VAX OS's & SGI OS's

[BobTheHob]

One of the professors at my college is donating some mainframes and workstations to the college, since I know the most about UNIX I was appointed in charge of getting them operational. There will be some VAX mainframes and workstations, some SGI workstations, and some SUN Sparc workstations. I plan on putting Solaris 10 on the Sun workstations since I can get it free, but I don't know if I will be able to get ahold of IRIX for the SGI. I may be able to get ahold of VMS for the VAC but thats not definate. So I was just wondering if any of you knew some good OS's for VAX's and also SGI MIPS's.
I was thinking OpenBSD for them since I'm pretty good with BSD. But I dunno if anyone knows anything better for one or both of those platforms.

[bedouin]

VAXen can run NetBSD, probably other operating systems too.  VMS is a cool OS though; the first I used to access the Internet with.

[dishawjp]

I had an old MicroVAX... micro...yeah... must have weighed in at about 80 lbs. or so.  Anyway, it ran Ultrix.  Ultrix was a DEC Unix.  Don't know if you can get a hold of a copy of it, but if you want a *nix OS on a VAX, Ultrix will run.  

I always did like VMS and then later, OpenVMS.  I had work accounts on several VAX's and then later an AlphaVAX.  VMS was a nice OS once you got used to the syntax and all.  Having to enclose directory names in square brackets always seemed a bit crude to me..  Setting permissions and a few other things took longer command lines than *nix OS's chmod commands too.  But it was rock solid and stable and once you got used to it it was good.  Oh, and the text editors... they had nothing as powerful as vi. EDIT and EEVE were OK, but a lot slower than vi.  Also, not being case-sensitive limited things a bit.  But compared to DOS it was killer.  I still like the VMS MAIL utility better than sendmail.

But *nix is really the way to go and if you can get a copy of Ultrix it should load on any VAX box nicely.

[mobrien_12]

One of the professors at my college is donating some mainframes and workstations to the college, since I know the most about UNIX I was appointed in charge of getting them operational. There will be some VAX mainframes and workstations, some SGI workstations, and some SUN Sparc workstations. I plan on putting Solaris 10 on the Sun workstations since I can get it free, but I don't know if I will be able to get ahold of IRIX for the SGI. I may be able to get ahold of VMS for the VAC but thats not definate. So I was just wondering if any of you knew some good OS's for VAX's and also SGI MIPS's.
I was thinking OpenBSD for them since I'm pretty good with BSD. But I dunno if anyone knows anything better for one or both of those platforms.

You can run Linux on Sparc if you want.

What  kind of Sparcs?  Sparc I chips are weaker than 486 chips.

[BobTheHob]

VAXen can run NetBSD, probably other operating systems too. VMS is a cool OS though; the first I used to access the Internet with.

Yep, I'm hoping I can get ahold of VMS though, my department chair was a VMS Sys-Admin for a number of years. Hopefully he still has connections, I havent talked to him about it yet.

@dishawjp: lol, I always got a laugh out of the old "Micro" form-factor. Thanks for the suggestion though, I'll have to look into Ultrix.

@mobrien_12: The Sun workstations are the newest ones, I don't have the exact specs on any of the stuf yet, but they should be UltraSPARC III, I don't yet know whether they will be single or dual. But I already have the SPARC solaris 10 discs, So I'm gonna put that on the sun's, thanks though