I'm planning a weird project

I know. The following could be a bad idea.

You may already know that I always try to work off the grid when the price of the kilowatt per hour is raising in vertical to the clouds. And with the current weather in my location and with some equipment I have I can recharge all batteries almost in a daly basis.

But I want to try it because... why not xD

Thing is, my old Sun Blade 1000 workstation is stopped since the COVID days. I barely can afford the amount of power consumption on that big boy, but sometimes I want to turn on the damn machine and play again with a real UNIX workstation. I was a Solaris teacher and field engineer many years ago -when my hair was black and not white- and I miss to deal with non-PC machines.

I confess that I'm also a little bored of both Solaris 10 and all the Oracle stuff as well. I also have Oracle Database installed and running, among another services like a web server and application servers in this machine.

I want to try something new: I want OpenBSD in this workstation: I just want to known how usable, fast (or slow) can be this big boy with a modern, small and polished operating system like OpenBSD.

So, lets go...

- First stopper: the original monitor from Sun was gone (broken) several years ago and still I have a weird adapter to VGA, but is not working because the rare frequencies used by the graphics card (Elite3D), incompatible with my monitor. Also tried with another converter equipment and even with an old TV with VGA.

- Next stopper: my original Sun keyboard and Mouse is Type5c and not Type6 nor USB. I forgot that I used to have UltraSPARCs (5,10, 60...) at $HOME in the past but not the Blade 1000, not in my current flat. And a typical keyboard will not work because it lacks of the STOP key.

Let's try using a serial connection between the workstation and a laptop, so I could instruct the OpenBoot to boot from the CD-ROM and trigger the OpenBSD installation using my non-proprietary keyboard.

Well... I don't have a proper CAT5 to serial nor a DB25 serial to USB (I have one but kind of different and it's intended for the Amiga) so I can't continue with the installation until I can see something in the comms program or in a monitor.

After several seconds, the machine start to burn the engines, then the loud FC-AL disks start spinning, perform a loud BEEP and then, the machine is ready to start the operating system. I can hear the big boy breathing...

In the end, I'm looking in Ebay for a used USB Sun keyboard and mouse and a PGX32 PCI graphics cards with VGA output xD

Meanwhile another weird project could be try to boot 9front using PXE. But that's another history.

I know. This is nuts :-D

I'm planning a weird project was published on 📅 2023-10-07

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