Hello,

Mike Parson wrote:

>>After watching Window Maker and depencies build - about three hours
>>in total - and turning off the machine afterwards, my ears hurt a
>>little. I don't want to know what it's like to sit there for a whole
>>day... ;) Like I said, I think I'll rip out the harddrive and boot
>>over ethernet until I can find a quiet replacement.  Since I got a
>>second CPU with the machine which apparently works, too, I think I'll
>>install Solaris once for fun and then set up NetBSD 2.0 to boot over
>>ethernet.  Now that I know it's a sun4m, the rest doesn't seem to be
>>too hard.
>>    
>>
>
>Yeah, once you get netbooting down, it's pretty easy to maintain.
>  
>

I now have set up rarpd, tftpd and nfs on my home server and tried 
booting the
Sparc over network for the first time - unfortunately, OpenBoot does not 
detect
the twisted pair cable correctly and gets a rarp timeout. I started the 
rarp daemon
on my server in debug mode to make sure - no packet arrives...
When I boot the system installed on the harddrive, it does detect the 
cable and gets
a dhcp lease, though. What am I doing wrong?

>>Another thought just pops up in my mind - it's funny somehow that a
>>machine aimed at professional users "just works" like this, while PCs
>>that aim for computer illiterates often are painful to configure and
>>need a lot of tweaking and sometimes deep knowledge of the machines
>>configuration.
>>    
>>
>Not quite a fair comparison, you need to see what that macine cost
>new compared to anthing you could get with Intel Inside from the same
>period.  Sun Workstations were high-end machines, designed for people
>who could not or could not put up with downtime due to piddly failures,
>or be bothered with silly configuration issues.
>  
>
That's a point.

Still, I think it's a funny contrast, since Windows is aiming for 
non-technical people
whereas Sun - in my knowledge - tends to attract more technically 
interested people.

Then again, it's a point - with a machine as expensive you can pretty 
well expect things to
just work. Also, it's a much closer integrated system than a PC that 
needs to work with hundreds
of devices from different vendors.
And today's laptops offer a similar degree of "just working".

Kind regards,
Benjamin