[rescue] SS10 Accessories

[Romain Dolbeau]

2015-11-11 10:43 GMT+01:00 Eddie Cottongim <eddie_cottongim at cox.net>:

> I'm putting together a Sparcstation 10 system. I always thought the
> hardware was well built, and figured it was getting close to now-or-never
> before stuff gets too hard to find. I'll probably put the latest supported
> flavor of Linux on it, maybe Debian 4.
>

Why not go full vintage and run Solaris 8 ? 7 is very old (no ipv6), 9
might be a bit heavyweight...

If you want a 'modern' OS, NetBSD 7 will run on it. Many missing packages
in pkgsrc for sparc32 however :-(

As for now-or-never - we're already a bit past that point over here in
continental Europe. It's become
near impossible to discover/salvage pre-PCI let alone pre-Ultra hardware :-(


> I have the basic system unit in working order, including a SM51 CPU, 1 gig
> hard drive, 2x16 meg memory, and a GX framebuffer.
>

For the disk drive, you might want to look into <
http://www.codesrc.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=SCSI2SD>.
Haven't gotten around to buy one yet, but it's a simple way to connect a
lot easily interchangeable disk space
if you want to try more than one OS. I love that idea that it exists. Would
have loved it more cheaper, faster,
or both :-)

Things I'm looking to liberate/rescue:
> Keyboard, mouse
>
Speakerbox
> Additional memory - 64 meg modules are nice
>

The SS20 modules will work, and more to the point, the U1, U2 & U60 will as
well (same modules, just faster,
not sure about the exact list of systems, sunstuff.org/sunhelp.org should
help). 64 megs are middle-range for the
Ultras, and so cheaper for some reason if you're willing to buy.

> Another SM51, or other CPU upgrades that might come along

SM61 might still be available for not-too-ridiculous-money. Low frequency
HyperSparc as well.
Everything faster seems to have been hoarded by collectors (us :-) and
specialist shops :-(

> TGX framebuffer

Go for a TGX+ if you can. It's much easier to connect to LCDs (the TGX+
will do 1280x1024
trivially for old cheap 5x4 17" LCDs, and can be convinced to output
1920x1080 that will
work on 16x9 22-24" LCDs). 1152x900 will be blurry on LCDs, you'll need a
CRT.

> External CDROM

Don't bother. Slow and probably failing by now. Just use NFS for installing
and exchanging
data, it will be much easier (assuming you have at least one
NFS-server-capable machine
on the same network).

> I've found many of these things available cheap, but thought I'd see if
anybody was dumping this kind of stuff before I go on an Ebay spree. They
do add up.
>  would cover shipping within the US, and a little beer money for the
effort.

Well, if anyone as anything they want to dump in Europe I'm interested as
well :-)

Cordially & good luck,

-- 
Romain Dolbeau