19 Dec
2001
19 Dec
'01
7:03 a.m.
On Wed, 19 Dec 2001, Tothwolf wrote:
I wouldn't even buy a non -BXX series 70. I would take it for free and
find a good home for it though.
Nope. You just need a monitor capable of the weird refresh settings.
Peace... Sridhar
On Tue, 18 Dec 2001, Doc Shipley wrote:
Nope, definitely ESDI.
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. 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. 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?