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Sun SPARCStation 5

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DimensionDude

Experienced Member
Joined
Jun 4, 2005
Messages
363
Location
Arkansas, USA
Even though I already have a boatload of projects going right now, I've acquired another. This past Saturday was the Oklahoma Vintage Game Exhibition in Tulsa. Plenty of old and new games, everything from Magnavox Odyssey 2 to XBox 360. A vintage computer showed up as well, an Altair 8800 running the Star Trek text game.

Anyway, one of the vendors/exhibitors had a stack of Suns in what appeared to be decent condition. There were 4 or 5 SPARCStation 5 and 1 server. No hard drives in any of them, no ram in some. They were all marked $7 each. I talked briefly to the guy and finally he said "just take one. I don't want to have to haul it home." So I took a SPARCStation 5 with ram, floppy drive and cdrom drive.

I haven't done any research at all yet, so I'm going to ask my stupid questions here :) Anyone have or know where to find a keyboard and a video adapter (for VGA)?

Kent
 
No silly questions

No silly questions

On the keyboard-
You should be able to find a keyboard / mouse combo on ebay fairly cheap
This is not your daddy's PS2 mouse however. Sun has thier own connector style.

Monitor
Option 1- you are looking for a 13w3 to SVGA either adapter or cable. the cable is preferable.
Option 2- Buy an actual Sun monitor locally. Getting one from ebay is a little ify due to the shipping cost and what to do when/if it doesn't work.

I've got a SS5 and it's the third love of my life (behind my wife and my vax, though not always in that order)- Keep the questions coming.

Hint- When you load the OS (Solaris 8 works best) and you go to run the patch cluster- don't plan on doing anything else with it for quite awhile. The SS5's came in 70,110 and 170 mgHz flavors and doing the patch cluster on my 170 is an overnight deal.

-ctp
 
Option #3 on the monitor - don't worry about it immediately.
The default resolution on Sun framebuffers is a bit odd, 1152x900. Though adaptors/cables do work it has been/hit or miss for me. If the monitor can do 1280x1024 you have a good chance. Just beware and get the right 13w3 adaptor...not ibm & not sgi.

But why hassle with all that when you can start working now by running a serial line off ttya? You might need to do that anyway to get set the resolution on the framebuffer to something a bit easier for a non-sun monitor to handle.

shirkahn hit the nail on the head on one bit. Set aside some time for the setup, no matter what you end up choosing. The more memory the better...I'd consider Sol8 to still be quite recent and not the lightest system in the world. Like shirkahn I have a 170 and even with the memory topped out compilation is slow. Whatever you do, if you use a Solaris version that comes with GNOME, don't! If it's creeping on a 170 I wouldn't even attempt it on a 70 or 85.
 
Well, I've got 2 things on this issue:

1. I've been offered a 70MHz SparcStation5, with 64MB Ram, 8MB VRAM, 4GB HDD and a 20" monitor for $50 - what do you think about the price? The current owner told me that it's hardly been used, has Solaris 8 installed and works flawlessly.

2. If I buy this one, I'm going to be stuck with the monitor [I won't use it, as I already have a 19" Sun monitor with both SUN and VGA inputs] and I won't have the space for it. If you want it, we could probably arrange something ;)

EDIT - I just realised that you said Oklahoma in the first post; I'm from Romania... Well, I guess the first question remains: is it worth the $50 value?
 
I have a SGI monitor connected to my SPARCstation 4 and that also works like a charm so you can add that to your list of possibilities.
My SPARCstation 4 is not working though, not sure if the graphicscard would work in a 5 but I would be willing to part with it, the graphicscard works just fine so.
 
The Sparcs are quite fun computers - I have a couple of them. I haven't gotten a graphical operating system running on any of them yet; I need a mouse, keyboard, and monitor. I do have Linux installed on my UltraSparc and NetBSD on my Sparcstation 20. They work quite well. I've gotten some extra RAM for both, bought the thin CD-ROM drive for the ss20, put a Sun floppy drive in the UltraSparc... why use new stuff when you can use cool stuff? :)

I have a bunch of 16 MB DSIMMs for the SparcStations if anybody needs some. Going on eBay soon if no takers.
 
I know I'd need some memory for my SS5 :) With 64MB Ram I can't even install Solaris9.

My SS5 currently runs on 2 x 18GB 10.000rpm drives; it's quite nice. But the memory is dragging me down.

I've been trying to find Sun CD + floppy for it, but no luck in my neck of the woods. I found a 32x regular size scsi cd-rom so I need to take off the cover just to install something.

Until yesterday, I only had a 2x cd-rom. Aurora taked 8CDs, Debian about 13. Installing from a 2x drive was pure hell.
 
I sure hope Debian does support ftp installs, because the alternative is I've been hallucinating the past few years.
 
I'm not sure about ftp install, but there is a Net-Install Disc [apart from the 13 binary ones]. I haven't tried it yet :)
 
fxg said:
Aurora taked 8CDs, Debian about 13. Installing from a 2x drive was pure hell.
Click to expand...

Please read about the distributions. Those 13 CDs represent different configurations and options. If you're net connected, you probably only need CD1.
 
I know that, but the binaries are spread all over the discs, and installing all the packages I wanted required all the discs. I am net connected, but the 1.5Mbps line is not the best way to go when trying all kinds of software. I'd rather have all the packages right here, in case i need them again. Blank CDs are cheap these days ;)
 
I use Gentoo 2004.1 Universal for my 32-bit SPARC machines. 1CD. Only downside is the install can take a little while if you're doing an install from source (like a week). With practice, a binary install of Gentoo takes a little over an hour depending on your packages and hardware speed. You can still download the old images from a mirror.

Not for everyone though.

Matt
 
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