Ultra 10

Sun Microsystems Home

Overview

The Ultra 5 and Ultra 10 were the first computers made by Sun that have a more PC like architecture. They both include the PCI bus, as well as IDE controllers for the hard disk and CDROM instead of SCSI. The Ultra 10 still uses Sun's proprietary keyboard interface.

This Ultra 10 is nicely spec'ed with a 333 MHz UltraSPARC IIi, 256MB of RAM, 80GB IDE hard disk, SCSI controller, Creator 3D graphics, and a SunPCI.

SunPCI

The SunPCI was Sun's solution for businesses that still needed to run software on Windows. It is essentially a single board computer on a PCI card with some software that passes I/O to Solaris. When you launch the software, it's similar to opening a VM. You'll see the SunPCI boot like a normal computer. The SunPCI hard disk is an image file stored on the Solaris file system. This is a normal file that can be moved like any other.
The SunPCI also has dedicated video out, keyboard, USB, and Ethernet if you wanted to connect to it like a traditional computer.
I haven't been able to get the SunPCI to work well on my system. Either I'm missing patches, or I'm using an incompatible version of Solaris. Eventually I'm going to try installing Solaris 9 and see if that works better.
NCommander made a in-depth video about the SunPCI here: Video