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SGI Visual Workstation Linux HOWTO posted
Steve Phillips sent us
a link to the
SGI Visual Workstation HOWTO.
It is what it sounds like. Some notes about what makes the new machine
different (and more expensive) than many x86 boxes. It's interesting,
but probably more so if you actually have one of those boxes. Wish
I did... if only for that screen. Yum yum.
Woohoo!
There's a link on lwn.net to an RPM that already has TT support. Haven't tried it though. Has anyone had any experience with this particular package?
I just had a look at one of these machines (very briefly) at work, and yes, the screen is beautiful, but the graphic performance looks rather poor, especially for an SGI.
Has anyone used one of these or seen any reports to support or refute that?
Oh gee, another toy Malda wishes he had... You know Rob, if you'd spend half the time whining about shit you don't have and acted thankfull for what you do I might take posts like this one seriously...
80 gb hd..
OC-10000,
1 TB of ram on the size of a dime
It gets old Rob.. "wow, that'd be nice"...
Been using an SGI flat panel at the office - attached to a dell PII 450 - for about a week. by far, the crispest, sharpest, display i have ever seen. 1600x1200, and readable down to the pixel level.
makes me WANT to stay at the office and work. i'm sure if management knew that, they would easily pop for a $2300 display for the rest of the poor programming sods to get the boost out of them as well.
In an effort to continue the never ending software and hardware upgrade cycle, Microsoft came up with the stupid idea to create a 3D user interface (chrome effects).
I'll make an out-of-my-ass prediction: It'll take more computing horsepower to run a desktop with "chrome effects" than it took to create "The Last Starfighter" (the first movie with its special effects done all in computer graphics.)
I still remember the days when idiots like John Dvorak proclaimed, "The 486 is more computing horsepower than the desktop user will ever need."
I'm still using MY 486 (no X), how 'bout YOU.
You can buy that SGI monitor seperately, but unfortunately it comes with an expensive graphics card, which drives up the cost. I have no idea how much money it costs, but you don't have to buy the workstation to get the monitor.
Howsabout MINIX on an 088?? No X!
Is this sad or what. A pissing contest to see
who is the biggest masochist.
OTOH MINIX on 088 is actually quite a bit more
usable than NT on the PII 450 next to it. Go figure.
I cannot believe Neanderthals like him and Don Crabb get paid to write their drivel.
Maybe you should wait until you have something worthy to say before posting. Instead of whining about trivial crap.
Whats with this yum yum shit? you sound like a fag.
What a Slashdot thing to say. Grow up.
...since it only takes a few minutes to register...
...and they never have anything worthwhile to say anyways?
This is not my reason for not registering.
Oh, I dunno. I think we post just as many unfair generalizations as you do.
You mean YOU think KDE sucks. According to Linux Journal magazine:
Linux Journal publishes a "1998 Reader's Choice" in which, at page 31,
KDE can be found as winner of "Favorite Window Manager" with FVWM as a runner up.
Also of interest is that, on page 30, S.u.S.E is listed as "Favorite Linux Distribution" with
Red Hat runner up. It is known that S.u.S.E includes (and integrates very well) KDE in its
last versions.
Bottom line is, don't print pseudostatistics like that - they don't mean anything.
If YOU think KDE sucks - fine, you're entitled to your opinion. Some of us happen
to think its one of the best things to happen to Linux on the Desktop for a long
time.
KDE 1.1 rocks, and KFM makes for an excellent Web Browser now. Its light-years faster than 1.0.
Galen Brooks of Number Nine announced in the previous forum here that he had provided Xfree86 drivers for this display. That was about a month ago. Don't you guys ever read? Don't you remember what you read?
The display, including the AGP card can be had for $2,265 from buy.com. Now, will you all quit your whining?
I checked out there web site recently also. I also checked it about 2 or 3 years ago. Back then they were planning to write it using assembly language to optimize everything. I see that they really havent made much progress except that they don't mention assembly anymore.
I know there is a large group of people who don't seem to care for X windows. X windows is a memory hog, and can sometimes can be unstable, but on the other hand, network transparent windowing is really cool as well as extremely usefull when you have to administer a lot of machines, and I've impressed a lot of people who didn't know anything about Unix systems too.
Maybe what is needed is a rewrite of the X servers to make them modular. So if i'm not using the shared memory extension, that part isn't loaded and so on. Threaded servers is also a must. I hate when everything freezes up because I selected a different font in the gimp. Other than that, if people are still interested in alternate window systems, they should take the best features from X, instead of starting from scratch, but that's just my oppinion.
I'm running a TT server too. I was actually wondering about this specific bundling, simply because I've been involved in a project that's brought many new users (~20,000) to Linux, and it would be nice to be able to point them to this one package and say, "rpm -Uvf * and voila! Pretty fonts!"
:-)
I posted the original question. Yes, I agree that it looks great at that resolution (well, the Windows part could go :-). But... things like dragging windows around seemed jerky (or at least 'not smooth'). That's in comparison, for example, to a PII 450, which performs much better (empiracal evidence only).
That's what I meant by graphics performance -- not the image onscreen.
But, the thing looks beautiful, I agree. The screen's so flat that it almost looks like it's warped inwards.
Just so you know, today's LCDs seem to have some significant physical limits as a display technology that make them "jerkier" than normal CRTs. A little-known fact about normal LCDs (say, in a laptop) is that the pixel response on them is only about 10fps. You know how the cursor is a little jerky or seems to disappear if you move it fast? That's an artifact of the display- the pixels don't refresh very fast, about 100ms.
Anyway, SGI&Mitsubishi have apparently improved the pixel response of this new screen to about 30 fps (33ms). Better, but still not great.
Needless to say, LCD marketers haven't advertised this weakness, and CRT marketers haven't figured it out yet or are making more margin on their LCDs...
So it's a tradeoff of pixel clarity (advantage: LCD) vs. pixel refresh (advantage: CRT). Bottom line, for FPS games, LCDs today are not necessarily your best bet.
(Disclaimer: I am not a LCD engineer. Iterative corrections welcome.)
IG, you are so right in saying that it'd be a shining star in the Linux community. But you're underestimating the amount it'd take to do what you propose -- something that would pop into any SGI engineer or manager's head.
There's a lot of special hardware in the box. The memory controller, the graphics ASIC, the non-BIOS bootprom, the unique audio/video I/O interfaces, the memory modules, the overall unified memory architecture. And I don't even know about stuff like the keyboard and mouse, which the HOWTO hints required some modification. It's all proprietary, meaning that SGI personnel would probably have to do it since SGI won't want to put all their internal specs out on the web so Compaq/HP/Intergraph/etc. can see the juicy unique stuff they are doing. (For starters, what parts of the Linux kernel would have to be rewritten to allow for the UMA architecture, using system memory as the local video and audio memory? You'd have to do that from scratch, I imagine.) And getting it all to work well, that takes man-months of effort itself, under NT or UNIX. And then SGI would have to make all its hardware bugfix workarounds on twice as many platforms. And if you actively market it as a Linux box, that implies you have to service and support it, a non-trivial training exercise for personnel at the very least.
I don't think it's merely a matter of "marketing"; it takes a huge amount of work to add another platform to your product line. For a community that has a reputation as being thrifty, this isn't intuitively a good business bet.
Sure, I'd like to see Linux on SGI hardware too, but talk and wishes are cheap...
--X3Danalyst
http://user.tninet.se/~gap660e/SGIVW320e.htm
If you guys actually visited the site, instead of just spouting uninformed crap, you would see a link where SGI invites interested parties to email them if they would be interested in buying a visual workstation if it had Linux support.
I've just spent a couple of hours using the flat panels with the xfree drivers, and can say they are very nice to use indeed. The colours are vibrant and of course the pixels are much clearer than a CRT. Also, I find 1600x1024 a very easy resolution to work with in X.
:)
Now if only the 25 we have bought (for a new lab) included a spare for me to take home...
Thanks must go to Number nine for their help - otherwise I'd have had to work during the install
The only slight problem is update speed when scrolling, but it's at least as good as any other flat screen I've used.
Oooh.. I can boot Linux on my new overpriced SGI peecee but can't take advantage of any of the features that are the only thing that distinguishes it from a $500 peecee clone! Who cares!?
actually MS is working together with SGI (who will probably do the most work ;-) to create a new 3D API named Farenheit which is meant to replace both openGL and Direct3D and is supposed to run on both NT and IRIX systems.
KDE is a good desktop environment all that must be done is that KWM is shit it is rather crappy I really don't like it but it works pretty good. QT tool kit is good the programs are great and the consistant interface is good. wmaker and KDE all the way.
Heh.
;-)
/dev/hdb1 as root, and that RAM size is hardwired to 64Mb..."
;-)
"If your idea of "support" is posting questions (and answers!) to the linux kernel mailing list..."
Okay, sure.. I could do that
"Note that this kernel is hardwired to look for
Hah! Reminds me of stories I've heard from the pre-1.0 days of Linux (no, I didn't run it back then..) Back before LILO...
Ahh.. Well, I imagine I might want to learn kernel hacking, if I had the money for a Visual Workstation, the time, and a tad bit more experience
Naw, on second thought -- the only restriction is the money.. I'm ready for an adventure...
"Regarding OpenGL, the coming 3D-UI push by MS will probably push ..."
...
What are you referring to here? Is there any URL on MS' efforts at creating 3D GUI's? I wasn't aware they were doing anything in this regard, but I guess I'm either a) clueless or b) misinterpreting what you mean.
I'd love to solve both a) and b)
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Quit being a whiny prick.
Did you read the How-To? They're *working* on it.
They released the kernel as it currently stands in the *spirit* of open development. Clearly, SGI recognizes that the best way to get Linux running on these boxes is to get a de-facto grass roots project started up and let people at it...
Sorta like a few other projects you may, or may *not*, be familiar with.
Sheesh.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Thanks ...
...
/. effect on a few sites, he deserves it.
*THWAP*!
Rob says that so that companies that read his reviews might be swung towards *actually* sending him stuff
Not a bad strategy, for one who tirelessly puts everything into SlashDot and gets very little out of it.
After all, what with Rob turning the ol'
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Posted by Mike Huang:
I've heard the 1600x1024 res on the SGI flat screen for a while now, but I still haven't found out if that is a locked resolution -- that is, if I go to 640x480 (a common game resolution) and go full screen, will 640x480 look like a postage stamp?
While I don't have a SGI LCD, I do use an IBM LCD (T55A, for those that are interested) at work.
One of the things that is great about the LCD is that it's flicker free. Although there's not so much pixel blurring on a CRT, it doesn't matter how high you drive the monitor's refresh, you can still see the flicker.
Now to be fair, I do notice some pixel blurring, but not much. I can definitely notice it when I scroll down a webpage quickly, but for looking at video clips or playing games, I don't really notice the pixel blurring at all.
I rather like my LCD monitor, but it does lack two things -- the same clarity that I get on a CRT at a smaller resolution (640x480 looks blurred on the LCD, while on a CRT, it's still quite clear) and Height adjustment. Most LCDs do not have a way of adjusting the height, just the view angle (that takes it's cue from the CRT monitor market -- how many CRTs have height adjustment?) Thankfully, some LCD companies are beginning to see the light and add height adjustment.
One other minor caveat is that due to the manufacturing process of LCDs, you'll have to live with some dead pixels.
(really - couldn't they at least have produced a version of X that takes advantage of the neat graphics hardware? I know it would mean not releasing Linux support the day after the machine comes out, but support without keyboards isn't really support).
They, who? The kernel people probably aren't too interested in writing X servers. Releasing support the day after the machine comes out is just fine - people who find the lack of keyboard support galling can wait until later. But if releasing support for keyboards delays kernel support, that only hurts people who don't care about keyboards. And since keyboard support is so important to you, I'll look for your name in the CREDITS file.
I think the page makes it pretty clear that this is a preliminary thing.
And just how are we supposed to get X support if we can't even boot a kernel?
This is just a first step, it may not be all you want, but it's incredibly important to getting the stuff you want developed in a timely fashion.
Anyway, there is a cool factor involved in it. Just like the completely useless PalmPilot/Linux port. It was cool, but useless. But unlike the Palm/Linux thing, this is a VERY necessary stepping stone to more support.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Oh great, another member of the thought police, telling someone else how they should act.
/., trying to attract an audience with which to share the things he enjoys or thinks are important, and this is your response?
Rob's put a lot of time into
Some people just have no respect for someone else's work.
What's the point of any new port when it first comes up? You can't work on getting X or the USB ports working until you have a working machine to bang on. Patience!
Once it IS up and running correctly will be the time to judge whether the price/performance is worthy or not.
Democrat delenda est
Maybe you're X setup is misconfigured. I don't notice much of a difference between X and windows fonts at 800x600 on my laptop, and at the 1280x1024 resolution on my desktop I can use big 100dpi fonts that look great.
They aren't my posts, but I thought they were interesting, so I decided to share them with you ;-)
I don't know how far along those berliners are, but let me tell your from personal experience that OpenGL is not optimized for 2D graphics, period. I suppose if you shut off depth-buffering, alpha-blending, lighting, and a few other things, then it *can* be fast, but then it's not 3D anymore, hence defeating the original purpose of using OpenGL.
On top of that, OGL has no native support for fonts, printing, serialization, and probably a few other things that may be important for a windowing system. One of OpenGL's original design principles was to be window-system agnostic (unlike IRIS-GL), so it's kind of ironic that it's being used to create a window system.
Although I salute their effort, I think OpenGL is the wrong tool for the job. It'll probably be a decade before computers are fast enough to handle a truly 3D windowing system. Right now, I'm guessing that anything short of an Onyx won't even come close.
Anyone care to benchmark cpu-bound, memory-bound, and disk-bound applications under Linux on one of these, so we can all see what we are getting for the money? :-)
I can't remember what it's called, but it's scheduled for about 3 or 4 years' time, i.e. the successor to the successor to Win2000. I think the name may be GDI, but I'm probably wrong.
Chrome is the codename for special web effects that were due to appear in IE 5.
Today I visited the local computer show, and they had one of those kick ass SGI monitors, it was $2,300 and came with a 32 meg video card! The bastards had to keep it in the box though... Guess they were afraid of the riots...
/orion
Earn cash in your spare time! Blackmail your friends!
I can't help but think that if SGI marketed this box correctly, it could be a shining star in the Linux world. The technical effort required to get Linux running well on SGI's Intel boxes would be minimal - basically, just good drivers for XFree86 and any other special hardware in the box.
They could then market it as "SGI's Linux-based workstation" and as "SGI's Windows NT workstation." Linux users would be thrilled to have Linux running on such high-profile hardware. SGI would attract more business; perhaps some of those graphics apps which ran so well on the Indy could be ported to Linux, and they'd keep the hardware business. Everyone would be happy (except Microsoft).
By the way, whoever was asking about TrueType fonts: XFree86 v4.0 is going to support TrueType 'out of the box' without the need to add any font servers.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
> You mean YOU think KDE sucks.
...
> Bottom line is, don't print pseudostatistics
> like that - they don't mean anything. If YOU
> think KDE sucks - fine, you're entitled to
> your opinion. Some of us happen to think its
> one of the best things to happen to Linux on
> the Desktop for a long time.
All that is required to satisfy his statement is that there exist, somewhere, anywhere, at least 9 people that consider that KDE "sucks". You woud then provide the tenth person to satisfy the "nine out of ten people agree that KDE sucks!". Simple, no? There's no requirement for the ratio to be generally applied, just for it to be true in at least one case.
Can anybody tell me - will the next version of
X windows support nice looking fonts. It is just terrible now.
And OpenGL acceleration. Got no Voodoo, just ATI but want to play some games.
Any progress in that direction - of making standard graphic extensions for Linux's X windows?
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
I was not talking about MS as a credible competitor. Overall it sucks. Just my eyes somehow prefer NT, which I boot when I do typing/reading. I can only stand fixed font under X - in Emacs. Somehow X manages to screw up the look of TT fonts beyond my toleration limit. ;( (I use KDE) and WWW browsing is just horrible, whatever tweaking you do with the Netscape. too bad...
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
..did a search and found their web site. Great. Hope it will be done soon. Really great.
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
my system is very, very decent. upgraded very good 17" trinitron to a better 19" latest Hitachi tube. 16Mb card. Same at home. :( ;(
Maybe I just see the defects better? I also have too sensitive eyes
Also I just gave up tuning Netscape under Linux so it uses nice sized fonts. On some pages it will always screw up.
Somebody - please, write an improvment to current X system.
peace.
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
I found it is the font size problem. For some reason the range of sizes becomes too big on a single page - I do not see that with NT version of Netscape.
I have installed all fonts for X I could find, including Type1 an TT.
Even with a right font - I find the rendering to be shitty under X. Probably its my personal perception...
Bring back display PostScript. My old Next box was rather decent in this regard.
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
lighten up. Part of being a true nerd is being flat broke and always wishing you had the latest and greatest technology and being pissed off that your clueless friend/neighboor/co-worker has said toy and uses it for word processing.
-matt
Actually, Chrome has now been un-cancelled.
He said, "You'll be able to tell your grandchildren that you helped assemble the first NT supercomputer," and I cringed.