bazik's Journal: Rise of the Sun

So after watching eBay for weeks I finally bought myself a Sun Ultra 5 with 333MHz and 512 MB Ram.

I dont remember how I came to Sun, but there was some point where I thought that I should try something "new"... I am a tech guy and love to try out new things.

The seller lives close to me, so I could drive by and pick the Ultra up by myself... he also asked me what I want to do with that Box. My first answer was "Good question... first I'll install Linux on it". Heh, I wont forget his face... he is a Sun and Solaris Freak... has only Sun's running Solaris at home and I told him I want to kick that System off the disk :P

When I got home and played a bit with Solaris (hey, why not give it a chance), I really decided to put Linux on my system :)

Gentoo was my weapon of choice because it runs fine for months on my primary workstation and my server. But before I started the installation, I replaced the 48x Sun labeld CD drive with a 12x LG DVD drive and the 9 GB Seagate(?) disk with a 120 GB Samsung and a 60 GB IBM :)

Now I know that the Ultra5 has only a 16.7 MB/s IDE interface, but thats ok for "desktop" use... Heh, I dont want to stream video to it ;)

Compared to my other systems, its really impressive how good the system works. Its a lot faster than the Solaris which was installed before. And it looks better aswell ;)

I am currently doing a clean reinstall as my first Linux installation on it was just for playing around and trying some applications... when the reinstall is done, I gonna use that box as my primary workstation and turn my 2 GHz P4 into a gaming box (again) as I sometimes need to frag a few people ;)

But there was one point which the seller told me and which really became true: If you work one time with a Sun, you will fall in love with it. That system makes addicted :) My next box will be Sparc based for sure... I am currently checking eBay daily in hope I might catch a cheap Blade150 (contributions welcome!) :)

I cant really say what it is which makes me liking Sun systems that much... maybe its because they are something "special"... the hardware is expensive, but it runs very well. Its like buying a Mercedes... you pay a lot of money but you got something you can keep for all your life.

A good quality has its price :)