Sun Ultra 20 reborn
===================

I have  replaced the original  mainboard of the  Sun Ultra 20  with the
Tyan  Tomcat K8E  one. The  Sun's one  is a  customised version  of the
Tomcat, actually. The  Sun added some stuff (a  FireWire controller and
connectors  and  probably an  audio  port)  but  also removed  part  of
connectors  (a serial  port, both  PS/2 ports  and the  second Ethernet
port).

So I  also have had  to remove the back  steel plate which  covered the
ports (I should get a Tomcat-compatible one later, I hope).

I  also have  found that  one of  DIMM moduli  is bad.  It's a  problem
because DIMMs have  be installed in pairs.  So I lost a half  of RAM in
this way. Thus  instead of 4GB RAM  I now only have 2GB  (I should have
original 2 256MB  DIMMs somewhere so I  should be able to  have 2.5GB -
but I'm not sure if it will make any difference)

The rest  of the system seems  to be OK.  It now has a  build-in serial
port, a complete pair  of PS/2 ports, several USB ports  (4 on the back
and 2 on the front panel - I still  have to test if they work), 4 or so
PCI slots, two 1x  PCIE slots and one 16x PCIe slot.  And there are two
SATA HDD drives (both are 320GB).

I will probably add my USB3 PCI card and maybe even the SCSI PCIe card.
I'm not sure if it will make any sense to add a new Radeon card to such
old system (I got  one for the BlackBird but I  still didn't decided to
use it). I can also use several PCI cards but I don't think that I need
them just now.

Anyway there  is still  a lot work  to do: a  new thermal  paste should
arrive tomorrow and  I have to consider fans replacement  (both CPU fan
and case  fan are old  and noisy). Also the  OS will require  update or
replacement.  I have  researched  that there  are  actually two  Ubuntu
installations  (one per  HDD): a  12.04 one  and a  10.04 on.  I didn't
remember why I kept the old one here but there was probably some reason
(compatibility  with some  software,  maybe).  Both installations  have
shown issues with  our widescreen monitors, of course (I  hope that the
old build-in AMD card can manage them - I use the ViewSonic vp171b with
the Ultra 20 which is a normal 1280x1024 device).


Anyway, some progress is visible...