I have been Busy. Busy-with-a-capital-B-Busy. Work. Home. Illness (= falling behind, = busier when I’m healthy). <\/p>\n
How busy? It’s April 7, and this is my first post in April. Ouch.<\/p>\n
How busy? Yesterday, while at work, I decided I needed some thinking music, so I grabbed my Powerbook from my bag, grabbed the mini-plug for my powered speakers that sits on my desk (I have a Wintel PC at work; why would I plug speakers into that?) and plugged in my ‘book. Two minutes into “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?”, the music died. Battery. Oops. Power supply is at home. Did I say oops? I don’t think I ever used it all weekend. And this is my primary computer at home. Tonight I finally got around to plugging the thing into AC, only to find the battery had really, really<\/em> died. Oops.<\/p>\n At least I’m getting things done. Released one major app last Thursday at work. Releasing the other this Thursday (crosses fingers). Nearly finished cleaning the garage<\/a>. <\/p>\n Of course, when I get this busy, I usually end up looking for a stress-release, and the less practical the better. While cleaning the garage, my attention kept getting drawn to the pair of Sun SPARC\/Station 1’s (complete with monitor) sitting on a shelf in my garage. I grabbed these years ago when my employer was discarding them. Of course, I’ve never been able to do anything useful with them. Or anything at all, for that matter. I’ve got an old copy of some version of a Sun OS for them, and even borrowed a SCSI CD-ROM drive at one point, but they were both net-booted workstations and have no hard drive. The only SCSI drive I’ve ever gotten my hands on (for free) I could never get to work.<\/p>\n In the years since I last played with these machines, I’ve gotten a little more Unix\/Linix savvy, and have certainly acquired more hardware. As I’ve gazed at these old machines while I clean my garage, sorting through boxes of old memories and old junk, I’ve been pondering the potential. Linux. Net boot. Old hardware. What more could I need?<\/p>\n Well, a keyboard would be nice. At one time, at least, I had<\/em> a Sun keyboard. I had hoped to find it in one of the remaining boxes. That hope was dashed tonight. I assumed it must be around the house somewhere. After calling it a night on the cleaning front, I decided to check my email for the first time in days (did I mention I’ve been Busy?). This proceeded into Googling for sparc 1 linux<\/a>. I found scads of good stuff in the UltraLinux FAQ<\/a>.<\/p>\n You can guess what happened next. With a little help<\/a>, I got TFTP running on my Powerbook. I was just about to grab a compatible boot image, when I decided to grab some hardware. That’s when my lack of keyboard became more than a minor annoyance. I checked the basement, my office, and double-checked the garage… and I can’t find my Sun keyboard. <\/p>\n