[geeks] Needed: A good sparc workstation

[gsm at mendelson.com]

On Sun, Mar 08, 2009 at 03:04:16AM -0500, Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:

>
> As someone (George Adkins) formerly of this list once said:
>
>   "Saying 8MB of RAM doesn't do as much anymore is like saying a gallon
>    holds more than it did in 1988."

I agree with that, except that since 1988, what we do with that gallon
has changed. In comparison, while people in 1988 where driving small
cars, we've moved on to personal 747's. 

The good thing about it is that somethings have become so cheap while 
technology has moved on, that you can buy an off the shelf PC, stick in
it an off-the shelf operating system, attach it to an off the shelf
monitor, keyboard and mouse, and still have one heck of an X terminal :-)

I found that out recently when I upgrade my local server from a much enhanced
red hat 7.2 system to Ubuntu 8.04.2 LTS server. Lots of things were no 
longer included, and you could not IMHO do any meaningful maintainance.
I ended up installing so many packages that it would have been easier and
faster to install the regular one. 

I also found that I could not do a lot of adminisration things without a 
gui, and this was a server with a 640x480 monchrome monitor. Luckily I
figured out how to connect to it using my Mac as an Xterminal.

To be honest I would not do it again, but if I were to set up a server,
I would do it the same way, text console, Xwindows on another machine.
I would probably use a different Linux distro unless I had the money to
buy the hardware to run Solaris, which was out of the picture at this time.

Geoff.

-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM