Sparcstation 20: OS roulette leads to NetBSD
I've had my $10 Sparcstation 20 sitting on the desk for awhile. I don't have a monitor, mouse or keyboard hooked up, so I've been running it over the serial port, which was surprisingly easy to do, via my Windows box and PuTTY, which provides for connections over SSH on the network or via the serial port. (I've also used Tera Term and Minicom (the latter in Linux), as well as the cu utility in Linux and OpenBSD to facilitate serial connection to this box.)
Thus far I've had trouble loading and running just about everything on this 1995-era Sparc. The easiest system thus far to install has been OpenBSD. It boots and installs from a floppy, with the filesets coming over the network, with little trouble.
The only problem with OpenBSD is that many of the apps I want on the box are not in the Sparc 32 packages repository, which has many fewer prebuilt binary packages than are available for 64-bit Sparc systems. Thus, for things like Web browsers that aren't Dillio (which runs great under OpenBSD on the Sparc 20, by the way), I need to use ports. And every time I try to install one of those apps (so far Seamonkey, Firefox and the Geany text editor) from ports, the build fails.
Maybe that's why these apps aren't in packages: They won't build in Sparc 32.
I tried to install Debian Etch. The floppies I made wouldn't boot on the Sparc, and the CD stalls at loading the esp driver for the CD. I've seen this in bug reports, but if you can't get the installer to work, who knows what else lurks in Debian for Sparc 32?
Now I'm trying NetBSD 4.0.1 on CD. I would've tried the floppies there, but I could barely understand how to make them. (You need two, and I couldn't get the first one to boot on the box.) As far as making a bootable install floppy, OpenBSD is the only OS with which I've been able to do that successfully.
But NetBSD for Sparc 32 had many, many binary packages, and I actually have a good chance of setting up a nice box ... if I can load the OS.
Once I got the CD drive hooked up, my first try with the NetBSD CD ended with read errors when pulling the filesets off the disc.
But since I was able to boot the system from the NetBSD CD and then start the install process (which is extremely clear and straightforward, by the way), I opted to pull the filesets over ftp.
That worked, and now I'm booting into NetBSD 4.0.1, still over the serial port.
The box works. I had trouble with the terminal type, which defaulted to sun. That doesn't play well with the PuTTY on the serial port.
When I installed the system, I chose the Bash shell for root. I probably should've used the ksh, which which I'm becoming more familiar with in OpenBSD, but since I had Bash, this is how I set the terminal type in the console:
# TERM=vt100 ; export TERM
After changing the terminal type at the Bash prompt, I was then able to use vi to get into /etc/ttys and change that terminal type from sun to vt100 without the whole file blowing up — something that has bitten me you know where in my previous OpenBSD install on the Sparc. Morale of story: If you have the choice to set a terminal type and aren't using the attached Sun keyboard and monitor (or another Sun over the serial port), DON'T CHOOSE SUN AS YOUR TERMINAL TYPE. Use VT100, VT220, or whatever it is your terminal software emulates.
Without this change, you might be OK at a prompt, but bad things will happen in vi.
Tomorrow I'll try to control the box over SSH instead of the serial port and see if I can run X over SSH (and maybe ... finally ... get my $5 adapter to hook up a VGA monitor to the Sparc).
Right now, if I didn't need any applications from the ports tree, OpenBSD would run very well on the Sparc 20. But if I can manage to get a "real" Web browser (Firefox or Seamonkey) and my preferred X text editor (Geany) on the box with NetBSD packages, I'll stick with NetBSD and hopefully have a little fun with my 50 MHz Sparc 20.
Photo at top right: Thanks to HolyCowPie! for the "Stack of Sparcs" image. If you're in Omaha, Neb., or near it, HolyCowPie! will fix your hardware for $35 an hour with a two-hour cap, meaning you won't pay more than $70 — a stake in the collective heart of the pricier, Best Buy-owned Geek Squad.
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Steven Rosenberg aims to learn what he does not know. He writes about it here.
Steven Rosenberg aims to learn what he does not know. He writes about it here.
You may need a little more than your $5 video adapter.
I settled on openbsd on my one of these, though it was a long way back, and NetBSD may be even better now.
I originally had a sparcserver 20, which is the same box
without any framebuffer RAM. If you get nothing at all out
of the video port, check to see if you have any memory in
the framebuffer slot inside. I got some on eBay without much difficulty.
You may also have difficulty with the output frequency if you
are going to a PC monitor. I had the luxury of a few old
Sun monitors, so I never suffered that particular pain!
Good luck with the machine, they're loud and heavy,
but rock solid for all that they're slow.
The $5 Sparc-to-VGA adapter TOTALLY worked. Video is perfect on my 15-inch CRT monitor.
I've already done a new OpenBSD install (from the boot floppy), and now I'm ready to try NetBSD 4.0.1, too.
The Sun keyboard and mouse work great. The only problem is that the Sun backspace key is small and differently placed.
But if I can manage to get some good packages installed, in either OpenBSD, NetBSD or Debian, this should be a nice box to use.
Already I've figured out that the Sparc CD drive is rather finicky. It has trouble with CDs burned on my Dell, but does very well (thus far) with CDs burned on a Mac G5.
Since this last comment, I discovered that NetBSD doesn't run so well on the Sparc 20. The install went fine, but the X configuration was less than optimal. Console messages continued to appear on the X screen, and I could tell that, among other things perhaps, the horizontal sync and/or vertical refresh might have been just a bit off. I imagine that if I take the xorg.conf information from OpenBSD and use it for NetBSD, all issues will be solved.
But when NetBSD's 32-bit Sparc packages for Firefox and Seamonkey (precompiled packages, NOT ports) wouldn't install, and then the Geany package did install but ran so slowly as to be unusable, I decided to go in a different direction.
Thus far, that direction is a reinstall of OpenBSD. I haven't tried any ports yet, but all the packages I have installed — a few GUI editors (nedit, which I quite like, and another I can't remember), plus the Dillo browser, which in all fairness ran great in NetBSD, too — did work.
Now that I'm running not the box's original, jet-plane-noisy 2 GB Seagate hard drive but a super-cheap-on-eBay 35 GB Hitachi SCSI drive that's pleasantly quiet, maybe the installation of an OpenBSD port of a "modern" Web browser will work. Maybe not. I'll also try to roll Abiword onto the box, as well as Geany (for comparison's sake, if anything else).
And there's always Solaris.
I know there are Solaris-compatible packages for just about everything, so if I can't manage to get Seamonkey or Firefox installed from OpenBSD's ports with the extra disk space, my next move will be installing Solaris 9 (I got an unopened box of the software for $1 — yep, that little, plus shipping — on eBay) and see how that OS runs on the box.
One thing: Sound on the 32-bit Sparc platform doesn't work in OpenBSD. It does in NetBSD. Of course it does in Solaris, since Sun's OS was written with the Sparc in mind.
It may be that Solaris is the best OS for desktop use on the Sparc 20. Probably the best thing to do is get a CPU module faster then the current 50 MHz processor I'm now running, and also upping the memory to the max of 512 MB (right now I have the 128 MB the box had when I got it).
But make no mistake, for sheer out-of-the-box configuration on a Sparcstation 20 (sound nothwithstanding), OpenBSD is way ahead of NetBSD.
My next line of attack is trying a few (or more) OpenBSD ports. Even if this experiment goes well, I'll have to roll Solaris 9 onto the Sparc 20 before I decide on any long-term OS for the box.
Before I finish this entry, it's worth pointing out that Debian Etch for Sparc boots but won't install. It hangs when trying to load the CD driver. I don't know if the Sparc port of Debian is broken for EVERY 32-bit Sparc model, but it sure doesn't work for the Sparcstation 20.