unsigned long geek = random();

There’s been quite a bit of buzz over the past few months about Xgl, the X server architecture layered on OpenGL. Although still in the early stages of development, some code has been released and there are numerous guides explaining how to get Xgl running on a Linux system (the Gentoo Wiki has a good run down of what to do).

Until quite recently, Xgl was only supported on machines that could use the proprietary ATI or NVidia X drivers, which excluded me, as my laptop has an Intel 915DM display subsystem (one of those horrible shared memory systems). This has since changed and the 915DM is now supported. Rather fortuitously, today Jonathan kindly passed along a copy of the latest Gentoo-based Kororaa Xgl Live CD 0.2. When I booted it on my laptop, I was very impressed with what I saw – the performance was good (much better than, for example, the composite extension of X.org 6.9, as I’m using currently) and the eye candy certainly is purrty

A few months ago, Steve Rikli sent me a SPARCstation 5 that he no longer had a use for. The machine arrived yesterday and boy was I impressed. Steve went to a lot of effort to make sure the machine was properly packed – it arrived in a very sturdy Cisco box, with inserts to hold the machine in place and plenty of plastic peanuts. In addition, in order to get the machine in the mail to me, Steve also had to suffer multiple trips to the post office because of the vagaries of USPS’s shipping policies and their maximum package sizes.

The machine itself is a very nice one: 170Mhz TurboSPARC CPU, 256MiB RAM, 73GiB Fujitsu HD, CD-ROM, cgsix, SunVideo and quad ethernet. He also tossed an SBus Fast Ethernet/wide SCSI adapter in the box. Thanks Steve!

For those interested, here is the dmesg output. Of course, it runs NetBSD

As part of my ongoing project to get XFree86 working on a NetBSD/alpha system with a commodity PCI video card, I need to do a native build of XFree86. PR 29882 explains why the XFree86 X server is not included by default in the NetBSD release engineering releases, hence the need for my native build.

One slight potential fly in the ointment is that all my NetBSD source trees are stored on my source server and mounted read-only via NFS on the systems that need it. To build XFree86 with a read-only source tree requires a little trickery, but the procedure is nicely explained in the Building XFree86 from a Source Distribution guide (see page 3 onwards). The idea is to create a shadow tree containing symlinks to all the files in the original tree and using that to build instead of the original tree. It’s quick to set up and works very well.

Now to get a decent PCI video card…

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post about XFree86 on NetBSD/alpha, I was pointed in the direction of these two very useful references:

• Digital AlphaServer XFree86 Code
• Tested Good Video cards

It seems like a lot of commodity PCI video cards Just Work(tm) with XFree86 in Alpha systems, but just for safety’s sake I think I’ll stick with one of the known good cards. PCI Radeon 7000s can apparently be had for R300 (about $45) from a local computer reseller – I’ll go and check them out tomorrow and probably pick one up. Getting the card locally will probably cost the same as eBaying one, but it’ll certainly be a lot quicker.

Two weeks ago Jonathan collected his “new” Alpha – an AlphaServer 800. Of course, being the good chap he is, he promptly loaned it to me for a few weeks. It’s a nice machine: 500Mhz EV5 (21164a) CPU, 1GiB RAM, 2x9GiB SCA drives, CD-ROM and 4/8GiB DDS2 tape drive.

The machine was running FreeBSD 5.2.1, which I promptly replaced with NetBSD 3.0. Installation was fairly straightforward, once I had correctly identified the CD-ROM drive (the AlphaLinux SRM HOWTO is useful in this regard).

After using the machine for two weeks (and somehow destroying my only working Alpha in the interim), I decided to buy the machine from him for the price he paid for it (nice chap that he is, he agreed to sell it to me at no profit).

Now to get x.org working on it, with a good PCI video card (preferably something that supports two heads and DVI)…

New York City BSD Users’ Group have put a number of their talks online in mp3 format and a number of them make for great listening. One of my favourites (and particularly relevant in light of yesterday’s post on the subject) is Michael Shalayeff’s talk about porting OpenBSD to PA-RISC . Grab it here.

For the past few days I’ve needed an OpenBSD machine to test some IPSec code I’m busy working on (more on that in a few days). At Jonathan’s suggestion, I toyed with using a VMware virtual machine, but this morning decided to use a spare HP B132L I have lying around instead. Unfortunately NetBSD‘s hp700 port is not yet production-ready, so the machine had been running HP-UX 10.20. It’s a fairly nice mid-90s vintage machine – 133Mhz PA-7300 PA-RISC CPU, 64MiB RAM, 4GiB IBM narrow SCSI drive and Visualize-EG graphics. It could do with a bit more RAM, but 64MiB is more than adequate for my purposes.

Getting OpenBSD/hppa installed was pretty easy, but I managed to trip myself up a few times along the way:

• Plugging the wrong cable into the serial port means the console output isn’t going to be visible, no matter what the terminal settings are.
• Mixing and matching RJ45< ->DB25 adapters is not a wise thing to do when in a hurry.

To network boot the machine it was simply a matter of configuring my DHCP server to tell the HP to load the LIF image served by my tftp server. About half and hour after booting the installer I had an OpenBSD/hppa 3.8 machine on my network.

For those who enjoy such things, here’s the dmesg output.

After trying unsuccesfully to trade it to a friend a few months ago, yesterday I decided to fire up my AlphaServer 2100. It’s not a high-spec machine, with only a single 190Mhz EV4 CPU (the other CPU board failed a few months ago), 512MiB RAM and half a dozen 2GiB drives on a DAC960, but I thought it would be nice to at least get NetBSD installed on it.

I dug out a known-working NetBSD/alpha 3.0 CD and after a bit of fiddling, got the bootloader to load and uncompress the kernel. After decompressing, the machine appeared to hang. After waiting a few minutes, I hit the reset button, at which point things took a turn for the worse… The LCD status panel stopped displaying anything and the monitor connected to the VGA display remained blank. The fans were spinning, the disks had spun up and the network card LED was lit. I power-cycled the machine – same result. After reseating all the cards and even running the machine open for a brief period to look for status LEDs inside (didn’t spot any), I decided to hit Google.

I seems as if a few people have had the same problem, most notably Zoon PHAM (see this mail to Tru64 UNIX Managers), but no-one seems to have any possible solutions. This is rather disappointing – this is the only Alpha I own (although I currently have an AlphaServer 800 on loan, a machine that has rekindled my interest in Alphas), and they’re not particularly easy to come by here in South Africa.