On Fri, 24 Dec 1999, christophe plasschaert wrote:
> hi everybody and happy christmas for all > New on this list, i've the possibility to buy a sparcstation 10 and i > would like to know a > few things before: > Will the hardware go through y2k ? As far as I know, there is nothing explicitly date-dependent in Sparc hardware architecture. > Is it interesting to use this hardware ? The Sparc 10 was midway between the Sparc 5 and the Sparc 20 in the SparcStation/SparcServer line, and supported dual processors. I have a Sparc 5 that runs at around 70Mhz, with roughly the computing power of a 486-DX100; the Sparc 10 should perform around the same as a Pentium 60, at a guess. > can i use a pc screen with this station ( with adaptator ) ? Yes, provided that the Sparc comes with a framebuffer (Sun-flavor video card). The Sparc 20 generally requires a Sun monitor, since the PC ones don't support the resolution the 20 wants to put out, but the 10 should be fine. > any information which can help a newbie with this kind of hardware. Building a boot floppy for a Sparc is more involved than for a PC. I tried copying a Sparc boot image to a floppy with dd, and got an error message from my 5, saying that it didn't find a Sun label on the boot disk. OTOH, you can get a Debian Linux CD set from Linuxcentral.com for a reasonable amount of money, which will boot a Sparc with no problem. I have my Sparc 5 (which came with two NICs) running as a network server/firewall/NAT box, and it performs its function admirably. OTOH, trying to do any kind of large-scale data moving/computation with it (copying CDs to hard disk, installing Solaris, building Linux kernels, etc.) is pretty slow. > > thanks a lot for your answer and sorry for my bad english. > Your English looks fine to me! Hope mine is equally comprehensible to you. :-) All the best, --Walter Keeler [EMAIL PROTECTED] ******************************* Walter Keeler * If my words did glow... * San Francisco, CA *******************************
