Sun At Home Notes and Support Links
This is a private site not associated with Sun Microsystems®
Site Map
This set of web pages is intended for the lucky AGCS employees who
purchased Sun Sparc 20 workstations in the Sun lotto. Once you get
the machine home, you will discover that it is loaded with a really
minimal version of Solaris 2.5.1. Now what? It turns out there is
a fair amount of work to be done to integrate the machine into a
home network and many of the things you have to do fall into the
catagory of arcane knowledge. By forming an AG Sun At Home users
group, it is hoped that we can collect all this information into
a useable form.
These web pages are maintained by Robert Styma. He
is soliciting input from all sources either as suggestions, updates to existing pages, or
new pages. When the pages begin to stablize, a revision notes section will be added to
the end of this page to identify where things get added and changed.
Turning the Sun On for the Tirst Time
The first time you fire up the Sun, you will get to the login prompt on a white screen.
The only account is root with no password. That is, type root at the login
prompt and just press "Return" when it prompts for a password. You should change this
after you log in using the passwd command.
Doing all your work logged in a root is like wandering around an oil refinerery with
a lit propane torch. Sooner or later you are going to inadvertently do something bad
to yourself. You should probably set up a separate non-root account to do most things
and then su as root to do system administration. There are several
ways to add accounts to your machine.
A good choice for an account name is your AGCS account name. You are likely to
remember this name. Account names can be 1 - 8 alphanumeric characters. If other
family members will be using this machine, you can set up separate accounts for them.
When add an account, you can choose the UID number. A good choice, for an account
with your work user id on it is your work UID. You can find this number by running
the command: id at the UNIX prompt when you are at work. The output will look like:
uid=727(stymar) gid=358(ce)
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The Sun workstations as delivered are not supplied with software to run a full screen
environment such as CDE or OpenWindows. By tar'ing /usr/openwin, /etc/dt, and
/usr/dt from a AGCS Sun Desktop and putting them on your machine, you can get CDE and Openwindows
to run. I suspect AGCS would prefer you not do this as these files were not included with the Sun you purchased. Even if you do, you will still not be able to get gcc and some other tools to run.
You may as well resign yourself to installing Solaris 8
on your machine. You end up with a much better load. You will however have to attach a CD ROM
to your machine.
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You can use your Sun at home as a stand alone machine. The machine is much more useful if you
connect it to the rest of your home network and to the Internet.
The Connecting to your Network
page describes some of the options you have. It also talks about some of the system files
you will need to change in order to make your machine play nicely with the rest of your network.
You will very likely want to add extra disks to your Sun. A CD ROM would
also be nice and maybe more memory or a second processor. The
Hardware page talks
about some of the issues involved in adding hardware to your Sun.
Sun Microsystems offers a
free binary download of Solaris.
The 3 CD images total about 800 Megabytes, so you had better have a cable or
DSL internet connecton available. The page also contains the option to purchase
the CD's for $75.00 + Shipping and Handling. You will need to have a
CD attached
to your Sun to perform this install.
Installing Linux on your Sun Sparc
Hopefully I can get someone who has done this to write up their experience. I have a spare drive
and have ordered Red Hat 6.2 for Sparc, so I may have something to say soon.
The Mailing List / User Group
As we get this user support group started
Ted Krueger (Sun Support) and Bob Styma (SDE) will attempt to answer questions as they
come up. A mailing list will be added with all the users who wish to participate.
We will use the users group alias for mailing questions and answers. Thus as expertise
grows more and people will become involved in answering questions. You will also get to
see the questions other people ask and how they are answered. You can request to be
removed from the mailing list at any time you like.
You are welcome to contribute to the web pages. You can do this one of two ways. You
can send updates to Bob Styma and have them incorporated into this set of pages. You
can also request files you have write permission to be set up in the SunAtHome directory
and links to them added. It is advisable to keep all the pages together in case they
have to be moved. You can, of course, softlink to the file from your home directory which
is effectively the same as having it in your home directory.
Links of Interest
Newsgroups of interest
- comp.unix.solaris
- comp.sys.sun.admin
Back to Bob's Home Home Page
Last Maintained, 01/31/2008 by R. E. Styma