[Sunhelp] Info for my AXi

[James Lockwood]

On Mon, 28 Jun 1999, Paolo Di Francesco wrote:

> 1) Can I use PC Floppy Drives?  If yes, shall I have troubles with eject?
> Have I to buy them from Sun?

PC floppy drives work fine, but you have to live with manual eject.
"eject floppy" still unmounts the floppy filesystem, but then prompts
you to remove the disk from the drive.

To my knowledge, the AXi does not support autoeject floppy drives as such
(this is stated in the OEM manual).

> 2) About keyboard and mouse. I want to buy a keyboard, (USA version) but 
> I don't if it's better the Unix version or the not-Unix. Suggestions?
> About mouse: optical or mechanical mouse? 

Do you want to go with a Sun keyboard and mouse or PC?  The AXi has
connectors for both types.

The biggest difference that I notice between the Unix version and the
non-Unix version of the Sun keyboard is that the Unix version has Control
to the left of the 'A' key (where god intended IMHO) and Caps Lock in the
lower left corner out of the way.  The non-Unix layout swaps these two. 
There are other minor differences, but none of them bug me as much as
this.

I love optical mice myself (esp the type-5) but many people don't (my wife
can't stand them).  They're both pretty maintenance free, it just comes
down to personal taste.  The mechanical mouse does feel better in quality
than most PC mice.

> 3) about video adapters: I want to connect my PC monitor to the Sun. I 
> have no video card, but I know if you buy a Creator card the connector 
> on the card is the 13W. Now I have read somewhere, there is a converter 
> but it's limited by freq. and resolution. Is this true? 
> And I would know if there is a 13W->Bnc connector from Sun. I have a BNC 
> monitor, so it could be nice use the BNC connectors. 

Check out Pi Manufacturing (http://www.pimfg.com).  Cheapest source of
quality 13W3 cables (and a lot of other stuff) that I've found, even after
paying for shipping and duties you should still come out in good shape. 
Be warned, their online catalog is terrible, but if you can spend the time
to browse through it you will find some great stuff.  I believe that you
can find both 13W3 to BNC and 13W3 to VGA cables in there. 

You should have no problem running high-quality cables at high
resolutions.  These adaptors have a set of sense pins set such that they
tell the framebuffer what resolution to start at, but any modern Sun
framebuffer (GX and up) can be told to use a different resolution and
frequency via NVRAM.

> 4) I have a problem: I have more workstations than monitors. (1 monitor!)
> So I would connect the monitor and the workstations usign a switch. I 
> have tried a 20$ manual switch (blah...) but you can use it at very low 
> freq (640x480) and it's not useful under X.... Have you tried (cheap!!!) 
> digital switch models?

Never tried them, but you would probably want to get a VGA-style digital
switch as 13W3 switches are extremely expensive.  If you get good results
from a cheap solution let us know, many people could use this.

-James