[geeks] Disturbing Sun articles

[wa2egp at att.net]

> > 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.

> > 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.
> 
> 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. :)  
 
> That's why I was recently ranting about how outdated SunFreeware is,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.

Bob