der Mouse said:

>Only those last two would be any problem, and they're mostly a matter
>of RAM from what little I understand of them.  My main
>screen-&-keyboard these days is a SPARCstation 20 with 304M of RAM
>(64x4+16x3); while I don't use fvwm, mozilla, or openoffice, 304M is
>actually approaching "modern" amounts of RAM, so it might well be
>usable.

I had a SS5 with 160M running 1.6.2, fvwm, and some small browser. It wasn't
too bad. Fvwm is pretty light, I use it for the multiple desktops. I could
have gotten by with ctwm.

>Perhaps - but I tend to consider Sun hardware "commodity junk" ever
>since they went PCI.  After all, why did they switch to PCI?  So they
>could use cheap PCI cards - and there's the "commodity junk", right
>there.  (The Sun-made part may be reliable, but a machine is just as
>crashed if the video card goes wonky as if the cpu flakes out - and my
>i386 boxen (see below) don't fail for mobo reasons anyway.)

I had an Intel PII 450 die last year from swollen capacitor disease, and
an AMD motherboard died this year from heat although the cpu and memory
survived and are in use.

PCI video cards seem to be pretty reliable, although I don't buy the really
fancy ones.

>As for 4c/4m versus wintel "commodity junk", my own experience matches
>yours.  I have some five or ten SPARCstations of various vintage and a
>Sun-3/60 (in a -3/260 cardcage, for better cooling) in routine live
>use.  I also have a K6-2/500 and an Athlon 2600 in routine live use.
>Even though the Suns outnumber the Intel-architecture junk at least two
>to one and probably more like four or five to one, when a machine needs
>repair (hardware or software), it's better than even money that it's
>one of the i386 machines, not a Sun.

I have a Sun 3/80 that is going along pretty well. The worst thing about
Intel stuff is the cheap fans.

>I can't comment on Ultra boxen of any stripe in this regard.  I have a
>U2 and two U1s, all of which are sitting idle at the moment and none of
>which have been in regular use in my setup, for reasons which I can go
>into if anyone is interested but which aren't really relevant to the
>topic at hand.  In a past job we had a U1, back when they were new, and
>aside from the CPU fan seizing up (apparently common with U1s of that
>era), it doesn't stand out in my memory as worse or better than the
>rest of the Suns.

I've seen U1 and U2 boxes run for years on Solaris. NetBSD seems to be 
getting better. The Ultra 5/10 is great if you stick in a Symbios SCSI
controller and dump the IDE disks.
-- 
Rick Kelly	rmk@rmkhome.com
		<http://www.rmkhome.com/>
		<http://rkba.rmkhome.com/>