Operating System Overview
Since I have owned my Ultra 20 I have installed a few different Opernating Systems on it, all with decent results. In hindsight perhaps I should of left Fedora on it, but I did not like the attributes of the non-closed binaries, and didn’t realize it was just a driver problem.
My Ultra 20 during this process was the large configuration,
2.6GHz Opteron 152
2GB ram
250GB SATA drive
Nvidia FX 1400 Quattro video card
with an extra 250GB SATA drive installed.
Solaris 10 (came pre-installed)
I liked the performance of it, except for problems with IO, zone creation or even package installation caused the machine to stall for a few
seconds. I found this unacceptable. Perhaps this has been fixed since, but I have not investigated. But still it was a nice combination in all. It would still be running Solaris 10 today, if it had full VMware support.
Redhat:
Various versions are supported but I don’t own them so I did not test
them
Fedora FC4:
Very smooth install, from the DVD, supported all the hardware that I tested. Biggest problem was with the standard NVIDIA drivers, it caused on screen
corruption, that was very disconcerting considering it was a new system. It does run VMware like a champ. But in the end it was the video problem that
kept me moving on to find another choice of Operating Systems.
CentOS 4.2 X86_64:
(http://www.centos.org) CentOS worked just great out of the box. No special configuration needed and it correctly
configured all hardware, was reported by Avi Schwartz
Windows XP PRO sp2 (32 bit)
I first tried installing from my old Windows XP pro disk, which failed. My guess is that the non SP2 version lacks support for the SATA drives. Once I
used the SP2 disk, all was fine, I did have to use the driver disk that comes with the system to get full hardware support, but all and all very
painless. In fact I still have XP installed on the system today.
The only problem I have had with XP on this system is when using VMware gsx with it. During installs it sometimes pops up dialog boxes complaining that VMware has exceeded it quota. Not sure why it happens. There are no quota’s enabled on any of the disks installed in the system. It does give the option to retry, abort, or continue. You must use retry, to work beyond the error message. Anything else aborts the vhost. From what I can tell this happens more after the box has been running for a few days. Freshly booted machines exhibit this behavior less, but it still happens.
Windows XP PRO sp2 (64 bit)
I don’t own so I have not tested it.
If you own a Ultra 20 and would like to submit your experiences with different Operating Systems. Please use the contact us link below.
