Hello, SPARC users!
Our department has thrown away an LX in my direction, which
I intend to donate to my father so that he can contiune the
job of editing the Church Magazine after a break of 40
years. He has difficulty in setting the VCR clock, so this
will be quite a challenge, but since he's not ever used a
Windows machine or a Mac either, at lease he's unprejudiced.
I have spoken with an ex-sys-admin friend of mine, who has
recommended putting Linux on the machine because of the
possibility of dial-up and PPP support without having to run
a newer version of Solaris. The machine has only 24MB of
RAM, and the general opinion seems to be that it will work
better with a small+efficient Linux kernel than a bigger and
more memory-hungry Solaris one.
I've not played with it yet, apart from conspiring to remove
the PROM password, but I am fairly experienced in Intel IA32
Linux boxes, have set up more or less a superset of what is
required at home on an old P120.
The questions I have relate to the office packages I need to
install for somebody who is just going to use the machine as
a word processor, email station and web browser. I would
really like to run, say star office, and train the user up
on that. But this may be impossible. Would the Solaris
emulation be up to it? Would there be copyright problems is
getting the solaris shared binaries on to the machine (I'll
need to look into this because the LX was originally
purchased very cheaply on an educational discount)? More to
the point, would it run in 24MB at a reasonable speed?
I have no problems trying to teach the user, eg, LyX
(although probably not raw LaTeX). But I've not seen may
RPMs of up-to-date SPARC binaries for this program. I've
been looking at the rufus.w3.org site, but the LyX packages
seem quite old.
Also, I see that the RH netscape for SPARC is quite old
(4.51), or are the version numbers different on this
platform? Would the community advise going out and getting
hold of a cheap and nasty second had PC instead (I can get a
486 machine for about UK�20 at the moment) bearing in mind
the target audience?
Would running a reasonably nice parallel printer (eg an
Epson Colour) be any harder than it is on my Intel box at
home?
So many questions! I'd appreciate any experience/advice
from people on the list. I'll probably install Linux on the
thing just for the hell of it, although my wife will
probably kill me (there's enough junk in our house already
8-)
Many thanks for yr help & advice!
Nick/
--
Dr N J Bailey, mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Deputy Director, Interdisciplinary Centre for Scientific Research in Music
Lecturer in Applied Computing, School of Electronic and Electrical Engineering
University of Leeds. http://www.ee.leeds.ac.uk/homes/NJB
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