Recently, I bought a Sunblade 150 off of Ebay to experiment with OpenSolaris. I considered getting another PC specifically for this project, but eventually my nostalgia for Sun SPARC gear won out and I got it... it wasn't even that expensive. I did end up replacing the RAM and adding a second IDE drive to it, which all seems to be working fine. I had earlier tried to get OpenSolaris working on a Sun Ultra 10 someone has on semi-permenent loan to me. With only 128MB of RAM it didn't seem to want to boot SunOS 5.10 or 5.11 svn_16 (although it runs Gentoo just fine, if slowly). Between that and having a couple of 9GB drives in it, that wasn't an ideal platform.
I'm hoping, as time goes on, to become more familiar with the internals of OpenSolaris. I had some exposure in a couple of classes, mostly the SunOS 5.5.1 device drivers class I took way back in 1996. If nothing else, this will give me more practice on Solaris features that became available in SunOS 5.10, such as Dtrace
My first project is to time the compile of the complete system using the nightly command. I timed it before, but it wasn't a fair test because I was compiling several things at the same time, as sort of a stress test of the system after I replaced all the memory. I'll post the results here.