Yesterday I discovered a neat piece of software to complement my Fluxbox desktop – fluxter. It’s a pager that’s faster than bbpager, can be embedded in the slit and tracks the style of the current theme.
I’ve commited a package to pkgsrc-wip.
For ages now I’ve been trying to installing SunOS 4.1.4 (the last pure BSD-based version), but haven’t had any luck. I’ve tried my CD on three different machines (a SPARCclassic, an Axil 320 and a SPARCstation 10), but each ended up printing garbage to the serial port once the kernel had booted (I access the machines via serial console, using minicom or cu). I eventually figured it out (after some judicious Googling) – the installer assumes the serial console is using 7 bit, even parity. Gaaah!
With the correct serial port settings, I now get the following:
What would you like to do? 1 - install SunOS mini-root 2 - exit to single user shell Enter a 1 or 2:
Damn, why doesn’t it say “Greetings Professor Falken”?
Note to self – stop playing with 10 year old operating systems.
On Monday I finally acquired my first Silicon Graphics machine – an O2. It cost me only R500 (about $85) for a machine with a 150Mhz R10000 CPU, 128M RAM, 2x4G SCSI drives and a 2G tape drive. It also came with IRIX 6.3 and 6.5 media, which is great.
Unfortunately none of the open source operating systems support SGI machines well – NetBSD, OpenBSD and Linux all have ports, but none have full hardware support or have stability problems. I’ll therefore be using IRIX for the moment (yay! /usr/etc/ifconfig here I come!).
Yesterday I bought a 10,000 rpm 18G Fujitsu SCA drive from Bridgeport to replace the internal 4G drive. I’m still looking for more RAM (preferably another 4x128M DIMMs to take the machine up to 640M). Unfortunately the RAM is rather pricey, even on eBay.
Some useful SGI links:
For those interested: hinv output.
Recent Comments