Re: Ressurecting an IPX

--- On Tue, 3/15/11, der Mouse wrote:

> From: der Mouse
> Subject: Re: [Suns-at-Home] Ressurecting an IPX
> To: [email protected]
> Date: Tuesday, March 15, 2011, 2:30 AM
> >> What OS should I run on it
> today[?]
> > NetBSD is probably the best match IMHO. It's
> low-budget in terms of
> > what system resources it needs and has plenty of
> active support.
> 
> One note: don't automatically assume you want the latest
> version.
> NetBSD has gotten rather bloated in recent years,
> especially in the
> compiler, to the point where it can no longer self-host on
> some
> otherwise perfectly reasonable machines.  (Apparently
> 32M of RAM is
> considered unusably low by modern NetBSD; I did a build on
> a 32M i386
> and it paged itself to death.  I haven't tried that on
> sparc, but doubt
> it would be better.)

Speaking of *BSD on an IPX, is there a BSD that has full support for the serial port on the IPX including all the signaling?  The current OpenBSD is somehow missing a whole lot of serial port code in the kernel that supports the signal pins like DCD, CTS, RTS, etc.  The /dev/ tree is missing some of the devices for the serial port (tty is there but cua isn't or maybe it's the other way around, I don't recall at the moment.)

I was trying to use one of my IPXes as an NTP server with GPS receiver but I can't use the PPS signal on the receiver because OpenBSD was missing support for the DCD pin where the PPS signal goes.