[geeks] Disturbing Sun articles

[Joshua Boyd]

On Fri, Sep 05, 2008 at 03:09:43AM +0000, wa2egp at att.net wrote:
> > > I'd like to get a video capture card working on mine for a little
> > > project I'm working on. 
> > 
> > I believe there are some options out there.
> > 
> > http://bt848x.sourceforge.net/
> > 
> > It looks like they have some amount of support for bt848x1 cards and
> > saa713x cards.
> > 
> > Alas, I don't see where he lists what cards he actually tests with.
> > 
> > There are also USB video capture devices that are now supported.
> > Presumably it will work with class compliant devices, but they list some
> > Logictech units they've actually tested with here:
> > http://opensolaris.org/os/community/device_drivers/projects/usb/uvc/
> 
> Thanks for the pointers.  At least some one is doing something.  I
> wish I had the time and the smarts to help out or do something on my
> own.  I did try using a VideoPlus card but I just never got it right.
> There was some little hardware info that I'm missing.  That or I just
> have a bad card. 

I've done drivers on linux (and some RTOSs), but I've never gotten
around to trying on Solaris or NetBSD.  I have a new bit of hardware I'm
working on a linux driver for at home.  I'm hoping to do drivers for
NetBSD and Alsa as well when I'm done with linux.  I'm having trouble
finding time to work on it, which is irritating because I bought the
card solely because I happened to have specs for it and knew there was
no linux driver.  But it was not a competitively priced card compared to
some that already had linux drivers from Maudio.

I fear that trying to do older video capture cards might be a nightmare,
but I've never really looked into it.  I do someday dream of making my
own video capture card, at which point it would hopefully be easy to
write drivers for.
 
> > > It's just that I've been reading a lot of "my Suns take too much power
> > > so I'm getting a PC" stuff this past week and it's getting old real
> > > fast.  Just getting grumpy, school started. 
> > 
> > I love my Suns.  I've been pretty stuborn with using them and not just
> > moving to PCs.  It is very frustrating though.  My electric bills are
> > very painful, although they probably aren't the fault of the Suns.
> 
> Don't use mine as often as I'd like.  I have one running in my stock
> room during the day and it just seems to be darn stable compared to
> all the other machines we have.  It is also a darn side faster than
> the anemic PCs they give us.  It's my ultimate backup for my job
> related stuff.  We do have a lot of line glitches but I checked today
> and the uptime was over 178 days. 

My best uptime is 548 days, but that is in a controlled datacenter.  I
eager to see how far it ends up getting before something happens (such
as replacement).

Speaking of the datacenter machine, I'm a bit troubled about what to
replace it with.  Currently it is a V100.  I'd strongly prefer something
SPARC, but 300 gig SCSI drives are still amazingly expensive (at least
$250ea), and T1000s is the first 1U sparc that can take SATA, and they
are still about $1500, which is more than I can see spending.  I also
would like more speed and SMP, but to get SMP means at least a V210, and
those don't seem to be much cheaper than a T1000 (well those plus 300gig
SCSI disks).

> > Also, getting stuff going on them can be extremely painful.  I want to
> > test build GCC, but it takes forever to build on the machines I
> > currently have (most of a day), which makes it very hard to make
> > headyway.   There is a lot of other software I'd like to be using and it
> > is also hard, especially when I know most of it is an apt-get install
> > away if I was using Ubuntu instead.  For instance, Xapian (easy to
> > install, language bindings not so easy to install), Python Imaging,
> > Cairo and PyCairo, CouchDB, etc.
> 
> Yea, patience is one requirement. :)  

Patiance, organization (work 5-30 minutes, wait 12-24 hours, then try to
remeber to get back to it and where you were when you left off), and
skill.  

Obviously people are running a lot of the stuff I want on Solaris, but
packages are being made and shared.
  
> > That's why I was recently ranting about how outdated SunFreeware is,
> > especially since they don't seem to want outside contributions.
> 
> True.  It does seem a little static lately.  Haven't visited there too
> often this past year due to other things I've been involved in.