[rescue] Fixing the NVRAM battery in the SS5

[Bryan Gurney]

On Fri, 06 Jan 2006 15:07:50 -0500, Sridhar Ayengar <ploopster at gmail.com>  
wrote:

> Bryan Gurney wrote:
>> I might try NetBSD, since Sarge doesn't play nice with the serial  
>> console
>> (and for a machine that is destined to run headless, that just won't  
>> do).
>> Sarge seems to run a bit heavy, and defaults to installing things like
>> exim4, etc. that I just don't need.  Sure, I could remove them, but then
>> there's all the "Unimplemented Sparc system call X" messages on the
>> console, and a few other things that are broken.  Time to experience
>> another OS; I've gone through Winders, Mac System 7.5 through OS X 10.4,
>> RedHat 6.2, Fedora, Debian Woody SPARC, Solaris 9 and 10.  I've tried  
>> and
>> tried to set up OpenBSD on the SS5 but it always wedges at some point.
>
> That's odd.  Is it a different place every time or the same place
> consistently?

It's usually in the bootup section.  I remember reading an FAQ on it, and  
they said "Don't worry, it's just debug stuff."  Okay, but considering  
that I downloaded a released version of Debian, could you guys turn that  
off? :-P

And yeah, I'm definitely doing ntpdate on this thing, and I have the  
NetBSD 3.0 ISO burned and ready to install.  Time to hook up my Plextor  
40X SCSI CD-ROM in an external cage.  I think there's some kernel option  
in NetBSD and OpenBSD that will blink the SparcStation's light according  
to system load.  Anyone else know about this?  Considering that the SS5  
has NO status lights, and I have a thing for status lights, this is a good  
thing.