[rescue] Just a thought - what would be a good starter SPARC

[Brian Hechinger]

> Yeah, I'll bet Sol7 on a 16-MB LX would suck planets through pipettes....

anything post 2.5.1 or not netbsd would, yes.  maybe 2.6 would be ok, never
used it, so i don't know much about it's performance.

> However, Sol7 on an LX with 128 MB of RAM is OK.  In fact, if you do all
> your X stuff remotely, it's downright pleasant.  I use either X-win32 on a
> PC or an old HP X-terminal, and, except for starting Netscape and a few
> other things, it's all quite reasonable.

upgrade to 8.  you'll thank me.  the performance on my 160M sparc5 with 7 was
ok, but not good enough to make me want to stick with it.  i was considering
going back to 2.5.1 which is what i previously ran on it.  then we got a copy
of 8 final release (beta was too slow since all the debugging crud was on) and
i figured since i'm reinstalling anyway i may as well try 8.  so i installed
it, and have never looked back since.  it's nearly as fast as 2.5.1 on my
sparc5.  maybe even as fast.  it could be faster, but it was definitely
something that i sat in front of and worked on for a while and liked before i
"needed" 24-bit and went and got a sparc20.  install 8.  throw 7 in the trash.

> If you want to see something abysmal, though, run Sun's own HotJava "web
> browser."  I can't believe they let that thing escape; it's the worst
> advertisement for Java one could imagine.  Making it a part of the normal
> installation process was a huge blunder; at the very least they should have
> had the installation routines check the hardware and run the installation in
> character mode if the hardware was too old/slow/small.

you think it's performance is abysmal?  have you actually used it?  i think its
functionality is more abysmal than it's performance. :)

-brian