Hi, back in the 2000s at university i used to work a lot on Sun workstations like Ultra 5 and 10, together with E450 and also some older sparcstations.
To revive this a bit, i got myself a Sun Blade 100 and a Sun Blade 2000 to get me going with sparc again. Also i am thinking to get some of the more modern rackservers as they are available for cheap nowadays. I have Solaris 8 ready to install, but i gave debian sparc64 a ride first to evaluate if it is any good. So far i have the latest ports flavor up and running with mate on the Sun Blade 100. Initially i had a little installation trouble since apparently grub relies on the /boot partition to exist, together with a warning that my standard 40GB drive for the machine exceeds 65536 cylinders. Once that was sorted, i had trouble getting a clear picture on my monitor because the framerate was to high. So i lowered the framerate from 75hz to 60hz by creating config files for X11 with the correct modeline. So far the desktop is running, albeit a bit slow and opengl is not working at all. I think i should have the PGX64 chipset in this machine, but i am not sure if it uses the correct driver. glxinfo tells me everything is fine with direct rendering using llvm. When i try to run glxgears, i get a bus error. When i try to run extremetuxracer, i don't get into the game, the errors point to unhandled calls in some asound library. Also i can't run any web browser. Midori and Epiphany crash or don't open a website and the current Firefox or Firefox-esr are not installable due to missing dependencies. Is any of this current normal behavior or is my configuration incorrect at some point and some of these thing are supposed to work, albeit slow on these old machines? Finally before i install Solaris 8 on a second drive: is it possible to create a dual boot installation with debian and Solaris on one drive? If it is, how would i achieve this with grub? Regards, Connor
