[geeks] Disturbing Sun articles

[Joshua Boyd]

On Thu, Sep 04, 2008 at 04:36:01AM +0000, wa2egp at att.net wrote:
> -------------- Original message ----------------------
> From: Joshua Boyd <jdboyd at jdboyd.net>
> >
> > On Thu, Sep 04, 2008 at 03:46:25AM +0000, wa2egp at att.net wrote:
> > 
> > > What I find disturbing are the comments on the first one.  "All hail
> > > x86" :)  Reminds me of the beta vs VHS wars years ago.  I guess some
> > > will only be happy if you can put World of Warcraft on an Ultra 80.   
> > 
> > Well it would be nice to be able to do more with a U80.
> 
> I'd like to get a video capture card working on mine for a little
> project I'm working on. 

I believe there are some options out there.

http://bt848x.sourceforge.net/

It looks like they have some amount of support for bt848x1 cards and
saa713x cards.

Alas, I don't see where he lists what cards he actually tests with.

There are also USB video capture devices that are now supported.
Presumably it will work with class compliant devices, but they list some
Logictech units they've actually tested with here:
http://opensolaris.org/os/community/device_drivers/projects/usb/uvc/

> It's just that I've been reading a lot of "my Suns take too much power
> so I'm getting a PC" stuff this past week and it's getting old real
> fast.  Just getting grumpy, school started. 

I love my Suns.  I've been pretty stuborn with using them and not just
moving to PCs.  It is very frustrating though.  My electric bills are
very painful, although they probably aren't the fault of the Suns.

Also, getting stuff going on them can be extremely painful.  I want to
test build GCC, but it takes forever to build on the machines I
currently have (most of a day), which makes it very hard to make
headyway.   There is a lot of other software I'd like to be using and it
is also hard, especially when I know most of it is an apt-get install
away if I was using Ubuntu instead.  For instance, Xapian (easy to
install, language bindings not so easy to install), Python Imaging,
Cairo and PyCairo, CouchDB, etc.

That's why I was recently ranting about how outdated SunFreeware is,
especially since they don't seem to want outside contributions.