in the installation,  the installed system is
miles better than the 2.6 install.  Indeed I deem 2.4 on the IPC with 200M
disk, 12m ram as a useable system.  The same could not be said for 2.6
(paging like a pig).

Installation of 2.6 was in character mode due to (I suppose) insufficient
memory to run Openwindows.  When I installed 2.4, it successfully started
Openwindows and run the X version of the Installation program.  I suspect
that a 12M is still short for a reliable 2.4 (OpenWindows) install because a
number of windows failed to render correctly causing me to guess what the
questions was.  I ran the installation again, this time I chose to keep my
hands off the mouse.  I had noticed during the first install that even
moving the mouse causes CD-ROM action. The result was a much smoother
install the second time around.  The leson here is... if you're a fiddler
like me,  leave the room, because moving the mouse during installation will
slow the thing down to a crawl.

BTW - Single spin CD-ROM drives add a new dimension to the word SLOW.
Booting to CD-ROM and getting the install program up takes  20 minutes. If
one had 2 CD-ROMs,  I have noticed that (once booted) the install can be
started from any file system. This means one could mount a second CD-ROM , a
hard drive or nfs mount and run the installation from there.

Conclusion:
	* Solaris 2.4 runs quite OK on 200Meg / 12M ram  but more ram would
provide a significant performance increase.
	* Solaris 2.6 doe not run OK on 200Meg / 12M.  Core system runs ok,
OpenWindows is too slow to use, CDE does not even start up.

Frank Brand - Information and Analysis, Suncorp-Metway Limited    Tel: +61 7
3835 5499
The views expressed herein are my own and not necessarily those of
Suncorp-Metway Ltd.


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