| My question is: is an Ultra 1 a realistic buy for a small workstation 
| machine? I'd like to run Solaris (or NetBSD/sparc64 once it becomes 
| X-capable) with Opera, StarOffice, Sylpheed, play MP3s, and do some basic 
| C/C++ development - I don't care about OpenWindows or CDE, I usually just 
| use xdm and Xfce with Solaris. I would also like to tinker with 
| NetBSD/sparc64 and maybe try to do a little hacking on it if I get to that 
| point.
|
| Is an Ultra 1/170 with, say, 128MB memory good enough to do these things 
| smoothly? I had an Ultra 10/333 on loan from a friend for a short time, and 
| I was very happy with it's performance. How does an Ultra 1, or a basic 
| Ultra 5 stand in comparison?

If you're planning on running NetBSD on it I'd recommend an Ultra 1 with
cgsix.  It's the only machine with a working X server and has the best
price/performance.  X is quite snappy as long as you don't run some huge
monstrosity such as CDE (which is slow on even brand new machines).

The only other machine I would consider would be a new Blade 100.  Most
other machines seem to be too expensive for what you're really getting.
(Ultra 5/10 machines have lousy IDE performance.  U2s and U60s are too
expensive.)

Eduardo