Sun Ultra 20 Workstation
Friday, Jul 22. 2005 – Category: Musings
hrghghghhh… employee discount pricing was finally put up for the Ultra 20.
…
[captain kirk voice]
must…resist…buying….ultra…20…
[/captain kirk voice]
10 Responses to “Sun Ultra 20 Workstation”
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August 23rd, 2005 at 10:25
My Ultra 20 just arrived! Alas, everyone at Sun seems to be clueless about this machine. It arrived with all software pre-installed, but not one shred of documentation beyond a useless “setup” guide that did not remotely match the actual boot process, which asked a slew of questions and apparently requires that reverse-DNS be configured for the IP address you assign the thing.
There is no documentation CD, no Solaris installation media, and lots of fluff stuff like a demo “solutions” CD (with, amazingly, not ONE Solaris demo on it!) The registration card says only “Be the first to know! Go to http://www.sun.com/registration/hardware.” This link goes nowhere.
I called tech support, but I don’t have a support contract number, and after two days nobody can find out where my support information is. They can’t find the machine s/n in their systems. One Sun person solemnly assured me that I can’t possilby have an Ultra 20 because the first ones won’t ship until August 26th, yet my machine plainly says “Ultra 20″ right on the front of it.
It’s been a while since I used Solaris, and a lot has changed. The default Java desktop replaces CDE (I’m sure I can get CDE going if I try). This desktop is very clean looking, but rather sluggish. Dragging a window results in many ghosted copies of the window dragging behind — very ugly, and very tedious after just a few minutes.
Oddly, the default $PATH is so primitive that even ping doesn’t work. I doctored it up, but still haven’t been able to get any of the clearly-existing Jave Studio packages to run. There are no obvious launch icons for these, and no printed docs, and no system-resident or online docs that anyone can point me to. There are install CDs for the various Studio things, but they appear to have no manuals on them — just some VERY complex installation instructions for installing from scratch. Sheesh! This can’t really be this hard!
I installed a third-party package installer, called pkg-get, that let me install some useful open source tools to make the machine usable — ethereal, debuggers, etc.
The machine looks absolutely stunning sitting there in the corner, giant SUN logo in 500-point type blazing away on the side. Sun gets an A+ for pretty box design. Alas, they get a D- for out-of-the-box experience. I’m not expecting to have my hand held every step of the way, but I expect SOME sort of basic guidance from Sun. A Getting Started guide. SOMETHING!
Ah, there’s Sun calling me back again now… False alarm, just a Sun techie telling me that his group can’t help me because they don’t support the Ultra 20 and he doesn’t know who does.
-mel
September 16th, 2005 at 10:00
Just fired up my new ultra 20. After about 30 reboots, only ONE has been successful. And the machine is silly loud. Like being inside a vaccuum cleaner.
I continuously get different error messages. Different boot options (into the BIOS this morning, but not since). Ran a hardware check – everything OK.
Haven’t contacted sun yet – mostly bc I have a feeling they are not going to help much. Will probably break down soon though.
Pretty box – if only a little smaller I could at least use it as a paper weight.
jeff
September 18th, 2005 at 08:44
No one at Sun can find my order. I’ve copied the emailed invoice a couple of times. Sounds like it doesn’t matter.
September 22nd, 2005 at 08:54
don’t know what you guys are talking about but my Sun Ultra 20 is lovely so far. I installed RHEL4 on it and it’s like a Dell Optiplex except faster and cooler. Maybe I’m having a good experience so far because Red Hat offers a lot of support. do you know anybody who intalled windows? I was going to, but after intalling RedHat I didn’t have time.
May 14th, 2006 at 17:38
I got mine, reinstalled Open solaris from opensolaris.org its all good dont forget to use your supplemental disk or download latest for video drivers nad other nice stuff
September 15th, 2006 at 19:38
Ultra 20, eh? Say, isn’t that just another implementation of Solaris-flavored x86? I wonder if they purposefully omitted critical documentation for that reason… And, I wonder if the experience would have been the same with, say, an Ultra 25 or 45? Just wondering mind you, no harm or secret voodoo spells intended.
I have been drooling over the Ultra 45 for long enough now that I am ready to transfer my kid’s college education fund over to Sun so that I can have an Ultra 45 of my very own to play with.
April 7th, 2007 at 15:26
I bought an Ultra 20 recently. I couldn’t quite configure Solaris well enough to see it as a replacement for my old Windows machine so I bought a 2nd HD and installed XP 64 on it. That CD that comes with the box is critical for setup as it has all the drivers to get Windows running. My only gripe at this point (besides the ridiculous amount of trouble it is to actually purchase something from Sun) is the noise. It gets quieter when it gets into the OS but is still too loud. I have a Dell Optiplex at work and I can’t hear that thing but the Ultra 20 grinds away. I’m going to be treating it to quiet it down. Other than that I find it as fast as I want to be. I dual boot the HD’s via the BIOS because I couldn’t find any documentation on two HD dual on Sun’s site. Oh wait, the poor documentation would be gripe number 2…….
September 12th, 2007 at 04:59
I got the Sun ultra 40 under Sun’s Try and Buy program. Sweet looking computer and apparently well made but what a nightmare to install Windows XP Pro. During the install, I loaded the Sun provided drivers (F6 to load drivers), but windows kept on telling me it found no hard drives (it had a 146 gb sas drive). I tried each driver Sun provided with no results. Finally, I did a little research, found which embedded controller was in the motherboard and used it; I used LSI’s 1604e drivers and, presto, it worked like a champ; it installed without incident and I was able to evaluate it. Overall, it was a fast computer but in the end, I decided not to buy it because of all the installation issues, lack of Sun’s ability to solve my issues (I wound up showing Sun how to solve it) and the price relative to performance (my IBM Intellistation with dual pentium’s was slower,but not by much for what I do, and cost alot less). I didn’t mind spending the bucks (around $5500.00) if there was a significant performance difference but I did not see it.
November 1st, 2007 at 09:03
i want the driver for network specific for window XP professional
November 1st, 2007 at 09:22
network driver for Sun Utra 20 workstation for window XP Professional