I should have responded better when you posted this to one of the other
lists, but I was a bit busy. :-( Comments below.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Nick Bailey [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: Friday, June 02, 2000 7:35 AM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Linux on LX with some sort of office package
>
> 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?
Star Office doesn't run at what I'd consider a "reasonable" speed on my
P-II400 with 256MB of ram at work, nor on my dual SM41 SS20 at home. The
load times on SO are absolutely absurd. Solaris is free, sort of, so
libraries shouldn't be much of an issue. However, Star Office 5.2 is in
Beta, with a S/Linux version, which I haven't tried. There has been a lot
of demand for it, so I'm sure that somebody here has tried.
> 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.
You could get a copy of a recent .src.rpm, and recompile it on your S/Linux
machine. The command would be 'rpm --rebuild lyx-version.src.rpm'. I do
that for a lot of packages, because the latest versions of binaries are
almost never available for SPARCs.
> 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?
4.51 isn't that old, and I've seen a SRPM for 4.73, I just haven't
downloaded/updated to it yet. Maybe there isn't a SPARC version available,
who knows.
> Would running a reasonably nice parallel printer (eg an
> Epson Colour) be any harder than it is on my Intel box at
> home?
Nope, shouldn't be, although I don't recall if the LX has a parallel port,
and if it does have one, then you'll probably need some strange adapter
cable to hook it up. If it doesn't have parallel, you should be able to
find one with a serial connection.
Later,
Greg
[snip]
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