On 9/11/25 08:56, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
On Thu, 2025-09-11 at 08:38 -0400, Dennis Clarke wrote:Just an update. The Netra X1 is no longer a reasonable test box.It's still useful for testing on UltraSPARC II though which is needed for kernel testing.
I think I have poured entirely too many hours into this museum piece.
I suggest that you open the machine up and connect an old IDE CD-ROM drive to be able to build the installer from CD-ROM instead of over the network. According to various discussion forums on the net, this should be possible.
The firmware does not recognize any CDROM or DVD that I connect to the IDE bus. My only interest now is that the ORACLE S7-2 server works well enough to be a compute backend type machine. I don't need anything graphical other than a few X11 libs as dependencies for XTerm. The X11 passthrough via OpenSSH is reasonable if I want it to render something on a screen. The CPU's will likely have reasonable horsepower to compute stuff but really we already know that any NVidia Quadro GPU can run circles around the fastest cpu's anywhere when it comes to raw floating point stuff. So this is all just an expensive experiment to see if the Linux kernel can *really* work on something made in the last eight to ten years. If it does not work then I drop it on eBay dirt cheap and take a loss. -- -- Dennis Clarke RISC-V/SPARC/PPC/ARM/CISC UNIX and Linux spoken