During a Dell earnings call, the company mentioned some staggering numbers regarding the amount of PCs that will not or cannot be upgraded to Windows 11.

“We have about 500 million of them capable of running Windows 11 that haven’t been upgraded,” said Dell COO Jeffrey Clarke on a Q3 earnings call earlier this week, referring to the overall PC market, not just Dell’s slice of machines. “And we have another 500 million that are four years old that can’t run Windows 11.” He sees this as an opportunity to guide customers towards the latest Windows 11 machines and AI PCs, but warns that the PC market is going to be relatively flat next year.

↫ Tom Warren at The Verge

The monumental scale of the Windows 10 install base that simply won’t or cannot upgrade to Windows 11 is massive, and it’s absolutely bonkers to me that we’re mostly just letting them get away with leaving at least a billion users out in the cold when it comes to security updates and bug fixes. The US government (in better times) and the EU should’ve 100% forced Microsoft’s hand, as leaving this many people on outdated, unsupported operating system installations is several disasters waiting to happen.

Aside from the dangerous position Microsoft is forcing its Windows 10 users into, there’s also themassive environmental and public health impact of huge swaths of machines, especially in enterprise environments, becoming obsolete overnight. Many of these will end up in landfills, often shipped to third-world countries so we in the west don’t have to deal with our e-waste and its dangerous consequences directly. I can get fined for littering – rightfully so – but when a company like Microsoft makes sweeping decisions which cause untold amounts of dangerous chemicals to be dumped in countless locations all over the globe, governments shrug it off and move on.

At least we will get some cheap eBay hardware out of it, I guess.

So my love for the Common Desktop Environment isn’t exactly a secret, so let’s talk about the project’s latest release, CDE 2.5.3,released a few days ago. As the version number suggests, this first new version in two years is a rather minor release, containing only a few bug fixes. For instance, CDE’s window manager dtwm picked up support for more mouse buttons, its file manager dtfile now uses sh to find files instead of ksh, and a few more of these rather minor, but welcome, changes and bugfixes.

Ever since CDE was released as open sourceover thirteen years ago, and while considerable work has been done to make it build, install, and run on modern platforms, that’s kind of where the steam ran out. CDE isn’t being actively developed to build upon its strengths and add new and welcome features and conveniences, but is instead kept in a sort of buildable stasis. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this – it keeps CDE accessible on modern platforms, and that’s a huge amount of work that deserves respect and gratitude – but it’d be nice if we lived in a world where there was enough interest (and time and money) to have people work on actually improving it.

Of course, the reality is that there’d be very little interest in such an improved CDE, and that’s exactly why it isn’t happening. On top op the current work the CDE team is doing, you’d need to not only develop new features, but also improve the Motif toolkit to make such new features possible, and make sure such improvements don’t break anything else. With such an old codebase, that can’t possible be an easy task.

Still, I will continue to daydream of a slightly more modernised CDE with some additional niceties we’ve come to expect over the past 30 years, even if I know full well it’s futile.

Moss is a Unix-like, Linux-compatible kernel written in Rust and Aarch64 assembly.

It features a modern, asynchronous core, a modular architecture abstraction layer, and binary compatibility with Linux userspace applications (currently capable of running most BusyBox commands).

↫ Moss’ GitHub page

I mean, hobby operating systems and kernels written in Rust aren’t exactly the most unique right now, but that doesn’t make them any less interesting for the kinds of people that frequent a site called OSNews. Moss has quite a few things going for it, including support for enough Linux system calls to run most BusyBox commands, complex memory and process management, use of Rust’sasync/await model in the kernel, and much more.

I love my job. I make a great salary, there’s a clear path to promotion, and a never-ending supply of cold brew in the office. And even though my job requires me to commit sociopathic acts of evil that directly contribute to making the world a measurably worse place from Monday through Friday, five days a week, from morning to night, outside work, I’m actually a really good person.

↫ Emily Bressler at McSweeney’s

The tech industry is full of people like this.

The KDE project has made the call.

Well folks, it’s the beginning of a new era: after nearly three decades of KDE desktop environments running on X11, the future KDE Plasma 6.8 release will be Wayland-exclusive! Support for X11 applications will be fully entrusted to Xwayland, and the Plasma X11 session will no longer be included.

↫ The Plasma Team

They’re following in the footsteps of the GNOME project, who will also be leaving the legacy windowing system behind. What this means in practice is that official KDE X11 support will cease once KDE Plasma 6.7 is no longer supported, which should be somewhere early 2027. Do note that the KDE developers intend to release a few extra bugfix releases in the 6.7 release cycle to stabilise the X11 session as much as possible for those people who are going to stick with KDE Plasma 6.7 to keep X11 around.

For people who wish to keep using X11 after that point, the KDE project advises them to switch to LTS distributions like Alma Linux, which intend to keep supporting Plasma X11 until 2032. Xwayland will handle virtually all X11 applications running inside the Wayland session, including X11 forwarding, with similar functionality implemented in Wayland throughWaypipe. Also note that this only applies to Plasma as a whole; KDE applications will continue to support X11 when run in other desktop environments or on other platforms.

As for platforms other than Linux – FreeBSD already has relatively robust Wayland support, so if you intend to run KDE on FreeBSD in the near future, you’ll have to move over to Wayland there, as well. The other BSD variants are also dabbling with Wayland support, so it won’t be long before they, too, will be able to run the KDE Plasma Wayland session without any issues.

What this means is that the two desktop environments that probably make up like 95% of the desktop Linux user base will now be focusing exclusively on Wayland, which is great news. X11 is a legacy platform and aside from retrocomputing and artisanal, boutique setups, you simply shouldn’t be using it anymore. Less popular desktop environments like Xfce, Cinnamon, Budgie, and LXQt are also adding Wayland support, so it won’t be much longer before virtually no new desktop Linux installations will be using X11.

One X down, one more to go.

With all the problems Windows is facing, I think one area where Microsoft can make some easy, quick gains is by drastically improving Explorer, Windows’ file manager. It seems that in the latest developer releases, they’re doing just that. The most impactful change – possibly – is that Microsoft is going to preload Explorer.

We’re exploring preloading File Explorer in the background to help improve File Explorer launch performance. This shouldn’t be visible to you, outside of File Explorer hopefully launching faster when you need to use it. If you have the change, if needed there is an option you can uncheck to disable this called “Enable window preloading for faster launch times” in File Explorer’s Folder Options, under View.

↫ Windows Insider Program Team

Microsoft is also reordering the context menu in Explorer, and while this may seem like a small set of changes, the new context menu does look much tidier and less busy. They achieve this by moving a few top-level items to a submenu, and reordering some other elements. Sadly, the context menu still retains its own context menu (“Show more options”), which is a traditional Win32 menu – which I still think is one of the most Windows of Windows things of all time.

Regardless, I hope these small changes make Explorer more bearable to use for those of you still using Windows, because we all know you need it.

Google has made itvery clear that it’s intending to bring Android to laptops and desktops, and replace Chrome OS with Android in the process. We now have a codename, and some more information about what this will look like in practice.

Over the weekend, a tipster on Telegram named Frost Core shared a link to an intriguing Google job listing for a ‘Senior Product Manager, Android, Laptop and Tablets.’ While we already know Google is bringing Android to the PC, the listing explicitly states that the role involves ‘working on a new Aluminium, Android-based, operating system.’ This effectively confirms that Aluminium is the codename for the new unified platform. The name appears to be a nod to the project’s roots: like Chromium (the open-source version of ChromeOS), Aluminium is a metal ending in ‘-ium.’ The choice of the British spelling — emphasizing the ‘Al’ prefix — likely pays homage to Android serving as the project’s foundation.”

↫ Mishaal Rahman at Android Authority

So we have the codename, and of course, what we also have is a strong focus on “AI”, which will be “at the core” of desktop Android. Further details uncovered in job openings include a focus not just on entry-level hardware, but also midrange and premium laptops and desktops, as well as Chrome OS being replaced by this new desktop Android variant. I somehow doubt existing Chrome OS devices will be updated to this new desktop Android variant, so Chrome OS will continue to exist as a product for at least quite a few years to come.

I still have a considerable amount of doubt that Google would be able to pull this off in a successful way. It’s already hard enough to get anyone to buy any laptop that isn’t running Windows or macOS, and I doubt the Android operating system has the kind of pull with consumers to make them consider switching to it on their laptops or desktops. Enthusiasts will surely eat it up – if only to try – but without any clear, massive success, this desktop Android thing runs the real risk of ending up atGoogle’s graveyard.

These Android laptops can be incredible products, but even if they are, I just won’t trust Google to remain interested in it.

You may have noticed a sharp increase in problems and issues in Windows recently – following the rise of the “AI” hype cycle, entirely coincidentally, I’m sure – and it seems Microsoft is finally starting to acknowledge just how bad Windows has become.

On the positive side though, following all that backlash, Microsoft acknowledged Windows has issues, and as if on cue, the company in a new support article has admitted that there are problems on almost every major Windows 11 core feature. The issues are related to XAML and this impacts all the Shell components like the Start Menu, Taskbar, Explorer, and Windows Settings.

↫ Sayan Sen at Neowin

It’s wild how many core components like this have apparently been broken due to these problems since July of this year. This means countless Windows users have been experiencing weird issues on a daily basis in multiple components for four months now, which is absolutely wild. On top of all the more structural problems in Windows, I wonder how people can get anything done at all – only a few days ago, I had to manually clean out the Installer folder in the Windows folder on my wife’s gaming PC, because for some inexplicable reason, Windows decided to permanently store 18GB’s worth (!) of past Adobe Acrobat updates and installers in there.

It’s impossible to reliably say that Microsoft’s incessant focus oncryptoNFTs “AI” lies at the root of all of these problems, but if 30% of “new” code in Microsoft is indeed regurgitated by “AI”, it’s hard not to conclude as such.

I suspect that many people who take an interest in Internet privacy don’t appreciate how hard it is to resist browser fingerprinting. Taking steps to reduce it leads to inconvenience and, with the present state of technology, even the most intrusive approaches are only partially effective. The data collected by fingerprinting is invisible to the user, and stored somewhere beyond the user’s reach.

On the other hand, browser fingerprinting produces only statistical results, and usually can’t be used to track or identify a user with certainty. The data it collects has a relatively short lifespan – days to weeks, not months or years. While it probably can be used for sinister purposes, my main concern is that it supports the intrusive, out-of-control online advertising industry, which has made a wasteland of the Internet.

↫ Kevin Boone

My view on this matter is probably a bit more extreme than some: I believe it should be illegal to track users for advertising purposes, because the data collected and the targeting it enables not only violate basic privacy rights enshrined in most constitutions, they also pose a massive danger in other ways. This very same targeting data is already being abused by totalitarian states to influence our politics, which has had disastrous results. Of course, our own democratic governments’ hands aren’t exactly clean either in this regard, as they increasingly want to use this data to stop “terrorists” and otherwise infringe on basic rights. Finally, any time such data ends up on the black market after data breaches, criminals, organised or otherwise, also get their hands on it.

I have no idea what such a ban should look like, or if it’s possible to do this even remotely effectively. In the current political climate in many western countries, which are dominated by the wealthy few and corporate interests, it’s highly unlikely that even if such a ban was passed as lip service to concerned constituents, any fines or other deterrents would probably be far too low to make a difference anyway. As such, my desire to have targeted online advertising banned is mostly theory, not practice – further illustrated by the European Unioncaving like cowards on privacy to even the slightest bit of pressure.

Best I can do for now is not partake in this advertising hellhole. Idisabled and removed all advertising from OSNews recently, and have always strongly advised everyone to use as many adblocking options as possible. We not only have a Pi-Hole to keep all of our devices at home safe, but also use a second layer of on-device adblockers, and I advise everyone to do the same.

We need to consume.

The average American now holds onto their smartphone for 29 months, according to a recent survey by Reviews.org, and that cycle is getting longer. The average was around 22 months in 2016.

While squeezing as much life out of your device as possible may save money in the short run, especially amid widespread fears about the strength of the consumer and job market, it might cost the economy in the long run, especially when device hoarding occurs at the level of corporations.

↫ Kevin Williams at CNBC

Line must go up. Ļ̷̩̺̾i̶̼̳͍͂̒ͅn̵͕̉̾e̴̞͛̓̀̍ ̴͙̙̥͋͐m̸͚̉̆u̴̖̰̪̽̔ͅs̶̨̛̾ţ̷̢̂͛̆͝ ̵̱̐̓̾̔͜ğ̷͕̮̮͆o̷̟͈̐̏̄͝ ̷̢̨̞̉u̴̢̪̭̱̿͑͛̌p̴͈̜̫̖̌.

For the past 18 months, the Linux OEM Tuxedo Computers has been working on bringing a Snapdragon X Elite ARM laptop to market, but now they cancelled the project due to complications.

Development turned out to be challenging due to the different architecture, and in the end, the first-generation X1E proved to be less suitable for Linux than expected. In particular, the long battery runtimes—usually one of the strong arguments for ARM devices—were not achieved under Linux. A viable approach for BIOS updates under Linux is also missing at this stage, as is fan control. Virtualization with KVM is not foreseeable on our model, nor are the high USB4 transfer rates. Video hardware decoding is technically possible, but most applications lack the necessary support.

Given these conditions, investing several more months of development time does not seem sensible, as it is not foreseeable that all the features you can rightfully expect would be available in the end. In addition, we would be offering you a device with what would then be a more than two-year-old Snapdragon X Elite (X1E), whose successor, the Snapdragon X2 Elite (X2E), was officially introduced in September 2025 and is expected to become available in the first half of 2026.

↫ Tuxedo’s announcement

Back when Qualcomm was hyping up these processors, the company madebig claims about supporting Linux equally to Windows, but those promises have turned out to be absolutely worthless. Tuxedo alreadyhighlighted the problems it was dealing with half a year ago, and now it seems these problems have become impossible to overcome – at least for now. This is a shame, bu also not entirely unexpected, since there’s no way a small Linux OEM can do the work that Qualcomm promised it would do for its own chip.

All this sadly means we still don’t really have proper Linux support for modern ARM laptops, which is a crying shame. The problem isn’t so much Linux itself, but the non-standardised world of ARM hardware. Large OEMs are willing to do the work to make Windows work, but despite recent successes, desktop Linux is nowhere near as popular as Windows, so there’s little incentive for OEMs (or Qualcomm) to step up their game.

It is what it is.

The CHESSmate was demonstrated at the January 1978 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas as a prototype in order to assess customer interest in the product. It was available for order at the June 1978 CES in Chicago and the first units, manufactured in Hong Kong, shipped later that year. It was a big seller in Germany from the beginning.

↫ Peter R. Jennings

There’s no way I can summarise this story.

Blasts from the pasts are often fun, and in the case of feature removals from Windows, it’s often accompanied by surprise that the feature in question still existed. Case in point:

This article provides essential information about the deprecation and planned removal of Windows Internet Name Service (WINS) from future Windows Server releases. Microsoft has announced that WINS will be removed from all Windows Server releases after Windows Server 2025 and will remain under the standard support lifecycle through November 2034. Organizations using WINS are strongly encouraged to migrate to modern DNS-based name resolution solutions.

↫ Microsoft knowledge base article

WINS was introduced with Windows NT 3.5 back in 1994, and maps NetBIOS to IP addresses in much the same way DNS maps domains names to IP addresses. Nobody should be using WINS anymore, and Microsoft has been discouraging its use for a long time now. With the ubiquity of DNS, WINS serves very little purpose, so it makes sense Microsoft is removing it from Windows.

LionsOS is an operating system based on the seL4 microkernel with the goal of making the achievements of seL4 accessible. That is, to provide performance, security, and reliability.

[…]

It is not a conventional operating system, but contains composable components for creating custom operating systems that are specific to a particular task. Components are joined together using the Microkit tool.

↫ LionsOS website

The project is under active research and development, led by the Trustworthy Systems research group at UNSW Sydney in Australia. The source code isavailable on GitHub.

Inter-corporation bullshit screwing over consumers – a tale as old as time.

Major laptop vendors have quietly removed hardware decode support for the H.265/HEVC codec in several business and entry-level models, a decision apparently driven by rising licensing fees. Users working with H.265 content may face reduced performance unless they verify codec support or rely on software workarounds.

↫ Hilbert Hagedoornn at The Guru of 3D

You may want to know how much these licensing fees are, and by how much they’re increasing next year, making these laptop OEMs remove features to avoid the costs. The HEVC licensing fee is $0.20 per device, and in 2026 it’s increasing to $0.24. Yes, a $0.04 increase per device is “forcing” these giant companies to screw over their consumers. Nobody’s coming out a winner here, and everyone loses.

We took a wrong turn, but nobody seems to know when and where.

LisaGUI is an amazing project that recreates the entire user interface of the Apple Lisa in the browser, using nothing but CSS, a bit of HTML, and SVG files, and it’s an absolute joy to use and experience. Its creator, Andrew Yaros, has published a blog post diving into the why and how of LisaGUI.

I had been trying to think of a good project to add to my programming portfolio, which was lacking. Finding an idea I was willing and able to execute on proved harder than expected. Good ideas are born from necessity and enthusiasm; trying to create a project for its own sake tends to be an uphill battle. I was also hoping to think of a specific project idea that hasn’t really been tried before. As you may have guessed by the title of this post, LisaGUI ended up being that project, although I didn’t really set out to make it as much as I stumbled into it while trying to accomplish something else.

↫ Andrew Yaros

I’m someone who prefers to run the real thing on real hardware, but in a lot of cases, that’s just not realistic anymore. Hardware like the Apple Lisa are not only hard to find and expensive, they also require considerable knowledge and skill to maintain and possibly repair, which not everyone can do. For these types of machines, virtualisation, emulation, and recreation are much better, more accessible options, especially if it involves hardware and software you’re not interestedenough in to spend time and money on them.

In mydetailed article about the Sun Microsystems ecosystem of the late 2000s, I mentioned an issue I ran into with the latest (leaked) patchset for Solaris 10, the one from 2020,available on Archive.org. Sun does not make Solaris 10 patches and patchsets from 2014 and later freely available online, restricting them to big enterprise customers with expensive support contracts. The same restrictions apply to mere support documents for Solaris 10, so that issues documented by Oracle, including causes and possible solutions, are only accessible to those with support contracts.

The specific issue I ran into is that after installing the 2020 patchset, theSolaris Management Console, a GUI application written in Java with which you can manage certain aspects of your system, would no longer work. It would start up, but any settings panel you tried to load would throw up anRMI_ERR: error unmarshalling return, rendering the SMC effectively non-functional. This problem is documented inOracle Doc ID 1559490.1, but of course, the Cause and Solution sections are hidden. I like weird commercial UNIX configuration GUIs, so even though you can do all of the SMC’s tasks with command-line tools, I still want it to work.

Judging by the error and the countless references to Java updates, it’s easy to figure out that the root cause is an updated version of Java installed by the patchset that the SMC doesn’t like. You’d think uninstalling any relevant patches would solve the problem, but I tried that and it didn’t make a difference, so I was hoping Oracle perhaps had a later patch to fix the issue, or perhaps a proper workaround to get the SMC working again. Well, a screenshot of the remainder of that Oracle Doc ID mysteriously materialised on my Ultra 45 this morning, and it turns out that Oracle just… Doesn’t care.

Honestly, I can’t blame them. Solaris 10 is old, outdated, pure legacy, and the very small number of organisations still using it are probably using it inSolaris Zones on servers anyway, and definitely not as a workstation/desktop operating system. There is zero incentive for Oracle to waste any time trying to fix this issue that, let’s be honest, really only affects one person in the entire world:me. Still, I wanted it fixed, and so I brute-forced a solution.

It’s pretty straightforward: just change your default Java version back to one that the Solaris Management Console can work with. While I have Java 1.6.0 and 1.8.0 installed on the Ultra 45, with 1.6.0 being the default, the SMC will only work when 1.5.0 is set as your default Java version. There’s a wide variety of ways to do this, ranging from hatchets to scalpels, but considering nothing else on Solaris 10/SPARC on the Ultra 45 relies on 1.6.0 or later (as far as I can tell, at least), I took a hatchet approach and just changed the/usr/java symlink so that it pointed to 1.5.0 again.

cd /usrrm javaln -s jdk/instances/jdk1.5.0 java

It’s that simple. Like I said, there are far more elegant ways of doing this, down to various scripts and other things to force only the SMC to use this specific Java version, but it’s not worth the effort to figure that out, and this works just as well. So, just in case there’sever going to be a second person looking to fix this problem, here you are.

You weird, weird person.

Microsoft has just announced a whole slew of new “AI” features for Windows, and this time, they’ll be living in your taskbar.

Microsoft is trying to transform Windows into a “canvas for AI,” with new AI agents integrated into the Windows 11 taskbar. These new taskbar capabilities are designed to make AI agents feel like an assistant in Windows that can go off and control your PC and do tasks for you at the click of a button. It’s part of a broader overhaul of Windows to turn the operating system into an “agentic OS.”

[…]

Microsoft is integrating a variety of AI agents directly into the Windows 11 taskbar, including its own Microsoft 365 Copilot and third-party options. “This integration isn’t just about adding agents; it’s about making them part of the OS experience,” says Windows chief Pavan Davuluri.

↫ Tom Warren at The Verge

These “AI” agents will control your computer, applications, and files for you, which may make some of you a little apprehensive, and for good reason. “AI” tools don’t have a great track record when it comes to privacy – Windows Recall comes to mind – and as such, Microsoft claims this time, it’ll be different. These new “AI” agents will run in what are essentially dedicated Windows accounts acting as sandboxes, to ensure they can only access certain resources.

While I find the addition of these “AI” tools to Windows insufferable and dumb, I’m at least glad Microsoft is taking privacy and security seriously this time, and I doubt Microsoft would repeat the same mistakes they made with the entirely botched rollout of Windows Recall. in addition, after the Cloudstrike fiasco, Microsoft made clear commitments to improve its security practices, which further adds to the confidence we should all have these new “AI” tools are safe, secure, and private.

But wait, what’s this?

Additionally, agentic AI applications introduce novel security risks, such as cross-prompt injection (XPIA), where malicious content embedded in UI elements or documents can override agent instructions, leading to unintended actions like data exfiltration or malware installation.

↫ Microsoft support document about the new “AI” features

Microsoft’s new “AI” features can go out and install malware without your consent, because these features possess the access and privileges to do so. The mere idea that some application – which is essentially what these “AI” features really are – can go out onto the web and download and install whatever it wants, including malware, “on your behalf”, in the background, is so utterly dystopian to me I just can’t imagine any serious developer looking at this and thinking “yeah, ship it”.

I’m living in an insane asylum.

The contents of this repository allow older versions of UNIX (ancient UNIX) to run easily on modern Unix-like systems (Linux, FreeBSD, macOS, among others).

↫ Run ancient UNIX GitHub page

With the guides in this repository, you can easily run Versions 1/5/7 UNIX and 2.11BSD UNIX for the PDP-11 and Version 7 UNIX for x86 (ported to x86 by Robert Nordier in 1999, with patches in 2006-2007). That’s it.

In my lifetime, there’s been one ecosystem I deeply regret having missed out on: the Sun Microsystems ecosystem of the late 2000s. At that time, the company offered a variety of products that, when used together, formed a comprehensive ecosystem that was a fascinating, albeit expensive alternative to Microsoft and Apple. While not really intended for home use, I’ve always believed that Sun’s approach to computing would’ve made for an excellent computing environment in the home.

Since I was but a wee university student in the late 2000s living in a small apartment, I did not have the financial means nor the space to really test this hypothesis. Now, though, Sun’s products from that era are decidedly retro, and a lot more approachable – especially if you have incredibly generous readers. So sit down and buckle up, because we’ve got a long one today.

If you wish to support OSNews and longform content like this, considerbecoming a Patreon ordonating to our Ko-Fi. Note that absolutely zero generative “AI” was used in the writing of this article. No “AI” writing aids, no “AI” summaries, no ChatGPT, no Gemini search nonsense, nothing. I take pride in doing research and writing properly, without the “aid” of digital parrots with brain damage, and if there’s any errors, they’re mine and mine alone. Take pride in your work and reject “AI”.

The Ultra 45: the central hub

In the early 2000s, it had already become obvious that the future of workstations lied not with custom architectures, bespoke processors, and commercial UNIX variants, but with standard x86, off-the-shelf Intel and AMD processors, and Windows and Linux. The writing was on the wall, everyone knew it, and the ensuing consolidation on x86 turned into a veritable bloodbath. In the ’80s and ’90s, many of these ISAs were touted as vastly superior x86 killers, but fast-forward a decade or two, and x86 had bested them all in both price and performance, leaving behind a trail of dead ISAs.

Never bet against x86.

Virtually none of the commercial UNIX variants survived the one-two punch of losing the ISA they were married to and the rising popularity of Linux in the workstation space. HP-UX was tied to HP’s PA-RISC, and both died. SGI’s IRIX was tied to MIPS, and both died. Tru64 was tied to Alpha, and both died. The two exceptions are IBM’s AIX and Sun’s Solaris. AIX workstations were phased out, but AIX is still nominally in development for POWER servers, but wholly inaccessible to anyone who doesn’t wear a suit and has a massive corporate spending budget. Solaris, meanwhile, which had long been available on x86, saw its “own” ISA SPARC live on in the server space until roughly 2017 or so, and was even briefly available as open source until Oracle did its thing. As a result, Solaris and its derivative Illumos are stillnominally inactive development, but in the grand scheme of things they’re barely even a blip on the radar in 2025.

Never bet against Linux.

During these tumultuous times, the various commercial UNIX vendors all pushed out systems that would become the final hurrahs of their respective UNIX workstation lines. DEC, then owned by HP, released its AlphaStation ES47 in 2003, marking the end of the road for Alpha and Tru64 UNIX. HP’s own PA-RISC architecture and HP-UX met their end with the HP c8000 (which I own), an all-out PA-RISC monster with two dual-core processors running at 1.1GHz. SGI gave its MIPS line of machines running IRIX a massive send-off with the enigmatic and rareTezro in 2003. In 2005, IBM tried one last time with the IntelliStation POWER 285, followed a few months later by the heavily cut-down 185, the final AIX workstation.

And Sun unveiled the Ultra 45, its final SPARC workstation, in 2006. Sun was already in the middle of its transition to x86 with machines like the Sun Java Desktop System and its successors, the Ultra 20 and 40, and then surprised everyone by reviving their UltraSPARC workstation line with the Ultra 25 and 45, which shared most – all? – of their enclosures with their x86 brethren. They were beautiful, all-aluminium machines with gorgeous interior layouts, and a striking full-grill front, somewhat inspired by the PowerMac G5 of that era.

And ever since the Ultra 45 was rumoured in late 2005 and then became available in early 2006, I’ve been utterly obsessed with it. It’s taken almost two decades, but thanks to an unfathomably generous donation from KDE e.V. board member and FreeBSD contributor Adriaan de Groot, a very unique and storied Sun Ultra 45 and a whole slew of accessories showed up at my doorstep only a few weeks ago. Let’s look back upon this piece of history that is but a footnote to most, but a whole book to me – and experience Sun’s ecosystem from around 2006, today.

First and foremost, I want to express my deep gratitude to Adriaan de Groot. Without him, none of this would have been possible, and I can’t put into words how grateful I am. He donated this Ultra 45 to me at no cost – not even the cost of shipping – and he also shipped another box to me containing a few Sun Ray thin clients, completing the late 2000s Sun ecosystem I now own. Since the Ultra 45 was technically owned by KDE e.V. – more on that below – I’d also like to thank the KDE e.V. Board for giving Adriaan permission for the donation. I’d also like to thank Volker A. Brandt, who sent me a Sun Ray 3, a few Ultra 45 hard drive brackets, and some other Sun goodies.

The Sun Ultra 45 De Groot sent me was a base model with an upgraded GPU. It had a single UltraSPARC IIIi 1.6Ghz processor, 1GB of RAM, and the most powerful GPU Sun ever released for its SPARC workstation line, the Sun XVR-2500, arebadged 3Dlabs Wildcat Realizm with 256MB of GDDR3 memory. Everything else you might need – sound, networking, and so on – are integrated into the motherboard. It also comes with a slot-loading, slimline DVD drive, a 250GB 7200 RPM SATA hard drive, and its massive 1000W power supply.

First order of business was upgrading the machine to match the specifications I wanted, with the most important upgrade being doubling the processor count. Finding a second 1.6Ghz UltraSPARC IIIi processor was easy, as they’re all over eBay and won’t cost you more than a few dozen euro excl. any shipping; they were also used in various Sun SPARC servers and are thus readily available. The bigger issue is finding a second CPU cooler, as they are entirely custom for Sun hardware and quite difficult to find. I found a seller on eBay who had them in stock, but be prepared to pay out the nose – I paid about €40 for the CPU, but around €160 for the cooler, both excl. shipping.

Installing the second CPU and cooler was a breeze, as it’s no different than installing a CPU or cooler on any other, regular PC. The processor was detected properly by the machine, and the cooler whirred to life without any issues, but of course, if you’re buying used you may always run into issues with parts. If you want to save some money, thereis a way to use a specific cooler from a Dell workstation instead (and possibly others?), but I wanted the real deal and was willing to pay for it.

The second upgrade was the RAM. A mere 1GB wasn’t going to cut it for me, so alongside the processor and cooler I also ordered a set of four 1GB RAM sticks, the exact right kind, and ECC registered, too, as the machine demands it. This turned out to be a major issue, as I discovered the machine simply would not boot in any way, shape, or form with this new RAM installed. It didn’t even throw up any error message over serial, and as such, it took me a while to pinpoint the issue. Thankfully, I remembered I had a broken, non-repairable Sun server from the same era as the Ultra 45 lying around, and it just so happened to have 8✕1GB Sun-branded RAM sticks in it. I pilfered the sticks out of the server, stuck them in the Ultra 45, and the machine booted up without any problems.

I later learned from people on Fedi who used to work with Sun gear from this era that RAM compatibility was always a major headache. It seems the wisest thing to do is to just buy Sun-branded memory kits, because there’s very little guarantee any generic RAM will work, even if it is entirely identical to whatever sticks Sun slapped its brand stickers on. For now, 8GB is enough for me, but in a future moment of weakness, I may order 8✕2GB Sun-branded memory to max the Ultra 45 out. The main reason you may want to invest in a decent amount of RAM is to make ZFS on Solaris 10 happy, so take that into account.

Aside from these upgrades to the base system itself, I also planned two specialty upgrades in the form of two unique expansion cards. First, a Sun Flash Accelerator card to speed up ZFS’s operations on the spinning hard drive, and second, a SunPCi IIIpro, which is an entire traditional x86 PC on a PCI-X card, the final iteration of a series of cards designed specifically for allowing Solaris SPARC users to run Windows inside their workstation. I’ll detail these two expansion in more detail later in the article.

What’s in an Ultra 45?

The Sun Ultra 45 was launched as one of four brand new Sun workstations, with an entirely new design shared between all four of them. Two were successors to Sun’s first (okay, technicallysecond) foray into x86 workstations, the Java Workstation: the Ultra 20 (single-socket Opteron) and Ultra 40 (dual-socket Opteron). These were mirrored by the Ultra 25 (single-socket UltraSPARC IIIi) and Ultra 45 (dual-socket UltraSPARC IIIi). However, where the Ultra 20/40 were genuine improvements over their Java Workstation predecessors, the story gets a bit more muddled when it comes their SPARC brethren.

Let’s take a look at the most powerful direct predecessor of the Ultra 45, the Sun Blade 2500 Silver. The table below lists the core specifications of the Blade 2500 Silver compared to the Ultra 45. Notice anything?

As you can see, the Ultra 45 was only a very modest upgrade to the Blade 2500 Silver. While the upgrades the Ultra 45 brings over its predecessor are very welcome, it’s not like upgraded expansion slots and the move to SAS/SATA would make Blade 2500 owners rush out to upgrade in droves. For heavy graphics users, the new XVR-2500 graphics card may have been tempting as it is inherently incompatible with the Blade 2500 (it uses PCIe), but I have a feeling many customers at the time would’ve probably just opted to move to x86 instead. For all intents and purposes, the Ultra 45 was a slim upgrade to its predecessor.

The story gets even more problematic for the SPARC side of Sun’s workstation business when you consider the age of the 2500 line. While the 2500 Silver was released in early 2005, its only upgrade compared to the 2500 Red was a clock speed bump (from 1280Mhz to 1600MHz), and the 2500 Red was released in 2003. This means that the Ultra 45 is effectively a computer from 2003 with improved expansion slots and a fancy new case. As a final knock on the Ultra 45, its processor had already been supplanted by Sun’s first multicore SPARC processors, the UltraSPARC IV in 2004 and the UltraSPARC IV+ in 2005, and Sun’s first multicore, multithreaded processor, the UltraSPARC T1, in 2005. These chips would never make it to any workstations, being used in servers exclusively.

Sun clearly knew further investments in SPARC workstations were simply not worth it at the time, and thus opted to squeeze as much as it could out of a 2000-2003ish platform, instead of investing in the development of a brand new workstation platform built around the UltraSPARC IV/IV+/T1. In other words, while the Ultra 45 is the last and most powerful SPARC workstation Sun ever made, it wasn’t really the balls-to-the-wall SPARC workstation sendoff it could’ve been, and that’s a shame.

But this one is mine

Now that we have a good idea of where the Ultra 45 stood in the market, let’s take a closer look at my specific machine. My Ultra 45 is not just any machine, but actually a pre-production model, or, in Sun parlance, an “NSG EARLY ACCESS EVALUATION UNIT”. The bright orange sticker on the side and the big yellow sticker at the top make it very clear this isn’t your ordinary Ultra 45.

I’ve removed and cleaned some other sticker residue, but these will remain exactly where they are, as I consider them crucial parts of its unique history. The fact it’s a pre-production unit means there are some very small differences between this particular machine and the final version sold to consumers. The biggest difference is found on the inside, where my model misses the twoRAM air ducts found on the final version; my wild guess is that during late-stage testing they discovered the RAM could use some extra fresh air, and added the ducts.

Another difference inside is that the original CPU cooler, which came with the machine, is purple, while the second CPU cooler I bought off eBay is silver. As far as I can tell based on checking countless photos online, all CPU coolers on final models were silver, making my single purple cooler an oddity. I’d love to know the story behind the purple cooler – Sun used purple a lot in its branding and hardware design at this point, and it could be that this is a cooler from one of their many server models. Other than the colour, it’s entirely identical to its silver counterpart.

On the outside, the only sign this is a pre-production model – other than the stickers – is the fact that the ports and LEDs on the front of the device are unlabeled, while the final models had nice and clear labels. My machine also lacked the “Ultra 45” badge at the bottom of the front panel, so I did a silly and spent around €50 (incl. shipping and EU import duties) on a genuine replacement. It clicks into place in a dedicated hole in the metal meshwork.

It’s the little details that matter.

On the front of my Ultra 45, there’s a strong hint as to it history: a yellow label maker sticker that says “KDE project”. Sun’s branch in Amersfoort, The Netherlands, donated (or loaned out?) this particular Ultra 45 to KDE e.V. back in 2008 or 2009, so that the KDE project could work on KDE for Solaris and SPARC. You can even findblog posts by Adriaan de Groot about this very machine from that time period. It served that function for a few years, I would guess up until around 2010, when Oracle acquired Sun and subsequently took Solaris closed-source again.

Since then, it’s mostly been sitting unused in Adriaan’s office, until he offered to send it to me (after confirming with KDE e.V. it could be donated to me). Considering KDE is an important part of the machine’s history, I’m leaving the little KDE label right where it is. Perhaps Sun sent out its preproduction machines to people and projects that could make use of it, which was a nice – and a little self-serving, of course – gesture. Now it’s getting yet another lease on life as by far my favourite (retro)computer in my collection, which is pretty neat.

The operating system

Once I had the machine set up and booting into the OpenBoot prompt, it was time to settle on the software I’d be running on it. Since I tend to prefer setting up machines like this as historically accurate as is reasonable, Solaris 10 was the obvious choice. Luckily, Oracle still makes the SPARC version of Solaris 10 available in the form of Solaris 10 1/13as a free download. This article won’t go too deep into operating system installation and configuration – it’s straightforward and well-documented – but I do have a few notes I’d like to share.

First and foremost, if you intend to use ZFS as your file system – and you should – make sure you have enough RAM, as mentioned earlier, but also to start the installer in text mode. You can’t install on ZFS when using the graphical installer, in which you’ll be restricted to UFS. Both variants of the installer are easy to use, straightforward, and a breeze to get through for anyone reading OSNews (or anyone crazy enough to buy SPARC hardware in 2025). If you’ve never worked with SPARC hardware and Sun’s OpenBoot before, have a list ofok> prompt commands at hand to boot the correct devices and change any low-level hardware settings.

The1/13 in Solaris 10 1/13 means the DVD ISO is up-to-date as of January 2013, and sadly, Oracle hides post-1/13 patchsets behind support contract paywalls, so you won’t be getting them from any official sources. There’s a few 2018 and 2020 patchsets floating around, as well as collections of individual patch files, but I’ve some issues with those. One of the major issues I ran into with a more recent patchset is that it broke the Solaris Management Console, a Java-based graphical tool to manage some settings. There is a fix, but it’s hidden behind Oracle’s dreaded support contract paywalls, so I couldn’t do anything about it.

I’m sure a later version of the Solaris 10 patchset – they’re still being made twice a year, it seems – addressed this issue, but none of those patchsets ‘leaked’ online. I did try to install the individual patches in the massive patchset one-by-one to avoid potentially problematic ones identified by their description, but it was a hell of a lot of work that felt never-ending, since you also have the dependency graph to work through and track. After a few hours of this nonsense, I gave up. I would love for Oracle to stop being needlessly protective over a bunch of patchsets for a dead operating system running on a dead architecture, but I don’town a massive Hawaiian island so I guessI’m the idiot.

One of the things you’ll definitely want to do after installing Solaris 10 is set upOpenCSW. OpenCSW is a package manager andassociated repository of Solaris 10-native SVR4 packages for a whole bunch of popular and useful open source programs and tools, with dependency tracking, update support, and so on. It’sincredibly easy to set up, just as easy to use, and installs its packages in/opt/csw by default, for neat separation. As useful as OpenCSW is, though, it’s important to note that most packages have not been updated in years, so it’s not exactly a production-ready environment. Still, it contains a ton of tools that make using Solaris 10 on SPARC in 2025 a hell of a lot easier, all installable and manageable through a few simple commands.

I have a few other random notes about using Solaris 10 on a workstation like this. First, and this one is obvious, be sure to create a user for your day-to-day use so you don’t have be logged in as the root user all the time. If you intend to use the Solaris Management Console, which offers a graphical way to manage certain aspects of your machine, you’ll want tocreate the Primary Administrator role and assign it to your user account. This way, you can use the SMC even through your regular user account since it’ll ask you to log into the primary administrator role.

Second, assuming you want to do some basic browsing and emailing, you’ll also want to install the latest possible versions of Firefox and Thunderbird, namely version 52.0 of both. You can either opt for basic tarball installation, or usethe SVR4 packages available from UNIX Packages to make installation a little bit easier. Version 52.0 of Firefox is severely outdated, of course, so be advised; tons of websites won’t work properly or at all, and security is obviously out the window. A newer version will most likely not be released since that would require an up-to-date Rust port and toolchain for Solaris 10/SPARC as well, which isn’t going to happen.

In addition, if you’ve set up OpenCSW, you should consideradding/opt/csw/bin to your PATH, so that anything installed through OpenCSW is more easily accessible. Furthermore, Solaris 10 installs both CDE and theJava Desktop System – GNOME 2.6 with a fancy Sun theme – and I highly suggest using the JDS since it was properly maintained at the time, while CDE had already stagnated for years at that point. It’ll give you niceties like automatic mounting of USB sticks and DVDs/CDs, and make it much easier to access any possible network locations. Speaking of which – you’ll want to set up a SAMBA or NFS share so you can easily download files on a more modern machine, and subsequently make them accessible on your Solaris 10 machine. Both of these protocols are installed by default.

As a final note, there are three sources I use to find ancient software for these older UNIX systems (I use both Solaris 10 and HP-UX):fsck.technology,whatever this is, andthe Internet Archive. You can find an absolutely massive pile of programs, software, operating system patches, and everything else in these three sources, including various ways to circumvent any copy protection schemes. I don’t care about the legality, and neither should you.

If you want to go for something more modern than Solaris 10, SPARC is still supported by a variety of operating systems, likeNetBSD,OpenBSD, and a number of Linux distributions. Your best bet is to buy one of the lower-end GPUs, like the XVR-300 or XVR-600, as the XVR-2500 is not supported by the BSDs, but may work on Linux. I haven’t tried any of them yet – this article is long enough as it is – but I will definitely try them out in the future.

The future island owners among you may also be wondering aboutIllumos and its various derivatives and distributions, likeOpenIndiana and personal OSNews darlingTribblix. While they all do support SPARC, it’s spotty at best, especially on workstations like the Ultra 45. SPARC servers have a better success rate, but the Ultra 45 specifically is unsupported at this point due to bugs preventing Illumos and friends from even booting. The good news, though, is thatthe people working on the SPARC variants have access to Ultra 45 machines, and work is being done to fix these issues.

Now, let’s move on to the two specialty upgrades I bought for this machine.

Accelerating ZFS

The transition from spinning hard disk drives to solid-state drives was an awkward time. Early on, SSDs were still prohibitively expensive, even at small sizes, but the performance benefits were obviously significant, and everyone knew which way the wind was blowing. During this awkward time, though, people had to choose between a mix of solid state and spinning drives, leading to products likehybrids drives, which combined a small SSDs with a large hard drive to get the best of both worlds. As prices kept coming down, people could opt for a small SSD for their operating system and most-used applications, storing everything else on spinning drives.

A hybrid drive doesn’t necessarily have to exist as a single, integrated product, though; depending on factors like operating system, controller, and file system, you could also assign SSDs as dedicated accelerators. This is where Oracle’s line of Flash Accelerator cards – the F20, F40, and F80 – come into play. These were released starting in roughly 2010, and consisted of several replaceable flash memory modules on a PCIe card. They were rebranded LSI Nytro Warpdrives with some custom firmware, which can actually beflashed back to their generic LSI firmware to turn them into their white label LSI counterparts.

Oracle’s Flash Accelerator cards are remarkably flexible, because their firmware presents the individual flash modules as individual block devices to the Solaris 10 operating system. This way, you can assign each individual module to perform specific tasks, which, combined with the power of Solaris 10’s ZFS, gives people who know what they are doing quite a few options to speed up specific workloads. In addition – and this is pretty cool – these accelerator cards can also serve as a boot device, meaning you can install and run Solaris 10 straight from the accelerator card itself.

These cards come in a variety of sizes, and they’re incredibly cheap these days. They’re not particularly useful or economical for modern applications, but they’re still fun relics from an older time. And because they’re so cheap and plentiful on the used market, they’re a great addition to a retro project like my Ultra 45 – even if they’re technically intended for server use. I ordered a Flash Accelerator F20 on eBay for like €20 including shipping, giving me 96GB, spread out over four 24GB flash modules, to play with.

The card has two stacks of two flash modules, which can be removed and replaced in case of failure, as well as a replaceable battery. Sadly, the one I ordered didn’t come with the full-height PCI bracket, but even without any bracket, the card sits incredibly firmly in its slot. The card also functions as a host bus adapter, giving you two additional SAS HBA ports for further storage expansion. Do note that you’ll need to perform a reconfiguration boot of your SPARC system after installing the card, which is done by first dropping to the ok> prompt, and then executingboot -r. Once rebooted, theformat command should display the four flash modules.

# formatSearching for disks…doneAVAILABLE DISK SELECTIONS:    0. c1t0d0 <ATA-HITACHIHDS7225S-A94A cyl 65533 alt 2 hd 16 sec 465>       /pci@1e,600000/pci@0/pci@9/pci@0/scsi@1/sd@0,0    1. c3t0d0 <ATA-MARVELLSD88SA02-D21Y cyl 23435 alt 2 hd 16 sec 128>       /pci@1e,600000/pci@0/pci@8/LSILogic,sas@0/sd@0,0    2. c3t1d0 <ATA-MARVELLSD88SA02-D21Y cyl 23435 alt 2 hd 16 sec 128>       /pci@1e,600000/pci@0/pci@8/LSILogic,sas@0/sd@1,0    3. c3t2d0 <ATA-MARVELLSD88SA02-D21Y cyl 23435 alt 2 hd 16 sec 128>       /pci@1e,600000/pci@0/pci@8/LSILogic,sas@0/sd@2,0    4. c3t3d0 <ATA-MARVELLSD88SA02-D21Y cyl 23435 alt 2 hd 16 sec 128>       /pci@1e,600000/pci@0/pci@8/LSILogic,sas@0/sd@3,0Specify disk (enter its number):

Now it’s time to decide what you want to use them for. I’m not a system administrator and I have very little experience with ZFS, so I went for the crudest of options: I assigned each module as a ZFS cache device for the ZFS pool I have Solaris 10 installed onto, which is stupidly simple (the exact disk names can be identified usingformat):

# zpool add -f <pool name> cache <disk1> <disk2> <disk3> <disk4>

To check the status of your pool and make sure the modules are now acting as cache devices:

# zpool statuspool: ultra45state: ONLINEscan: none requestedconfig:    NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM    ultra45     ONLINE       0     0     0      c1t0d0s0  ONLINE       0     0     0    cache      c3t0d0s0  ONLINE       0     0     0      c3t1d0s0  ONLINE       0     0     0      c3t2d0s0  ONLINE       0     0     0      c3t3d0s0  ONLINE       0     0     0errors: No known data errors

The theory here is that this should give the 7200 RPM SAS drive the ZFS pool in question is running on a nice performance boost. Now, this is mostly theory in my particular case, since I’m not using this machine for any heavy workloads in 2025, but perhaps if you were doing some heavy lifting back in 2010 on your Solaris 10 workstation, you might’ve actually seen some benefit.

Of course, this is anything but an optimal setup to get the most out of this hardware, but I already had a fully configured Solaris 10 install on the spinning hard drive and didn’t feel like starting over. Like I said, I’m no system administrator or ZFS specialist, but even I can imagine several better setups than this. For instance, you could install Solaris 10 in a ZFS pool spanning two of the flash modules, while assigning the remaining two flash modules as log and cache devices for the spinning hard drives you keep your data files on. In fact, Oracle still has a ton of documentation online about creating exactly such setups, and it’s not particularly hard to do so.

This F20 card wasn’t part of my original planning, and the only reason I bought it is because it was so cheap. It’s a fun toy you could buy and use on a whole variety of older systems, as long as they have PCIe slots and compatibility with PCIe storage. The entire card is just a glorified HBA, after all, and many operating systems from the past 20 years or so can handle such cards and its flash storage just fine.

Let’s move on to something more interesting – something I’ve been dying to use ever since I learned of their existence decades ago.

I put a computer in your computer so you can computer with other computers

Even in the ’90s, much of the computing world – especially when it came to generic office and home use – had already moved firmly to x86 and Windows. Sun knew full well that in order to entice more customers to even consider using SPARC-based workstations, they needed to be interoperable with the x86 Windows world, since those were the kinds of machines their SPARC workstations would have to interoperate with. So, from quite early on in the 1990s, they were working on solutions to this very problem.

Sun’s first solution wasWabi, a reimplementation of the Win16 API to allow a specific set of popular Win16 applications to run on non-x86 UNIX workstations. This product was licensed by other companies as well, with IBM, HP, and SCO all releasing their own versions, and eventually it was even ported to Linux by Caldera in 1996. Another solution Sun offered at the same time as Wabi was SunPC, a PC emulator based on technology used inSoftPC. SunPC was limited to at most 286 software, however, so if you wanted to emulate software that required a 386 or 486 – like, say Windows 3.x or 95 – you needed somethingmore.

And it just so happens Sun offered something more: the SunPC Accelerator Card. This line of accelerator cards, forSBus-based SPARC workstations, contained a 486 processor (and one later model an AMD 5×86 processor) on an expansion card that the SunPC emulator could use to run x86 software that required a 386 or 486. With this card installed, SPARC users could run full Windows 3.x or Windows 95 on their workstations, albeit with a performance penalty as the SunPC Accelerator Card did not contain any memory; SunPC had to emulate the RAM.

With Sun’s SPARC workstations moving to more standard PCI-based expansion busses in the second half of the 1990s, Sun would evolve their SunPC line into the SunPCi (clever), and that’s when this product line really hit its stride. Instead of containing just an x86 processor, SunPCi cards also contained memory, a graphics chip, sound chip, networking, VGA ports, serial ports, parallel ports, and later USB and FireWire as well. A SunPCi card is genuinely an entire x86 PC on a PCI expansion card, and the operating system running on that x86 PC can be used either in a window inside Solaris, or by connecting a dedicated monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers, and so on. Or both at the same time!

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Sun would release a succession of ever faster models of SunPCi cards, culminating in the last and most powerful variant: the SunPCi IIIpro, released in 2005. This very card is one of the reasons I was so excited to get my hands on a machine that could do it justice, so I splurged on a new-in-box model offered on eBay. This absolute behemoth of a PCI-X card contains the following PC hardware:

• Mobile AMD Athlon XP 2100+ at 1.60Ghz
• Two DDR SODIMM slots for a maximum of 1GB of RAM
• S3 Graphics ProSavage DDR
• A sound chip of indeterminate origin
• VIA Rhine II Fast Ethernet Adapter

The base card contains a VGA port, a USB port, Ethernet port, and audio in and out. The number of ports can be expanded with two optional daughter cards, one of which adds two more USB ports as well as a FireWire port, while the other one adds a serial and parallel port. These two daughter boards each require an additional PCI slot, but only the USB/FireWire one actually makes use of a PCI-X connector. In other words, if you install the main card and its two daughter boards, you’ll be using up three PCI slots, which is kind of insane.

By default, the card only comes with a single 256MB DDR SODIMM, which is a bit anemic for many of the operating systems it supports – as such, I added an additional 512MB DDR SODIMM for a total of 768MB of RAM. Unlike the Ultra 45 itself, it seems the SunPCi IIIPro is not particularly picky about RAM, so you can most likely dig something up from your parts pile and have it work properly. The card has a few other expansion options too, like an IDE header so you can use a real hard disk instead of an emulated one, but that would require some hacking inside the Ultra 45 due to a lack of power options for IDE hard drives.

Once you have installed the card – a fiddly process with the two daughterboards attached – it’s time to boot the host machine back up and install the accompanying SunPCi software. The last version Sun shipped is SunPCi Software 3.2.2 in 2004, and in order to make it work on my Ultra 45 I had to perform some workarounds. Searching the web seems to indicate the problems I experienced are common, so I figured I’d collect the problems and workarounds here for posterity, so I can spare others the trouble.

What you’ll need is the SunPCi Software 3.2.2, the latest version; you can find this in a variety of locations around the web, including in the software repositories I mentioned earlier in the article. The installation is fairly straightforward, but the post-install script might throw up an error about being unable to find a driver calledsunpcidrv.2100.The fix is simple, but the odds of finding this out on your own are slim. Once the installation is completed, run the following commands as root to symlink to the correct drivers:

cd /opt/SUNWspci3/drivers/solaris/ln -s sunpcidrv.280 sunpcidrv.2100ln -s sunpcidrv.280.64 sunpcidrv.2100.64

The second problem you’ll most likely run into is absolutely hilarious. If you try and start the SunPCi software with/opt/SUNWspci3/bin/sunpci, you’ll be treated to this gem:

Your System Time appears to be set in the futureI can't believe it's really Tue Nov 11 18:01:23 2025Please set the system time correctly

This error message comes from a bug in the 3.2.2 release that was fixed in patch 118591-04, so you’ll have to download that patch (118591-04.zip) from any of the countless repositories that hold it (here,here,here, etc.) and install it according to the instructions to remove this time bomb. I’m glad people have been willing to share this patch in a variety of places, because if this one remained locked behind donations to the Larry Ellison Needs More Island Fund I’d be pretty upset.

Once installed, the SunPCi software should start just fine, greeting you with a dialog where you can configure your emulated hard drive and select the operating system you wish to install. Provided you have the correct operating system installation disc, the operating system you select will automatically be installed onto the emulated hard drive. You’ll also see proof that yes, this card is really just a regular, run-of-the-mill PC: it boots up like one, it has a BIOS like any other PC, you can enter this BIOS, and you can mess around with it. It’s really just a PC.

Sun put a lot of effort into making the operating system installation process as seamless and straightforward as possible; in the case of Windows XP, for instance, the SunPCi software will copy the contents of your Windows XP disc to a temporary location, and slipstream all the necessary drivers and some other software (specificallyJava Web Start, of course) into the Windows XP installation process. In other words, once the installation is completed and you end up at the Windows XP desktop, all proper device drivers have been installed and you’re ready to start using it.

The amount of effort and thought Sun put into this product shines through in other really nice touches as well. For instance, inserting a CD or DVD into the Ultra 45’s drive will not only automatically mount it in Solaris, but also inside Windows XP – autorun and all. Making folders on the host’s file system available inside Windows XP is also an absolute breeze, as you can mount any folder on the host system inside Windows XP using Explorer’s Map Network Drive feature:\\localhost\home\thomholwerda, for instance, will make/home/thomholwerda available in Windows. You can also copy and paste text between host and client, and SunPCi offers the option to grow the virtual hard drive you’re using in case you need more space.

The installation procedure installs two different video drivers in Windows XP: one for the S3 Graphics ProSavageDDR, and one for the SunPCi Video. The former drives any external display connected to the SunPCi card, while the latter outputs to a window inside Solaris. If you need to do any graphics or video-related work, Sun strongly suggests you use the S3 chip by using an external display, and it’s obvious why. The performance of the SunPCi Video is so-so, and definitely feels like it’s rendering in software (which it is), so you can expect some UI stutters here and there. A nice touch is that there’s no need for the SunPCi window to “capture” the mouse pointer manually, as you can freely move your Solaris cursor in and out of the SunPCi window.

As for the performance of Windows XP – it will align more or less with what you can expect from a mobile Athlon from 2002, so don’t expect miracles. It’s entirely usable for office and related tasks, but you won’t be doing any hardcore gaming or complex, demanding professional work. The goal of this card is not to replace a dedicated x86 workstation, but to give Solaris/SPARC users access to the various office-related applications most organisations were using at the time, like Microsoft Office, IBM’s Domino, and so on, and it achieves that goal admirably.

There’s a ton of other things you can do with this card that I simply haven’t had the time yet to dive into (this article is already way too long), but that I’d like to come back to in the future. For instance, the list of officially supported operating systems includes not just Windows XP, but also Windows 2000, Server 2003, and a variety of versions of Red Hat (Enterprise) Linux (think Linux version ~2.4.20). The SunPCi software also contains an entire copy of DR-DOS 7.01, which is neat, I guess. Lastly, theuser manual for the SunPCi software lists a whole lot of advanced features and tweaks you can play with, too.

I would also be remiss to note that you can actually use multiple SunPCi cards in a single machine, as that’s a fully supported configuration. You can totally get a big SPARC server, put multiple SunPCi cards in it, and let users log in remotely to use them, perhaps using Sun’s true thin client offering, Sun Rays. This is foreshadowing.

As for other operating systems – I’ve seen rumblings online that versions of NetBSD and Debian from the early 2000s were made to work on the SunPCi II (the previous model to what I have), but I can’t find any information on anything else that might work. The issue is that any operating system running on the card needs drivers for the emulated hard disk, which are obviously not available as those were made by Sun. Since the SunPCi IIIpro has an actual IDE connector, though, I’ve been wondering if it would at least be possible to boot and run an “unsupported” operating system using the external method (dedicated display, mouse, keyboard, etc.). If there’s interest, I can dive into this in the future and report back.

All in all, though, the SunPCi IIIPro is a much more thoughtful and pleasant product to use than I originally anticipated. Sun clearly put a lot of thought into making this card and its features as easy to use as possible, and I can totally see how it would make it palatable to use a SPARC workstation in an otherwise Windows-based corporate environment. Just load up Outlook or whatever Windows-based groupware thing your company used using the SunPCi software, and use it like any other application in your Solaris 10 SPARC environment. Since you can set the SunPCi software to load at boot, you’d probably mostly forget it was running on a dedicated PC on an expansion card, and your colleagues would be none the wiser.

To round out the Sun Microsystems ecosystem of the late 2000s, we really can’t get around explaining why the networkis the computer. It’s time to talk Sun Ray.

Sun Rays: the spokes

During most of its existence, Sun’s slogan was the iconic “The network is the computer“, coined in the early 1980s by John Gage, one of the earliest employees at Sun. Today, the idea behind this slogan – namely, that a computer without a network isn’t really a computer – is so universally true it’s difficult to register just how forward-thinking this slogan was back in 1984. These days, everything with even a gram of computer power is networked, for better or worse, and the vast majority of people will consider any PC, laptop, smartphone, or tablet without a network connection to be effectively useless.

Gage was right, decades before the world realised it.

The product category that embodies Sun’s iconic slogan more than anything is the thin client, and Sun played a big role in this market segment with their line of Sun Ray products. The Sun Ray product line consisted of a variety of products, but the main two components were the Sun Ray Server Software and the various Sun Ray thin clients Sun (and Oracle) produced between 1999 and 2014. The server component would run on a server (or workstation, as we’ll see in a moment), and the Sun Ray client devices would connect to said server over the network.

The idea was that you had a giant server somewhere in your building, running the Sun Ray Server Software, accompanied by whatever number of Sun Ray thin clients you needed on employees’ desks. Each of your employees would have a user account on the server, and could log into that user account using any of the Sun Ray thin clients in the building. The special ingredient was the fact that Sun Rays were stateless, which meant that the thin clients themselves stored zero information about the user’s session; everything was running on the server.

This special ingredient made some real magic possible, most notably hotdesking, which, admittedly, sounds like something LinkedIn professionals do on OnlyFans, but is actually way cooler. You could roam from one Sun Ray to the next, and your desktop, including all the applications you were running and documents you had opened, would travel with you – because they were running on the server. Sun also bet big on smartcards, so instead of logging in with a traditional username and password, you could also log in simply by sliding your smartcard into the card reader integrated into every single Sun Ray. Take your smartcard out, and your session would disappear from the display, ready to continue where you left off on any other Sun Ray.

And yes, you could make this work across the internet as well.

Reading all of this, you may assume Sun Rays and hotdesking involved a considerable amount of jank, but nothing could be further from the truth. I’ve been fascinated by thin clients in general, and Sun Rays in particular, for decades, but I never had the hardware to properly set up a Sun Ray environment at home – until now, of course. With the Ultra 45 all set up and running, and the generous Sun Ray-related donations from Adriaan and Volker, I had everything I needed to set up some Sun Rays. If the Ultra 45 is the central hub, Sun Rays are its spokes.

Let’shotdesk like it’s 2007.

I expected setting up a working Sun Ray environment would be a difficult endeavour, but nothing could be farther from the truth. It turns out that installing, setting up, and configuring the Sun Ray Server Software is incredibly easy, and Nico Maas made it even easier back in 2009 bycondensing the instructions down to the bare essentials (Archive.org link just in case). After following Maas’ list of steps (you can skip thepersonal notes section at the end if you’re not using a dedicated network card for the Sun Ray Server Software), any Sun Ray you connect to your network and turn on will automatically find the Sun Ray Server, perform any possible firmware updates, and show a login screen.

From here, you can log into any user account on the Sun Ray Server (the Ultra 45, in my case) as if you’re sitting right behind it. Depending on which generation of Sun Ray you’re using, loading your desktop will either be fast, faster, or near instantaneous. Thanks to Sun’s network display protocol, the Application Link Protocol, performance is stunningly good. Even on the very oldest Sun Ray 1 device I have, it feels genuinely like you’re using the machine you’re remotely logged into locally.

As part of Maas’ instructions, you also installedApache Tomcat, included in the Sun Ray Server Software’s zip file, which is a necessary component for the graphical configuration and administration utility. Since we’re talking 2000s Sun, this administration GUI is, of course, a web application written in Java, accessible through your browser (I suggest using the copy of Netscape included in Solaris 10) by browsing to your server’s IP address at port 1660. After logging in with your credentials, you’ll discover a surprisingly nice, capable, and detailed set of configuration and administration panels, which mirror many of the CLI configuration tools. Depending on your preference, you may opt to use the CLI tools instead, but persoally, I’m an absolute sucker for 2000s enterprise GUIs.

While there’s a ton of configuration options to play around with here, the ones we’re looking for have to do with setting up smartcards so we no longer have to use bourgeois banalities like usernames and passwords. To enable logging in with a smartcard, you’ll obviously need a smartcard – I have a Sun-branded one, which are objectively the coolest – but there are other options. You’ll then need to read the token on said smartcard, and associate that token with your user account. As a final step, you need to utterly wreck the security of your setup by enabling passwordless smartcard login.

This process is fairly straightforward, but there a few arbitrary details you need to be aware of. First, you need to designate a Sun Ray as a card reader by going to Desktop Units, and selecting the Sun Ray unit you’d like to use as a card reader by clicking Edit and under Advanced, select “Desktop unit is used as token reader” – click OK and perform the cold restart of the Sun Ray Server Software as instructed. Once the restart is completed, make sure the smartcard you wish to use is inserted, then go to the Tokens tab, click on New…, and you’ll see that the token is already read and selected. Enter your username next to “Owner:”, and save. Make sure to undo the “Desktop unit is used as token reader” setting, and you’re good to go.

If you wish to log in entirely passwordless – as in, you just need to insert the smartcard, no typed credentials required – you need to go to Advanced > System Policy, scroll down to “Session Access when Hotdesking”, and tick the box next to “Direct Session Access Allowed”. It should go without warning that this is quite insecure, as someone would just need to yoink your smartcard to break into your account. For whatever that’s worth, on a retro environment in your own home.

Now you can properly hotdesk. Insert your smartcard into any connected Sun Ray, and your desktop will automatically appear, running applications and all. Take the card out, and the Sun Ray login screen will reappear. Wherever you insert your smartcard, your desktop will show up. This way, your session will travel with you no matter where you are – as long as there’s a Sun Ray to log into, you can continue working, even across the internet if that functionality has been enabled. Nothing about this is particularly complex technology-wise, but it absolutelyfeels like magic.

The clients

Let’s dive a little deeper into the Sun Ray clients. Sun (and later Oracle) produced a wide variety of them over the years, but roughly they can be divided up unto three generations. Disregarding theextremely rare early prototypes, the Sun Ray 1 is probably the most iconic model, as far as its design goes. It also happens to be the only model powered by a SPARC chip, the 100MHz microSPARC IIep accompanied by ATI Radeon 7000 graphics. The second generation switched from SPARC to MIPS, a 500MHz RMIAlchemy Au1550 (built by AMD) accompanied by ATI ES1000 graphics. The third generation of Sun Rays moved to either a 667MHz RMI Alchemy Au1380 for the base model, or the MIPS 750MHz RMIXLS104 for the Plus model, both with graphics integrated into the processor.

None of these core specifications really matter though, as the performance will mostly be identical. What really matters is the port selection, and the display resolution the Sun Ray unit is capable of outputting. I would strongly suggest opting for models with DVI output capable of handling at least 1920×1080, since full HD panels are easy to come by and you probably have a few lying around anyway. All models of Sun Ray have USB, audio, and Ethernet ports, so you’re good there, but the Sun Ray 2FS and Sun Ray 3 Plus also have fibre optic Ethernet options. You know, just in case you really want to go nuts.

Your eyes are not deceiving you. That’s a KDE-branded Sun Ray 2FS, and according to Adriaan, there’s only two of these in existence.

Sun also produced various Sun Ray models with integrated displays for that all-in-one experience, includingone with a CRT. Beyond Sun, various third parties also made Sun Ray-compatible devices, offering form factors Sun didn’t explore, like laptops and even tablets. Sadly, these third party models seem to be exceedingly rare, and I’ve never seen one come up for sale anywhere. I would personally haul16 tons and owe my soul to theKing of Lanai’s company store to get my hands on a laptop and tablet model.

But what if you don’t want to deal with the hassle of real hardware? Thin clients or no, these things still take up space and require a ton of cabling and peripherals, which can be a hassle (I have three Sun Rays and their peripherals hooked up… On the floor of my office). Fret not, as Sun and later Oracle also released virtual Sun Ray client software, allowing you to log into the Sun Ray Server form any regular PC. Called the Sun Desktop Access Client or the Oracle Virtual Desktop Client, it’s a simple Java-based application for Linux, Solaris, Windows, and Mac OS, available in 32 and 64 bit variants. Alongside the entire Sun Ray lineup, this piece of software was retired in 2017,but it’s still freely available on Oracle’s website, given you manage to navigate Oracle’s byzantine account signup, login, and download process.

I only tested the version available for Linux, and to my utter surprise, it still works just fine! Since I run Fedora, I downloaded the 64bit RPM, and installed it withrpm -ivh --nodigest ovdc-3.2.0-1.x86_64.rpm. You’re going to need two dependencies, available from Fedora’s own repositories through the following packages:libgnome-keyring andlibsnl. Once installed, the Oracle Virtual Desktop Client will appear in your desktop environment’s application menu, or you can start it withovdc from the terminal. Before you start the application, though, you’re going to need to enable the option “Sun Desktop Access Client” in the Sun Ray Server Software web admin under Advanced > System Policy, and perform a warm restart.

You’ll be greeted by an outdated Java application, so on my 4K panel the user interface looks positively tiny, but otherwise, it works entirely as expected. Enter the IP address of the machine you’re running the Sun Ray Server Software on, and the login screen will appear as if you’re using a hardware Sun Ray client. I find it quite neat that this ancient piece of software – last updated in 2014, its RPM last updated in 2017 – still works just fine on my Fedora 43 machines. There were also Android and iOS variants of the Oracle Virtual Desktop Client, but they’re no longer available in their respective application stores, and the Android APK I downloaded refused to install on my modern Android device.

The Sun Ray ecosystem is, even in 2025, a versatile and almost magical experience. It’s incredibly easy to set up and use, but of course, effectively useless in that Solaris 10 and its GNOME 2.6-based desktop Sun Rays provide remote access to are outdated and lack the modern applications we need. Still, this entire exercise has given me an immense appreciated for what Sun’s engineers built back in the late ’90s and early 2000s, and I wish the Sun Ray ecosystem didn’t die out at Oracle alongside everything else island boy got his hands on.

But did it die out, though? Recently, I reported on the latest OpenIndiana snapshot, and wrote this:

A particularly interesting bullet point is maintenance work and improvements for Sun Ray support, and the changelog notes that these little thin clients are still popular among their users. I’m very deep into the world of Sun Rays at the moment, so reading that you can still use them through OpenIndiana is amazingly cool. There’s a Sun Ray metapackage that installs the necessary base components, allowing you to install Sun’s/Oracle’s original Sun Ray Server software on OpenIndiana. Even though MATE is the default desktop for OpenIndiana, the Sun Ray Server software does depend on a few GNOME components, so those will be pulled in.

↫ Thom Holwerda at OSNews

Now that you’re reading this article, it means the hold this project has had over my life has lessened somewhat, hopefully giving me some time to dive into OpenIndiana further. I’ve had issues getting it to boot and work properly on any of my devices, but knowing it’s still entirely compatible with Sun Ray means I might build a machine specifically for it. The sun must shine.

Conclusion

Could Sun’s ecosystem have made for an excellent computing environment at home? I’m realistic and realise full well that nobody was going to buy an expensive Ultra 45 or otherwise set up a SPARC server with a SunPCi card and Sun Rays just for home use. These were enterprise products with enterprise prices, after all. Still, I think the basic idea of a powerful central computer in the home – perhaps a server in the utility closet – accompanied by a number of cheap thin clients is sound. Most of our computers are sitting idle most of their lifetime, and there’s really no need for every member of a household having access to their personal overpowered desktop and/or laptop.

Twenty years ago, Sun’s ecosystem showed us that such a setup need not be complex, janky, or cumbersome, and with a bit more end-user focused polish it would’ve made for an amazing home computing environment. Of course, there’s far more profit to be made in selling multiple overpowered computing devices to each consumer, especially if you can also manage to force them into subscription software and “cloud” services, while showing them ads every step of the way.

I’ve only scratched the surface of everything you could possibly do with the hardware and software covered in this article, as I didn’t want to get too bogged down in the weeds. There’s other operating systems to try on the Ultra 45, there’s compatibility to explore with the SunPCi, there’s OpenIndiana to install to see just how hard it is to get the Sun Rays working with a modern operating system, and, of course, there’s a ton of finer details to tweak, fiddle with, and discover. I haven’t had this much fun with a bunch of computing devices in ages.

This deep dive into Sun’s ecosystem has consumed most of my life over the past few months. I know full well writing 10,000 word articles on dead Sun tech from the 2000s is not a particularly profitable use of my time. This isn’t going to draw scores of new readers to the OSNewsPatreon andKo-Fi and make me rich. For profit, I should be making YouTube videos with fast transitions and annoying sound effects to stir up drama based on GitHub discussions or LKML posts with my O face in the thumbnails.

Butsomeone needs to show the world what we lost when Sun died and the industry enshittified. Tech has hit rock bottom, and I want to show everyone that yes, wecan build something better.

We only have to look back at what we lost, instead of forward at what’s left to destroy.