No fun with Ultra 20
====================

I spent another  night in attempts to  return my Sun Ultra  20 to life.

There have been several main  issues: bad RAM, non-working Ethernet and
non-working Xorg. There have been also some minor ones (all port on the
front panel are dead and the CD-ROM drive, too).

At the  moment I  have a  semi-working system  with a  replacement Tyan
Tomcat mainboard  (it's not  100% identical to  the Sun's  version, you
know) so there  is now FireWire (no ports, no  chips, just empty space)
and no sound (the sound ports and chips are missing at all!).

It turned out that two RAM moduli are  OK so the system now has 2 GB of
RAM. So it can start and it can boot Linux.

The video  output was a tougher  nut. There is  the ATI Rage XL  Pro (a
card which was  obsolete even when the  system was new). It  has 8MB or
memory and it can only do  non-wide video formats (like the 1024x768 or
then  1280x1024), it  seems that  1280x1024 is  the maximum.  It wasn't
problem in the past (I had 1280x1024  LCD both at work and at home) but
it seems  to be and issue  on modern widescreen LCD  screens which have
penetrated everywhere.

It  does not  work  out-of-box in  modern  Linuxes. So  I  have had  to
construct  the  xorg.conf file,  select  the  "mach64" driver  and  so.
Unfortunately,  the GLX  does not  work at  all so  there is  on OpenGL
support (it's a problem for me). I sound like easy task but I spent few
hours it trying to make it work. 

I have upgraded the system to the  Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. It's still old but
I have had to use the step-by-step upgrade approach.

For now  I have  a (not so  well configured) FVWM  desktop and  the XDM
display manager. Anyway,  the X11 are unaccelerated so  even this setup
is  not pleasant  to use.  It's  actually OK  until one  needs to  move
windows (the  FVWM allows  resolve this problem  by drawing  of windows
frames only but I was too tired to change the .fvwmrc successfully).

The good news are that system boots directly to the XDM screen and then
starts the FVWM. I can use XTerms without problems and even the Firefox
is 79 so it's current (!). And it's not as slow as I expected. The boot
procedure is quite long, of course.

So what now? I'm considering upgrade of the Ubuntu to the 18.04. Then I
should find  the pair of 256MB  RAM moduli to  extend the RAM a  bit. I
will probably  try to use a  modern (cheap) PCIe graphics  card here to
get the GLX back and to be able to connect the thing to one of EIZOs or
at least to the 1600SW screen. The obvious aim is to configure the FVWM
to make  it work properly  and to change its  look to be  more Sun-like
(now it looks like SGI's 4Dwm).

Initially I wanted  to set up it as  a desktop for my wife  but we have
satisfied her needs with a brand  new AMD Ryzen-based computer which is
quieter, smaller and boots much faster (and it run even the LibreOffice
and the  Firefox very well). Now  I'm considering a bit  different use:
I'm still  searching for  a good  Linux/UNIX computer  to my  office to
complete the  standing desk. The  Raspberry Pi of the  first generation
(which I now have there) is far  from ideal because I have found that I
do more computing  than reading here. And  the old Pi is  very slow for
that. Furthermore it  has compatibility issues with  too many programs.
It seems that the Ultra may be better here.

I  have to  say that  I'm  pretty exhausted  after the  night with  the
Ultra 20...