[geeks] Needed: A good sparc workstation

[gsm at mendelson.com]

On Sun, Mar 08, 2009 at 08:01:08AM -0400, Joshua Boyd wrote:
>
> If you couldn't figure out how to do it without a GUI, you were doing  
> something wrong since a lot of people run Ubuntu 8.04 LTS on completely 
> headless systems (meaning serial console).

It was more of a matter of not wanting to learn yet another
adminsitration system. Ubuntu is a blend of debian and it's own thing
and while I can do a lot with aptitude, it's a lot easier to do software
updates and installs with a gui, and to make parameter changes using the
admin tools, instead of trying to figure out yet another convoluted
subtree under /etc.

Of all those headless systems, how many of them are adminstered using
command line tools? I used to do that with my red hat system. I
still do it with the ubuntu system, but as I said, they put a lot
of effort into gui tools, why not use them?

I also found that LTS meant only those things which they think you need
get backported. No one is checking security updates to see if they apply
or not and if something is fixed relating to security, if the person
fixing it does not think of backporting it, it won't be. Nor is there
any easy way to do it.

I was able to easily change using a text editor GDM to answer X queries
on remote ports and use X windows from my Mac. Unfortuately, Gnome won't
work with a remote X session, not will it work with a local one connected
via VNC. The keyboard gets messed up and the one fix I found in the forums
only partially worked, e.g. abcd now produces abcd, but the shift and control
keys don't work properly.

I also found a problem with CUPS and USB support, and to use my printer,
a Samsung Laser, I had to go back to my old version of CUPS and 
netatalk would not work. Once I took the netatalk source code I was 
using on my old system, and recompiled it, it worked, although 
they were both the same version.

Geoff.

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