Experiences with the Sun Blade 100? 21
SomewhereElse asks: "
It's been a few months since Sun introduced the Sun Blade 100 and I wanted to ask Slashdot readers who have had the oppotrunity to review/play with the box what they thought of it. How upgradeable is it? How fast does it feel? And were there any problems with the hardware?"
Absolutely dog slow (Score:2)
Re:Absolutely dog slow (Score:1)
The machine might be doing DNS lookups to match IP wrappers settings or just for logging purposes. Sometimes if the machine has no reverse-DNS name (e.g. common on a private home lan segment), it'll just sit there twiddling its thumbs for a long time trying to figure out of any other DNS servers in the world can figure out the name. :-)
It's nice (Score:2)
The other problem I had with them. Hmm. We got several of them at work, and this one guy's 'blade dies one day. I open it up and the CPU heatsink wasn't actually CONNECTED to the CPU. So the CPU fried. After they replaced the the CPU the IDE chain died. Took SUN a week to figure out that what I told them was correct.
Other than that they're a fun machine. I wish the SUN logo was translucent and had a blue LED behind it. I might have to do that to this box (:
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Re:It runs great (Score:2)
I tried it. My reason was Because It's There. I tried Red Hat, debian and SuSE, none of them could even boot.
I Emailed one of the Debian/SPARC developers and offered my help, and got a slightly impolite "Why don't you sit down, shut up and wait for us to do it, eh?"
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Re:It's OK (Score:2)
The one advantage a 'Blade has over an Ultra5 is that it has a 24-bit graphics card by default. So if you're going to use a head on it, it's actually not as painful.
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Re:It runs great (Score:2)
I figured it's a hacked kernel. In the meantime mine's actually running some solaris-only stuff, so I'll stick with it, but maybe I'll get another one for games.
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Re:Looks halfway decent (Score:2)
When you order your Sun systems, ask for the "North American" keyboard kit -- it's no extra charge, and it includes the "proper" keys you're looking for.
If you want to order the keyboard, its part number is:
320-1271 Sun Type 6 USB keyboard (PC layout)
320-1270 Sun Type 6 (proprietary connector) keyboard (PC layout)
If you have a service contract (not warranty service!), these parts are covered if you should accidentially bust your keyboard.
--DM
Go read groups.google.com (Score:3)
The blade has now become my main home machine. Its basically a PC with a sparc in place of a pentium. You buy it to out-geek your geek friends, not to win childish MHz pissing games. It can be overclocked, and there are other hardware tweaks. The RAM is a cheap PC commodity, IDE drives easily upgradable (buy a matched pair, DiskSuite comes installed, and throw out that noisy seagate), the 10/100 ethernet provides excellent thru-put. You can use any USB keyboard or mouse you want, but mouse wheel support is still lacking. Standard VGA multisync monitors work with it.
It runs all the hi-paying software that I and my conslutant friends use in our professional lives. Oracle 8i, SAP financials and tons of other stuff. Having a true sparc at home is great for brushing up over a weekend before heading out to a new client site, can't do that on an x86 box.
There are some 'bad' things, but nothing to keep you from buying a blade. Support in OpenBoot for USB hubs is lacking, so you can't have a KVM switch or hub when booting (but you can switch once booted). There is a built in smartcard reader, but absolutely no software for it yet, it reads SunRay cards, but doesn't do anything. There is almost no USB driver support for all the cool USB peripherals out there (most USB crud requires special micro~1.oft or mac drivers to work, and solaris is ignored). There is no Firewire support, except for one hacked driver for their overpriced web-cam. There is only one serial port (the second one is on the mobo, just add your own cable). The built in sound card has no internal audio connector, so you can't play audio CDs in the internal drive, and you probably couldn't hear the music over the drive anyways, the CD-ROM is the loudest peripheral I've ever had, not counting disintegrating hard drives. The real time clock is so fucked, even ntpd can't correct it.
With any luck, sun is working hard at fixing all the little problems. Most complaints come from lack of working features/drivers in Solaris, which means they'll get fixed in time. The hardware itself is pretty solid.
Go read news:comp.sys.sun.hardware, and peruse google groups, and find the B100 FAQ and you'll have a much better idea of what to expect.
the AC
Got mine about two weeks ago. (Score:3)
Memory upgrades are easy. They ship Crucial memory in the unit so you know you're safe adding more. Nice to add 512MB of RAM to a Sun for $100.
As someone else said, it is very quiet. Nice compared to my loud PC sitting beside it.
It runs great (Score:2)
Re:hardware nits (Score:1)
Finally, there is some crosstalk between the sound outputs and the video outputs leading to "buzzes" on certain screen backgrounds.
According to the UnOfficial SunBlade 100 FAQ [wells.org.uk], people who have complained about this to Sun have gotten replacement motherboards that fix the problem [wells.org.uk].
Re:It runs great (Score:1)
hardware nits (Score:1)
onboard sound.
As mentioned, there isn't an internal sound connection, so you can't easily route the cdroms
sound around, short of putting a cable on the front cdrom "headphone" connection and routing it into line-in/microphone on the back.
Also annoying is that you can't mute, or even adjust the volume of the "headphone" out.
Finally, there is some crosstalk between the sound outputs and the video outputs leading to "buzzes" on certain screen backgrounds.
Software-wise: I miss not having a lot of the more versatile gnu utilities pre-installed, but a quick visit to http://www.sunfreeware.com/ fixes that. And, to be fair, they have started shipping a lot more free software.
Solid machine (Score:1)
Mike
Looking to get one (Score:1)
Re:Looking to get one (Score:1)
It's OK (Score:2)
On the positive side, the Blade 100 is SILENT and machine overall is put together with excellent build quality.
Other than that, the Blade is essentially the same as the Ultra-5 that it replaces.
Re:It's nice (Score:2)
I had the same thing happen to an Ultra 10, and the 'engineers' were just as clueless about it.
Re:Go read groups.google.com (Score:2)
Also, Sun makes a kickass SCSI/Ethernet combo that sells on ebay for around $200.
Looks halfway decent (Score:1)
Another nice feature I like is that the Blade comes with USB Keyboard and mouse, compared to the sun interface for keyboard/mouse for other systems. Now only if they could ship a keyboard that has a "normal" backspace key! (they still put the backquote where the normal backspace would go)
The default Solaris configuration that comes with the system leaves much to be desired (especially partition-wise), so we're going to be formatting it and re-installing solaris from scratch with our own partition scheme. We ordered our Blade with 256mb of ram also (they normally ship with 128)
Overall, it appears to be nice, although I haven't been able to use it for very long, so i can't make any substantial evaluations of it.
Sun Blade (Score:1)