My Multia finally arrived yesterday, and I'm quite pleased with it
so far. It's one of the 233 MHz/512K cache/24M RAM/500M disk models,
and it boots along like stink compared to my Sparcstation 1. :-)
I bought it from DCG (www.dcginc.com) for $1100, and it came
pre-loaded with Red Hat Linux.

I noticed that it seems to have both the ARC and the SRM consoles
built-in. It starts up with an SRM console prompt, and if the ARC
console is enabled it says `Loading ARC' and then runs that.
Switching back and forth is easy; I didn't need to reload any
firmware.

I was under the impression that Linux needed its own firmware to
load, but it seems that Red Hat, at least, now loads up using the
ARC.  There is (or rather, was :-)) a 1.5 MB DOS partition at the
beginning of the disk with an exe program and the milo loader in
it. I quick perusal shows that this change happened just couple of
weeks ago. As it turns out, it's a nifty little idea, except that
a) you've got to have a DOS-type partition table and MBR on your
disk, and b) you can't compile it without a Windows NT developer
kit.

Also, I noticed that the CPU when I got it was marked `233 MHz' on
the heat sink, but someone had set the jumpers to run it at 266
MHz. (I noticed this when I did a hardware list in the ARC monitor
actually.) I've heard that a couple of people have overclocked to
266 Mhz without problems, but I'm wondering if it's worth the risk.

(Just as a quickie benchmark I tried out a Dhrystone test. At 233
MHz it's about equivalant to a 133 MHz Pentium, and at 266 MHz it's
about equivalant to what I calculated a 150 MHz Pentium should be.)

At any rate, I got all my stuff loaded up via a Jaz drive, and
wiped the disk, and copied everything over there. My next concern
is setting the machine up so that I can boot something if I blow
up my drive. The easiest thing looks to be to just set up another
bootable Jaz disk with a known good OS on it. But before I go out
and spend $125 on this, is there any support for booting from
floppy?

Also, what is the terminal type of the built-in video console?
vt100 sort of works, but there seem to be things about it that
don't work.  And is there any chance we can get a smaller font?
I'm sure the current one looks very nice on a 19" monitor at 1280
x 1024, but on my little old monochrome monitor, which supports
only 640 x 480, it gives me a 53 column by 21 line screen that
reminds me of a VIC-20. (Ok, so it's not quite that bad... :-))

cjs

Curt Sampson    cjs@portal.ca		Info at http://www.portal.ca/
Internet Portal Services, Inc.	
Vancouver, BC   (604) 257-9400		De gustibus, aut bene aut nihil.