Speaking of PS/2s...

From: Boatman on the River of Suck <vance_at_ikickass.org>
Date: Wed Dec 19 07:03:09 2001

On Wed, 19 Dec 2001, Tothwolf wrote:

> On Tue, 18 Dec 2001, Doc Shipley wrote:
>
> > I have a 5870-121 that I snarked recently, with 4 megs of RAM and a
> > 120M ESDI drive. I'm wondering what I want to put on it as OS. I have
> > plenty of Linux/NetBSD critters. I was thinking OS/2, but I threw v3.0
> > Warp on Saturday night, but it's slow as dirt with 4 megs. Oh, yeah. It
> > had the original reference disk in the floppy drive. I think that's
> > really why I bought it.
>
> Are you sure the drive is ESDI? I think the model 70 shipped with an IDE
> drive.

Nope, definitely ESDI.

> > Main questions are, how uncommon are they (I know how cool they are),
> > is either one worth anything, and is there a contemporary Unix that'll
> > run on the model 70? Um, that's actually available I mean. All I need is
> > another Ultrix quest.
>
> I have no idea about worth, I guess they are only worth what we PS/2 fans
> are willing to pay for them. Personally I probably wouldn't pay more than
> maybe $25-30 or so for one, with or without a monitor.

I wouldn't even buy a non -BXX series 70. I would take it for free and
find a good home for it though.

> As far as an operating system goes, I know Linux supports the MCA arch,
> but most Linux distributions do not ship a boot kernel with MCA support
> compiled in. Since you have a small drive, you'd also want a distribution
> with a small footprint. Anyone have any recommendations on a particular
> distribution?

As far as Linux, I would suggest Slackware, as it has an MCA bootdisk in
the regular distrib, as well as an MCA kernel. However, your best bet
(with an ESDI box) is probably NetBSD.

> > Corollary questions: I mentioned earlier that I've found PS/2 adapters
> > in 7012 series RS/6ks. I still have 'em. The 8514/A with the 512k
> > daughterboard is recognized in the model 70 by the reference utility,
> > but Warp pukes on it, and insists on 640x480x16 VGA settings. Did I miss
> > something? Do I need to "copy the options disk" even though Setup
> > already sees it?
>
> If I remember correctly, the 8514/A adapter needed an 8514 monitor to do
> anything more than 640x480x16 since it used odd frequencies. Maybe a
> multisync will work if the sense pins are jumpered correctly on the DB-15?

Nope. You just need a monitor capable of the weird refresh settings.

Peace... Sridhar
Received on Wed Dec 19 2001 - 07:03:09 GMT