Miscellaneous Operating Systems/Hardware

This guy!

Picked one up from a buddy in the southern Bay Area. It's an RM5230 (the original model). Gonna wipe it and put NetBSD on it, and use it as (what else?) an NFS server.

Nice, i hadn't realised that first ones were MIPS based, I thought about getting one a while back to act as a router etc, but never bothered in the end.

The Cobalt Qube looks a bit like a shrunken SGI too

And here's oulu saying hi to its previous owner (NetBSD can define a /dev/lcd):

http://www.floodgap.com/iv/1864

It's amazingly very power thrifty. At idle, 16W, at load, 21W. But it's essentially just a 150MHz R5K and NetBSD doesn't detect any L2, so stuff like Texapp brings it to its knees. My slow-by-any-other-standard 200MHz PPC 604e in the Apple Network Server runs rings around it, and the 1MB L2 probably makes more difference than the clock speed. On the other hand, the RaQ uses 1/6th the power.

That's one of the reasons why I didnt bother, comparative lack of oomph, but still quite neat

It's just going to be an NFS server for netbooting some of the exotics around here, which is entirely appropriate and within its capacity. At 16W most of the time, I'm considering just leaving it on and putting it in the server room. It generates very little heat.

Nice machines got few raqs and qubes with mips, however they need fans replaced - too much noise

The bearings sound like they're trying to die on the microfan. That'll be the next thing to fix, and maybe a RAM bump.

Picked up a CacheRaQ 2 -- shipped by the seller in a box that looked like it had been dropkicked. I open it up and the machine is wrapped in shopping bags and a freaking towel . But it's intact, and it boots! The RM5231 is a pleasant speed bump over the RM5230 in my RaQ 1 in service (it's the NFS server for the Dreamcast and a few other machines), though I don't really need the extra CPU power, so this will do nicely as a spare.

The CacheRaQ has two NICs, so that's a nice bonus, but otherwise has the same hardware as the regular RaQ 2. I can see the solder pads on the board for the SCSI port which it doesn't have; fortunately, the internal IDE is sufficient for my purposes.

Very nice! I have a thing for cube computers and the cobalt qube is the only one I want that's missing from my collection. Next cube, game cube and g4 cube: all check!

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_Qube

I like the Qube, but the RaQ is so slim and uses so little power that it's more useful to me in my space-constrained ghetto server rack. I'd have to find a "place" to put the Qube.

I need a NeXT Cube. I have a G4 Cube which I need to put a 1.8GHz card in (and a fan).

sgifanatic wrote: Very nice! I have a thing for cube computers and the cobalt qube is the only one I want that's missing from my collection. Next cube, game cube and g4 cube: all check!

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_Qube

I like cubical computers as well. I've got the whole set, along with the MicroNet SAN Cube.

http://www.digitalvideoediting.com/Htm/ ... ancube.htm

Next is to find a Cerf Cube

https://nees.org/data/get/facility/UCSB ... nuxWeb.pdf

ClassicHasClass wrote: And here's oulu saying hi to its previous owner (NetBSD can define a /dev/lcd):

http://www.floodgap.com/iv/1864

It's amazingly very power thrifty. At idle, 16W, at load, 21W. But it's essentially just a 150MHz R5K and NetBSD doesn't detect any L2, so stuff like Texapp brings it to its knees. My slow-by-any-other-standard 200MHz PPC 604e in the Apple Network Server runs rings around it, and the 1MB L2 probably makes more difference than the clock speed. On the other hand, the RaQ uses 1/6th the power.

And it uses EDO RAM. Effectively, a RaQ2/Qube2 is just PC motherboard with a QED RM5231 MIPS CPU, a Galileo (now Marvell) Northbridge, and a VIA 686B Southbridge. Linux can even detect the presence of USB1.0 on the southbridge, but there aren't any visible leads to wire a port up for it.

Btw, the firmware on a Cobalt RaQ2 and Qube2 is a butchered Linux-2.0.34 kernel. I believe the Linux bits were used for the NFS booting when holding the buttons down on the front panel and all. Some missing kind of proprietary blob of code that hooked into this butchered kernel that actually set the hardware up, then the whole thing would get unloaded when the kernel on the disk was booted. It's a crappy firmware, too. Some weird limitations, like a maximum kernel image size of ~617KB, which is why it took a lot of work to finally get Linux 2.6 to boot on the damn thing. Peter Horst wrote a brand-new firmware from scratch, called CoLo (CObalt LOader), that can either replace the original firmware entirely, or be chainloaded by it. It's nicer, better, and should boot Linux and the BSDs (though I never tried the BSDs):

http://www.colonel-panic.org/cobalt-mips/

Threadjack alert! Threadjack alert!

ClassicHasClass wrote: I have a G4 Cube which I need to put a 1.8GHz card in (and a fan).

Done that - almost ten years ago now. Well, a 1.7GHz Sonnet 7447A upgrade IIRC, with fan. And the bigger acrylic cube case from YourMacStore, I think it was. And a flashed Radeon 9600 or 9700, which meant an external PSU to feed it... At the end of which, it was really depressing to see how many wires were spilling out of the poor little thing, trying to be a big-boy PowerMac - but which was still choked by the IDE controller and PC100 memory bus. Then I got a TiBook, and my Cube got set aside.

Might be interesting to see how *few* wires one could get a Cube working with. Could you use a Bluetooth dongle to eliminate the keyboard/mouse wires, for example? There used to be a nice gallery of mods and hacks over at cubeowner.com - they're low on the first page of a Google search for "G4 Cube" now.

Yeah, I'm not that nuts. I even have an ADC panel for it, so I'll keep the original video card. My worry with the fan is the Sonnet 1.8 I have was used and while I tried to source a fan of approximately the same size, I'm not sure about the mounting screws it came with and I definitely will need to rewire the power terminals (I might tap the hard disk line).

On the other hand, my iMac G4 works so well in the commons area I really haven't been motivated to attack the Cube.