Re: Which Sparc is best?
On Tue, 2002-07-23 at 18:46, Craig Morehouse wrote:
> I'm new to Debian, but am going to be buying 30 workstations for a new
> operation, and I'd like to use Sun hardware running 3.0 Woody.
>
> Question, which Sun box has proven to be REALLY good and solid with Debian? Are
> the Ultra 2's better than Ultra 5's or 10's, or vice versa? Should I
> build a bunch os SS20's with 4 cpus, or should I get the latest Blade?
>
> We're going to be using these machines for Typesetting and Editing,
> primarily. Being able to configure for wide variety of languages is BIG
> plus. We'll need GIMP and XFig graphics, and lots of XEmacs
> configurations.
>
> If you don't think that Sun is the right platform for these things,
> please say so. I have access to all architectures, basically. I'd like to
> be using Sun/Sony monitors and the Sun keyboards are ideal for these
> uses, particularly the older 5 versions.
>
> Cost is not particularly an object (Though I am not going to buy Ultra
> 80's for this), but reliability definitely is.
Craig,
First, it would be interesting to know why at this scale and "cost not
particularly an object" you aren't using Solaris with proprietary
application software, instead of doing Linux and free apps.
May I suggest that you also post your question on the Debian i386 and
ppc lists, if you haven't already? Your cited applications are generic
enough to run on a wide variety of hardware. i386, SPARC (32 bit), and
PowerPC (32 bit) are the most widely used and tested Linux ports. I've
installed Woody in the last couple of months on all three platforms
(replacing Potato or RedHat 7.x). Woodied SPARC and i386 have been
solid; as were the RedHatted and Potatoed installations before them. A
Woodied PowerMac 7300 has had a couple of lockups but perhaps that is a
hardware problem or maybe I should be using kernel 2.2 instead of 2.4.
Regarding SMP (in SPARC 20 example), what among your applications would
take advantage of more than one processor? Are there non-interactive
processes that can be backgrounded while working on foreground GUI
things?
Gimp is the most interesting application. UI performance could be
limited by either disk throughput (imagining large 24-bit 1200 dpi
images of digitized photos spilling to swap on disk) or on-screen
rendering (imagining lots of redraws while panning and zooming). X with
Debian on a Sparc 20 is not accelerated. Maybe the XFree86 driver for
UltraSPARC Creator framebuffers is accelerated ...
Good luck at research and implementation.
-- SP
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