[rescue] Sun Kit Needed for EE Student Here

[Wesley Will]

Greetings unto the list.

May all your children wed young.

Anyway, I've got an intern here, a top-flight EE student, about to go
on an externship to the Motorola embedded research shop.  He's looking
to move out of the Wintel world and get some real working kit, so he
can get some real engineering work done without all the delays that
using Windows and Intel/AMD teeny little CPUs entails.

I've been bragging up Sun hardware, and he's convinced.  Being a
student (and this fall, a grad student in EE, and he's to take his PE
Cert soon too) means he doesn't have a lot of cash laying around
spare, so we're looking into finding him something reasonably
horse-powered and at the same time reasonably priced.  I was thinking
about a 420 or 450, with just a couple of processors to start and a
gig or more RAM, some decent disk space, and he can use his current
Winblows box for a Linux machine (and run the Sparc headless, so
graphics is not exactly a big issue here).

This has to be Solaris or BSD compatible, I'd like to be able to show
him how it runs on both of those and let him choose the software and
OS that suits him best, so maybe the 420/450 isn't the absolute best
choice.  I'm polling for both available stuff somebody wants to part
with for a reasonable sum, and for what you folks would recommend for
this in the way of hardware model and expansion cards/accessories.

So, what advice do you have, within the constraints of cheap enough to
afford for a college kid (does not need to be free, he's not a pauper,
just can't be top-dollar), yet enough oomph! to run some heavy math
and lighter-weight modelling and circuitry software?

Inquiring minds want to know....

--
wes will
siuc