0 - SUN Sparcstation 20

Author: sgeorge, Posted on: 24 December 2024 09:28

Hanging out on twitch is bad for my health... It gave me the itch to pickup and old unix workstation. To be fair, I'd been itching for one for ages but never bothered.

And suddenly a wild Sparcstation 20 appears!

Back in the early 2000's, I had me a Sparctstation 5 that ran at 110mhz (I wanted the fancy 170mhz one but couldnt find one then), and also a HP Visualise C360 which was another unix beast with a very cool PA-RISC 8500 CPU.

As beastly as the 64bit PA-RISC cpu was, I was more enamoured of the Sparcstation for some reason. I decided it was time to dig back into the SUN landscape. One of the reasons being, I still had my original install media!

I was, a long time ago lucky enough to have got an original copy of SunOS 4.1.4, aka Solaris 1.1.2

I also have an original copy of Solaris 2.6 11/98.

And I'm waiting on a new old stock copy of Solaris 2.5.1 to arrive.

I've been collecting expansion cards and parts for about two months to put this together. Heres a current list;

  • NVRAM replacement
  • Extra RAM
  • VSIMM / 4mb
  • ZuluSCSI scsi2sd
  • Sun TurboGX framebuffer (not needed since we have a vsimm)
  • Sun 'Happy Meal' Fast Ethernet 2.0 card (not the quad version)
  • Native Instruments GPIB (SB-GPIB/TNT)
  • SunPC 133mhz AM586 x86 cpu card
  • Sun type 5c keyboard and mouse.
  • Serial cable 530-1677-01 (the stupid 2 serial ports on one port deal!)
  • 13w3 to vga (I got a cable but it was the wrong gender!)

So the plan to do some overall cleaning, load it up, and get 3 different OS's installed.

  • SunOS 4.1.4
  • Solaris 2.5.1
  • NetBSD 10

So, the ZuluSCSI can show 6 or 7 drives, and the plan is something of the following;

  • SCSI ID 0 - 2.1gb (sunos 4.1.4)
  • SCSI ID 1 - 2.1gb (share drive between sunos + solaris)
  • SCSI ID 2 - 10gb? (solaris 2.5.1, need to research more)
  • SCSI ID 3 - 16gb?
  • SCSI ID 6 - CDROM

This should allow me to get all 3 OS on a single 32gb SD card (ZuluSCSI supports a max of 32gb).

But I might also just go with NetBSD on its own card and SunOS + Solaris together. I need to think more on how they will all co-exist. Or even just one OS per SD card might be fine too.

And the master plan going forward;

  • Can we even boot the machine?
  • Recap PSU (Its an old 'FDK' PSU which is known to be problematic and requires a recap)
  • New NVRAM, pull old one. Solder up + hotglue new device with replacable coin cell.
  • Test RAM sticks
  • Install VSIMM, see if we can upgrade the RAM to 8mb (going to be very hard, but I have a plan!)
  • Install all cards
  • Futz with OS's.
  • WIN!

tags: SUN, Solaris, Sparcstation, SunOS

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