Several years ago, well, maybe over a decade ago I was working at my first "real" job after college. It was at a remote sales office for a VAR named Andataco based out of San Diego, CA. Our office was in Irvine, CA and just happened to be right across the hall from a Sun Microsystems branch office. They had just released the new and exciting Ultra 1 and 2 using UltraSPARC processors as a replacement for the SPARCstation 20. So sometime around late '95 and early '96.

I remember walking across the hall and seeing a demo unit powered on and thinking to myself "what could anyone possibly do with that?" I believe it was running the Common Desktop Environment (CDE) and it looked cool, but I couldn't figure out specifically why it was any better.

Mostly, this was because I really didn't have that much experience with computers. Sure, we had a Commodore VIC-20 and eventually a PC clone running DOS/Windows when I was growing up, but I only used those for games. If you remember the VIC-20, then you remember buying the books with pages and pages of basic code that you had to type in just to play a game. And if you had a typo, you spent hours trying to figure out where you went wrong.

That trend didn't change at all in college. I had a computer, but it was only as good as the games I could play on it were. I didn't take any computer science courses, programming classes, or anything to trigger a further interest in technology. Computers were for playing games when you should be studying.

So I really had no idea why UltraSPARC was cool or what advantages Solaris had to offer. I just knew that people wanted them and were spending a lot of money.

I had an old AMD 3200+ machine laying around with Fedora running that I experimented with Mono on. MonoDevelop is actually much better than I had ever thought, but that is a different story altogether. The machine has a decent hard drive, memory, and graphics. Remembering that Solaris is freely available for x86 machines, I figured I'd give it a try even though finding drivers for my system most likely would be a deal killer.

I went and fetched the ISO's for Solaris here, burned them to DVD, and installed. Goodbye Fedora. To my surprise, the install went on without a hitch. Upon login, you are given a choice between CDE and the Java Desktop. I chose CDE but quickly switched to the Java Desktop because CDE looked terrible out of the box.

The Java Desktop looks really nice and it is very friendly as far as providing GUI configuration. It comes pre-packaged with productivity tools, internet, and collaboration applications.

For the most part, all of my hardware seems to work in the Java Desktop. Everything but the on-board network adapter, which is ok for now. In looking at the hardware compatability list, it looks like I can pick up a cheap 10/100 PCI NIC from Belkin and fetch the Solaris drivers from RealTek. Their site seems very slow, but you can find them here.

After playing around with it for a couple hours, I find myself in the same place I was all those years ago. "What could I possibly do with this?"

To be continued...