Aerospace Software Ltd.

Obsolix Howto

Linux on obsolete systems.

For Linux Kernel 2.6, Yuletide 2006.

Why?

Why not? It is Yuletide!

It started when I was confronted with a badly installed Sun server. It was a great machine, brand new, oodles of RAM, 4 way processor - hardly obsolete. However, since the thing was not installed properly, I needed a fix, so I installed OpenSolaris (http://opensolaris.org). It worked like a charm and in the process, I learned some things about Sun hardware, old and new.

The next problem was with an old SparcStation 20. We needed some Xterms and these old machines seemed to fit the bill, except for a few minor issues. However, the best version of Solaris that these old boxes can run is Solaris 7 and it has no SSH, no utilities, no tools and no compilers - ugh. I then started to look around for a Linux solution.

Screen Adaptors

The old 20 inch screens were all shot. Peter Jarmics of Monkeyspeek.com, told me that one can wire them to a multi-synch VGA screen (red, green, blue, vertical and horizontal sync). Sun used an odd resolution, but most modern screens can cope with it. So I snipped some cables in half, cut the ends off the broken Sun screens and grabbed the soldering iron. One can buy adaptors ready made, but hooking it up myself was quicker and more fun anyway.

13W3 Connector
--------------

The 13W3 is an unusual connector combining a
10-pin D-shell and three analog video co-axial conductors:

                                 gray/          1  gnd*
        red   *   *              green blue     2  vertical sync*
         |   1o  2o  3o  4o  5o    |     |      3  sense #2
        (O)                       (O)   (O)     4  sense gnd
            6o  7o  8o  9o 10o                  5  composite sync
             *   *                              6  horizontal sync*
                                                7  gnd*
        * Considered obsolete, may not be       8  sense #1
          connected.                            9  sense #0
                                                10 composite gnd

   The codes for the three monitor-sense bits are:

        0 ???                   4 1152 x 900 76Hz 19"
        1 reserved              5 reserved
        2 1280 x 1024 76Hz      6 1152 x 900 76Hz 16-17"
        3 1152 x 900  66Hz      7 no monitor connected

To connect the 13W3 to a VGA screen, hook up the red, green, blue, vertical and horizontal sync and some grounds - ignore the rest. Most modern screens will work despite the strange resolution.

VGA Connector
-------------
1	Red
2	Green
3	Blue
4	No Connect
5	Ground
6	Ground
7	Ground
8	Ground
9	No Connect
10	Ground
11	No Connect
12	DDC DAT
13	Horizontal Synchronization
14	Vertical Synchronization
15	DDC Clock

Memory

It may be time to and dig in the junk box again. The Sparcs used 72 pin SIMMs, typically 60ns with parity (9 chips). Some old 486 PCs used those. If you can find some, plug them in.

Keyboard and Mouse

The keyboard and mouse are weird. You better find real working ones. The mouse is a serial mouse, running on TTL levels. You may be able to make an old serial mouse work, but I don't have much hope for that.

If you have an optical mouse and no Sun mouse pad, then you can try to print a sheet of paper with a very, very, fine cross hatch pattern on a laser printer and use that as a mouse pad.

Splack

The old Sparcs were very high tech ten years ago. They typically had 50MB RAM and a 32bit, 50 to 100MHz single or dual processor, with maybe a 2GB hard disk. Speed wise, they compare to a 200 to 400MHz Pentium. Screaming fast and lots of storage space, yeah...

It turned out that Redhat dropped support for Sparc in 2003 - can't blame them! Most projects that used to deal with Sparc died shortly after. However, one can still download a special Sparc build of Slackware called Splack (http://www.splack.org/), from late October 2003 ISO.

Aurora

The only active version for Sparc is a hobby project run by some Redhat employees called Aurora (http://auroralinux.org/). This is based on the Fedora project. The ISO files can be downloaded from Ibiblio (ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/aurora/build-2.0/sparc/iso/).

The main caveat seems to be that one has to burn the CDs very slowly at 4x or less, since the old CDROM drives have trouble reading modern CDRs.

Also bear in mind that installing an 8 CD distribution onto a 2GB hard disk will require very careful package selection!

Install

Well, the magic incantation is:

Stop-A
> boot cdrom

Then, say a prayer to all the computer gods and let the games begin...

Have fun!

Herman