this is an addendum to yesterday's post on setting up a Sun Ray server on OpenIndiana Hipster 2025.10. all of this is written with the assumption you've followed the setup steps in that post already.
I hadn't realised just how much of a pain not having (non-smartcard-based) mobile sessions is, especially given I use the virtual clients a non-trivial amount. so let's fix that on the newly-built Sun Ray server.
the mobile session login UI requires a few libraries that are... "period-accurate," so to speak - Motif; the CDE runtime; and ToolTalk. the sunray-essential package has dependencies on all of those, so that they get installed before the Sun Ray server software - but the packages for those libraries in the main OpenIndiana repositories are completely empty, and thus the mobile session login UI won't run. we need to replace those empty packages with the real things - which are available in the repository at https://pkg.toc.de/sunray/.
to add that repository, and install the needed libraries:
pkg set-publisher -g http://pkg.toc.de/sunray sunray
pkg install pkg://sunray/cde/cde-runtime pkg://sunray/library/tooltalk pkg://sunray/library/motifthe pkg://sunray/ part of the package FMRI tells IPS to get these packages from the configured sunray publisher specifically, even if another preferred provider has packages by the same name.
with those installed, we can then adjust the Sun Ray client policy to allow mobile sessions, and restart the Sun Ray server to apply that policy change:
/opt/SUNWut/sbin/utpolicy -a -z both -g -M
/opt/SUNWut/sbin/utstart -cthe policy that I actually use has a few extra flags (most notably, -u both to enable virtual clients; and -m to enable multihead support) - but keeping it simple is better for demoing things!
once the Sun Ray server has restarted, your Sun Ray clients should now show you a mobile session login screen, rather than the GDM greeter:
speaking of the Oracle Virtual Desktop Client...
my main laptop these days is a 16" MacBook Pro (M2 Max). it's a great machine, and I dual-boot it between macOS Tahoe and NixOS. but I need to connect to my Sun Ray server on the go, and I had absolutely zero luck getting native macOS version of Oracle Virtual Desktop Client to work on macOS.
the solution? run the Windows version in WINE! being a Sun/Oracle application of this time period, it is of course a Java app - however, it requires a native support library that sits alongside the JAR, and it has a custom launcher executable. thankfully, setting it up isn't too difficult.
I'm using Whisky to manage the WINE prefixes - which sadly has been discontinued, but it still works perfectly well.
create a new bottle with the version set to Windows 7, wait for it to initialize (it takes a while, and there was no progress indication other than the buttons in the lower right enabling), and then bring up Winetricks. I installed msxml6, msvcrt40, and gdiplus - although I'm not sure all those are strictly necessary.
I then installed Java: this Temurin build of jdk8u312-b07 (64-bit) (file name OpenJDK8U-jre_x64_windows_hotspot_8u312b07.msi) worked perfectly. hit the "Run..." button in the bottom right of the Whisky window, locate and select that MSI, and run through the setup wizard as normal.
now, for OVDC itself. unfortunately, the OVDC MSI refuses to install in WINE, because it's trying to install drivers for USB and smart card redirection that obviously won't work - so we need to unpack it and grab the necessary files. 7-Zip works just fine for this. i'm using OVDC version 3.2 for Windows x64 (found in V36439-01.zip - available from Oracle eDelivery, or on archive.org).
only three files out of the extracted MSI are needed - ovdc.exe, ovdc.jar, and vdc.dll. all the other stuff in the MSI is driver-related. throw those three files in a directory somewhere inside your WINE prefix's C: drive - I put them in C:\Program Files\Oracle\, mostly because that directory already existed from my attempts at actually using the MSI. you can then click the "Pin Program" button in Whisky, and navigate to the ovdc.exe file - resulting in this:
just for peace-of-mind's sake, after starting OVDC, I went into the application settings and turned off the checkboxes for USB and smart-card redirection also.
some shout-outs, some rambling
if you want to see some more period-correct Sun Ray server setup (Sun Solaris, on an actual Sun rack-mount SPARC server!), among other (mis)adventures with old enterprise computing hardware, check out youtube.com/@clabretro! I'd watched Colby's videos for a while at this point (before I had even started playing with the Sun Rays), but a couple months after I published the first blog post in my ever-growing Sun Ray series, I ended up reaching out to him by email, only to hear that another of his viewers had sent him a link to one of my follow-up posts!
I ended up shipping him some Sun & Oracle branded smart cards from my pile, and he pointed me towards a source for brand new Sun Ray-compatible smart cards (which he's since also covered in a video).
speaking of the earlier follow-up post about Sun Ray firmware - if you happen to know where to find the later releases of the Sun Ray Operating Software (or a copy of the Sun Ray Server Software version 5.4.5.0 for Solaris 11 x86), please send me an email!
it is honestly kind of wild to see Bryan Cantrill comment on the Hacker News submission for yesterday's blog post (if you see this, hi Bryan!)
it's also kind of wild just how many ex-Sun employees have reached out since that initial blog post was published. I've been really glad to hear from everyone who has emailed!
Sun really were right - the network is the computer.