Setting up a Sun Ray server on OpenIndiana Hipster 2025.10

jjandeboevrie about 4 hours ago 13 commentsRead Article on catstret.ch

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martinbfine•about 2 hours ago

We had hundreds of them. Fantastic technology, really secure and reliable. Wish I had saved a few, threw them all out shortly after Oracle acquired Sun. Moved to HP and Dell thin clients with VDI. All the problems and patches and maintenance of that environment paid for a really big new house for me, lots of overtime. Thanks Microsoft/HP/Dell/VMware!

haunter•about 2 hours ago

The predecessor that the Sun JavaStation “Krups” is one of my all time favorite computer design https://forums.sgi.sh/index.php?threads/the-sun-javastation-...

We used to have these at my workplace and always wanted to get one but they got thrown out and I didn’t manage to save one… And nowadays they are kind of rare to find on used marketplaces.

And of course you can still set them up today https://youtu.be/Fb0w5OT1U58

pjmlp•about 1 hour ago

Thanks for sharing, that brings back good memories.

Here is another one, from the first JavaStation,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxV_pR1ZsXM

Sun was my favourite UNIX vendor, oh well.

alexellisuk•about 2 hours ago

Interesting to see it all play out through the post.. OpenIndiana is virtualized, the Sun Ray connects to it and runs like a thin client.

I hadn't heard of "Sun Ray" until today, but it reminds me a lot of the idea behind Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP) - which I used on our school's IT lab back then at a teen. Set up an old i386 machine with the various netbooting daemons. Then on each host - boot from floppy disk, remove disk, insert in next machine until 20 hosts were running from that poor old hard drive.

The nice thing was that the installed OS on each was unaffected, and each machine was running X11 over the network.

Seems like those solutions were optimising for a time where hardware was overly expensive.

lizknope•about 2 hours ago

Today if we say "open an xterm and type this command" we mean to start a program that runs in a window that has a text interface with a command line.

Here is an X terminal from around 1990.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_terminal

It displayed everything over the network via X11 from a more powerful workstation / server.

> Datapro wrote in 1991 that X terminals could provide windowing capability, high-resolution graphics and relatively fast processing for prices starting around US$1,500, compared with workstations that could cost more than US$10,000.

pjmlp•about 1 hour ago

When I got to the university, we had a DG/UX server, the usual green and ambar phosphor text terminals, and the few lucky ones IBM X Windows terminals, which were mostly used to manage several xterms, given the choice of applications at the time.

pjmlp•about 1 hour ago

This was perfectly normal at the time, my first UNIX developer experience was the traditional timesharing experience, one server for everyone.

Ironically cloud based development is nothing other than going back to these days, just with other set of technologies.

Remember, "The Network is the Computer" (1984).

ktm5j•about 1 hour ago

I'm a huge Sun dork, so I play around with OI every now and then.. but every time I try to use OI in libvirt I have a problem where the display is cut off. This only happens when using resolutions bigger than 1024x768, and if you mouse over to that area the screen will shift over to the missing bit, so it's sort of usable.. but maddening haha.

I'm pretty sure I can see the same thing happening in the picture of the sunray client they have on this page. The left hand side of the screen is cut off (you should see the clock and syspanel icons on the top left).

Anyone know why this happens? And how to fix it?

eoskx•about 1 hour ago

Fond memories of buying cheap Sun gear around 2005-2007. I had an E4500, Blade 1000, and a Tadpole SPARCbook 6500 that I ran Solaris 10/11 on along with a couple of Sun Rays. Used the Blade 1000 as a Sun Ray server and it was a great experience. Glad to see it is still alive and kicking in some form.

khalic•about 1 hour ago

Ah OpenSolaris, good to see you survived, but oh boy it aches my heart every time I hear your name. Just like ZFS

i_think_so•about 2 hours ago

So cool!! I thought SunRay was dead forever!

I used to have a stack of those login cards from the Sun courses I took. (I think they gave them to us to to log in to the "attendance" system, but really they were just souvenirs to show your coworker when you got back.) They sat on my desk and were a marvelous kind of fidget device, like shuffling a very scanty deck of cards over and over.

I bought a gen 2 SunRay in the hopes that I'd get around to installing it in my LAN some day as part of my eternal To-Do list. Sadly, I trashed all of that stuff when Sun got eaten and Solaris turned into a niche tech that I was almost embarrassed to have on my resume. I wish I had that stuff now.

Thank you for submitting this link, and (if they come by here) thanks to the author for writing up such a lovely, nostalgic bit of work.

mitchell_h•about 1 hour ago

The login cards were the killer feature on them(at the time). I managed a fleet of them things spread all over 4 buildings. Being able to work in one location, get up and goto another and just pickup what you were doing was INSANE in that day and age. Slapping in a keycard do it all was unheard of.

We had citrix and sunray in those days. Citrix was for those that had BIG BIG BIG money and needed windows. We were a java shop, so it was either an e450 in the server room and sunrays, or ultra5s at every desk.

whalesalad•about 1 hour ago

This reminds me of one of my favorite youtube channels, clabretro: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjeznAUfx0OfCseO3gKOv...