[cptnapalm]

While not quite a Sun system, I still have my Tadpole Viper. The only thing that runs on it in a straight forward manner is OpenBSD; even Solaris needs patch discs. I'd still use it regularly if only web browsers would work. I still prefer its keyboard and screen to anything else I've ever owned. It's the machine I was using when I finally was able to overcome my previous difficulties in learning C. And I even got to diagnose an endian problem.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

> I'd still use it regularly if only web browsers would work. I still prefer its keyboard and screen to anything else I've ever owned.

You can just cheat: https://virtuallyfun.com/2024/08/12/vncfox-better-way-of-bro...

[johnklos]

I wonder how well NetBSD would run on it. There're quite a lot of current packages for it:

https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/sparc64/10...

[cptnapalm]

When I was looking for a not-Solaris OS, OpenBSD was the only game in town for it. Literally. Somebody maintaining the UltraSPARC OpenBSD port decided to support this oddity specifically. Nothing else, including NetBSD, would work.

[systems_glitch]

Probably not especially difficult to port the platform-specific bits from OpenBSD to NetBSD, but also not trivial.

A lot of the "wow, this actually Just Works on OpenBSD!" support is because one or more OpenBSD developer actually runs the given system. Supposedly that's why there's really good support for a large number of laptop peculiarities that NetBSD lacks -- OpenBSD devs are actually dailying OpenBSD on those machines.

[systems_glitch]

In general, OpenBSD/sparc64 support is excellent. Up until a few years ago, we were still maintaining high security routers running OpenBSD/sparc64 on various SPARC64 products (mostly SunFire T1000 1U boxes). Even with the additional hardening, it's often faster than even NetBSD.