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Discussion (52 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
As an aside on Sun Ray, it played a very important (if incidental) role in the development of DTrace in that one of the first truly production systems we used DTrace on was a Sun Ray server inside of Sun that was in a huge amount of pain. (I described this in the DTrace USENIX paper[0], and also in my "Dtrace (sic) Review" talk at Google ca. 2007.[1])
[0] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedin...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgmA48fILq8
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.
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.
It was very much like running an X11 server/terminal, except the session could stay open while you moved to another physical terminal. This was great for universities where you might be working on something, have to rush off to class, then could head back to a terminal to pick up where you left off. Also handy if you have long-running tasks that you don't want to interrupt.
Theoretically, given a sufficient networking configuration/VPN/etc., you could pull your smart card out of the Sun Ray in your university office, go home, and then drop your smart card into a Sun Ray at home and still have everything back where you left off.
It was basically the last great innovation of the mainframe/terminal server paradigm, as far as I'm aware. A little late to the party, since by that time most students in CS had laptops and the rest used computers at home, but still very cool.
They (well, the late models) had a Cisco compatible VPN client built in. Worked like a charm at my place of work in the late naughts.
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).
Systems programming with compiled BASIC, its Extended Pascal version, the API surface that somehow we can find traces where Windows NT got its design inspiration from, really leaves some space for what ifs, in the operating systems adoption evolution.
I also really liked the idea of the smart card, more secure than just a password. And you would transfer your entire open session to another terminal with it which was really nice.
I still have one or two SunRays here but the problem is they don't allow for modern resolutions like 1920x1080x8bpp
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaStation#/media/File:Sun_Mi...
Here is another one, from the first JavaStation,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxV_pR1ZsXM
Sun was my favourite UNIX vendor, oh well.
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.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Continuum
(Except the Citrix. I never admin'ed that, only used it for a few gigs.)
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?
This is a feature that some graphical desktops used to have back when 640x480 and 800x600 monitors were still common, the desktop resolution could be set independently of the display resolution, so you could have a larger framebuffer that your monitor presented a view in to. I recall some graphics drivers (Matrox for sure) added this to Windows 9x and called it "virtual desktop" and I know I've seen it on a few *nix platforms too.
I'd assume if the resolution adjustments work as expected below 1024x768 that whatever graphics driver OI is using in your VM only sees the virtual display as capable of 1024x768 at max and so it does this if directed to provide a larger desktop.
edit: apparently xrandr calls this "panning"
Still think they've not been matched for ease of "start a session, walk away, carry on somewhere else" as if you've never left your desk.
I worked for a meat works that had Sunrays on all the corporate desktops and the IT manager (in a department of 3 supporting a billion dollar business) made the decision to move Sunrays off the clunky Solaris 10 CDE onto... Ubuntu Dapper Drake. My predecessor had worked out how to get all the bits running and we had Ubuntu on Sunray!
Ref: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuOnSunRay