On 07/11/18 01:33, Martin McDonough wrote:
On Tuesday, July 10, 2018 at 4:47:44 PM UTC-7, Chris wrote:
On 07/08/18 04:41, Martin McDonough wrote:
I'm not in the UK, unfortunately. Thanks for the offer though.
I did go through some of my old hardware about a month ago, and
I found a 240 that passes all diagnostics and gets to the OK prompt.
My plan now is to load it with the drives and RAM from the machine
I was working on before.
If you are happy with command line, V240 will run FreeBSD, which
actually runs pretty well. I run it on a slightly later
V215. Frame buffer drivers are a problem and you will have to build
packages as required, but you can build Xvnc and use that to get a
remote desktop. Plus of course, you also get zfs and jails. Solaris
10 just works out of the box and you can get a working desktop by
adding a low end XVR100 graphics card or similar. Great machine to
get working and do some real work :-)...
Chris
I do have an XVR 100 card. I've been running OpenBSD on my 240s, since it seems to work a
bit better the FreeBSD and supports the graphics card out of the box
(even starting up
with it enabled, which Solaris 10 did not).
Solaris 10 should work out of the box on a V240, but you must have a
keyboard and frame buffer in the machine and select everything on
the install, to be sure. Should come up with a desktop login on
reboot.
Not tried OpenBSD, but must find time this year to do that. Currently
working through a decades long Sun collection. A couple of 3/60's,
3/50's, one with the dimpled base, a 3/150, various Sparc lx, ipx, ipc
etc, plus later v series and others. A 3/60 was the first
serious unix box here, around 1993, recovered from a junkyard, no
drives, broken colour monitor case but fixed it up. Used it for
couple of years for software development and learning, before getting
a Sparcstation 1+. Main problem with such older machines is power
supplies and have already replaced caps and fans in several machines
in the past month or so. Must have too much time on my hands these days,
but even the 3/60 is quite fast enough for general interactive use,
openwindows etc. You really notice it when compiling a package, but
otherwise pretty good. These early workstations help design and
implement much of what we take for granted these days and remember the amazement at how good they were when first saw those machines working.
They had Sun 3's and later Sparc at companies I worked for back then
and got well infected. An engineers tool, designed by engineers for
engineers. They were to be found everywhere, when any half way
professional windows was a decade away :-)...
Chris
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