[geeks] Seeking a laptop scsi disk...

[Michael Parson]

On Tue, Nov 07, 2006 at 07:03:03PM +0200, Geoffrey S. Mendelson wrote:

<snip>

> A year ago, I tried to install various xBSD versions on my 3GX and none
> of them supported the hardware that I had. By now it may work, new releases
> were "in the works".

I'm running a recent NetBSD-4 daily snapshot on my sparcbook.

Accellerated X11 with XFree86 at 24 bits and wireless (Dell
TrueMobile/Prism II).  I have one of the newer IDE->SCSI adapters with
the larger limit attached to an 80 gig Fujitsu drive.  I was also able
to find the famed 128M SIMM set.

$ uname -a
NetBSD tadpole 4.0_BETA NetBSD 4.0_BETA (TADPOLE3GX) #0: Sun Nov  5 01:26:19 CST 2006  mparson at tadpole:/usr/src/sys/arch/sparc/compile/TADPOLE3GX sparc

$ df -k
Filesystem  1K-blocks      Used     Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/sd0a      127495     31264     89857    25%    /
/dev/sd0d     1032486      6112    974750     0%    /var
/dev/sd0e     8258742   2490326   5355480    31%    /usr
/dev/sd0f    67258754     90270  63805548     0%    /home
kernfs              1         1         0   100%    /kern
procfs              4         4         0   100%    /proc
mfs:276        127023         6    120666     0%    /tmp

$ dmesg | grep mem
total memory = 127 MB
avail memory = 122 MB

The default kernel doesn't support everything, but a simple recompile fixes it.

If you want to give it a shot, grab the install bits from the NetBSD
site and let me know, I'll put the kernel I'm running up so you can
use it, the GENERIC kernel they ship with doesn't work well with the
installer on the sparcbook, but the one I've got should work better.

> Bear in mind that although they had excelent screens and good keyboards,
> they are awfully slow by modern standards, limited in RAM, and have very
> short battery life.

The 3GX is faster under NetBSD than it was under Solaris 2.6.

-- 
Michael Parson
mparson at bl.org