Sun IPC ... a bit more success

I managed to play a bit more with my Sun IPC this evening and despite the fact that the machine has a bad memory chip in the first bank, I managed to learn enough about the machine to determine that the hard drive has Sun OS Release 4.1.4 on it.

I would have liked to continue playing with the box, but it was getting pretty close to midnight and each time I reset the box it cycles through testing the audio device, which gives a nice loud beeeep!

Here's a bit of a transcript of what I managed to discover:

PROM Checksum test
Context Reg Test
Segment Map Test
Sizing Memory
Page Map Test
Page Map Test
Memory Test
Probing Memory Bank #: 1 2 3 4 5
Initializing Auxiliary Register
Reset/Initialize Keyboard
not nvramrc
Setting up Console Parameters
SPARCstation IPC, No keyboard.
ROM Rev. 1.6, 36 MB memory installed, Serial #16777215.
Ethernet address ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff, Host ID: ffffffff.


The IDPROM checksum is incorrect.
Testing
Testing audio chip; listen for a beep
Synchronous Error Reg Test
Synchronous Virtual Address Reg Test
Asynchronous Error Reg Test
Asynchronous Virtual Address Reg Test
System Enable Reg Test
FPU Test
Memory Test

Type b (boot), c (continue), or n (new command mode)
>n
Type help for more information
ok boot sd(,0,3)

Type 'go' to resume
ok boot sd(,0,3)
Probing Memory Bank #: 1 2 3 4 5
Booting from: sd(0,0,3)
root on sd0d fstype 4.2
Boot: vmunix
Size: 1343488+218408+131992 bytes
Invalid format type in NVRAM
Machine type set to Sun-4/60
SunOS Release 4.1.4 (SUN414) #1: Tue Aug 8 13:22:14 EDT 1995
Copyright (c) 1983-1993, Sun Microsystems, Inc.
mem = 36864K (0x2400000)
avail mem = 34504704
Invalid format code in NVRAM
cpu = Sun 4/40
zs0 at obio 0xf1000000 pri 12
zs1 at obio 0xf0000000 pri 12
fd0 at obio 0xf7200000 pri 11
audio0 at obio 0xf7201000 pri 13
sbus0 at SBus slot 0 0x0
dma0 at SBus slot 0 0x400000
esp0 at SBus slot 0 0x800000 pri 3
sd0 at esp0 target 3 lun 0
sd0:
le0 at SBus slot 0 0xc00000 pri 5
bwtwo0 at SBus slot 3 0x0 pri 7
Cannot open 'sd0d'
root device (fd%d[a-h] sd%d[a-h] ):

I think it's a perfectly cool box!

Linux on an iMac & beginning Sun IPC exploration

This morning was very productive! I installed Ubuntu PowerPC edition on a Cherry iMac (400MHz) donated to The Working Centre and I managed to get a response over a serial connection to my Sun IPC.

The iMac works brilliantly, and compared to Mac OS/X Tiger on a slightly better iMac with more RAM (256MB vs 192MB) Ubuntu wins hands down! Tiger crawls on the other G3.

The Sun IPC is a fascinating little box because it's about the size of a lunch pail. I'm going to buy a NIC for it and use it as an apache web server.

A screen shot of the nvram shot can be found at: http://members.porchlight.ca/charm/img/sparcIPC.png.

Converting flac to mp3

Recently one of my fathers asked me to rip a CD to a high quality format that he could play on his system. I chose flac, the free and lossless audio codec. It seemed like a good choice because I had lots of space (80GB) and Bill tends to be picky about his audio.

Later I found out that it wasn't such a good idea because Bill also wanted to play the files on an mp3 player that accepts mp3's only. No problem I thought, flac is after all a "free" audio codec. What I found was quite a different story. While there were quite a few converters, most of them written in python, most didn't work; then I came across audio-convert.

While audio-convert did require a few extras (zenity, python-vorbis, python-ogg) SuSE 9.3 had all of them. There is no install script so I just added the directory to the local path before using the script:

PATH=$PATH:~/audio-convert-0.2.1

Then I changed into the directory with the .flac files I wanted to convert and typed:

audio-convert *

A few dialog boxes pop up to let you choose what format you want to convert to. Simple simon!