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:This and that

[Anonymous Coward]

Install Solaris or Linux on it.
Then install blender and gimp(if you chose solaris), then install vnc and samba
on it(of course if solaris start pulling down GNU software to make it useable). Then install vnc client on the
windows machines in the lab and mount
part of the Ultra 60 filesystem on the
NT machines. Now you can offer those
alternatives(blender,gimp, other) or if that
violates your grant, just become proficient
administrating the configuration. Then
also work on converting your NT maya licenses
to Linux maya licenses, if possible.

Then in 18 months convert half of the lab to
linux on the PC's and either use X and nfs to
access the Ultra 60 or continue to use vnc and
samba. Then eliminate the remaining windows
boxes or keep one around as a reminder of why
you converted the lab linux. I'd probably
continue to use solaris 8 on the ultra 60.

But I have to ask you this, what are the
details of this crazy grant. Is this a grant
of pc's and software from Microsoft or something?

Re:Huh?

[1101z]

Well you don't have to take Maya away to switch to Linux, as Maya runs on Linux. Plus, people like Dreamworks and Digital Domain thing Linux is the future and are moving to Linux as fast as they can.

Did you sell your last brain cell for beer money?

[cooldev]

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. . . 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.

Are you INSANE? You have an animation lab with software such as Maya and you want to switch to Blender and Gimp? Sure, those are decent packages if you're an amature on a low-low budget, but if I were a student interested in computer animation I'd raise a huge ruckus if some open-source advocate switched the lab from Maya to those inferior tools without a really, really, really good reason.

This isn't a troll. A few years ago I was seriously interested in computer animation at one time and got to wet my feet with Lightwave and Alias|Wavefront (before it became Maya). I still play around, even though my object modeling skills have stagnated. I've tried nearly all free and inexpensive commercial 3D packages (including the latest Blender as of about 3 weeks ago) and none can come close to even early versions of Lightwave. Unfortunately that does matter, as inferior tools put a low ceiling on students' creativity.