[geeks] Needed: A good sparc workstation

[Joshua Boyd]

On Mar 8, 2009, at 8:23 AM, gsm at mendelson.com wrote:

> 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 believe most of them were administered using command line tools.   
Certainly all of the ones I had anything to do with, which was  
several dozen running all over the US (from a previous job).

> 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 didn't use 8.04 LTS for long.  I used 6.06 LTS for a very long  
time, but 8.04 LTS for only a brief while.

For newer stuff, I thought there was a specific backport place, but  
maybe that is still what you are talking about.  Frankly, when we  
needed newer stuff we built it from source and sometimes made our own  
packages.

> 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.

That is odd.  Do you think that is a foreign keyboard problem?  I've  
run Gnome over VNC from 8.04 easily.  I haven't tried remote X  
sessions of GNOME in some time since, as I said, we used CLI  
administration.  The ubuntu forums have a lot of good information on  
most things you might want to do and google is a great way to find  
the relevent posts.

Still, if you aren't willing to hack your way through a new linux  
setup, maybe you should have tried RHEL5, although I think you will  
find that that also is quite a bit different from redhat 7.2.