zabbo

For the past few months Aaron and Chris and I have been trying to help Free Geek out with their sparc gear. Chris and I finally found some time to help out and had a great time.

For those who don’t know, Free Geek is a non-profit which finds productive uses of donated computers which would otherwise be scrapped. They focus on getting the most bang out of the time their volunteers give by working with maintream PCs. They’ve been given a fair number of old Sun sparc machines but don’t have the expertise to move them. Chris and Aaron and I didn’t love the idea of these nice old Sun machines being recycled for lack of recognition so we tried to get Free Geek to let us help them. It took us a few weeks of poking at the organization before we were introduced to the guy who has worked with their sparc gear in the past and things got rolling.

The goal, of course, is to connect machines with people who can use them. So we need to know what’s in the machines. In the past they’ve only gotten as far as writing down the banner from the Sun prom which isn’t all that informative:


Sun Ultra 5/10 UPA/PCI (UltraSPARC-IIi 270MHz), No Keyboard
OpenBoot 3.11, 128 MB memory installed, Serial #10414024.
Ethernet address 8:0:20:9e:e7:c8, Host ID: 809ee7c8.


I threw together some scripts to automate the task of taking inventory of the machines. It turned out ot be fairly easy to set up the laptop to use expect to boot into an Aurora rescue image. This lets us test that the box can at least boot the kernel into a prompt and once we’re in the image we can run some commands to see what’s in the machine. We now have a list of what’s in the first handful of machines. We’ll be getting in touch with as many communities that use sparcs as we can find.

So, here comes the pitch. If you are interested becoming the happy owner of some sturdy old ultra or 4m workstation-grade machines please do let me know. I’ll make more noise here once we have a relatively stable location for the list of available hardware.