Hello Andy!

  ACR> I have an SS1 that booted fine from floppies (after I
     > fixed a hardware problem). I have no idea what level
     > of firmware is needed... You can also boot from CD or
     > tape, yeah.

This may be a silly question, but if I boot into the serial
console, what would I type to ask it to boot from the
diskette drive?

  ACR> Sparcs are quite ubiquitous and there aren't too many
     > problems that can't be solved in order to make it run
     > NetBSD as far as I can tell.

Sounds good.

  ACR> I say buy it and don't have any worries. It can't be
     > that expensive right?

It won't be, if the price is too high I won't buy it.

  ACR> You'll probably pay more for the cabling adapters
     > than the actual machine...

This one has a frame buffer, but I may take that out.  I
would most likely bring it up with a serial console and just
telnet in over the network once NetBSD is up.

I'm guessing the only adaptor I might need straight away
would be a 10baseT transceiver if the ethernet port is AUI,
as I think it was on many of the Sun 3 systems.

I'll also need to dig up a hard disk, and may need to invest
in a drive sled, short SCSI and power cable, all of which I
can get fairly inexpensively from www.memoryx.net. They seem
to suggest that the SPARCstation 2 uses 3.5" 'narrow SCSI
drives', which I take to mean 8-bit, single-ended, 5 or
perhaps 10MHz SCSI.

Regards,
  - Andy Ball.