[rescue] Linux

[Kevin]

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I agree totally.  I have 9 PeeCees running linux on my
home network and they do the brunt of the work.  The
only reason i bought an old Sun was to see and
experience a Sun.  Not some bastard love child
of Linus Torvalds and Bill Joy :)

If i was stuck with a bunch of old workstations and i
actually had to accomplish something significant with
them, i would go the BSD route, but 99% percent of the
time i wouldn't even bust my ass, why.  I'd just pick
up some commodity SMP PeeCees, cheap, and in
their own way "crappy" but that would trounce all of
these old workstations to death in most tasks.

I want my machines to be pure.  I'm busting my ass
trying to get an old SGI mouse (before the new "sgi"
logo), i could just as easily plug in any PS/2 mouse
and have it work but that has a tendency to make my
skin crawl.  I even came close to buying a "official Su
brand" CAT5 cable off Ebay, just to be kosher, but i
figured that was going a bit too far.

That being said, this is all just for fun anyway so if
sticking NetBSD or Redhat on an SS10 or plugging up an
old Compaq keyboard to an Indigo2 makes you happy... go
nuts.  But for me, personally, ill take the old school
route.

/KRM



On Thu, 28 Nov 2002 21:33:40 -0500 (EST)
"Carl R. Friend" <crfriend at rcn.com> wrote:

>    Dave McGuire comments:
> 
> > On Thursday, November 28, 2002, at 08:27 PM, Carl
> > R. Friend wrote:
> > >    The OS is part of the history as much as (some
> > >    might even
> > > venture to say more than) the iron it runs atop. 
> > > If all we want to do is run *BSD (to pick a
> > > random OS), we can run it atop the latest PeeCee
> > > silicon available.
> > 
> >    Agreed...but given a choice (and we ALL have the
> >    choice, no matter 
> > how much we may try to claim otherwise) wouldn't
> > you rather run it on a real computer, and get some
> > performance and stability? ;)
> 
>    I think that some of the "problem" here is that
>    probably a
> quite a few good folks on this list have more recent
> iron than I have in my humble abode.  The most recent
> SPARC box, for instance, that I have is a SPARCserver
> 20 (aside from my Netra NFS-150 - an Ultra-1 under
> the covers - that I cannot bring home because there's
> no space left).  The machine I sit in front of,
> habitually, is a 1995-vintage 90 MHz (mHz?)
> Pentium-class box running Linux (it does what I need
> it to, why should I "upgrade"?).  The rest of my
> "herd" dates from anwhere from the late 1960s to the
> mid 1990s.  I get decent stability out of all of
> them.
> 
> >    Running modern software on classic hardware can
> >    be very interesting 
> > and educational in itself, because for many years,
> > hardware advances far outstripped those of
> > software.
> 
>    That model broke, badly, when the 80386 (in PeeCee
>    terms) gt
> introduced.  Up until that point, I had a challenge
> open to anyone I knew at the time where I'd take any
> of my "antiques" up against a PeeCee with a
> mumble-frotz CPU so long as I could get a good handle
> on the problem and do my coding in assembler. By the
> time the 80386 came along, good software architecture
> practises had gone out the window and we were looking
> at the hardware advances to keep the whole house of
> cards standing. I gave up at that point.
> 
>    I think that the modern interest in simulators is
>    a good thing
> as it'll give folks who cannot get their hands on
> physical "classic" iron a chance to delve into the
> operating environments of the time. After all, how
> many of us can afford the space and power it takes to
> run, say, an all-up DECsystem 1090?
> 
>    Porting modern software to "classic" hardware,
>    however, remains a
> mystery to me.  If I boot up a classic machine, I
> want that machine to show off what its designers had
> in mind for it.  If I want modern software, I'll run
> it on modern machines that I don't have to wait for.
> 
>    How many of us remember the vaunted measurement of
>    the MIPS?  How
> many of us would be happy to sit in front of a one
> MIPS box today? The paradigms are completely
> different - so different that I suspect that there
> can be no comparison.
> 
> >    That said though, I'll be running RSTS/E on my
> >    PDP11/70 when I can 
> > cut that new system disk.
> 
>    Kudos!
> 
> +------------------------------------------------+--
> -------------------+| Carl Richard Friend (UNIX
> Sysadmin)            | West Boylston       ||
> Minicomputer Collector / Enthusiast            |
> Massachusetts, USA  || mailto:crfriend at rcn.com       
>                 +---------------------+
> | http://users.rcn.com/crfriend/museum           |
> ICBM: 42:22N 71:47W
> |+------------------------------------------------+-
> --------------------+_______________________________
> ________________ rescue list -
> http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue
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