Re: Sun Sparc-Station 5 and Debian
>First i have to say sorry for the long posting ;)
>I'm receiving a used Sparc5 this weekend. So i have a few questions
>(of which some may be a little offtopic):
>
>2GB SCSI-HD, 32MB-RAM, 2D Gfx card (fast for wireframe, i think), FDD
>and
>CD_ROM.
Lucky you! ;-)
>The Gfx card seems to be a problem. We tried many different monitors
>(all
>of them should've been able to produce a normal screen) - but none of
>them found any signal to display. Last we tried a monitor with fixed
>frequency and finally got some output on the screen. The output was
>scattered as if the Sparc and the monitor were not in sync or generally
>use
>and expect different frequencies. Hitting Alt-F(1-8) did change the
>display
>a bit and after a few more hits the screen went black and stayed black
>until reboot.
First off, do you know what graphics card it is (probably a cg6 or a TCX)?
Recent Sun graphics cards run at 1152x900@76Hz, however it's possble to
change the resoltion and refresh rates on some (most?) either via the
monitor identity pins in the connector or by setting the output-device
variable in the NVRAM. If you have a recent Sun monitor and nothing in
the NVRAM, it should work.
A few thoughts: Sun framebuffers generally don't do sync on green, so
if you are using 13W3->coax converter make sure it has 4 BNCs. IIRC
SGI uses 13W3 connector but do sync on green. Another idea might be
to forcibly set resolution and refresh rate (though not all framebuffers
support more than one rate). Try setting output-device to screen:r1152x900x76
or screen:r1152x900x66 (the latter is the old Sun standard refresh rate).
You do this by typing setenv output-device blah at the prom ok prompt, or,
from Linux, by echo blah > /proc/openprom/options/output-device, or, from
SunOS/Solaris eeprom output-device=blah. (If you unplug the keyboard and
hook a terminal 9600 baud 8n1 to serial port A you get a console there).
>The first thing for me is to install Debian :) (stable enough?)
>
>The second thing may be to install Solaris (pro's, con's, suggestions?)
Solaris is still more stable than Linux, but it has a significantly larger
memory footprint. If you plan on running X, 32MB isn't enough. Meanwhile
my sparc classic with 24MB doesn't swap too badly when I compile stuff with
it (though I generally don't run X on it, I just build it ;).
>32MB RAM is not much. I would like to install a minimal System on the
>Sun
>and hope that memory will be enough to run without much swapping.
>
>Is it illusionary to assume that the Debian base, a bit net, min. X
>server,
>and one or two additional daemons, packages will run without much
>swapping?
I would think it is doable, SunOS was usable with 16 MB in a machine,
and from the feel of it Linux is about the same size (though it was a
while ago I used SunOS). One thing to watch for on installing Linux though
is that it doesn't (really, it boots now though) support the TurboSparc
processor that's found in some sparcstation 4 and 5's (it's the 170 MHz
variant. If you have a 70, 85 or 110 MHz machine you're fine).
Regards,
/Anders
--
-- Of course I'm crazy, but that doesn't mean I'm wrong.
Anders Hammarquist | Mud at Kingdoms | iko@netg.se
NetGuide Scandinavia | telnet kingdoms.se 1812 | Fax: +46 31 50 79 39
http://www.netg.se | | Tel: +46 31 50 79 40
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