Michael went out yesterday and I had the house to myself. I thought about going out, but while making plans to meet up with a friend things just weren’t working out (which turned out to be a good thing, as Michael ended up needing my car in the afternoon). I spent most of the morning reading and around 11 I camped out upstairs to check out our new toys:
A friend Michael used to work with had been collecting old sun sparcs for a while, and just recently decided he didn’t have a use for them anymore. He knew that Michael was into sparcs (Michael installed Debian on one one of these machines back in the day) so he offered to give them to us. Woo little sparcs! It’s not clear whether all of them work yet, we suspect that a couple will just have to be used for parts.
I did some research into them yesterday, using information gleened from the wikipedia page on SPARCstation and this SPARC CPU names guide we have the following:
Two SPARCstation 2 – according to the site these are 40mhz, Cypress CY7C601 CPU, max ram of 128M, we have yet to discover how much ram we have in ours, both of these come with a floppy drive
One SPARCstation LX – 50mhz, microSPARC CPU, max ram of 96M and I think ours is maxxed out, this has a floppy drive (and this is my favorite because it’s so cute)
Three SPARCstation 5 – according to the site these are made in 70, 85, 110, 170 MHz versions, microSPARC CPU, and max ram of 256M, none of these have floppy drives
These are all 32-bit processors released in the early 90s.
I didn’t know a whole lot about sparcs, so I grabbed the little LX for inspection. Opened it up, and poked around, then looked at the monitor connector – it’s a Sun proprietary connected to connect to Sun monitors. When Michael came home in the early afternoon to pick up my car I told him of the non-standard connectors and he just said “oh, yeah, well we have a converter.” So after he left I went digging through our boxes of cables and connections, eventually finding it in the box we got with his Sun E250 server a few months back. Finally I got the little connector box set up and another monitor on my desk and booted the sparc, which dropped me into OpenBoot. I’d never seen the OpenBoot shell before, it’s pretty slick looking for the time it was made.
I then went looking for Debian install floppies for the little sparc. I couldn’t find any. I eventually found some for woody, but, eh, woody? I gave up after a while, expecting that Michael had a plan. It turns out that the Debian floppies for sparc never worked very well and Michael’s intention was to do an install over the network, which he’s going to show me how to do, yay!
Honestly I don’t know what we’re going to do with all of these, I’ll keep one for myself to play with, depending on how fast the sparc 5s are I’ll either keep one of those or the cute little LX.
Around 5 I called up a pizza place down the road that delivers and ordered a hoagie. I’m so happy that we found a place that delivers to us, we’ll have to try their pizza sometime to see if it’s any good (oh and we should get a menu too). The food came pretty quickly and I sat down at my desk with my dinner and fired up my Debian Unstable machine. It had been gathering dust next to my desk for quite some time, and I decided I’d install x and mplayer on it so I could watch movies while working on my primary system. The xorg install went almost perfectly, the only problem was with Xwrapper.config not being created, so until I added it with the allowed_users option I could only startx as root, I’m glad it was an easy fix that didn’t take me long to figure out. The graphics card is still that terrible old one with something line 8M video ram, so I had to turn the colors down to 16 bit and the resolution to 800×600 so the movies would play ok, even now the bigger movie files sometimes skip a bit but that doesn’t bother me too much.
Michael came home around 9 and needed some cheering up so we watched a few episodes of Harvey Birdman before bed.