Even with Linux's immense penetration into the dot-com and Web hosting world, Sun is still currently the big honcho in UNIX enterprise computing. If you want to host an Oracle DB running SAP, or PeopleSoft at a Fortune 500 company, chances are the preferred vendor is Sun and the hardware platform is UltraSPARC. And of course, while Java development can take place on any OS, Sun's preferred development platform is without question their own native Solaris.

Even with Linux's immense penetration into the dot-com and Web hosting world, Sun is still currently the big honcho in UNIX enterprise computing. If you want to host an Oracle DB running SAP, or PeopleSoft at a Fortune 500 company, chances are the preferred vendor is Sun and the hardware platform is UltraSPARC. And of course, while Java development can take place on any OS, Sun's preferred development platform is without question their own native Solaris.

Well, there's good news for the many Open Source and UNIX professionals who would love to have their own Solaris SPARC platform; now you can have your cake and eat it too. The Sun Blade 100 is the first UltraSPARC machine which starts with a basic configuration of under $1000. For $950 shipped direct from Sun's Web site, you can get a 500mhz 64-bit UltraSPARC-IIe with 128MB of RAM; 15GB EIDE disk; integrated hi-res graphics accelerator; 3 PCI slots; a 48x CD-ROM; 1.44mb floppy drive; a Smart Card reader; 10/100 Ethernet; Firewire 1394; 4 USB ports; and Solaris 8 pre-installed. The Sun Blade has a regular VGA output, making it easy to connect to a KVM switch and share a monitor with a PC. Our supplied test machine configured with 256MB of 168-pin JEDEC RAM goes for $1450, and if you really want to build some serious applications the machine can handle up to 2GB.

Setup was a breeze. We connected our Hitachi SVGA monitor, the supplied mouse and keyboard combo, and Ethernet connections, and fired the machine up. When Solaris booted, a simple script asked us a series of configuration questions, and within minutes we were up and running in the Solaris CDE desktop. Our only snag was figuring out the exact ifconfig parameters for proper DHCP configuration.

CDE is nice, but we were happy to discover that we had a choice of two different GNOME environments for SPARC, a preview from Sun's Web site and the complete Ximian GNOME from the Ximian Web site. If you opt to run GNOME on a SPARC, we suggest you go for the polished Ximian version. KDE 2.x also runs on Solaris as well, although we really had to dig around on the Net for pre compiled KDE and Qt binaries at http://www.rt.e-technik.tu-darmstadt.de/~student2/kde.solaris.sparc/.

If you have to build something yourself, Open Source development tools are in plentiful supply on Solaris, including GCC and other important libraries common to Linux such at GTK+ and Qt. Native Solaris SPARC ports of Netscape, Mozilla, and Opera had us surfing the Web in style, and with StarOffice and SAMBA we were able to work nicely with our Windows friends.

Generally speaking we found regular application performance to be better or equal to that of a 700Mhz Pentium III machine, which was more than adequate for the resource-heavy GNOME 1.4. In floating point intensive applications like SETI and Distributed.net where the 64-bit CPU made a considerable difference, the Sun Blade utterly crushed our 1GHz Pentium III running Red Hat with 256MB of RAM. As a remote desktop for our Linux servers, the Sun Blade also serves an excellent X-Windows terminal. For those with more serious 3D graphics needs, Sun offers and OpenGL Expert3D graphics processor at additional cost.

At PC price points, the Sun Blade is an affordable, expandable and powerful UltraSPARC machine that allows the Linux and OSS developer to easily broaden their horizons to include enterprise UNIX computing. If you want to make Solaris part of your professional life, this is definitely the machine to get.

One caveat: While SPARC Linux distributions do exist, such as Debian and SuSE, the Sun Blade was not capable of running them at the time of our evaluation due to driver issues.