Date: Sun, 19 Jan 97 16:18:59 EST From: Dwight McKay (The Moderator) Reply-To: Suns-at-Home@net-kitchen.com Subject: Suns-at-Home Digest V10 #2 To: Suns-at-Home-List@tigger.net-kitchen.com Status: RO X-Status: Suns-at-Home Digest Sun, 19 Jan 97 Volume 10 : Issue 2 Today's Topics: 4300 CPU out to lunch... ideas? Currently supported cd-roms NetBSD/sun3x No Subject Problem running Netscape on Xterminals Slighlty used 1/4" tape cartridges for sale Solaris v1/Sparc 1 Sparcstation 1 lost its NVRAM SunOS 3.2 on a 3/60 Suns-at-Home Digest V10 #1 X11 +--------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Submissions: suns-at-home \ | | Requests: suns-at-home-request > @net-kitchen.com | | Archives: suns-at-home-archives / | | WWW Archive access: http://www.net-kitchen.com/~sah | +--------------------------------------------------------------------+ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 12 Jan 1997 10:47:47 -0800 From: "Gary W. Cook" Subject: 4300 CPU out to lunch... ideas? To: suns-at-home@tigger.net-kitchen.com The NVRAM is located at U2200. It's in a socket along the edge of the board opposite the SIMM sockets. It's the same part used on the early desktop SparcStations such as the 4/60, 4/65, 4/75.. No programming required other than the setups you would normally enter since it's ethernet address and hostid are stored in a separate PROM. - ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 12 Jan 1997 18:30:01 +0100 (MET) From: lukas@design.de (Lukas Wunner) Subject: Currently supported cd-roms To: Suns-at-Home@tigger.net-kitchen.com > Hi, Does any one have any info on CURRENT cd-roms drives that will work with > sparcs. i have done some looking around to no avail. At this point i cannot > locate any toshiba 3301,3401,4101 or any hitachi 1750s. If unable to locate > a cd rom i will have to do a network install. the problem being i do not > have a network! Try to get a Plextor drive. I have used a PX-63CS (6x) CD-ROM to boot and install a 4/20 (Sparc SLC); worked excellent. The Plextor drives have a dip switch or a jumper to switch the block size between 512 and 2048, so the drives can be used happily on a Sparc, PC, Mac etc. Pretty cool that it is indeed possible to boot a machine built 1989 with a high-speed drive built in 1996 -- thanks to SCSI2 and Sun supporting it so quickly back then. Just imagine; it is possible to boot PCs from a CD-ROM only for a few months and with a few mainboards now. The 6x drive is no longer sold, the current Plextor drives have 8x or 12x. Lukas. - ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 14 Jan 1997 14:47:20 -0800 (PST) From: Jeremy Cooper Subject: NetBSD/sun3x To: Suns-at-Home@tigger.net-kitchen.com As a grateful Suns-at-home member, I'd like to make this list the first receipient for the following announcement: After nearly a year of research and design discussions, we (Gordon Ross and Jeremy Cooper) are pleased to announce that the NetBSD port to the Sun3X architecture has reached a major milestone. The current kernel boots up to the point just before mounting the root filesystem. At this stage it is stable enough to facilitate the development device drivers. Here are answers to a few of the questions we anticipate: Q. What machines are in the sun3x architecture? A. The machines that belong to the sun3x architecture are the Sun 3/80 and 3/470. The 3/80 is a desktop `pizzabox' unit, while the 3/470 is a deskside chassis. Q. Why is there a need to separate the sun3x port from the sun3 port? A. The sun3x architecture was developed at the time when Sun had just begun investing in the SPARC architecture. It appears to have been a safety net - a platform that Sun could expand should the SPARC have failed to catch on. It contains many SPARC-like device features but retains a sun3 CPU - a Motorola 68030. The addition of the SPARC-like devices changes the operation of the lower levels of the kernel significantly from the sun3. Most notably these are a different MMU and a different approach to DMA. Given the amount of code needed to dynamically incorporate these changes into a single, unified kernel, and given the speed of the CPU and RAM capacity of the sun3 and sun3x, it just isn't worth sacrificing the compatibility for the efficiency. On machines with faster processors (such as the SPARC), this hinderance would not nearly be so noticeable. Q. What device drivers are needed? A. Much of the standard sun3 devices, such as the Zilog serial drivers, have been ported. The major devices that need to be implemented or debugged are the SCSI and Ethernet controllers. The Sun3x architecture contains two possible SCSI devices: an Emulex chip used in model 3/80, and an unknown chipset in the 3/470. The Emulex is probably identical to that used in most SPARC 4Cs. There are also two possible Ethernet controllers. The Am7990 in the 3/80 and an Intel chip in the 3/470. The 3/80 contains a (yet unknown) parallel port chipset which is probably identical to the one found in the SPARC IPX. (Do not quote me on this.) Once this driver is written, it should be beneficial to both ports. This is not nearly as crucial as SCSI and Ethernet. -Jeremy Cooper - ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 13 Jan 1997 15:46:37 -0500 From: JACKC@cliffy.polaroid.com (Charlie Jack 6-4479) Subject: No Subject To: matt@severian.chi.il.US Hi: I just now read my Suns-at-Home digest and thought I ought to respond to this posting. The Sparc-1 uses the same power supply as the Sparc-2 the difference between the two machines being that the Sparc-2 has an additional cooling fan. The Sparc-1 should easily be able to handle any of the newer higher capacity disk drives that are available today and generate less heat than the older 105MB drives. Since the Sparc-1 was designed to hold two drives one can assume that you should be able to put any drive in it that uses less power than two 105MB drives. By the way I own a Sparc-1+ and have a 1.05G and 540MB drive in it. It does tend to run a bit warm so I plan to install an additional cooling fan as in the Sparc-2, something that's easily done. > installing a larger hard disk The power supply on the sparc-1 is minimal and Sun does not recommend any internal disks larger than the Quantum 105MB drives they shipped. Externally, you can connect pretty much any single-ended (i.e., not differential) narrow (50 pin) SCSI device you care to name. - ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 19 Jan 1997 20:36:16 +1100 (EST) From: Craig Dewick Subject: Problem running Netscape on Xterminals To: suns-at-home@tigger.net-kitchen.com (Suns-at-Home M/L) Hi folks, I have a Sparc LC (aka Classic) here as my personal machine, and I use a SparcStation 1 as an Xterminal, hosting via xdm off the LC. If I configure xdm to start an Xserver on the native framebuffer of the LC, I can run Netscape without any problems. However, if I try to run Netscape on the Xterminal, it fails every time I try to start it with 'cannot open display yoda:0.1'. I have both an ECL mono and a normal colour framebuffer in the SS1 so I can do graphics work on a colour display and text-based work on the mono display, but have one Xserver controlling the two (the mono display is 'yoda:0.1', and the colour display is 'yoda:0.0'). I have tried 'xauth +' to disable authentication, but the same problem occurs. All the versions of Netscape I use are the free beta's which I update regularly from 'ftp.netscape.com.au'. Is there anything anyone can suggest for why netscape cannot start on the Xterminal? All other applications (such as Xv, Xpaint, etc.) run without any problems on both the local display and the Xterminal, so why is Netscape so fussy? I've posted this to a few of the newsgroups as well to see if anyone there can or will provide me with some pointers... Hopefully between the people reading this mailing list and people reading the newsgroups I'll gather enough information to work out why Netscape won't run on an Xterminal. Regards, Craig. - ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 12 Jan 97 13:28:01 PST From: rodgers@maxwell.ucsf.EDU (R. P. C. Rodgers, M.D.) Subject: Slighlty used 1/4" tape cartridges for sale To: Suns-at-Home@ecn.purdue.edu Dear Colleagues, We have some slightly used 1/4" tape cartridges for sale, each in its original plastic slip case. All are in excellent condition: 1) Type: DC6150 Quantity: 40 Price: $3 each 2) Type: 600A Quantity: 3 Price: $2.50 each 3) Type: misc. Quantity: 10 Price: $1.50 each 615A: 1 QD6-B: 2 DC300XL/P (305 ft.): 1 QDS-450: 5 QD3-B: 1 Preference given to those wishing to buy the whole lot. All orders will be shipped C.O.D. using your method of preference, purchaser to pay shipping costs. Best Regards, Rick Rodgers (rodgers@maxwell.ucsf.edu) - ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 13 Jan 1997 15:52:45 -0500 From: JACKC@cliffy.polaroid.com (Charlie Jack 6-4479) Subject: Solaris v1/Sparc 1 To: hhuntley@ix.netcom.COM Solaris 2.5 is actually faster than any V4.?.? release IF you have sufficient memory. If your system is 16MB or less it will run Solaris very slowly as it will page a lot. 24mb or better will get you better performance and of course more memory is better. There are numerous other advantages to Solaris if you are not locked into wanting Berkeley UNIX as in SunOS 4. I am running Solaris 2.5.1 on Sparc-1's and getting quite acceptable performance. None of the machines is less than 24mb however. Charlie Jack > I have a Sparc 1 with SunOS v4.?.? I want to install one of the Solaris > v2.+.+ on the system. I have been told that one of the Solaris v2.?.? will > run very slow, Is that true. If not how can I get a used copy of the > Solaris v2.?.? and a manual for the v2 I have installed. I can't figure out > how to do a tape back up under SunOS v1.. I have a very good book for v2.0 > which shows me enough to really get going. - ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 13 Jan 1997 08:45:34 -0800 From: vprev Subject: Sparcstation 1 lost its NVRAM To: suns-at-home@tigger.net-kitchen.com Hi, I just got a used sparcstation 1 which has a bad NVRAM chip or perhaps the NVRAM chip works and its battery is dead. Anyway the symptoms are that when the SS1 is powered up it reports a hostid of FFFFFFF and and ethernet address full of FFs. ALso there is no Time of Day clock and all the PROM settings are at their default values. Apart from that, I can boot ok and even talk to the net. However everytime I power-cycle the machine I have to reenter everything. Anybody knows how I can fix the NVRAM chip? Thanks Vassilis Prevelakis University of Pireus vp@hol.gr - ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 13 Jan 1997 01:59:15 -0500 From: Craig L Wasson Subject: SunOS 3.2 on a 3/60 To: Suns-at-Home@tigger.net-kitchen.com, kosack@fred.net Dan; I've been using SunOS 3.0 tapes with my Sun 2/170 - if your tape is anything like mine here is how it works. I use an old 'ar' tape drive and SMD disk - I assume you can substitute st/sd and it'll work the same. The first file on tape is a bootstrap loader. This is used to load the 'diag' program to format your drive (if necessary). 'diag' is file number 3 (ar(0,0,3)) I believe you don't say 'b' when you have the 'boot:' prompt. So to format your disk you just reply 'ar(0,0,3)' as the file for the bootstrap to load. Once your disk is formatted you boot the standalone copy program which is file number 4 (ar(0,0,4)). It will ask which file to restore and you probably want to restore the mini-root which is file number 5. This of course gets restored to the swap partition. On my system I boot the mini-root with the command: b xy(0,0,1)vmunix -a This seems to be required or it'll assume root is on partition 0. When the mini-root then asks where root is, specify 'xy0*'. In other words put an asterisk in place of the partition number. Took me a while looking at source code to figure that one out. If you dump the 3rd file on the tape you get a table of contents for the tape. The table of contents list the first file as '1' but when you refer to files while booting the first file is 0. Here is what's on my SunOS 3.0 tape: 0 Bootstrap 1 Table of Contents 2 Copyright notice 3 Standalone disk diag/format 4 Standalone copy 5 Mini-root 6 Root - tar format 7 pub - tar format 8 client image Now - can someone out there tell me the sequence of commands to load a SunOS 4.0.3 tape? I have not been able to guess it yet. And while I'm taking everyone's time - does anyone have a type-1 keyboard or info on how I can recreate one? This is the old parallel keyboard used by the sun-1 processor. My CGONE display driver expects a type-1 keyboard and I have not had much luck getting it to use anything else. Craig - ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 13 Jan 1997 19:19:53 -0500 (EST) From: Rick Leir EPS Subject: Suns-at-Home Digest V10 #1 To: Dwight McKay On Sun, 12 Jan 1997, Dwight McKay wrote: > 1) My sun20 workstation always lost its "lpsched" process, so I can't use > print service. when I start the process, it will be killed soon. > What can I do ? I don't want to re-install the system.( My OS is > SunOS 5.5 i.e. Solaris 2.5) Use Admintool to set up printing to a working initial state. > 2) Also in the Solaris 2.5 system, how can I get user login accounting > report from /usr/adm/wtmp ? I don't want pacct for process accounting > ( I think it's time consuming and using too much disk space) `man who` might help > Clueless Newbie question here. No, this is a difficult q. > 1) Does anyone have any advice on how to choose an ISP ? In a recent Sun Expert, Ask Mr. Protocol talked about this. hee. - ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 12 Jan 1997 10:14:27 -0500 (EST) From: "David L. Elliott" Subject: X11 To: Suns-at-Home@tigger.net-kitchen.com I'm running SunOS 4.1.4 with OpenWindows 3.14 on a SPARC-II. The X11 library is Revision 4. Lots of nice GNU software on it-- but recently more software has assumed the presence of X11R5. The sources for this are available, but don't look very easy to deal with and l'd like some advice: is there a compiled version that will work on my system? will I need to recompile other software? How about OpenWindows? ... or can both libraries be used on the same system? David Elliott - ------------------------------ End of Suns-at-Home Digest ******************************