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This computer only has a 70 mhz processor, but 128MB ram on board and it came with a 24 bits AFX framebuffer. It runs NetBSD on its 500 MB disk, but I put Debian testing on a spare HD to see the full 24 bits color in action on my 17” monitor.. The trick to get the 24 bit color working is to set the default depth in the XF86Config file at 32 bits, whitch means manually adding some extra lines. It has XFCE4 as X Windowmanager, and I can do webbrowsing at reasonable speeds with Dillo. The fonts and colors look nice and crisp on using the AFX framebuffer with a 1152×900 resolution.

Some time ago I found a computer that looked exactly like a SparcStation 5, but instead of the Sun logo it had Kodak Digital Processor 1000 on its frontpanel. It was left on the street to be collected by the garbage pickup, so I rescued it. It had a 8-bits vga-card so I connected it to my flatscreen and booted the thing. After a long time some screen came up, but it didn’t continue because it needed a touch-screen. Apparently it was used as some sort of foto processing-device, but I couldn’t find very much info on the net. But indeed it was a SparcStation 5, with a 110MHZ processor, so I just swapped the NVRAM chip with the one from the 70MHZ model, and it works dandy, an instant 40MHZ upgrade.

Recently I got another SparcStation 5, with a 170MHZ processor. Quite a bit faster than the 70MHZ model, and happily running XFCE4. It can even run KDE 3.x at an almost decent speed. The AFX framebuffer is transferred to this machine, as is the 128MB memory, so now it has 192 MB. Runs Debian Sarge with 2.6.12 kernel. Here is a working XF86Config-4.

Some people claim that the Fujitsu TurboSparc is not working very well with Linux, but I never experienced any problems with it, although I have to admit I never tested it under heavy load. I suspect that whatever problems there were occurred with older distros, and the mantra is just being repeated on the net nowadays.

ss5:/home/pvz# cat /proc/cpuinfo
cpu : Fujitsu TurboSparc MB86907
fpu : reserved
promlib : Version 3 Revision 2
prom : 2.28
type : sun4m
ncpus probed : 1
ncpus active : 1
CPU0Bogo : 169.57
CPU0ClkTck : 0
MMU type : Fujitsu TurboSparc
contexts : 256
nocache total : 2252800
nocache used : 502528

Linux ss5 2.6.12-1-sparc32 #1 Mon Jul 11 21:21:17 EDT 2005 sparc GNU/Linux

update: I took off the XFree stuff and now this machine is a standby webserver, so the AFX framebuffer is not being used, but the card works well. Still a usefull machine.

Kernel downloaded from http://www.wooyd.org/debian/kernels/2.6/
See http://wiki.debian.net/index.cgi?PortsSparc