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What To Do With An Ultra 60?
"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?"
Your students want to use Maya because it helps them get a job, but you want to take that away from them.
You're going to lose students.
The company I am working for needs a new Sun box and money is tight. We could use one. ;-) We are actually looking on ebay. If you want to sell it ebay or some other site would be good. If you want to keep it it would be good to run Sun OS on or Linux possibly. Then you could set it up as a mail server, web server, gateway, firewall, whatever. Or even a test box for students who need more freedom on a box.
Only 'flamers' flame!
Seriously, though, have you thought of installing Maya Studio on it? Expensive, but maybe they'll give you a discount, since you're helping create a user base.
From your point of view, there's not that much difference between Solaris and Linux, so you might as well start learning Solaris now. And all the open-source stuff that Linux is known for runs on Solaris. So for all practical purposes, the Ultra will just be a supercharged Linux box.
One thing you can do is start installing the apps you want for your future Linux lab on the Sun right now. This will give you useful experience, and start you thinking on how your want your Linux boxes configured.
I got my former employer, some time ago, to order an Ultra 60 as an uberworkstation. Two CPUs. 1/2gb RAM. And best of all, a Creator 3D card and the Sun HDTV monitor. (That's right. High resolution, wide aspect ratio.) I believe the resolution was something outrageous like 1920x1200. Lots of real estate for applications. [After I left, the Ultra 60 went to another Sun admin, and the HDTV monitor went to a person who was visually impaired.]
I agree with the first poster here, in that if you can't find a good use for your Ultra 60, it isn't that bad of an idea to eBay it (if allowed).
I don't know enough about animation to say what software it is and isn't capable of running, but the first thing you'll want to do is to figure out how good of a video card (okay, framebuffer!) it has. If it isn't that hot, maybe you want to stop right there.
BTW... just something to note. You could install Linux on the Ultra 60, but given the Sparc architecture, you're not going to be as good off as running it on a PC, which most programs for Linux are targeted to, and supported.
A Google Search for GIMP and SOLARIS seems to indicate that there is a version of Gimp that'll work under Solaris.
Seems like you have a number of options here.
Perhaps you should set the machine up as a batch-renderer using PRMan/BMRT to give your students a chance to play with the kind of system they will encounter in a large studio.
The more technical among them will enjoy playing with shader code, and the less technical will appreciate the fact they can simply submit their render while they get on with interactive tasks.
Asset management is another application that is often neglected in 'school', so maybe you could look at buying or building a web-based system to handle storing and indexing tutorials, documentation, thumbnailing textures and animations (i.e. clips are subitted to the system, automatically downscaled and compressed to MPEG4/DivX etc.) so your students can easily browse a large repository and fetch the items without hunting through disks and CD's wondering where those preview renders they did 3 months ago went.
This may be a mid-to-long-term project, but will certainly make that Ultra-60 useful as a server.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
That said, Solaris isn't a bad skill to learn, and it might be worth playing around with for a learning experience. Bear in mind that an Ultra 60 will only be equivalent to something like a Pentium 600-ish (dependant on what kind of CPU or CPUs are installed) for most tasks unless its been optimised for a SPARC based architecture.
Hell, Industrial Light and Magic just dumped them in favor of Linux.
Says so here.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
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.
Even at SGI, they no longer believe that proprietary architectures can compete with commodity boxes in the workstation market. But there's still "visualization" systems, which you definitely can't do with PC clusters!
Uhm excuse me? Solaris is cheap. Media Kits for SPARC cost a mere $75 and only $45 for Intel. Don't bother yourself to the Alpha line since Compaq committed alphacide. If you want to learn a real UNIX platform at least get a SparcStation 5 at 170mhz but if you have some money then a Dual Ultra 2 is yummy.
Check out Sun newsgroups and web boards to see what strengths your machine in particular has, and use it geared to those strengths. I mean, if the idea is to just find a use for the machine, you either want to add functionality or capabilities to your existing way-of-doing-things, or simplifiy and make more effective current way of doing things. It doesn't make sense to duplicate functionality or move functionality to a box that's less suited to the task than some other existing machine.
I am by no means an expert on Sun products and have no experience with Maya whatsoever, so take this howevever you like.
- Jonathan
Isn't this typical of a sysadmin, especially for a university? He and his boss want to do things just for their own purposes with no regard for the students or faculty.
I'm watching one of these unfold right now in another department. Their new IS guy spent a bundle on Microsoft stuff and moved everything (mainly web serving and e-mail) from a functional Solaris server to a clumsy multi-server setup. Didn't even provide POP3 from the Exchange server, so everyone has to run Outlook or not use their university e-mail (which is becoming a popular choice). He can't get IIS configured properly, so all the promised additional functionality of Frontpage/ASP is still missing. And to top it off, the servers have been infected at least once in the past 6 months. Not once through this did they solict any other technical person's opinions and they ignored the unsolicted ones. Now the latest blow is coming. The university wants to consolidate and move all departments to one e-mail server and one web server. So now the department has spent 6 months struggling with this new configuration, plus the expense of the machines and software, for nothing.
Maybe your students will get lucky and some bright administrator will fire your ass.
Seriously, get a life. You are going to "save the university's money" by buying Sun workstations to run GIMP on?
I hope this article is another troll.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK