[geeks] Needed: A good sparc workstation

[gsm at mendelson.com]

On Sun, Mar 08, 2009 at 11:26:45PM -0400, Joshua Boyd wrote:

> 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).

That leads to a different discussion, about how do you keep many
servers in sync. But one server in my living room is as easily maintained
via a GUI than command lines.


> 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've been doing that on UNIX since 1990 and Linux since 1995. I wanted
to try the "new approach" using prebuilt packages and a worldwide support
network. Ububtu is rapidly becomming "The desktop Linux" and I thought it
would be good to have experience with it.




> 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.

That's where I found the problem documented and a fix. It did not work for
me. As for foreign keyboards, it's possible, but unlikely. Except for the
time zone, my server thinks it's in the US, the 104 Mac is US only, the 10.5
is US only (but has a Hebrew keyboard), and the Windows computers have 
Hebrew keyboards, but are set as if they were US English with extra Hebrew.

OSX did not even support Hebrew except for text entry and display until
Leopard, and I did not install the localization.

>
> 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.

That's what I figured. It's not that I haven't used anything later, but
that's what the server was.  It's underpowerd by modern standards so I
did not want to put something big on it.

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