Tyler, et al:

The cool thing is that all the Sparc is doing right now is crunching SETI.. 
I'm wanting to get it to do something else, as well, and I figured an X 
APRS station would be a very nice addition. That way the g/f can track me 
on the road and see where I'm at without having to go to 
http://www.findu.com/cgi-bin/find.cgi?ai8w-14 every time she's curious. 
It'll auto-track both me and the local stations in different windows.. 
XASTIR is a really really neat program, and it'd be nice to be able to get 
it running...

I do have a CGsix that I could pull out of an old SS2 I have sitting around 
doing nothing, but I'd rather have the Creator3D running, as it has more 
video ram, and is a bit faster. The tracking window will have to be updated 
on a fairly constant basis, and using CPU to do some of the rendering, as 
well as the memory pusing, will slow the whole system down.

Why am I worried about system slowdown? It'd be nice to get 2 WU's a day 
out of the machine, which is why I'd like to get both processors running.. 
Right now it's doing .61/day (about 1 day 18 hrs for each WU). The 
UltraSparc has 256M RAM in it, so memory isn't that big of an issue.

So, getting both processors running and getting the Creator3D working in X 
are high on my priority list. Unfortunately, I'm not a coder, and even if I 
was, I wouldn't have time to do it, as I own a small fleet of trucks and I 
drive one of them for a living. Yeah, a truck driver, HAM, networking, 
techie geek.. I'm an enigma. Sue me.

Thanks for the input. I'll be watching the lists and the website for 
developments on all of this, and hopefully soon we'll be able to put this 
UltraSparc2 to work doing something other than sitting there crunching SETI 
WU's entirely too slowly. ::grin::

73 de AI8W, Chris

At 12:46 18-09-04, you wrote:

> > I have an Ultra Sparc2 with a pair of 167Mhz Processors.. I know SMP
> > is still in development, as in Creator3d support for X for the platform...
>
>Me too!
>
> > What I'm wondering is where both of these projects are standing.
> > Here's the reasons:
> > 1. I crunch SETI@Home, and I'd like to get both processors running
> > on that machine for that reason.
>
>SMP is to the point where the kernel will spin up the second processor, I
>haven't troubled with building a .MP kernel in -CURRENT lately, but I doubt
>it's made much more progress (SMP is pretty hard)
>
> > 2. I'd like to get X up and running on the machine. I'm a HAM radio
> > operator, and I'd like to use the Sparc to set up an APRS (Amateur
> > Position Reporting System) Digipeater and mailbox, running XASTIR.
>
>I've gotten X working no problem, i've had _some_ framebuffer problems, but
>i've run Enlightenment and Fluxbox without a problem, along with some apps
>like Moz, etc.
>
> > Needless to say, the sooner I can get functionality out of both
> > processors and the Creator3D Video card in this machine, the better,
> > as I can get my current system off of that damned Windows box.
>
>If you run the setiathome process with 'nice' (`nice ./setiathome`) it'll be
>"nice" to you're running processes at any given time.
>
>But keep in mind, both SETI and X are hungry prograns. X takes up a good
>amount of my memory, and SETI would take up a good amount of CPU
>
>YMMV :)
>
>-R. Tyler Ballance

73 de AI8W, Chris

Abdico Concussio Fidens, Servo Libertas Semper.

Opportemus Perpotationis et Conceptimus Iam!