> i've got my hands on the first sparc in my life :-) - and now i have
> some questions about that [...]

Most of your questions I can't help with.  But I can perhaps help a
little...

> what is it for a serial port - it's named something like a/b or so -
> and looks like a standard pc-style serial connector (the wider type
> of those) - can i use standard serial cables for it - or has the sun
> a different cabling for it?

("standard pc-style serial connector"?  Sigh, what the world has
become.  The DB-25 is the standard EIA RS-232C serial connector, the
one everybody used until the DOS-box world decided it had to be
different from everything else in the known universe and started using
DB-9s.)

However, Sun decided to be different.  That connector has _two_ serial
ports on it.  One of them is on the usual pins, 1/2/3/7/8/20 plus
probably a couple others I forget; the other is scattered around on the
pins nobody ever uses from RS-232 ("secondary receive clock" and the
like).  Sun sells an adapter that breaks it out into two DB-25s with
normal pinouts; given the pinout (which I don't have at hand, though I
can probably find it for you if you want) and a few connectors, you
could wire one up yourself, probably a lot cheaper.

> in the installation instruction there is a section about netbooting a
> NetBSD/sparc - there are also second stage bootloader mentioned -
> where can i get them from - i don't have a sunos 4 machine around
> here - are they publically available somethere ?

> are there any second stage bootblocks on a solaris 2.5 sparc 5 to
> find for me (this is the only sparc i have also access too) ?

This depends on what version of NetBSD you want to run.  -current has
bootblocks for the SPARC; as far as I know, they work on all SPARCs
(well, all SPARCs that run NetBSD, at least), though if that's wrong
I'm sure someone from port-sparc will correct me.  But I think 1.0 and
1.1 didn't have full-fledged bootblocks....

					der Mouse

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