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An unknown SCSI card, can I get it to work? While rummaging through a box of old 8-bit and 16-bit ISA hardware that I had kept in the garage for some 30 years, I found two PC XT mainboards, each with a NEC V20 processor. This V20 processor is slightly faster than an 8088, but can also be switched to 8080 mode and for instance run C/PM. That triggered my interest to have a look at these boards again. But to start off, these boards are IBM XT clone boards, meant to run MS-Dos. So I figured that it was a good idea to start with some low hanging fruit and get them to function as a PC. Well, that took me down a rabbit hole... Gathering stuff  First, we need something to connect a monitor to... In the box, there were a bunch of HGC cards and an 8-bit EGA card. Next, we need something to boot from... And in the box, there were a bunch of floppy controllers, including cables. We need an XT keyboard... I have held onto a beautiful old 'Mind' keyboard with noisy clicky Cherry switches, w...
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Your own SPARCStation 5 workstation, with QEmu and Solaris, PART 2 - Installing Solaris 2.6

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  Previously in this series In the previous installment, we downloaded all required software, created a disk image, and prepared the disk. We ended with a reboot, and the emulator should now be showing the OpenBIOS boot prompt again. We are ready to install Solaris. For our installation, we cannot always use the defaults that the installer presents us. Specifically, we want to do three things differently: We want to set up the network using the virtual network system that QEMU provides the emulated machine with. This means that we will give the emulated system a fixed IP address. We want to have a larger sizes for /var and /usr than the installer will use by default. So we need to manually layout the file system. We don't want to automatically reboot after the installation is done. Because we want to set up a few little extra network options before the reboot. With that in mind, let's dive into the installation! Starting the installation procedure After rebooting, the emulato...
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