First, an appology to everyone reading the blog on a regular basis. Work has been really crazy lately and I've had a few other personal things on the go. Basically I've been getting up about 7:30am, at work by 8:45am, and working until about 8:00pm, then home by about 8:30pm. By the time I settle down I don't have much energy.
That said, I did managed to spend some time piecing together all the parts I bought off eBay for my
Sun Sparcstation 5 (SS5). I originally bought 3 Sparcstation 5's at $3.00 CDN each. The source I bought them from sells only "AS IS" parts, so I knew the best way to get 1 working machine was to buy as many as I could and use the parts from all of them to build one machine. Between the 3 machines I cobbled up enough memory to put 224MB of RAM into one machine. The big missing links were the Sun Type 5 keyboard and a CD-ROM to simplify the install process. I probably could have booted from the network card and did a network install, but it was easy enough to find a SCSI CD-ROM that was compatible. Unfortunately the CDROM doesn't sit well in my case, so I used it enough to install
Debian GNU/Linux SPARC, then I removed the CDROM. There are CDROM's that fit well in this case, I'm just too cheap to spend any more money on a 110MHz computer, even if it uses the SPARC architecture.
The Sparcstation 5 comes in a number of models that range from 70MHz to 170MHz, but the 170MHz version uses a different processor which
Obsolyte claims has issues with Linux. The next best machine in the line contains the 110MHz processor. I was lucky to get a hme (Happy Meal) network card in one of the Sparcstation 5's. Normally the onboard "Lance" network card runs at 10MB/s. The hme card runs at 10/100MB/s, which is great because I also bought a 9.1GB, 10000 RPM SCA hard drive. I was in a bit of a rush this morning and didn't want to set up my external USB drive so I just set up vsftpd and transfered the files to the sparc, then to the windows partion of my notebook. I still haven't managed to get the files (music) to my iRiver H10, which I haven't provided a link to because I strongly recommend people NOT buy it - it's a very nasty MP3 player that's overpriced, overhyped, and just plain incompatible with just about everything, which is a real disappointment since iRiver put out a lot of Linux-compatible mp3 players.
I was browsing local newsgroups a few weeks ago and someone was offering up a Sun Sparcstation 1, which is a really wimpy machine compared to my SS5, but I offered to buy it, hoping to get a working machine (this was before I had the SS5 working). The machine worked, but the passwords on it were tied to a NIS server - which meant that I either needed to set up a NIS server to get the thing working, or find some password cracking utility, which I'm not even sure exists for the SS1. In other words, at that point it was too much effort than it was worth. I may still refurbish this baby, but I have to find a new hard drive because the hard drive is only 250MB, enough for
SunOS 4.0.3, but not much else. Anyway, the best part of the deal was that I acquired a Sun GDM20D10 monitor. I think I mentioned in a previous post that the controls on this monitor are controlled via remote control, the last part of the puzzle I filled out on ebay. The remote hasn't arrived yet, it's coming from Texas, but it's a pretty cool concept. If I ever get XFree86 working the remote might come in real handy.
For now my plan is to use it as a file server/non graphical development machine. I thought about making it a proxy server, maybe in the future. Now I just need to learn
Emacs and brush up on my coding skills.
