[H-GEN] [Fwd: Sun Workstation for sale]

Ben Fowler b1.fowler at student.qut.edu.au
Sat Jul 31 03:48:18 EDT 1999


(Note reply-to: being general at humbug.org.au vs Ben Fowler <b1.fowler at student.qut.edu.au>)

On Sat, 31 Jul 1999, sinfetik wrote:

> Hmmh, I don't know much about Sun's hardware, but a 17 monitor is good,
> are they high-definition monitors?  I know I can run Linux on sparcs but 
> I know nothing of what is being offered - perhaps a comparison to an x86
> machine might help.  

I own one of these machines, and they tend to weigh in at about low-end
486ish performance.  The monitors, while being true-colour capable, tend
to only come with CG3 (8 bit colour) unaccelerated framebuffers, which are
nothing to get excited about, unfortunately.

> I want to run gimp and vmware (win95 runnning one Macromedia
> application, 
> either flash or fireworks).  Also does this include a mouse, are sun 
> mice three or two button?

Since these machines are not very powerful (for $300, you can't expect
much), you'll probably be wasting your time trying to run GIMP.  You might
find the 8-bit framebuffers (video cards) that tend to come with these
machines quite limiting.  Unfortunately, vmware will be completely out of
the question on this sort of gear.

However, don't let this discourage you: I have used my machine as an X
terminal without any problems, and these boxes are quite interesting to
play with, being non-intel hardware.  I would recommend that you avoid
Linux SPARC, and go for SunOS/Solaris instead; unfortunately, Linux SPARC
has a little way to go, and XFree for the Sun framebuffers is unreliable
garbage in comparison to the equivalent Intel software. 

> > For Sale:
> > Sun IPC WorkStation
> >   * Running Solaris 2.6
> >   * 17 inch Sun Monitor (Colour)
> >   * Sparc processor
> >   * 40 Meg RAM
> >   * Type 4 Keyboard
> >   * AUI - Ethernet adapter
> > Price: $300

Anyway, I hope this helps.

- warmest regards,

Ben.

--
 Ben Fowler, 3rd Year BInfTech(CompSci, DataCommunications), QUT.
   e-mail:       ben.fowler at humbug.org.au  b1.fowler at student.qut.edu.au 
   vanity page:  http://azure.humbug.org.au/~zuul/ 

  "Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn
    from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their
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