Notices by HP van Braam (hp@mastodon.tmm.cx)

@thomasfuchs @foone hoard the librettos, the most collectible of Laptops.

I bought a #compaq Armada m700 at the thrift store yesterday! It's a really nice pentium III laptop (1999 thin and light)

HOWEVER there's one terrible OCD triggering design compromise on this thing.

Why did it have to be this way Compaq... WHY?!

#retrocomputing #unsatisfying

@thomasfuchs It's a weird ebb and flow. It seems every ~10 years or so we go back and forth.

1 Mainframes
2 PCs
3 Terminal servers
4 Back to PCs
5 VDI (as in individual desktop VMs on central hardware)
6 BYOD. Everyone buys their own laptop (PCs again)
7 Pay-as-you-go AI from OpenAI/Antropic

There's some more home pc stuff stages as well, like the "gaming in the cloud" thing.

Corporations just really want us to rent computers. But they always, eventually, become too cheap to rent out.

@whitequark just less infrastructure, get closer to nature.

(Nature being the internet around 1993)

@whitequark I wish more people would copy this commitment.

Be the change you want to see in the world!

@TechTangents I'm in the same boat with various bits and pieces of Sun kit.

Some people just think that because EVERYONE is asking $500 for something it's worth $500, not realizing that if they are listed it means they aren't selling...

I keep making offers, pretty sure I'm the only one too. It doesn't say "active offers" or "in shopping carts" and stuff.

Some people really don't understand how this is supposed to work. 😄

@maxleibman the exact right amount of software you mean?!

Software is bad, mkay? 😄

Well my OTHER #sun ultra 10 just died. I now have two machines that will power on, but the power LED stays off, and no display ever comes.

Before that started to happen it complained about the IDPROM contents being wrong, so I followed a guide to re-create the contents and allow my ultra 10 to boot. The "power led won't come on" problem started then.

Does anyone know how to get this unstuck? I need at least one to work for my #sunpci #DOScember video!

#retrocomputing #unix #solaris

The general consensus appears to be that the problem is almost certainly dead NVRAM batteries. Apparently having bad/unstable NVRAMs can lead to all sorts of weird and wonderful issues.

I ordered some new ones, so lets hope that that can fix it so I can still finish my #SunPCi mini documentary. (And create Linux drivers for them)

#retrocomputing

So now I'm putting a €40 M48T58Y in my €17,50 #sun ultra 10.

#retrocomputing is a dumb hobby sometimes.

Did I manage to build and run SDL 2.32.8 for #solaris 8? No, no I did not.

Did I manage to build and run SDL 2.0.22 for #solaris 8? Also... No.

BUT! Did I manage to build and run SDL-1.2.15!!

No, also no.

However, finally. SDL-1.2.6 is working fine with only a minimum of fuss.

Maybe the real SDL2 were the friends we made along the way.

I guess I'm writing SDL1 code... :)

#retrocomputing

SDL1 is fiiiiiiiine

#retrocomputing #sunpci

Trying to build #SDL2 for #solaris 8 today. There's really no better way to spend a dark Sunday afternoon.

#retrocomputing

I think this is what we call in the biz "A bad omen of things to come"

#retrocomputing

The current levels of #yakshaving:

* I want SDL2
* SDL2 configure needs a gsort that has the -V option
* Coreutils 9 needs a newer gmake
* gmake-4.4.1 doesn't seem to want to build on 2.95.3

#retrocomputing

✅ gcc version 3.4.4
✅ GNU Make 4.4.1

Surely now nothing at all will go wrong right, right?!

You know, I "lived through this" on #linux before , but I honestly forgot just how ridiculously better #gcc 3.4 is than gcc 2.95.3.

I remember the upgrade when this was all current.

But hot damn, how did we ever manage with GCC 2.95. (No shade at the GCC project here, a large part of that was just how garbage older C/C++ is)

#retrocomputing

I don't know what I was expecting...

#retrocomputing

I spend a bit of time dissecting the #sunpci driver in #ghidra. And I can now boot the SunPCi from my own code! Using the #solaris driver still.

Some terrifying conclusions:

The windowed output in the SunPCi userspace application comes from repeatedly read()ing the /dev/sunpcidrv0 node. That just returns some raw video data and mode information.

Userspace contains a VGA emulator itself. Whenever it doesn't understand something it just switches to the external VGA.

#retrocomputing

Also note in the above screenshot that the "Award Modular BIOS" screen does not have the normal logo. But there's still SPACE for a logo.

The fact that the #sunpci did not show the Award logo bothered me from the start.

The reason for this is obvious now. The "Fake text mode" that the SunPCi application implements simply doesn't have support for the weird mixed text/graphics mode that the BIOS wants to use!

#retrocomputing