[geeks] AOpen makes SPARC notebooks?

[Michael Parson]

On Fri, Mar 24, 2006 at 03:36:41PM -0500, der Mouse wrote:
>>> [...sparc64 laptop vs sparc32 laptop...]
>>
>> Even on the 32 bit sparc laptops, like my Sparcbook 3GX, NetBSD only
>> really became viable in the past year if you follow -current.  It
>> now has full PCMCIA support, APM, 8, 16, and 32bit accelerated X11
>> (XFree86 + pnozz),
>
> I don't care about APM.

Power-management in general also.  I ran OpenBSD on it for a while,
no power-management at all, the little box would get noticeably hot.
NetBSD doesn't run the system noticeably warmer than Solaris did.

> PCMCIA I don't much care about.  If it doesn't work I can probably
> make it work with little enough effort that I'd be willing to do
> it.  Also, if there's enough onboard I may be willing to ignore it
> altogether.

Solaris' PCMCIA support was pretty weak, all I ever used on it was
reading the flash cards out of my digital camera.  NetBSD supports
everything on Sparc that it does on other platforms.  My Sparcbook is
now on my wireless network using a Prism II card (using the wi driver).

> But the framebuffer - the sparc32 laptops have framebuffers that
> aren't interface-compatible with sparc32 desktops?  That could be a
> problem.
>
> I'd like some acceleration.  I'd be willing to live with no
> acceleration, if the framebuffer is well enough documented to use
> it as a dumb memory-mapped framebuffer (preferably multi-depth, but
> that's less important).

The Tadpole Sparcbooks have a Weitek P9100 (P Nine One Zero Zero = pnozz) 
chip in them, which can run in cg3 mode, with no acceleration, which is
how things were till late last year.  Michael Lorenz was able to get 8
bits running with full acceleration, then about a month ago, he got it
going in 16 & 32 bits too.

>> and sound (output only right now).
> 
> Sound is no biggie for me.

Not a real biggie for me either, but this box used to be my mp3 player
too. =)

> Thanks for the warnings.  I'll keep this in mind when looking for a
> machine.

One last thing to keep in mind.  Sparcbook 3s use 2.5" scsi disks,
which are increasingly hard to come by, and the largest size made was
1.2 gig.  There are a couple of 2.5" IDE->SCSI adapters out there, the
better of which support up to 30 gig disks.  I paid $150 for mine 2 or 3
years ago, the only place I can find them right now is out of Japan, for
something like 11,000 yen ( just shy of $95USD according to google).

http://online.century.co.jp/BittradeTest/e_shop/chb25int.html

-- 
Michael Parson
mparson at bl.org