>> You don't say why it has to be *recent* Sun hardware, so I have to
>> wonder if a U1/U2 or maybe a pre-sparc64 box would do.  They
>> certainly work just fine for me; the recent mania for hardware
>> capable of running recent bloatware has produced a perception that
>> they're too slow to be useful, which as far as I can tell is
>> illusory.  They do still do everything they ever did, after all.

> My basic wishlist is to have an Ultra 5 or 10 replace the Athlon
> Thunderbird that I'm sitting in front of. I need fvwm with 16
> desktops and around 30+ xterm windows, mozilla, and openoffice.

Only those last two would be any problem, and they're mostly a matter
of RAM from what little I understand of them.  My main
screen-&-keyboard these days is a SPARCstation 20 with 304M of RAM
(64x4+16x3); while I don't use fvwm, mozilla, or openoffice, 304M is
actually approaching "modern" amounts of RAM, so it might well be
usable.

> I would expect that it would be a lot more reliable than commodity
> junk.

Perhaps - but I tend to consider Sun hardware "commodity junk" ever
since they went PCI.  After all, why did they switch to PCI?  So they
could use cheap PCI cards - and there's the "commodity junk", right
there.  (The Sun-made part may be reliable, but a machine is just as
crashed if the video card goes wonky as if the cpu flakes out - and my
i386 boxen (see below) don't fail for mobo reasons anyway.)

> I have 18 systems up and running, Four of them are Intel/Amd, and
> they seem to require the most frequent maintenance.  Sun 4c and 4m
> seem to go forever, The few Ultra boxes that I have are also fairly
> reliable.

As for 4c/4m versus wintel "commodity junk", my own experience matches
yours.  I have some five or ten SPARCstations of various vintage and a
Sun-3/60 (in a -3/260 cardcage, for better cooling) in routine live
use.  I also have a K6-2/500 and an Athlon 2600 in routine live use.
Even though the Suns outnumber the Intel-architecture junk at least two
to one and probably more like four or five to one, when a machine needs
repair (hardware or software), it's better than even money that it's
one of the i386 machines, not a Sun.

I can't comment on Ultra boxen of any stripe in this regard.  I have a
U2 and two U1s, all of which are sitting idle at the moment and none of
which have been in regular use in my setup, for reasons which I can go
into if anyone is interested but which aren't really relevant to the
topic at hand.  In a past job we had a U1, back when they were new, and
aside from the CPU fan seizing up (apparently common with U1s of that
era), it doesn't stand out in my memory as worse or better than the
rest of the Suns.

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