I have replaced the original mainboard of the Sun Ultra 20 with the
Tyan Tomcat K8E one. The Sun's one is a customised version of the
Tomcat, actually. The Sun added some stuff (a FireWire controller and
connectors and probably an audio port) but also removed part of
connectors (a serial port, both PS/2 ports and the second Ethernet
port).
So I also have had to remove the back steel plate which covered the
ports (I should get a Tomcat-compatible one later, I hope).
I also have found that one of DIMM moduli is bad. It's a problem
because DIMMs have be installed in pairs. So I lost a half of RAM in
this way. Thus instead of 4GB RAM I now only have 2GB (I should have
original 2 256MB DIMMs somewhere so I should be able to have 2.5GB -
but I'm not sure if it will make any difference)
The rest of the system seems to be OK. It now has a build-in serial
port, a complete pair of PS/2 ports, several USB ports (4 on the back
and 2 on the front panel - I still have to test if they work), 4 or so
PCI slots, two 1x PCIE slots and one 16x PCIe slot. And there are two
SATA HDD drives (both are 320GB).
I will probably add my USB3 PCI card and maybe even the SCSI PCIe card.
I'm not sure if it will make any sense to add a new Radeon card to such
old system (I got one for the BlackBird but I still didn't decided to
use it). I can also use several PCI cards but I don't think that I need
them just now.
Anyway there is still a lot work to do: a new thermal paste should
arrive tomorrow and I have to consider fans replacement (both CPU fan
and case fan are old and noisy). Also the OS will require update or
replacement. I have researched that there are actually two Ubuntu
installations (one per HDD): a 12.04 one and a 10.04 on. I didn't
remember why I kept the old one here but there was probably some reason
(compatibility with some software, maybe). Both installations have
shown issues with our widescreen monitors, of course (I hope that the
old build-in AMD card can manage them - I use the ViewSonic vp171b with
the Ultra 20 which is a normal 1280x1024 device).
