Sparky is back to life. It was simplicity itself. All I needed to do was reset the drive back to target 2, and then, in the EPROM do a "setenv boot-device=disk2". Now Sparky's lizard-brain looks for disk2 and the disk is disk2.
With Sparky back to life, it was now time to play with some things. First on the list: get an XWindow server to run on my Windows boxes. This would allow me to access Sparky through something other than telnet. Of course, there's not much to access on Sparky other than simple XClients like xload and xterm, but what the hell -- it would still be fun. So I searched around for an XWindow server, and found MI/X from MicroImages.
Installing MI/X was very simple. The install onto Sojourner (my laptop) took about 30 seconds. It wants to reboot your machine, but really doesn't have to (I wonder how many Windows products want to reboot, but don't have to?). Anyway, the only trick is that MI/X doesn't "bootstrap" your connection to the machine running XClients. You've got to run telnet to get that started. So, I telnet'ed into Sparky from Sojourner and exported Sojourner's display: "export DISPLAY=sojourner:0.0". Then I ran "xterm&". To my glee, I found an xterminal running under MI/X on Sojourner. now that xterm was running under MI/X, I could start other programs from X. I played around with different XClients for a while, and finally decided to run the big test: Netscape. This would be cool. Run Netscape on Sparky with its output redireced to Sojourner. Cool, but useless (after all I could run Netscape on Sojourner, too).
Anyway, it worked like a charm! Netscape actually looks better running under MI/X than it does on Sparky?!?. Part of it is the color depth, I'm sure (Sojourner is 24-bit color).
