[rescue] Perverse Question

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Mon, 9 Jun 2003, Jeffrey Nonken wrote:

> I was JUST given an LX last night. Hold on...

The first Sun I ever owned was an LX.  It provided me with years of
trouble-free mail and web service.

> YES! It does powerup using the power key on the keyboard.

Woot!

> Now that I have this thing... what on Earth should I do with it?

Well, S/Linux finally supports (in some rudimentary fashion, from what
I've read) the DBRI chip in there, so you'll get audio and possibly ISDN
support.  Aside from Solaris, it's probably the only OS with workable
DBRI support.  NetBSD and OpenBSD both run very well on it.  OpenBSD is
the fastest of the bunch.  NetBSD has better PCMCIA support, and Linux
has better Linux application support.  All three support SunOS binary
emulation to a fairly workable degree.

I'm using a SPARCclassic (also know as a SPARCstation LC) at home as a
router.  It does a terrific job of that, but the load hovers at about
0.9 if I run squid+AdZap on it while I'm hitting the web from another
system.

If you ever wanted to play with a RISC machine at a really low level,
the sun4c and sun4m (the LX is sun4m) are probably the best-documented
platforms on the planet, and SPARC assembly language is -really- easy.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke   )  "Leave your lawsuits at home.  I have guns."
Elgin, TX          (                      --"Kountry" Mike Lundgren