By now you probably know I'm a bit of a fanatic when it comes to technology generally not available through big box computer stores. Over the past few years I've picked up enough spare parts to get a semi-working Sun Sparcstation 5.Thanks to Netplus, an eBay seller, I finally have a Type 5 keyboard and mouse - the last component I really needed to simplify my Sun-penchant.
A couple of weeks ago I picked up a couple of other Sun parts, a Sparcstation 1, and a Sun GDM 20D10 monitor (pictured here). The Sparc 1 was set to get a password from a NIS server. I was thinking of wiping the machine, it seems in good working order, but the hard drive is barely 210MB, almost nothing I put on (Linux-wise) will be useful, so for now it's going to stay as it is until I set up a NIS server. Unfortunately, the monitor has a pretty bad bowing effect. There are no controls on the monitor to change the bowing, or anything else for that matter, and the keyboard controls apparently don't work unless you've got Solaris running (I could be wrong about this, if I am please correct me). At first I thought I might pop the cover and try to tune it as I have PC monitors (note: don't try poping your monitor cover unless you know exactly what you're doing, there's enough electricity in these babys to kill!) but I wasn't having much luck getting the cover off, so I decided to do some research... low and behold the controls for this baby are actually on a remote control - is that cool or what?!
So the ultimate idea here is to get my Sparcstation running and use it as a server for the futuristic MuSH/MUD I mentioned in my last post. With no CD-ROM, and what seems to possibly be a bad hard drive, I haven't had much luck yet. But I have another drive to test tomorrow. It's getting quite late and I still want to jot down a few notes to myself about the MuSH. Sleep tight everyone!
