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Picked up something that might be interesting to SUN workstation fans, a Penguin x86 SBC

I have two of those. One is installed on an Ultra 60 running Solaris 10 and the other is in a Blade 100 running either Solaris 8 or 9.

It is indeed a full PC on a PCI card with the display appearing in an X window if you don't want to use the VGA out and from the few hours I messed with it the software interfacing experience was terrible. Also the software package by default uses DR-DOS with no preset provisions for floppy or CD booting, much less a Windows installation image. I'm used to how Apple and Orange Micro did it on the mac under System 7 and Sun has it really really stripped down. There's no control panel you can pull up to select or manage virtual drive images, how physical devices like CD, floppy or Ethernet are handled or even folder sharing so both operating systems can handle the same files without import/export weirdness. I also ran into nasty framebuffer corruption on the Blade that depended on the window focus and the cursor. At least Apple had virtual disc/disk mounting without having to remember syntax.

As for running it on something other than Solaris it comes down to drivers. I'm only aware of Solaris drivers and no third party attempts to bring it to any other platform and even then it wasn't officially supported past Solaris 9.
 
I used to support a mix of around 60 SunPCi/ii/iii cards on Sun Ultras & Blades, I found them quite usable. We thought the ii and iii were better because they had their own independent Ethernet port rather than sharing the system one. In our day we ran either Windows NT or 2000 on them. I'm pretty sure we installed them from the syatem's CD/DVD drive initially, though it became easier to create a master image and use some tool to re-ID them (newsid?) I often wondered if it would be possible to use them on another platform (x86 linux would have been ideal for me), I don't know if anyone tried with success.
 
NeXT said:
I also ran into nasty framebuffer corruption on the Blade that depended on the window focus and the cursor.
Click to expand...
That sounds like color map flashing on an 8bit display in which case it's not a bug but a limitation of the hardware.
 
I have several of those.. wish I could use them outside of a sun chassis, but as a good friend of mine who worked at Sun informed me, because of how they interface, etc, sadly they can't. Like said above, drivers and so on.
 
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