[rescue] Operating system for a 3gx sparcbook

[Michael Parson]

On Wed, Aug 31, 2005 at 12:21:29PM +0300, Geoffrey S. Mendelson wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'd like to get my Tadpole 3GX sparcbook working again. It works 
> and has a 1.2 gig hard drive and 64m of RAM. It currently runs Solaris
> 2.6 with the Tadpole patches.
> 
> Can anyone suggest an operating system for it? 2.6 is a bit "long in tooth",
> and it's too slow and short on disk space to compile anything so I would 
> prefer something that comes in object code form.
> 
> If there was a way to put a wifi card in it I'd really love it. I have
> both CARDBUS (3.3v 32bit) and PCMCIA (5 volt 16bit) cards.

There have been some big advances in NetBSD/sparc for the sparcbook in
the past year.  We have functional X11, sound, pcmcia (and wifi!), and
power-management.

It's not in the release version (2.0.2), but looks like it'll be in 3.0,
which is due Any Day Now.

If you don't mind running beta code, the guy doing the bulk of this work
has builds available for downloads.

ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/misc/macallan/sparc/

He's building Tadpole 3GX specific kernels and userlands with -mcpu=v8

-- 
Michael Parson
mparson at bl.org