Two new toys
I mentioned over on my personla blog that I travelled to Dublin yesterday to collect two Sun Blade 2000 workstations. I've now got both of them up and running.
They are both identical machines with a 900Mhz UltraSPARC III CPU, 1GB of RAM and a 76GB FC-AL hard disk. I was pondering what to do with both of them. I was considering adding the CPU and RAM and hard disk from one to the other but in the end I decided to use them both.
Solaris 8 was installed on both but for obvious reasons I wasn't give the root password which meant that I had to install an OS on them from scratch. As it happened I had a copy of Solaris 10 for Sparc on DVD but neither of the machines had a CD-ROM or DVD drive which kind of left me scuppered as neither have support for IDE and are SCSI only. I had an old SCSI CD-ROM drive kicking around but obviously that wasn't going to be much good with a DVD edition of Solaris.
While considering my options I happened to look at my HP9000 and lo and behold it has a SCSI DVD drive. I yanked it out and stuck it onto the first Sun machine and it wouldn't work. probe-scsi-all found it but it transpires that Sun's OpenBoot looks for a CD or DVD drive on SCSI ID6 so it was a quick matter of changing the jumpers, 'Stop+A' , 'boot cdrom' and an hour or so later Solaris 10 was up and running.
Happy at this stage I considered installing Solaris 10 onto the second one but I decided to break with the norm and I downloaded an ISO of Ubuntu 7.10 for Sparc instead. I downloaded the server edition so I haven't had a chance to install X on it yet but installation was just as easy as it would be on commodity x86 hardware. One nice feature is that by default, once installed, the Vesa frame buffer is enabled. At a guess (I haven't checked yet) it looks like the default terminal is 1024×768.
Here is some info from the Ubuntu one:
Linux sparc2 2.6.22-14-sparc64 #1 Sun Oct 14 21:57:46 GMT 2007 sparc64 GNU/Linux
cpu : TI UltraSparc III+ (Cheetah+)
fpu : UltraSparc III+ integrated FPU
prom : OBP 4.5.16 2002/05/01 19:28
type : sun4u
ncpus probed : 1
ncpus active : 1
D$ parity tl1 : 0
I$ parity tl1 : 0
Cpu0ClkTck : 0000000035a4e900
MMU Type : Cheetah+
0000:00:00.0 Host bridge: Sun Microsystems Computer Corp. Schizo PCI Bus Module
0000:00:01.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Rage XL (rev 27)
0000:00:05.0 Bridge: Sun Microsystems Computer Corp. RIO EBUS (rev 01)
0000:00:05.1 Ethernet controller: Sun Microsystems Computer Corp. RIO 10/100 Ethernet [eri] (rev 01)
0000:00:05.2 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Sun Microsystems Computer Corp. RIO 1394 (rev 01)
0000:00:05.3 USB Controller: Sun Microsystems Computer Corp. RIO USB (rev 01)
0000:00:06.0 SCSI storage controller: LSI Logic / Symbios Logic 53c875 (rev 37)
0000:00:06.1 SCSI storage controller: LSI Logic / Symbios Logic 53c875 (rev 37)
0001:00:00.0 Host bridge: Sun Microsystems Computer Corp. Schizo PCI Bus Module
0001:00:04.0 SCSI storage controller: QLogic Corp. QLA2200 64-bit Fibre Channel Adapter (rev 05)
Time to play arount a bit more 
