Booting sun blade w/o sun keyboard. (there is no L1 / A or "Stop" A sequence possible on a 101 keyboard.

http://icesquare.com/wordpress/installing-freebsd-on-sun-blade-100/

quoting Derrick

Recently, I received a Sun Blade 100 as a gift. After doing some research on which OS is the best for this machine, I decide to go with FreeBSD. So, my journey with Sun began here.
I only used Sun/Solaris in my engineering courses in college, I don’t have much experience with Sun hardware. I assumed that the experience should be similar – I was wrong.
So, here is what I have: A Sun Blade 100 connected with a regular USB PC keyboard. Note that Sun comes with its own keyboard, which has additional keys like STOP.
Anyway, after downloading the image of FreeBSD 8.1 Sparc64 and burning it into a DVD (You can burn it on any OS), I tried to boot the machine from DVD (Note that Sun Blade was release in 2002. You may need to verify that it is a DVD reader. You can replace the CD reader by any IDE DVD reader if needed.). And I received the following error messages:

Boot device: net  File and args:
Timeout waiting for ARP/RARP packet
Timeout waiting for ARP/RARP packet
Timeout waiting for ARP/RARP packet
Timeout waiting for ARP/RARP packet
Timeout waiting for ARP/RARP packet

Apparently, this machine does not know how to boot from CD/DVD automatically. After reading 20 posts, I finally got a solution:
If you have a Sun Keyboard:
1.) Push the power button to turn on the machine
2.) Pressing STOP and A key together
Otherwise:
1.) Push the power button to turn on the machine
2.) After the beeping sound, push the power button twice in a short time.
After trying it for few times, I finally got into the OpenBoot:

Aborting auto-boot sequence.
ok

So, I want to boot from CD:

boot cdrom

That’s it. The installation of FreeBSD on Sun is pretty much the same as on PC, except that the color of the installation menu looks a little bit weird.
If you experience any difficulties on booting from CD, make sure that both harddrive and DVD drive are jumpered to Cable Select, also you can verify the connections by running this command in the OpenBoot:

probe-ide

which will return something like:

Device 0 (Primary Master)
   ATA Mode: XXX
Device 1 (Primary Slave)
   Removeable ATAPI Model: YYY

Now you can install FreeBSD on your sparc64 machine!

Few things I’ve learned from running FreeBSD on Sun Machine (Sparc64)

• Sun Blade 100 uses ECC (Error Correction Codes) memory. It doesn’t like the regular desktop memory.
• Sun Blade 100 is old, the CPU speed is equivalent to Pentium II. It takes a long time to compile applications from ports. I recommend to install the applications using pkg_add first, and then run portmaster to update all apps. It will save you lots of time.
• freebsd-update does not work on sparc64 machine. If you want to upgrade the FreeBSD system, you need to rebuild the kernel.
• Sun Blade 100 is a heavy duty snail. For example, it can handle lots of inquires at the same time without crashing, but the processing speed is extremely slow. I don’t recommend using it for any applications that use more than 10% of CPU resource, e.g., Webserver (dynamic content), Database or Web Framework. I tried running all of my websites (including this blog) on Sun, which resulted terribly slow. My recommendations: Firewall, Router, Load Balancer.

That’s it! Have fun with Sun + FreeBSD.
–Derrick

OpenVMS licensing notes from various people

notes from people about signing up for VMS Hobbyist licenses.

John reinhardt

It's easier (and cheaper) to get your member number through DECUServe. Just telnet to decuserve.org, log in with the username REGISTRATION and then follow the prompts.  You'll end up with a DECUServe account on their system named EISNER and you can get your member number by typing HOBBYIST at the command prompt.

See the Hoffman Labs site page <http://labs.hoffmanlabs.com/node/1416> for steps.

Then once you have that number go to <http://plato.ccsscorp.com/hobbyist_registration.php3> to register for your OpenVMS license PAKS.  They should arrive the next business day in your email.

Fairly easy and totally cheap.

John H. Reinhardt

 

 http://www.openvms.org/hobbyist

It's easier (and cheaper) to get your member number through DECUServe. Just telnet to decuserve.org, log in with the username REGISTRATION and then follow the prompts.  You'll end up with a DECUServe account on their system named EISNER and you can get your member number by typing HOBBYIST at the command prompt.

See the Hoffman Labs site page <http://labs.hoffmanlabs.com/node/1416> for steps.

Then once you have that number go to <http://plato.ccsscorp.com/hobbyist_registration.php3> to register for your OpenVMS license PAKS.  They should arrive the next business day in your email.

http://plato.ccsscorp.com/hobbyist_registration.php3

Fairly easy and totally cheap.

John H. Reinhardt 

Sean Caron

I don't think they'll issue hobbyist licenses to Explorer Members. You have
to pay $50 now AFAIK. (please correct me if this is not the case?)

Years ago (well, back in 2009, IIRC) I was able to talk them into doing it
for free (or maybe I just confused them & they mistakenly did it for me),
but this time around when I brought my VAXen out of storage to play with, I
just paid up. Honestly I'm happy to pay $50/year to be able to run VMS on
all my VAX machines.

When you sign up as an ordinary Encompass member, you'll get an actual
member ID number, which is what you plug into the form.

Also, I found that apparently within the last few months, the duty of
handling the hobbyist license has kind of bounced around within HP or
something, such that there was a little bit of delay in processing my
request. I found that for best results, you want to use the form at -

http://plato.ccsscorp.com/hobbyist_registration.php3

Don't use the form www.openvmshobbyist.com site, I think it's broken or
something; I never got a response from anyone when I used it.

Best,

Sean 

Jon Tabor

Ah, found it.  I had signed up through DECUServe (http://decuserve.org/),
which appears to still be functioning and still free (though accepting
donations).

Jon 

Steven M Jones

On 04/08/2014 10:30 AM, Seth Morabito wrote:

The process is pretty simple now, though the page has jumped around a
bit over the past year. For now, use this URL (it may change in the
future): http://plato.ccsscorp.com/hobbyist_registration.php3

I tried the form at openvms.org/hobbyist several times, trying to sort
out which "chapter" my old-school US DECUS membership had morphed into
(short answer: forgot about DECUServe). But in the end, I got no
response of any kind from any of these attempts...

I'll think happy thoughts and try the form at CCSS - I'd rather work
within the program if possible.

--S.