Those who follow me anywhere probably know that I'm a big fan of Sun
Microsystems hardware, SPARC CPUs, and Solaris OS.
For this year's OCC, I'll try to do most of my daily computing on a
Y2K Sun Blade 100 workstation. 

In this case, I chose to use NetBSD as opposed to Solaris 10 mainly
due to the ease at getting modern software running on a maintained OS.
At the moment of writing, the workstation dual-boots NetBSD and Solaris
anyway, using 2 separate hard drives.



■ hardware specs
- Sun UltraSPARC IIe 500MHz processor
* Sun PGX64 8MB integrated graphics card (ATI Rage XL)
* Sun serial smart card reader
* Sun ERI 100MB/s Ethernet
* Trident 4DWave sound card 
* 3.5" floppy drive
* 5.25" external bay
* LITE-ON 16P9SV ATAPI CD-ROM drive (Sun branding) 
* 2 internal 3.5" hard drive bays
* 3 PCI slots
* 2 ATA66 channels
* 4 PC133 DIMM slots (max 512MiB per slot, 2048MiB total, Unbuffered ECC)
* 4 USB 1.1 ports
* 2 Firewire ports
* DB-9 serial port, DB-25 parallel port

■ history
Quoting Ryan Finnie:

| The Sun Blade series was introduced in 2000 as a replacement to the
| Ultra series. The Sun Blade 100 was sold in 2001 and 2002 as a low-end
| Blade workstation. The UltraSPARC IIe 500MHz processor was respectable
| in its time, but only had 256KiB L2 cache, as opposed to 2048KiB in the
| mid-range Blade 150's UltraSparc IIi processors, or 8192KiB in the
| high-end Blade 2000's UltraSPARC III processors.

| Still, the Blade series was a major departure for Sun, using more
| "commodity" (PC) hardware systems. PCI replaced SBUS/UPA (while PCI was
| introduced in the Ultra 10, it wasn't standardized for a Sun line until
| the Blade series). VGA replaced 13W3. USB replaced Sun's proprietary
| Mini-DIN keyboard/mouse port. Firewire was standard. And the Blade 100
| included all of these.

I bought my Blade 100 about a year ago for €140, from a private seller
on eBay who tagged it as 'used' (working condition).

■ restoration 
The workstation was indeed in good shape, but noticeably lacked a
hard-disk, as mentioned in the item description.
I pulled a 7200 RPM EIDE Maxtor hard disk from another computer, and 
attached it to the Blade. I went on adding an IBM USB keyboard and a VGA
Acer B193 4:3 display.  
I also decided to upgrade the physical memory from 128Mb to 512Mb.
Eventually, I dediced to close the case, and attempt to boot this old
beast.  

■ getting started 
On boot, the USB keyboard was not detected (Sun hardware is a bit picky on
keyboards, so it's hit or miss case). Turns out this leads the machine
to switch to headless mode and  redirect all output on serial. 
I used a USB to female-DB9 serial cable (built-in chip) to get a serial
console on my Thinkpad X240 running OpenIndiana. Some /etc/remote
magic was needed to setup the serial conection with the correct baud
rate and escape sequences:


u0:\
      :dv=/dev/cua/0:br#9600:el=^C^S^Q^U^D:ie=%$:oe=^D:

At this point, executing `tip u0' from xterm was enough to get me
started with the Blade 100, and access its OpenBoot PROM (OPB).

I reset the NVRAM and ran some hardware tests from the OPB, which
thankfully passed fine.
I was able to force output on VGA screen by issuing:


  ok setenv input-device ttya
  ok setenv output device screen

At the OpenBoot ok prompt. 

The hard-disk was recognized (by `probe-ide`) once both the HDD and the
CD-ROM had jumpers set on 'cable select'.

I inserted a CD in the optical drive, where I had previously burned a
NetBSD/sparc64 ISO on, and booted it with:


  ok boot cdrom

I proceeded with installing NetBSD on hard disk; nothing special, a very
standard configuration with a journaled FFSv2 filesystem on a single 60Gb
partition. I also configured a static LAN IP and got a pkgsrc deployed
on my system from the installer.

Once booted, NetBSD allowed me to use the IBM keyboard. 
I finished configuring the system with the usual settings, and pulled
some pkgsrc packages for sparc64 from my Sun Netra X1.
I also decided to compile a minimal kernel, with just the drivers needed,
a few modified settings, and Xorg support for ATI RAGE graphics
(requires `options INSECURE'). This stripped down NetBSD kernel weighs only
7Mb and has a very low memory footprint. 

■ current setup
I eventually bought a Sun Type 7 keyboard and mouse (USB), with Italian
layout. This keyboard is correctly detected by the OpenBoot PROM,
removing the need of a serial console for firmware management
operations.
Xorg needs to be configured to use the unique keys included in Sun keyboards
(Compose, Meta, and all the left panel buttons). This was easily fixed by
by adding `setxkbmap -model sun_type7_usbi layout "it"' to my ~/.xinitrc
script.

My current setup involves a minimal Enhanced Motif Window Manager
desktop, themed after Solaris 9 CDE, alongside a number of CLI and TUI
applications, as well as Xlib/Motif based GUI applications.

I plan on cross-compiling Palemoon or Seamonkey from amd64 to get a
fully-featured web browser on this machine; for the moment, I'm
happily enjoying my time on the Blade 100, by surfing the smolnet,
doing pkgsrc development, reading, coding, tinkering with vintage UNIX
applications and much more.

Stay tuned for updates!