What To Do With An Ultra 60?

V_IL_Len writes: "I'm the administrator of a university NT based animation lab. I have a Sun Ultra 60 sitting unused in the corner which seems like a travesty. I don't have any Unix experiece but am willing to learn. I'm not sure what the best use for it is." Read on for more on the circumstances here; perhaps you've tried something similar?

"We currently use Maya. The students want to use Maya because it makes them more marketable. My boss and I would like to move away from a commercial package so the students would focus more on content rather than software proficiency. Unfortunately, the lab is under a grant which keeps it a Microsoft lab for at least 18 more months. My boss and I have talked about at the end of our software license contract moving the whole lab to Linux and using Blender and gimp as our primary tools. Still it seems a waste to let is sit antoher 18 months doing nothing. We don't need a web server because we don't maintain a web presence right now. So the question is what do you think is the best way for me to use an Ultra 60 in the short term? The follow up being, with 18 months to learn and prepare, how hard/practical would it be to create a Linux/Solaris based animation lab?"

Comments

Re:Put Apache and Slashcode on it.....

[Anonymous Coward]

bzzt. sorry. a single 450MHz Sun Ultrasparc-ii (or even two if its a SMP Ultra60) are easily outclassed by even the slowest gigahertz class processor out there (e.g. Pentium-4) in both specint and specfp. 32 vs 64 bits just means it can address twice as much space than a 32 bit processor but it doesnt triple the speed magically or make it super fast or something. if anything it takes more instructions for a RISC chip to do the same job as a CISC chip.