May 6, 2026
Thin client, thick drama
Setting up a Sun Ray server on OpenIndiana Hipster 2025.10
Retro office terminals are back, and the comments are pure nostalgia chaos
TLDR: A new guide shows people how to bring an old Sun Ray terminal system back to life on modern OpenIndiana, despite several weird setup hiccups. The comments stole the show, with readers swinging between shocked nostalgia, regret over thrown-out hardware, and jokes that newer replacements were such a mess they paid for someone’s house.
A hobbyist’s step-by-step attempt to revive a Sun Ray server — basically an old-school system that lets tiny desk terminals act like full computers — should have been a niche retro tech story. Instead, the comments turned into a full-on reunion tour for people who clearly never got over Sun’s glory days. The post walks through getting this vintage setup running on modern OpenIndiana inside a virtual machine, with plenty of little gotchas, weird installer pop-ups, and even a hilariously broken black-on-black terminal window. But the real plot twist? Readers were emotionally invested.
The strongest reaction was pure wistful devotion. One commenter gasped, “I thought SunRay was dead forever!” while others remembered stacks of login cards, beloved hardware designs, and office fleets of these thin little terminals humming along without drama. That nostalgia quickly turned spicy: one former admin said they had hundreds of Sun Rays, called them “fantastic,” and then dropped the killer punchline that switching to newer thin-client systems brought so many headaches and patches it basically funded a “really big new house” in overtime. Ouch.
There wasn’t exactly a flame war, but there was a soft clash between retro true believers and newer readers just discovering what Sun Ray even was. One person compared it to school computer labs from back in the day; another veered into a mini-rant about maddening display bugs in OpenIndiana. So yes, the guide is about resurrecting old tech — but the comments made it clear this is also about grief, regret, and a suspicious amount of longing for discarded office hardware.
Key Points
- •The article documents a tested method for running Sun Ray Server Software on OpenIndiana Hipster 2025.10 in a Proxmox VE virtual machine.
- •A specific Proxmox VM configuration is provided, including q35, SeaBIOS, VirtIO devices, 8GB RAM, 4 CPU cores, VirtIO RNG, and vIOMMU.
- •The author says OpenIndiana should be fully updated first and recommends enabling the hipster-encumbered repository before installing Sun Ray packages.
- •The setup uses the `sunray-essential` package plus Sun Ray Server Software 5.4.0.0 for Solaris 11 i386, extracted from `V37038-01.zip` and installed through a local IPS publisher.
- •The article notes that SRSS depends on older Java Runtime Environment and Apache Tomcat components included in the package's Supplemental directory.