I spent another night in attempts to return my Sun Ultra 20 to life.
There have been several main issues: bad RAM, non-working Ethernet and
non-working Xorg. There have been also some minor ones (all port on the
front panel are dead and the CD-ROM drive, too).
At the moment I have a semi-working system with a replacement Tyan
Tomcat mainboard (it's not 100% identical to the Sun's version, you
know) so there is now FireWire (no ports, no chips, just empty space)
and no sound (the sound ports and chips are missing at all!).
It turned out that two RAM moduli are OK so the system now has 2 GB of
RAM. So it can start and it can boot Linux.
The video output was a tougher nut. There is the ATI Rage XL Pro (a
card which was obsolete even when the system was new). It has 8MB or
memory and it can only do non-wide video formats (like the 1024x768 or
then 1280x1024), it seems that 1280x1024 is the maximum. It wasn't
problem in the past (I had 1280x1024 LCD both at work and at home) but
it seems to be and issue on modern widescreen LCD screens which have
penetrated everywhere.
It does not work out-of-box in modern Linuxes. So I have had to
construct the xorg.conf file, select the "mach64" driver and so.
Unfortunately, the GLX does not work at all so there is on OpenGL
support (it's a problem for me). I sound like easy task but I spent few
hours it trying to make it work.
I have upgraded the system to the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. It's still old but
I have had to use the step-by-step upgrade approach.
For now I have a (not so well configured) FVWM desktop and the XDM
display manager. Anyway, the X11 are unaccelerated so even this setup
is not pleasant to use. It's actually OK until one needs to move
windows (the FVWM allows resolve this problem by drawing of windows
frames only but I was too tired to change the .fvwmrc successfully).
The good news are that system boots directly to the XDM screen and then
starts the FVWM. I can use XTerms without problems and even the Firefox
is 79 so it's current (!). And it's not as slow as I expected. The boot
procedure is quite long, of course.
So what now? I'm considering upgrade of the Ubuntu to the 18.04. Then I
should find the pair of 256MB RAM moduli to extend the RAM a bit. I
will probably try to use a modern (cheap) PCIe graphics card here to
get the GLX back and to be able to connect the thing to one of EIZOs or
at least to the 1600SW screen. The obvious aim is to configure the FVWM
to make it work properly and to change its look to be more Sun-like
(now it looks like SGI's 4Dwm).
Initially I wanted to set up it as a desktop for my wife but we have
satisfied her needs with a brand new AMD Ryzen-based computer which is
quieter, smaller and boots much faster (and it run even the LibreOffice
and the Firefox very well). Now I'm considering a bit different use:
I'm still searching for a good Linux/UNIX computer to my office to
complete the standing desk. The Raspberry Pi of the first generation
(which I now have there) is far from ideal because I have found that I
do more computing than reading here. And the old Pi is very slow for
that. Furthermore it has compatibility issues with too many programs.
It seems that the Ultra may be better here.
I have to say that I'm pretty exhausted after the night with the
Ultra 20...
