Sun Blade 100 – Cheap and Useful
Whew, time has flown by, I'll have a couple posts to post on this week, but I figured I'd start with something I wrapped up today on, a Sun Blade 100. It's got a 500mhz UltraSparc IIe CPU, 768mb of PC133 memory, 80gb Western Digital hard drive, 48X CD-ROM drive and a 8mb ATI Rage XL video card, in addition to the usual firewire, usb ports, onboard sound etc. What I found interesting about this particular model and what drove me to getting it for $50 shipped was the more ATX style case and components. The hard drive is just a Western Digital ATA 66 drive, powering it is just a 200W ATX power supply. Upon receiving it I downloaded the Solaris 11 Express ISO image from Oracle.com only to find out that the Blade 100's video card is not supported in Solaris 11 as they dropped XSun support. So for those that didn't think to check the HCL, be warned, Solaris 10 is the most you'll be able to fully run on this machine. That aside, got Solaris 10 installed this morning, updated Firefox to version 5 from 3.5, downloaded Flash from Adobe and tested out Amazon's Cloud Player on it. Being only a 500mhz CPU I was surprised to find it can steadily play back audio from the cloud and do some light multi-tasking, however it will studder if you do too much while playing back audio. This probably relates to the lower end sound card in the system, not being able to handle a lot of audio processing in it's hardware, much like that of the onboard sound cards on today's PCs. That may be something to upgrade down the road, but I'm content for now. Using the line out of the sound card to my Sony 5.1 receiver, my Polk Monitor 50 floor standing speakers sound just fine. Be warned, the internal speaker tends to stay on if you don't run the sdtaudio executable in \usr\dt\bin. My first "upgrade" will be for the power supply. The current one is kind of loud and most likely not power efficient. I found a 430W Corsair on Amazon yesterday for $44.99 shipped ($20 rebate too, to bring it down to $24.99) so that will make it near silent and hopefully lower the BGE footprint. Here are some pictures:
Sun Blade 100 - With the cover off
Fits nicely on the bottom of my TV rack
Solaris 10 on the Sun Blade 100 on a 40" Sony LCD