> Though this doesn't necessarily pertain directly to NetBSD, I figured I'd 
> ask here since I can't recieve Suns@Home posts at the moment (short story, 
> AT&T cable sucks).

plus, we tend to know a lot about this hardware. :)

> buying an Ultra machine to replace my aging SS5/110 with S24. I've poked 
> around in benchmarks on the Web, but I'd like to have recommendations from 
> people who know much more about Sun hardware than I do :)

mmm, ss5/110, great machine.

> My question is: is an Ultra 1 a realistic buy for a small workstation 
> machine? I'd like to run Solaris (or NetBSD/sparc64 once it becomes 
> X-capable) with Opera, StarOffice, Sylpheed, play MP3s, and do some basic 
> C/C++ development - I don't care about OpenWindows or CDE, I usually just 
> use xdm and Xfce with Solaris. I would also like to tinker with 
> NetBSD/sparc64 and maybe try to do a little hacking on it if I get to that 
> point.

i run OpenWin/OpenLook plus all those apps you mentioned on my sparc20 with a
single 150Mhz HyperSPARC CPU running Solaris 8.  it's performance is more than
adequate, so you should be quite pleased with an Ultra 1, especially if you are
coming from an ss5.

> Is an Ultra 1/170 with, say, 128MB memory good enough to do these things 
> smoothly? I had an Ultra 10/333 on loan from a friend for a short time, and 
> I was very happy with it's performance. How does an Ultra 1, or a basic 
> Ultra 5 stand in comparison?

you should notice almost no difference between the ultra5/10 since they are
pretty much the same machine but in different cases.  i honestly don't like
the ultra5/10 since i think the IDE disk performance is dreadful.  a
combination of IDE being dreadful and i hear the sun's IDE drivers aren't
exactly up to snuff.  so the Ultra 1 being SCSI wins major points with me.
now you are going to be using a CPU that is less than half the speed of the
CPU on the ultra 10 that you used, but as we all know, that's not the most
important thing. ;)

i'd recommend an Ultra 1/170E and a Creator of some sorts.  should be fast
enough to make you quite happy, and you should be able to pick one up for
less than $200 or so.

> Thanks for any buying tips you may provide,

buy a SunBlade-1000, how's that for a tip?  :)

-brian