Regarding a gui, xorgxrdp and xrdp work well. They don’t require a graphics card on the s7-2. Also, it is easy to disconnect and resume your gui session without interrupting any running applications. I also use remmina on Manjaro linux to connect to the s7 via rdp protocol. MS windows should also work to connect to the s7-2 via Remote Desktop. Really recommend you try it, it is not bad at all.
The new test kernel on the s7 helps regarding stability. > On Sep 11, 2025, at 7:28 AM, Dennis Clarke <[email protected]> wrote: > > On 9/11/25 08:56, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote: >>> On Thu, 2025-09-11 at 08:38 -0400, Dennis Clarke wrote: >>> Just an update. The Netra X1 is no longer a reasonable test box. >> It's still useful for testing on UltraSPARC II though which is needed >> for kernel testing. >> > > I think I have poured entirely too many hours into this museum piece. > >> I suggest that you open the machine up and connect an old IDE CD-ROM >> drive to be able to build the installer from CD-ROM instead of over >> the network. >> According to various discussion forums on the net, this should be possible. > > The firmware does not recognize any CDROM or DVD that I connect to > the IDE bus. > > My only interest now is that the ORACLE S7-2 server works well enough to > be a compute backend type machine. I don't need anything graphical other > than a few X11 libs as dependencies for XTerm. The X11 passthrough via > OpenSSH is reasonable if I want it to render something on a screen. The > CPU's will likely have reasonable horsepower to compute stuff but really > we already know that any NVidia Quadro GPU can run circles around the > fastest cpu's anywhere when it comes to raw floating point stuff. > > So this is all just an expensive experiment to see if the Linux kernel > can *really* work on something made in the last eight to ten years. > > If it does not work then I drop it on eBay dirt cheap and take a loss. > > -- > -- > Dennis Clarke > RISC-V/SPARC/PPC/ARM/CISC > UNIX and Linux spoken >
