[geeks] Java Workstation - Windows Trouble...

[Mark]

On 4 Jan 2008, at 09:20, Geoffrey S. Mendelson wrote:

> On Fri, Jan 04, 2008 at 03:03:35AM -0600, Bill Bradford wrote:
>
>> If you were tearing up a nice piece of SPARC gear, I might care - but
>> Sun's PCs are just PCs, and not rare by a long shot.  They're  
>> nicely-built,
>> but they're just PCs.
>
> Which is my I am generally against running Linux or xBSD on old rare
> computers. IMHO if you want to run Linux, any old PC will do just as  
> well
> and have the same "look and feel".

Linux I never use on old systems, because frankly outside of it's huge  
x86 community base (and a few other major platforms like PowerPC) it's  
very poor, with the exception of hardcore distros like Debian and  
Gentoo. NetBSD and OpenBSD are different animals, and I often use them  
on older machines because they are all pretty well ported to an  
individual platform.

> Much of what makes those unusual computers unusual is their  
> operating systems.

In some ways, yes, but as a Hardware guy primarily, I just enjoy  
meticulously setting up the hardware, running it, seeing how it  
performs, and seeing how I can upgrade and enhance it. Just owning it  
is a big part of it for me too.

> With that said, I have Wallstreet Powerbook that runs Linux because it
> has too little RAM to and hard disk for OSX

Wallstreet Powerbooks aren't that rare, and while nice are not very  
'special' either.

> OS9.

*Holds back the vomit*

> I don't have any more SPARC hardware because I gave it to someone  
> who has more
> room, more time and would benefit from learning something besides  
> Windows.

That's a large part of why I've been exploring alternative platforms -  
I need to know what really *is* the best for every application.  
Windows is plainly not the ideal for most of them, and I want to know  
what is. I think OS X is pretty much my favorite 'very day living' OS,  
more orthodox UNIX for great servers, Amiga OS is my favorite retro OS  
by a country mile (it frankly craps all over old 68k Mac OS versions,  
especially System 7.x), and Linux... well comes in useful from time to  
time.


-- 
Mark Benson

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