The collected works of ClassicHasClass - Page 25

MrBill wrote: Yeah, that is what I am looking for. Ive run into a bunch of sites giving you patching tools and a list of addresses to change to patch it yourself, it seems like a headache. I just want the darn patched utility. On top of that, until i get the drive working, im running off only 2 800k floppys. Space is limited, everything is in some compressed sit format, which seems like a good idea, but the extraction software is another program i have to put on the disk taking up precious space. I'm running out of floppy disk space just trying to get a minimal base system with the tools and utilities needed to set up a scsi disk.

I found a bunch of maxtor hard drives at the scrapyard today, I might see if any of those are usable and try to get a working hard drive install done tonight.

I put it here in MacBinary Self-Extracting.

gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/1/archive/ ... lassic-mac

Building pkgsrc on Solaris, finally, and trying to find a bug in my TMS9995 emulation for my Tomy Tutor emulator.

Turned out I had to add USE_PKGSRC_GCC=no and USE_NATIVE_GCC=yes to get it off the ground (and bmake clean everywhere that could be tainted).

Now, as usual, it's busily building everything else as a prerequisite for everything else, but it's working, I guess.

I like my Libretto 70CT.

I can't run Doom on Solaris! This is serious businesses!

The default visual is 24-bit colour on this Ultra-3 (ATI RAGE Mobility M1 framebuffer). That works fine (Firefox, etc.) and is what I want by default. But Sun DGA Doom and sunxdoom won't run and complain with



Okay, says I, I'll run it in Xnest.



So I look at xdpyinfo, and dammit, it's right. There's only one visual defined, and it's TrueColor. I don't see an obvious way to set this, though I freely admit my Solaris ignorance. Does anyone know how to do this?

Ha. I'm on my G5 surfing Nekochan. That's pretty pointless.

So, I get to answer my own question. The Ultra-3's RAGE Pro equivalent is an ATI Mobility M1, which confusingly Sun alternately calls M64 or PGX64 . (I did get Quake2 on it and was quite perturbed to see how badly it performs under OpenGL. Apparently the driver doesn't expose most of the 3D acceleration functionality. Looked nice, though. That said, the software renderer was scads faster.) Since this is a SPARC running Solaris 10, it runs Xsun, not Xorg.

For this purpose, m64config should work. On that page it says setting it to depth 32 allows 8-bit depth windows simultaneously, so I tried that, but it said /dev/fbs/m640 was not an M64 device.

Turns out Tadpole's Mobility M1 doesn't get seen as a PGX64 by the system, even though it is. However, I could tell what m64config was going to do to OWconfig, so I just added a depth="32" into the right stanza within OWconfig by hand under /etc/openwin and restarted, and Xsun duly came up in 32-bit mode and xdpyinfo now shows all the expected visuals.

Now fixed up, I was indeed able to get Xnest at 8-bit depth and sunxdoom (though not sundgadoom) will now actually start and run briefly within it before dying with "Broken pipe." (Neither will run "naked" against the regular Xserver, for some reason.) But the Quake software renderer works now too and that actually plays, so the problem is at least now with the OS somewhere and not the colour depth anymore.

huepl 0.5 now at least reports that there is no colourmode available for these bulbs (I just got one myself and fixed it up so that huepl load will work right with it). You're right: they seem to have no colour options at all. But the rest of it seems to be working correctly with it.

Does it act like ASMI or something else?

Interesting. 1.4.2, at least, does run the Quake3Map demo on 10.4 on my Power Mac G5. This is noteworthy because not only is Mac PowerPC also big endian, but Tiger is only OpenGL 1.2. So I think it may work just fine on Irix.

Turned out the hard disk died (which has happened to me on the other two S4100s I own, so I should have suspected it). To the rescue: a SCSI2SD.

Now we have probably the world's first and only solid state media powered Solbourne S3000. It doesn't really boot any faster, but at least it boots. I'm also relieved that my OS/MP media is bootable still. One annoyance is that the SCSI2SD won't let you create 512-byte-sector CDROM SCSI targets, at least not yet.

Anyway, here it is running off my trusty boots-anything Toshiba external CD-ROM, installing OS/MP 4.1C. I love the S3000. They're just so wacky.

It's actually one of the portable tables from WalWart. I have two, though the IMSAI 8080 I'm trying to restore is somewhat permanently occupying the other.

Since this picture was taken, the S3000 was moved back to its old position and reconnected to everything, with a little "USB tail" sticking out of one of the slots in case I need to reconfigure the SCSI2SD card again. I really like how terminator power alone is sufficient for it.

Today finished installing OS/MP 4.1C and all the Grumman patches, configuring YP/NIS and getting some basic tools on it like perl, tcsh and gzip. Tomorrow I'll install X11R5 (it only has sunview on it right now) and Netscape Navigator.

Not sure. I've never used the second mini-DIN.

Netscape Navigator? No port of something later...?

I'll be getting gcc on it, so maybe ...
The nice thing is that it'll be SunOS 4.1 compatible in general, if it works, since OS/MP is binary compatible.

I did get sunview, openwin and X11R6 to run simultaneously on it thanks to judicious juggling of $PATH and $LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Sort of the best of all worlds.

It would be nice to have a more recent Mozilla on it. Netscape 4 is kind of slow. Netscape 3 was better, but it's Netscape 3, so ...

Do WOFF fonts work on it now?

I have no objection, I just wonder about the level of interest.

I like computers. I just prefer the old ones.

If gfx.downloadable_fonts.enabled is true (the default), just go to any site that has downloadable fonts. Ars Technica is a good example. If it doesn't crash on Ars and it looks like Firefox on another platform, then they probably work now.

So, I've joined the UB2i club.

http://www.floodgap.com/iv/2833

As sold, it was a 400MHz unit, with ATI 3D Expression (Sun has the framebuffer in /dev/fbs/m640, so I think this is a PGX24) graphics, three hard disks (two 12GB 4200rpm and one 80GB 7200rpm) and 1GB of RAM. However, OpenFirmware said there was only 512MB, and Solaris 10 froze about a minute or so after reaching the desktop. Some troubleshooting found the dud RAM module, but now it just has 512MB.

Anyone got RAM for these things? It's a weird module with the ominous notation "Huxley Only." The 512MB module looks like a composite stacked module, almost like overgrown PowerBook 1400 RAM.

Yep! Apparently it has three drive/battery bays (not sure if they can all be batteries -- I guess that would be dumb ). They're all populated with spinning rust. It's not tiny (14" screen), but it's much smaller than the specs would suggest. It's a bit poky in Solaris 10 compared to the Ultra-3, but it works well enough otherwise.

And no! You can't have it.

You want gopherspace.

gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/1/feeds

Java desktop. I like it better than CDE on Solaris.

For things like Firefox and other gtk-based apps, do they still run okay under CDE? I imagine they would, I've just never tried. Java Desktop has enough little differences from regular GNOME that it feels unique, but, yeah, de gustibus non disputandum.

the sales engineer pulled out his tadpole.

No wonder we have such issues with women in STEM.

The best way to think of gopher is not like a gimped web but more like a friendlier FTP -- that's how it was designed, in fact -- with a very strong menu-document hierarchy. Documents and terminal nodes != menus, although some documents can be encoded in them, and menus are not in general documents and certainly not terminal nodes.

(Physician experienced in radiology here)

By CTA, do you mean CT angiography? If so, CTs are almost always (as are virtually all radiographic images now) stored in DICOM format. There are some freeware readers that will show you the static images, but I don't know of anything freely available that will stack the images into slices for you.

An OpenPOWER workstation for about $3100. That's just under what I paid for my quad G5 new, so this is not a bad price at all. I've signed up for notification of preorders.

https://lists.debian.org/debian-powerpc ... 00000.html
https://raptorengineeringinc.com/TALOS/prerelease.php

Anybody know anything about these guys? This sounds pretty damn good. (Yes, BYO case/RAM/etc. That's no biggie.)

Hey, man, in my line of work I'm reading about 40 chest X-rays and a handful of CTs a week. That's a lot for a non-radiologist.

I doubt it. I imagine this is Linux and I'm sure one of the BSDs will get on it soon.

Well, it's the use case: if the desire was a cheaper AIX workstation, I don't think this was ever intended to serve that purpose. If the desire is a more modern POWER-based (or even just non-x86) workstation, then I think it does. The price premium doesn't seem unreasonable to me.

Sure, you could get a Linux workstation for much less, but for me what matters is under the hood.

No, I dispute that. I don't think proprietary Unix is necessarily a selling point myself. Maybe it's because I already have the hardware, but I don't like not knowing what IBM or Snoracle is doing in that black box they call a kernel and I don't have any tools around it.

I enjoy Irix, I like AIX, I can tolerate Solaris, I used to like OS X. But for AIX in particular I've gritted my teeth that it's more and more locked down, with needing HMCs to do anything now and APARs behind service contracts and paywalls. In that context, I don't think a non-x86 Linux is a disadvantage (I don't mind building my own binaries), especially on a platform this open, and a 12-core POWER8 is hardly small potatoes. Server-grade ARM so far has been a bust and SPARC workstations died off years ago. If we're going to actually have choices in the architecture we buy instead of CPUs we don't know what the hell they're up to, then people need to pony up for things like this.

Anyway, I think we're fundamentally disagreed on this point, but I hope enough orders come in for them to do a production run. I'm actually budgeting for two.

but my Dad actually has a RiscPC SA as his main workstation to get things done...

I'm impressed. Does he do this in RISC OS or something else?

It's been so long! I'm going to bring the Tomy Tutor family back. They display well and the kids love them.

... or, you can throw more CPU at the problem. I got adventurous and pulled the KAP/L2 module from an S4100 I had sitting around doing nothing, swapped the jumpers and put it in the S3000. Now, the crystals are unchanged, so it still runs it at 33MHz, not 36MHz as it does in the S4100. But! The cache is enabled, correctly detected by the kernel, and Dhrystone jumped from 14.6 VAXMIPS to 22.3. That's 53 percent .

Now Netscape 4.61 doesn't run so badly after all.

I'm not feeling crazy enough to desolder the crystals for that extra 3MHz, though.

http://www.floodgap.com/iv/2840

It is indeed, it's on a separate module that the KAP fits into. I basically just pulled the whole assembly off and put it in the S3000.

The S4000 has at least two motherboard revisions. The earliest has no jumper blocks. I checked and my S4000 is one of these; the board just says "IDT-CPU." The second revision is labeled "S4000/S4100" and has two sets of jumpers near the KAP and another back next to the first SBus slot. These control whether the L2 cache is enabled. At least ROM version 2.0 is required (but my S3000 had 2.1 ROMs, so no problem). Both my S4100s and my S3000 are this revision.

Solbourne apparently ended up using the same board for the entire IDT line, so the later S3000 and S4000 are exactly the same board as the S4100 except for a different clock crystal next to the KAP. On the S3/4000, it's 66MHz divided down for a 33MHz clock; on the S4100, it's 72MHz for a 36MHz clock. So the "S3000DX" still runs at 33MHz, but with the L2.

Never found my Fuel particularly noisy, but then it's next to a Power Mac G4 MDD and a Quad G5, both of which are quite noisy when they're under load, so maybe it's all relative.

Heck, I'll update my list. Of actual real "Sun" hardware, I have a Sun Ultra-3, which is actually a Tadpole Viper with a Sun label on the top, and a SPARCstation IPX somewhere in storage that's probably blown its Dallas battery by now. And ... that's it. The Ultra-3 runs Solaris 10 and the SPARCstation IPX runs mumble.

But I have other SPARC systems, mostly Solbournes. The Solbourne S3000 was revived and is happy. During the process of upgrading its CPU, I took stock of the other Solbournes around here. There's an S4000 and two S4100s, another S3000 but the screen is busted , and a Series 5 that I need to see if it even works, since I think it's the only VMEbus system I own of any architecture. They all run some version of OS/MP but the hard disks are shot in all of the S4x00 machines. Fortunately, SCSI2SD devices seem to work just fine in the IDT systems, at least.

Finally, picked up an RDI Ultrabook IIi, full complement of hard disks. It runs Solaris 10 too.

Ha! I do most of my posting from a Quad G5 and an iMac G4, as the sig says.

Be nice to see that SPARCbook live again. If you bump the systems to Solaris 10, you can run the Oracle contributed build of Firefox 38.6. It doesn't have a JIT like TenFourFox, so JavaScript performance sucks, but it works pretty well otherwise.

Yes, though not good ones, AIUI. But that improves with a bigger userbase and hopefully the unit will be attractive to a certain class of user (crazy and rich ).

Nicely done!

I've never seen that. I have an APC UPS connected to my G5 and it doesn't have that problem (but I'm also running 10.4, so maybe it's an OS glitch instead of a UPS one).