[tech] Upgrading our PCs..

[Grahame Bowland]

On Wed, Oct 25, 2000 at 12:15:29PM +0800, David Manchester wrote:
> > Damnit, I need a LISP interpreter to do my window managing!
> 
> emacsWM ?

Sawfish is pretty much the standard Gnome WM and runs in rep, a LISP dialect :)

> > The good thing about xterms is that they don't break. I'm planning on setting 
> > up the SPARC boxes only that bench netbooting OpenBSD from morwong. That way 
> > random fools turning them off won't matter so much.
> 
> Why don't we set them up to boot/swap from one of DaveT's Suns?
> The Sun login jazz has that natty XDMCP chooser, enabling them to
> boot over the network & just be an X-term if we want, OR to use
> the onboard CPU for boring little tasks.
> Hell - the Classic even has enough CPU to play MP3s.

Well, I'll probably set up netbooting up today. But it's not a hard thing 
to move around.

> > Oh, can anyone tell me how you get the boot image filename? It's some magic 
> > number like 825F658D.SUN4C - is that just the ethernet address expressed in hex
> > digits?
> 
> Close - the IP address. I think they RARP, get an IP and then try to
> TFTP get IP-address-in-hex.CPUtype, if that makes sense...

Yep, that explains it perfectly :)

> > Sounds good. There's definitely room in the machine room to hold some of those 
> > VAXen we took to Shenton Park a while ago. Maybe we could build a small VMS 
> > cluster up? I propose a UCC VMS day! And before we forget, Nick had the idea 
> > for a UCC Eric building day. These would both be cool events to look forward 
> > to after exams.
> 
> Erics good. Especially if we're futzing with VAXen :)

Sounds good. 

Cheers,
Grahame