The collected works of commodorejohn - Page 5

ClassicHasClass wrote: Don't impugn the memory of Lunix: http://hld.c64.org/poldi/lunix/lunix.html

Hah, I was wondering if someone was going to make that connection. Mea culpa, I just wanted a funny name for That One OS...

Looks like they were trying to be clever and turn the Y into a rotated lambda?

Ah.

Rad .

ivelegacy wrote: In the beginning was man, and man wanted to know, and so man learned, and the Universe was thus deciphered, or plausible substitutes for the indecipherable presented. And when man mastered " the physical " he looked to his own soul and saw it could not be explained quite so easily. How did a vast collage of atoms and molecules develop a consciousness and intelligence? Here, now,was the challenge to rival all others, here was a chance to become God and to make others in man's own image.

And somewhere, God chuckles to Himself and thinks, yeah, ask Me about how that typically works out sometime .

goto is kind of, you know, an actual legitimate part of the C language going all the way back to K&R.

Not to imply that GCC isn't full of horrors, but that one's not on them.

Pontus wrote: I think that a goto with the address of a label/symbol as "argument" is specific to gcc though.

Ah, gotcha. I certainly will raise no objection to complaints about GCC-specific extensions (because hey, "embrace, extend, and exterminate" isn't evil if it's Ooopen Sooource!!! and not TEH 3VULZ M1CR0$0F7, right?)

I can't imagine that the embedded world has gone any crazier than the desktop world.

Mmm, Lum cosplay...

I don't see how they can expect to be taken seriously in the modern software industry if they're still clinging to assembler and FORTRAN. Come back when you've got an enterprise solution leveraging SOAP, XML, PHP, and .NET, NASA!

ivelegacy wrote: Step back gonna come at ya fast, the C language is driving us out of control

If you think that C is what's causing software to get worse, you haven't been paying attention for the last fifteen years. Most programmers today could learn a thing or two from being forced to abandon their XML and their PHP and their whatnot and just work in straight C.

ivelegacy wrote: 15 years ago we do not have the multi cores machines we have today, and today we do not have the multi core machines we will have in 2020.

Who cares? Everything we do today we were doing satisfactorily 15 years ago, so there's nothing that actually requires multiple cores.

I figured they invented Go because of their compulsive need to control every facet of the software ecosystem...

Shine on, you crazy diamond.

Heh, nice

skywriter wrote: Sorry to be a party pooper, but there was was far too much unsubstantiated China and US bashing from him. I surely was not a favorite, but the only reason I came back was that he left. His parting shot wasn't a kudos for the board either.

Yes, he had a bizarro take on US/China relations, but in so many other ways he was a pleasantly sensible kind of person and great to have around. I'll miss him just for his immunity to starry-eyed futurist bullshit alone (a depressingly rare thing among the IT crowd, even with people like engineers and programmers who should have a strong practical understanding of the difference between promised fiction and plausible reality...)

I'll use PHP for a quick-and-dirty way to dike out common code on a webpage into separate files, but yeah, I shudder to think of people actually building applications in it...

ivelegacy wrote: that's all, for the moment, but … the SafeC Schoolmarm used to drink Conium Maculatum (Aka Cicuta) for her tea break
don't call her "poison-schoolmarm"

oh men, I am afraid that I have been writing worst wicked witch ever

I prefer C99, she's much more interesting and fun. Willing to go along with absolutely anything you can explain to her

So I've had a serious hankering to fiddle around with SPARC systems some more lately (sent my Ultras on to new homes when I moved last fall,) and I'm looking at picking up a Blade workstation for a modest price. I was figuring on dropping OpenBSD on it, and I still might, but I noticed that A. the workstation I'm looking at comes with an XVR-1000, which is unsupported as anything other than a dumb framebuffer outside of Solaris, and B. apparently you can just download Solaris 10 for free now? So I'm kinda pondering giving Solaris another shot, but I'm curious what kind of software I can find for it, and where. In particular, are they still trying to get you to pay for the compiler toolchain, and will I have to use gcc instead?

Good deal. I just bought it; it's a Blade 2000 with 2x1GHz CPUs, the full 8GB of RAM, and an XVR-1000, along with a couple other cards (a sound card and some kind of weird combination video/Ethernet card...?) Only thing I need to supply is the hard drive. It'll be fun to play around with this

Yeah, $75. Probably come out closer to $150 with shipping and replacement hard drives, but still not too shabby...

Yeah, I was gonna look at an Ultra 45, but that stuff is absolutely bonkers. I don't have that much of a hankering!

Oh goody, another platform built on top of Javascript. That shouldn't be irritatingly slow or crashy at all .

Well, the good news is that it got here in great shape, and I made out better than I'd realized - in addition to the XVR-something (pretty sure it's a 1000, but I can't pull it out for a good look - goddamn cheap aluminum screws!) it includes a Creative "Sound Blaster for Sun Ultra" (some one of their countless indistinguishable PCI wavetable sound cards, I think,) and a SunPCi-II of some description!

The bad news is that it doesn't seem to be doing much of anything when I apply power - the lights come on, the fans spin up, and the DVD drive recognizes when I put in a disk, but there's no video, the Caps Lock key on the Mac USB keyboard I'm using doesn't toggle the light, nothing. Even hooking my USB-to-serial adapter and null-modem cable into serial port A doesn't output anything in the terminal program (9600-8-N-1, correct?)

I'm trying to remember, as the last time I touched a Sun was over a year ago, whether it normally says or does anything before the memory test is complete - maybe it's just taking forever to check 8GB of 60ns RAM? I dunno...I've got a 30-day DOA warranty on the purchase, but I'd hate to have to ship it back...

Progress report: reasoning that it was odd for the Sun to be saying nothing over the serial port, I thought that perhaps one of the CPUs might not be working. Opened it up to check, and to my astonishment, the seller hadn't even secured them in place! They were just sitting loose in the rails, not seated at all, cold to the touch, and not screwed in with the torque screws that were there for that very purpose. Luckily, the torque screwdriver was still inside, and no harm had come to the connectors in transit. Seated them properly and locked 'em down and it's now chatting away over the serial port as it ought to do

The next issue is that it's dead-set on booting from the network, and doesn't seem to listen at all when I send a Ctrl-Break over the serial port at any point in the boot process. I'd try escaping into OpenBoot with the USB keyboard, but as mentioned, it's a Mac design, and the manufacturers helpfully decided that I didn't need that silly old Break key...guess I'll have to dig up a PC USB keyboard when I'm out shopping for a USB mouse while waiting for the hard drives to arrive...unless there's a way to hard-reset the NVRAM parameters without the use of serial or keyboard console?

Mentioned it in another thread, but I'm in the process of getting a Blade 2000 up and running (first Sun I've owned since I gave away my Ultra I and II before moving out west.) 2x1GHz, 8GB RAM, 2x146GB FC-AL hard disks, an XVR-1000, and a SunPCi-II, currently awaiting the arrival of A. a 13W3-to-VGA adapter (gorram video card won't do console output to the HDMI or VGA outputs!) and B. drive sleds. Already had it successfully boot from the Solaris install disk. Looking forward to playing around with this

Oskar45 wrote: Thanx! But just because our calendar dictates it - if you look around what happens in the world even right now, there isn't really much to be merry about. Might be the only one on here - but I'm glad X-mas is over.

So, what, are we all just supposed to forgo happiness until every problem in the world is sorted? Screw that . Merry Christmas, kids!

Let's see:

Power Mac G4 (MDD, 1.25GHz)
PowerBook G4 (Aluminum, 15", 1.5GHz)
PowerBook G4 (Titanium, 1GHz)
No-name PPC Mac clone
Performa 631CD
Centris 610
SE/30

Everything is running an appropriate version of Classic Mac OS except the AlBook, which is running Debian, and the SE/30, which I still need to do an install on. I've also got a Quadra 840AV lined up, I'm just waiting for the seller to find the time to pack it up and send it off...

Yep. It's known-good from a seller I trust, but I might look at getting it re-capped anyway.

tingo wrote: Seriously?
Things doesn't have to be "new" to serious stuff.

(Psst, that was sarcasm and a joke.)

I like the actual keyboard built into my laptop.

Well, time for another progress report. After like three goddamn tries, I finally tracked down the correct, will-actually-fit drive sleds for this particular model of this particular line of Sun workstations (thank you, MemoryTen,) and got a 13W3-to-VGA adapter since for whatever reason the XVR-1000 can't put the console on the VGA or DVI connectors like a sensible video card. Unfortunately, this is not the end of my problems. The drive sleds fit and the drives seat properly and show up in the probe-scsi results in OBP, so that's all well and good, but unfortunately Solaris is convinced they don't exist. Is there some particular voodoo that you have to do to get new, not-technically-purchased-from-Sun drives all blessed and shriven so that you can, y'know, put stuff on them? Am I going to have to burn an OpenBSD CD just for the purpose of writing a Sun partition table to them?

Also, the console still isn't showing up on my damn monitor. It damn well ought to, it's the same monitor my old Ultras were using, and when I set output-device to screen:r1280x1024x60 in OBP, the monitor gets enough of a signal from the card to try and sync to it, but doesn't actually manage to get it up and working, and the computer just keeps putting OBP out over the serial port. Am I missing something here? Do I need to find a less cheap adapter, a more compatible monitor, or what?

No, it can boot the Solaris DVD fine, it just won't recognize the hard drives.

Yes, FC-AL. probe-scsi shows both of them with the drive ID string, so it's got to be talking to the FC-AL controller correctly, and show-devs lists them under a SCSI device number; it's when I boot into the Solaris installer (or the OpenBSD one) that it doesn't see them.

Well, I can't create a partition on either at the moment, but I'll try taking one out and see if that en-sanes it.

Okay, so this is the log of the boot process:

And now that I get it all in a text editor and look at it, I'd bet that the issue is this "unsupported logical block size" error. I just wonder how one goes about fixing that...

Well, that's good information, but unfortunately it doesn't do me any good since I can't install Solaris to begin with, unless there's a way to download the executable to a RAM disk over serial or Ethernet from the Solaris boot disk...or possibly mount a USB flash drive?

Well, not from OpenBoot, but I can get to a console from the Solaris install CD; if I could just devise a way to get the executable over from there, I could run it.

I'm pretty sure my O2 doesn't have Fibre Channel.

No thanks, I don't use computers that try to prevent me from running any software I goddamn please, because I have at least some tiny shreds of integrity and dignity left and don't need to be herded around by the Appointed Overseers with the rest of the tablet sheep.