Carrier Detect: Sparcstation 20 resurrection

So I was ranting during lunch at work the other day - decrying the current state of ~~everything~~ operating system user interfaces. Examples on my hitlist were Windows 8, the iOS-ification of OSX, and of course the deadest horse of them all - Ubuntu Unity.

The point I got to eventually - is that I realized I missed having a Unix (or at least Linux) desktop. I'm talking X11, a window manager, a pager, middle button paste, etc. I wanted to go back to a day in the mid 90's when folks with clue had workstations - Solaris, HP Apollos, SGI's (Linux for those of us who couldn't afford any of the aforementioned or weren't old enough to be in college).

Anyway, it inspired me to resurrect my SS20. I have a 17" Sun "flat screen" CRT monitor, full size Type 5 keyboard, Type 5 optical mouse (more on that later), internal CDROM, external 2G Jaz. The machine itself is 60mhz, 80mb RAM, various HDDs (I have a Cheetah 18G in there now) and a VSIMM ! This is the "SX" framebuffer in Sun-speak - and the corner boot logo even changes to a 3D SX logo in place of the usual Sun logo. The VSIMM is fully supported by the OpenBSD "cgfourteen" driver. I find OpenBSD works better on this machine (sun4m), and on my sun4c stuff (currently only an IPX) - NetBSD is currently working best.

So the first thing after hauling all this out (literally hauling, this is HEAVY gear) and setting it up - the machine would not detect the hard disk. probe-scsi at a prompt only showed the cdrom. I tried a few different hard drives, double-checked SCSI jumpers and IDs, all to no avail. I noticed that the small fan to keep the drives cooled down wasn't spinning at all. I disconnected it and hooked up some batteries and it spun just fine. This is when I started thinking the PSU wasn't putting out enough power. Or that the 'aux' connector on it was shot. It had enough power to get the mainboard and video up, but drives (motors) were a no go.

I actually found one on ebay by searching the Sun part number, found one, and it arrived today. After putting it in (very easy, the internal engineering on these boxes is very nice) and booting it up - it was immediately (acoustically) evident that the fan and hard disk were spinning - success !

So after installation, when X came up - my mouse would only cause the cursor to 'vibrate'. I remembered that I used to have a metal mousepad for this, with a very small grid pattern printed on it. I can no longer find this :( I remembered that some folks had put up images that could be printed to make a mousepad for optical mice. The first one I tried was geared for modern mice, but they will basically work on any surface. I found the grids, but they wouldn't work either. I knew I needed something reflective (i.e. like the original metal mousepad). So a trip to FedEx office (nee Kinkos) was in order. I had the grid document printed on transparent sheet (~ $2.00). I cut a section of a large gift box, and put a smoothed out layer of tinfoil on that. I put the grid transparency on top and tried it out - it worked !