I got an itch to install Solaris 10. Nice to see IPv6 working out of the box. And CDE in Solaris colours is just gorgeous.
@mroach Nice! Real hardware? I'd love a VMS system. Used one quite a bit many years ago, but the default WM there is definitely not “gorgeous”. :-)
@fergycool Sadly not, although I do have a spare Sun Ultra 27 here that would be about period-accurate for this. Maybe Solaris 11. My VM already died though. Some disk issue. I've seen this before where the OS just doesn't play nice with a virtualised controller and disk.

VMS! I've never used it but I've seen screenshots. I'd love a bit of DEC gear. One time I had my bid in on a Digital Multia and lost out and I've never seen one for remotely as cheap since :[
@mroach I bitterly regret seeing a very small VAX system sat in a second market stall 30 years ago. The guy wanted just £20 for it but my bag was full and I thought it will still be there next week. It wasn’t!
@fergycool Our big lesson here is that the best time to buy old computers and parts is at the moment of opportunity! It's not like they're making them any more.
A VAX would have been *sweet*. Did you ever run VMS? I haven't used it personally, but at my first job they had one running for years to support a client that just didn't want to upgrade. We even had an LA120 around into the 2000s.
@mroach Yes. During my Ph.D. (molecular biology) I accessed an old Vax/VMS to run some bioinformatics software (for DNA sequence analysis). Generally just via telnet although every now and again I got access to the single XWindows client in the entire dept! Years later I ended up working for the company that developed that software but they'd dropped VMS support by then (just Linux, Tru64 and IRIX).