On Mon, 26 Jul 2004 17:39:49 -0400, Julian Squires <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Mon, Jul 26, 2004 at 08:44:01PM +0200, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > I just found that a Sun Sparc is, as second hand not expensive at all > > (well, that is a matter of "taste") but I have no idea, what models are > > confortable enough specially to get a fast execution of lily (I am > > actually running Athlon 2 Ghz with Suse 9.0) > > > > Who can help with own experience? > > Does Solaris accept rpms? > > You can run debian on sparc machines pretty nicely, and just apt-get > install lilypond. I have a bunch of sparc-based machines, but I do all > my lilypond work on a powerpc machine, so I can't say too much about > speed, except that you probably want an ultra 2 as an absolute bare > minimum; you probably want a modern machine like a blade 150 or better > for real work. Sun machines are great for multiuser work (amazing for > many interactive sessions for example), but their speed may not impress > you for single user work. Linux tends to be a bit faster than Solaris > on older sparc machines, can't vouch for the newer ones.
I've been away from Sparc machines for a year or two now, but I'd like to echo Julian's comments. The strength of the Sparc machines is in their scalability, not in their speed. In other words, they are much better than a Pentium-based machine if you want 32 processors and many gigabytes of memory, but for a basic single-processor machine you'll probably find that a normal PC is much faster. At my last job, we had some really long running jobs that took a couple days to complete. We used our flashy Sparc machine, which was very expensive when we bought it two years earlier. It was a single processor machine but we were all mesmerized by the Sun and Solaris names. The jobs were taking too long to run, however, so in the end we bought a consumer PC from Costco at less than 1/5 what the Sparc machine had cost us, and it ran the job 17 times faster. Normal PCs are cheap and fast, and a couple-years-old Sparc machine probably can't compete with a cheap, modern PC. If you don't already know how a Sparc machine will help you, then chances are it won't. - Russ _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user