[rescue] What to do with the SS20

[David Brownlee]

On 23 June 2014 16:49, Phil Stracchino <phils at caerllewys.net> wrote:

> On 06/23/14 11:18, Mouse wrote:
> >>> As long are you are happy with 8bpp in the console and only want
> >>> 24bpp for X then any version of NetBSD/sparc post 2009 should be
> >>> good  :)
> >> Does NetBSD support console on Sun framebuffers yet?
> >
> > It always has, as far as I can recall, if you're content with using ROM
> > console I/O.
>

I think it may have changed a little since you last checked :-p

NetBSD/sparc seems to be a pretty good choice for acceleration - console or
X11:

Apart from the cg12 (which runs as a dumb mono/8bit console or 24bit X11
framebuffer due to lack of docs) it looks like acceleration for both
console and X is working on ZX/Leo, GX, TGC, GXG (cg6), Weitek P9100,
AG-10e and TCX 8 & 24 bit, plus dumb framebuffer support for the dumb
framebuffers (cg3, bw2, IGS 1682)
8 bit console includes the option of antialiased console fonts, which is
nice :)

>> Last time I tried that, around 2005, with both NetBSD and FreeBSD, I
>> was told (pretty much in so many words) "No, nor do we intend to.
>> Why should we?  Piss off."
>
> Interesting.  I suspect you were misunderstood somehow; I can't account
> for such a response any other way.

I was surprised myself.  The closest I got to a useful answer was
> "Nobody uses Sun consoles.  Use a serial console."  Which answer assumed
> I had another machine there that I could serial-console to it from ...
> which I didn't, or I'd have been using serial console.
>
> So then I tried OpenBSD, and it Just Worked
>

I'm really quite surprised and disappointed that you received such a
response. Good to hear that you at least found a happy OpenBSD install
instead.

David