[SunRescue] Speaking of SGI equipment...

[ward at zilla.nu]

On Thu, Dec 16, 1999 at 06:44:25PM -0500, Dave McGuire wrote:

> Security is an attribute of a systems administrator, not an operating system.

Only when the system itself isn't full of holes.  If the system's services are
succeptable to buffer overruns, the sysadmin can't do much about it.

> I've run Irix in production just fine.  I still prefer pretty much any BSD
> though...

Irix is just fine in production, but I dislike their networking stack.  Then 
again, I haven't used an SGi since 5.3.

>   What?  The windowing system is X.  Plain old X just like the X that runs on a
> Linux box or a SPARC or anything else.  The GUI is implemented with 4dwm, the
> window manager.  If you'd rather use a different window manager, it's no more
> difficult to change that under Irix than it is under Linux.

Actually, it's not plain old X, it's a heavily modified X.  Their X isn't the 
problem, though, it's the desktop/wm/etc.  I agree that it sucks a lot of cycles
and RAM, but it's kinda pretty.  When the Indigo first shipped, we called it a
blue NeXT, 'cause of the little menubar on the top left, as well as the media
features.  Of course, we were paying a lot less for the NeXTs..

>   Give it a shot...I'm running Enlightenment on one of my SGI systems.  Took
> all of five minutes to switch over after getting it built.

E is another memory and CPU hog, but it's nothing compared to what SGi wants you
to use.  I like E.

Reagen