[geeks] Needed: A good sparc workstation

[gsm at mendelson.com]

On Sun, Mar 08, 2009 at 11:16:59AM -0700, Nadine Miller wrote:
>
> If you cannot administer it over a serial console, it's not a server.   
> Anyone who does 100% percent remote administration is going to say the  
> same thing.  Typing is far less cumbersome and annoying then having to  
> bust out the mouse for tasks.  Mice cause RSI, and mousing actions  
> cannot be saved into a text file so the next time you have to do  
> something 3-6 mo down the road and you can't remember wtf it was you  
> did, you can just peek into your cheat sheet file.

I hope this was sarcasm. I've known people who had surgery for RSI back
when it was called "carpal tunnel syndrome", from typing. It takes far
less actions and clicks to load the software update tool, than it does
to type aptitude. And surprisingly (to me) it works. 


>
> As for Geoff and his issues with LTS, I'm using that *desktop* distro  
> with Macs and Samsung printers and have only had to do one thing  
> special, other than extracting the PPD out of the old Samsung Apple  
> installer. 

No, it had to do with support of the USB port, or the printer on the USB
port, or some stupidity in cups. Foolishly I thought it was a problem
with CUPS 1.2 or later and the 2.4 kernel I was running, it turns out
that no matter what I did, CUPS would find the printer and never print to
it. I tried the unpack the PPD trick, I tried the Samsung drivers, I tried
everything that everyone else documented as working. 

When I was done, the only thing that actually worked was to go back to
CUPS 1.1.9 and stick with it.



> I had to compile Netatalk by hand because the "stock" *buntu 
> build does not enable ssl and OS X doesn't like that.  It's a simple 
> matter to mark that package so that it doesn't get upgraded.

Yes, but upgraded from what? It wasn't going to upgrade my RH 7.2 system,
no matter how many fixes, patches and new versions I applied by hand, I had
to do a fresh install.


> IME, "apt get update" and "apt get upgrade" work just fine in *buntu.   
> There is zero you need to do with Synaptic and that ilk to maintain your 
> system.  The only thing I've noted that is more of an annoyance than a 
> problem, is that the stupid "reboot your system" notification is too dumb 
> to realize you initiated the reboot from the command line.  But then, 
> while I call my home file server a file server, it's really a workstation 
> that's being forced into the role of server so I expect these types of 
> oddities.  If you *only* want a server, why even bother with *buntu?  
> Install Debian and be done with it.

IMHO they suck. If you are not careful, you can end up installing hundreds
of packages and uninstalling one or two critical ones, lost in a storm of
text flying by, and not always do you get a prompt. I've had to do all sorts
of things to get packages to install, including copy the name from the
error message and build an install command by hand and a lot of other
stuff to get it to work. 

YUM was much better, I wonder if it works with Ubuntu?

> I find it ironic that Geoff, the guy that seems happy to beat up on  
> everyone for their choices of over-powered, excessive machines is now  
> stating that GUIs are better.

No, what I said was that it was much easier to admin Ubuntu using a GUI, it
was set up with that in mind. The tools are there, they work and I can easily
remote into the machine, so why not use them? Do you have something against
doing things the easy way?

Setting up remote access was easy, to answer XDMCP queries, I just had to
change one line in config file, to disable X on the console 2. Adding
a VNC session with X on it was simple and well documented. MacOS X 
supports X windows, SSH and Leopard supports VNC out of the box, but
there were plenty of ports for older systems. 

Windows supports SSH and VNC easily, X with minor difficulty, and just
about any Linux supports them with a few package gets, if not out of the
box.

The only problem I have had is that GNOME won't work properly with a
remote X window, (nor VNC for that matter), and although it's been documented
for a long time, no one wants to bother to fix it. 

I first found it documented as a Leopard bug, but it also happens on Tiger and
Windows XP as remote systems.


>  I'll also point out that most commodity  
> x86 hardware (save perhaps your network card if it is an oddball brand) 
> will run Solaris 10 x86, so I'm not sure why he thinks costly special 
> hardware is necessary.

Never said that either. In case you have been asleep the last 4 years, I'm
out of work and on disability, buying anything costs too much. The only
reason I have this laptop is that my family and friends chipped in and
bought it as a 55th birthday present, with the hope that I can use it
to get out and become able to work again.

I find it ironic, to use your words, that with all the money troubles,
failed businesses, etc you've had, you expect that everyone can go out
and buy a new computer every time they need to upgrade software.

Unfortunately, I think that not only am I not uniqiue being broke, there
may be a lot more of us here than you think.

I'm not going to name names, as it is irrelevant, but you often see
people on this list selling last year's hardware to finance buying this
year's. So I think that the number of people on this list who can afford 
to go out and buy a new PC to get more disk space are pretty rare.

> I think this is irrelevant to the discussion at hand.  Windows was not  
> originally designed to be used @ the CLI only.  Recall that X, gnome,  
> etc. are all *add ons* for *NIX.

That was, like Linus Torvald's posting about linux being X86 only, a long
time ago. Gnome and KDE did not come about until well after Linux (my first
linux system ca 1995 did not have them and AFAIK they did not exist), but
my first UNIX system (Esix 3.2 ca 1990) came with X windows. 

The first time I used an AIX system (1992) it already had was at the point
where you could had to use the GUI tool, although some of it was available
in curses mode on a text terminal. 

Geoff.

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