l0pth is pronounced "loft" - synonomous with attic. l0phters are people who dumpster dive looking for computer parts, usually in large companies trash bins, and carry the parts back to their l0pht where they use them.
I've l0phted a couple monitors and cases from my ever so friendly ECE department before... It's a great way to get an eclectic computer collection for very little!
Currently, the utah GLX project (glx.on.openprojects.net) has GLX support from Matrox G200 and G400 cards, ATI RagePro (and derivatieves), and some (not in the main source t ree) support for S3 virge cards.
The speed of the project is amazing - after gX00 support was implemented, they got the ATI driver running in under a month.
It's completely open source, and the only thing thats stops cards from being supported is the availibility of documentation. I'd rather see card manufacturers support this effort (some have - Matrox has a press release out touting the success of GLX and of opening their card specs- http://matrox.com/mga/press_room/lat_press_rel/G40 0_Linux.htm )
For the near future at least, Alphas are still sitting on top of the performance heap. With API's (www.alpha-processor.com) new UP1000 AMD Irongate based motherboard (uses the same chipset as all Athlon boards), you can get a >40 SpecINT, >60 SpecFP computer for under $5000 (www.dcginc.com) . Nothing on the market is this fast.
For the price, Athlons and PIII's are great, but for serious number crunching, Alphas are the way to go.
Well, at Linux Expo 2 years ago...
on
Linux on Jeopardy
·
· Score: 1
They did something like it two years ago at the end of Linux Expo... Teams of people, questions like "name 20 linux distros", etc...
The funniest thing about it was the question:
"What kernel version was the first one where the.tar.gz file was bigger than 10MB?"
and Bruce Perens (I think, it was a while ago) answered "Windows NT". Yeah, you had to be there.
Linus was in the audience and was consulted a couple of times for corrections. Afterwards, I got run over by Miguel de Icaza chasing Eric Raymond around in the lobby... All in all it was damn cool!
OSS has its place, but I trust ALSA more. The main benefits I see of free software are in the areas of security and compatibiliy. Who knows what's in the proprietary OSS? Yeah, it runs, but how many bugs are in it that could crash the kernel? (not to say that is has bugs, but who knows?) Having many eyes look at something (ie if it had freely availible source code) is the best way to ensure that problems don't exist. Money isn't an issue, reliability is.
To correct you - the current kernel version isn't even supported by the 4front - most of the additions and bug fixes come from other kernel developers (mainly Alan Cox).
OSS has always seemed like "baitware" to me - give a version away for free, and then offer a much improved version for sale. In my experience, most people using OSS want it for the PNP functionality, which I doubt OSS will ever release to the public, as it would kill their sales. I don't see how that could be viewed as a positive thing in regards to the rest of the community.
They've also had a bad record of getting card support out, saying that they will release support only to announce later that the card in question will not be supported (mostly higher end cards) I've also heard of hardware manufacturers denying information to other developers because "4front is making a driver under our very restrictive NDA".
I don't have anything against people making a living, but when it impedes others, something isn't right.
The best supported card for AlSA is the Trident 4DWAVE-NX or DX (NX has quad speaker output). You can get these from www.hoontech.com for $50. It also supports a ton of other cards.
Not to burst any bubbles, but OSS isn't that great of a thing... It isn't free, and the free version that is in the kernel has a lot of features removed. I use ALSA for my sound support, and it can do so much more stuff than OSS, such as:
Full duplex support on all cards
Built in PNP support (runs my AWE64 without ever messing with ISAPNP, unlike OSS)
Quad speaker support
Multiple card support (I run a Trident 4DWave and an AWE64 in my system, and both work great)
Multiple applications opening the same sound device simultaneously (with a card that supports this in hardware)
Better organization and more configurability - save and restore all your settings for all your cards in one command line
The only things going for OSS now is a slight edge in the number of cards supported. When this is dealt with, I'm all for ditching OSS and moving to ALSA. If you're card is supported by ALSA, try it out - I guarantee you'll like it.
It is cool that OSS is supporting the contest though - community support in any form is always nice.
Never mind that there are some pretty bad Sparc bugs out there... The original UltraSparc has a nice bug that when run in 64 bit mode, it can be halted from any process on the system, unless you fiddle with the location of memory in address space.
We have a Ultra at where I work that has problems with its L2 cache - crashes on us once a week or so with parity errors...
The big advatage of free unix is that you can set up redundancy, due to the low cost of hardware - I would rather have 2 PIII machines running failover than one Sun.
Different free Unix'es are better at different things - We run OpenBSD as firewalls, Linux as client machines, FreeBSD on uniprocessor servers, and Linux on multiprocessor ones. This works well - specialization is the key.
We got some new Ultra10 360's at where I work (basically the same machine as the Ultra5 with more PCI slots and a tower case), and they are dogs. X performance is horrid, and the they are perceptibly slower than a PII-300 for most tasks... I'm not sure if this is Slowlaris or if it really is the hardware...
Now bump the processor speed up to 5-600 Mhz and put in a 7200RPM IDE drive and a better video card at the same price point, and I might start gettting interested, but as is, I wouldn't wish an Ultra5 on anyone.
As far as maintainence goes, I admin both Linux and Solaris machines, and I find that I spend twice as much time to do the same thing on Solaris as on Linux, mostly because the tools take longer to work, or are GUI only (unless you want to memorize some cryptic command line crap). Try adding a printer to 5 linux machines, and do the same with Solaris... Which takes longer?
Runs DOS/Windows? Where did they get that from? I know Sun has PC emulation, and they also have x86 coprocessor cards, but these are always extras...
Anyway, the Ultra 5 and 10 are dogs of machines compared to a PC of equivalent price. Athlon and 21164 based machine both blow them out of the water at the same price point.
The IO subsystems are basically the same as any PC, so you don't get the benefits of the UPA bus like in the Ultra 1 or 2, and they have IDE drives and ATI Rage 64 graphics.
Unless you have some closed source application that absolutely must run on Sparc, don't buy these - you can get a faster, cheaper solution elseware.
Linux has been running (more or less) on PSION for a while now... You can check it out here:
http://www.calcaria.net/
I would rather see linux on a WinCE machine though, as they usually have better expansion, faster proceesors, etc... But the PSION has a really nice keyboard, and the 5mx PRO boots from compactflash, so it would be possible to have a palmtop that is completely linux, with no other OS installed. And it works right now (which can't be said for the WinCE machines).
I've been using an original Millenium 8MB for the longest time, and it still is very fast, although the design is over 8 years old. I got a Voodoo 2, so 3D games are no problem (but lack of PCI slots is:-( )
I saw some Xmark performace figures with the Xfree86 pre 4.0 release on a G400 a while back - around 53 Xmarks! Thats really good for a consumer card that costs less than $200.
Anyway Matrox always has had THE BEST 2D performance of any video card, and the best Xfree86 drivers.
I'm not a "normal" geek. I definately know people who fit this stereotype, although I wouldn't include open minded as a characteristic. There are plenty of intolerant geeks out there that drive me crazy by assuming that they are the only right person in the entire universe, about anything, and that everone else is wrong. (I don't stand on either side of this issue, but see the kansas + evolution article for proof of this)
I would also add "alienates others" to the list as well. It happens even to the best of us when we drop into our technical vocab in front of the unwashed masses. Just because someone has a computer doesn't mean that they know the first thing about memory, disks or the processor. On the other hand, people who use this as a way to make themselves seem superior is just plain wrong. I see way to much of this in my job.
That said, get a life outside of computers. My systems are great, but the best investment I've ever made was in my friends.
Put one swap partition on each drive you have. The kernel will use whichever drive is less busy to swap on, spreading out the system load. They don't have to be the maximum size. Make whichever one is on the fastest disk have the highest priority.
You don't necessarily need 2x the size of your physical ram in swap - this is a throwback from the days when RAM was very expensive. 1x the amount of ram is perfectly fine, especially if this is going to be a single user machine - lots of swap is only useful when you either have a lot of users that are idle (i.e. stay logged in when they aren't there) or programs that take up more memory than you can afford.
I've also heard of ideas like putting small swap partitions inbetween normal partitions, so that the disk heads don't have to move as much. Anyone have luck with a setup like that?
Also, AFAIK the 127MB limit is a kernel 2.0.X an older requirement - 2.2.X supports bigger swap partitions.
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l0pth is pronounced "loft" - synonomous with attic. l0phters are people who dumpster dive looking for computer parts, usually in large companies trash bins, and carry the parts back to their l0pht where they use them.
I've l0phted a couple monitors and cases from my ever so friendly ECE department before... It's a great way to get an eclectic computer collection for very little!
Currently, the utah GLX project (glx.on.openprojects.net) has GLX support from Matrox G200 and G400 cards, ATI RagePro (and derivatieves), and some (not in the main source t ree) support for S3 virge cards.
0 0_Linux.htm )
The speed of the project is amazing - after gX00 support was implemented, they got the ATI driver running in under a month.
It's completely open source, and the only thing thats stops cards from being supported is the availibility of documentation. I'd rather see card manufacturers support this effort (some have - Matrox has a press release out touting the success of GLX and of opening their card specs- http://matrox.com/mga/press_room/lat_press_rel/G4
For the near future at least, Alphas are still sitting on top of the performance heap. With API's (www.alpha-processor.com) new UP1000 AMD Irongate based motherboard (uses the same chipset as all Athlon boards), you can get a >40 SpecINT, >60 SpecFP computer for under $5000 (www.dcginc.com) . Nothing on the market is this fast.
For the price, Athlons and PIII's are great, but for serious number crunching, Alphas are the way to go.
They did something like it two years ago at the end of Linux Expo... Teams of people, questions like "name 20 linux distros", etc...
.tar.gz file was bigger than 10MB?"
The funniest thing about it was the question:
"What kernel version was the first one where the
and Bruce Perens (I think, it was a while ago) answered "Windows NT". Yeah, you had to be there.
Linus was in the audience and was consulted a
couple of times for corrections. Afterwards, I got run over by Miguel de Icaza chasing Eric Raymond around in the lobby... All in all it was damn cool!
OSS has its place, but I trust ALSA more. The main benefits I see of free software are in the areas of security and compatibiliy. Who knows what's in the proprietary OSS? Yeah, it runs, but how many bugs are in it that could crash the kernel? (not to say that is has bugs, but who knows?) Having many eyes look at something (ie if it had freely availible source code) is the best way to ensure that problems don't exist. Money isn't an issue, reliability is.
To correct you - the current kernel version isn't even supported by the 4front - most of the additions and bug fixes come from other kernel developers (mainly Alan Cox).
OSS has always seemed like "baitware" to me - give a version away for free, and then offer a much improved version for sale. In my experience, most people using OSS want it for the PNP functionality, which I doubt OSS will ever release to the public, as it would kill their sales. I don't see how that could be viewed as a positive thing in regards to the rest of the community.
They've also had a bad record of getting card support out, saying that they will release support only to announce later that the card in question will not be supported (mostly higher end cards) I've also heard of hardware manufacturers denying information to other developers because "4front is making a driver under our very restrictive NDA".
I don't have anything against people making a living, but when it impedes others, something isn't right.
www.alsa-project.org
The best supported card for AlSA is the Trident 4DWAVE-NX or DX (NX has quad speaker output). You can get these from www.hoontech.com for $50. It also supports a ton of other cards.
- Full duplex support on all cards
- Built in PNP support (runs my AWE64 without ever messing with ISAPNP, unlike OSS)
- Quad speaker support
- Multiple card support (I run a Trident 4DWave and an AWE64 in my system, and both work great)
- Multiple applications opening the same sound device simultaneously (with a card that supports this in hardware)
- Better organization and more configurability - save and restore all your settings for all your cards in one command line
The only things going for OSS now is a slight edge in the number of cards supported. When this is dealt with, I'm all for ditching OSS and moving to ALSA. If you're card is supported by ALSA, try it out - I guarantee you'll like it.It is cool that OSS is supporting the contest though - community support in any form is always nice.
Never mind that there are some pretty bad Sparc bugs out there... The original UltraSparc has a nice bug that when run in 64 bit mode, it can be halted from any process on the system, unless you fiddle with the location of memory in address space.
We have a Ultra at where I work that has problems with its L2 cache - crashes on us once a week or so with parity errors...
The big advatage of free unix is that you can set up redundancy, due to the low cost of hardware - I would rather have 2 PIII machines running failover than one Sun.
Different free Unix'es are better at different things - We run OpenBSD as firewalls, Linux as client machines, FreeBSD on uniprocessor servers, and Linux on multiprocessor ones. This works well - specialization is the key.
I'm rambling here...
We got some new Ultra10 360's at where I work (basically the same machine as the Ultra5 with more PCI slots and a tower case), and they are dogs. X performance is horrid, and the they are perceptibly slower than a PII-300 for most tasks... I'm not sure if this is Slowlaris or if it really is the hardware...
Now bump the processor speed up to 5-600 Mhz and put in a 7200RPM IDE drive and a better video card at the same price point, and I might start gettting interested, but as is, I wouldn't wish an Ultra5 on anyone.
As far as maintainence goes, I admin both Linux and Solaris machines, and I find that I spend twice as much time to do the same thing on Solaris as on Linux, mostly because the tools take longer to work, or are GUI only (unless you want to memorize some cryptic command line crap). Try adding a printer to 5 linux machines, and do the same with Solaris... Which takes longer?
Runs DOS/Windows? Where did they get that from? I know Sun has PC emulation, and they also have x86 coprocessor cards, but these are always extras...
Anyway, the Ultra 5 and 10 are dogs of machines compared to a PC of equivalent price. Athlon and 21164 based machine both blow them out of the water at the same price point.
The IO subsystems are basically the same as any PC, so you don't get the benefits of the UPA bus like in the Ultra 1 or 2, and they have IDE drives and ATI Rage 64 graphics.
Unless you have some closed source application that absolutely must run on Sparc, don't buy these - you can get a faster, cheaper solution elseware.
I believe you mean "matter".....
You've been playing to much Final Fantasy VII (not that that is a bad thing - I'm completely addicted to VIII)
Sorry for the off topic post - I couldn't resist
Linux has been running (more or less) on PSION for a while now... You can check it out here:
http://www.calcaria.net/
I would rather see linux on a WinCE machine though, as they usually have better expansion, faster proceesors, etc... But the PSION has a really nice keyboard, and the 5mx PRO boots from compactflash, so it would be possible to have a palmtop that is completely linux, with no other OS installed. And it works right now (which can't be said for the WinCE machines).
I've been using an original Millenium 8MB for the longest time, and it still is very fast, although the design is over 8 years old. I got a Voodoo 2, so 3D games are no problem (but lack of PCI slots is :-( )
I saw some Xmark performace figures with the Xfree86 pre 4.0 release on a G400 a while back - around 53 Xmarks! Thats really good for a consumer card that costs less than $200.
Anyway Matrox always has had THE BEST 2D performance of any video card, and the best Xfree86 drivers.
I'm not a "normal" geek. I definately know people who fit this stereotype, although I wouldn't include open minded as a characteristic. There are plenty of intolerant geeks out there that drive me crazy by assuming that they are the only right person in the entire universe, about anything, and that everone else is wrong. (I don't stand on either side of this issue, but see the kansas + evolution article for proof of this)
I would also add "alienates others" to the list as well. It happens even to the best of us when we drop into our technical vocab in front of the unwashed masses. Just because someone has a computer doesn't mean that they know the first thing about memory, disks or the processor. On the other hand, people who use this as a way to make themselves seem superior is just plain wrong. I see way to much of this in my job.
That said, get a life outside of computers. My systems are great, but the best investment I've ever made was in my friends.
If you check this page....
3 p_260_specs.html
http://www.rs6000.ibm.com/hardware/workgroups/4
You'll see that they really only do about 13.2 SPECint, and 30 SPECfp. The "rate" numbers can't be compaired with normal SPEC numbers...
Put one swap partition on each drive you have. The kernel will use whichever drive is less busy to swap on, spreading out the system load. They don't have to be the maximum size. Make whichever one is on the fastest disk have the highest priority.
You don't necessarily need 2x the size of your physical ram in swap - this is a throwback from the days when RAM was very expensive. 1x the amount of ram is perfectly fine, especially if this is going to be a single user machine - lots of swap is only useful when you either have a lot of users that are idle (i.e. stay logged in when they aren't there) or programs that take up more memory than you can afford.
I've also heard of ideas like putting small swap partitions inbetween normal partitions, so that the disk heads don't have to move as much. Anyone have luck with a setup like that?
Also, AFAIK the 127MB limit is a kernel 2.0.X an older requirement - 2.2.X supports bigger swap partitions.