I was given 3 old sun sparc ultra enterprise 2 systems from a friend. said had no idea if they worked, so gave me all 3 since didn't want anyway incase parts were bad I'd have material fro at least a working system.
said video was proprietary, but figured could add a PCI VGA card, but on opening them all expansions are also proprietary. then noticed that keyboard/mouse share 1 port that looks something like a cross with PS/2 and S-video.
i'm thinking about possibly just hacking a VGA cable onto the card since same setup just different connection. would think that KB/mouse would be odd connection using PS/2, but when I looked up the pinouts they sound the same, but use different terms for some pins I was thinking somehow hack an old ps/2 KB onto it and forget mouse since almost all can be done using KB I would think.
any idea whether this is possible video sounds simple, but KB/mouse i'm not sure.
saw this http://www.ebay.com/itm/251224421182?hlp=false online for like $25 I can get a converter box which would be fine, but not sure worth getting. specs for systems I got are like 64 bit 100mhz CPU *2 max 2GB ram, 4.7 GB HDD. don't think worth investment. But if sun still uses these setups I could see doing that since could be handy in future.
any ideas whether they still do this or are they standard now with USB, VGA or DVI? just curious too any idea of suns market percentage right now?
thanks for any info first experience with sun product also.

 

It would be a good idea to get the converter. Sun sold the computer, monitor and keyboard/mouse as a unit, so if you don't have the original monitor, keyboard and mouse, this is about the only way to interface with the computer.
BTW, you do need a mouse with a Sun since the SunOS (a flavor of Unix) has a graphical interface (either Open Solaris or Gnome).

 

I figured had GUI since open Solaris 10 does, got Solaris 8 with systems, and one manual talks about gnome. I can do about 95% of all windows functions from just keyboard, but never actually tried with Linux/Unix, but figured would be possible.
thinking may end up getting one, have a lot of software got with it that is meant only for sparc systems. I looked around for emulators to change spark to X86, but nothing that for windows, and reviews of this type technology aren't that great. not sure worth figuring out older software, other than just for fun. if I want to learn some about it solaris 10 would probably be better and that comes in X86 too. and I don't even know if any of systems actually work, but I guess only one way to know, if they don't, or get sick of old systems I can just keep for future if I run into sun systems.

 

Have you googled for "wine for Solaris sparc"? See s the current wine (windows emulator) does not support Solaris 10, but an earlier version might. I don't know what I am talking about, not being a Linux guru, but I do know that several gurus do recommend wine for Windows programs on Linux.