Re: SPARCbook 3GX
On Tue, 21 Mar 2000, Matthew Haas wrote:
> Good morning.
>
> Just inquiring into the current status of Tadpole's SPARCbook 3GX under
> Debian... I will be getting one in the near future and am looking into the
>
...
> Does anyone have one of these machines, and what is their level of
> success/impression?
I tried the install a couple of months ago. At the time the install
floppies weren't working right (http install was broken) but that should
be fixed now. You can't use the boot floppies (since the machines have
scsi floppy drives), you'll need to use an ISO or (better) just tftpboot
the things.
We ended up putting RH 6.1 on that particular SB3, and it worked fine.
>
> What version should I run? I'm all for giving potato a try..
Use the latest potato tftp images. Slink won't work (well, it may with the
2.2 boot images, i dunno).
>
> Big question is, does X work? I have desires to use AbiWord on it.
Yes. But non-trivially. The contact person for this is Derrick Brashear,
shadow@dementia.org. He was working on ports back before sparc32 broke in
the 2.3 series. It's I believe fixed now, so he may be starting up again.
He should have the kernels he was working on available on dementia.org
(find Hugo's SPARCBook FAQ on sunhelp.org to get the exact location).
Basically, he implemented framebuffer console support, so the fb Xserver
works (slowly -- unaccelerated). He was working on PCMCIA and power
management support when he stopped, since it was no longer possible to
keep his changes up to date with the 2.3 kernel series.
The latest version of NetBSD, 1.4.2, which just came out, should have
better out of the box support for these boxes. I'm still running Slowlaris
on mine, and I'm looking forward to being able to put a _real_ OS on there
:)
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