[rescue] Sun Kit Needed for EE Student Here

[Michael Parson]

On Tue, May 02, 2006 at 12:23:14PM -0500, Wesley Will wrote:
> Greetings unto the list.
> 
> May all your children wed young.

I'll just be happen when he gets a job ;)

<snip>

> So, what advice do you have, within the constraints of cheap enough to
> afford for a college kid (does not need to be free, he's not a pauper,
> just can't be top-dollar), yet enough oomph! to run some heavy math
> and lighter-weight modelling and circuitry software?

An Ultra-60 is one of the better all-around UltraSparc based systems,
and can be had for not too much money on Ebay.  Can go up to dual 450
Mhz UltraSparc II Processors, 2 gigs of RAM, etc.  Would take up a lot
less space than a 420 or 450, being a pretty standard sized PC tower
like case.

As far as the OS is concerned, It should be able to run any Solaris
you'd come across, FreeBSD, NetBSD, or OpenBSD.  FreeBSD claims to have
functional SMP support, NetBSD does not yet support SMP on sparc64 and
still seems to have a few problems with native threads.  I don't see
anything on a quick look at OpenBSD's website regarding SMP.

-- 
Michael Parson
mparson at bl.org