Date: Sat, 14 Nov 1998 23:56:40 -0800 From: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au> To: "Jason C. Wells" <jcwells@u.washington.edu> Cc: FreeBSD-chat <freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG>, Ken Keeler <kkeysler@nwlink.com> Subject: Re: Can you recommend one of these workstations? Message-ID: <199811150756.XAA10471@dingo.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sat, 14 Nov 1998 23:42:00 PST." <Pine.BSF.4.05.9811142323380.21173-100000@s8-37-26.student.washington.edu>
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> I will be graduationg before long. I have little experience with expensive > unix workstations. > > The software that I am interested in running is SDRC IDEAS Master Series 6 > which is a CAD system among other things. Unfortunately, I cannot this > software on FreeBSD. (or can I?) > > It runs on: Sun, HP, IBM, and SGI. > > (I have used SGI and wasn't really impressed by IRIX. I have used Solaris > in process control and thought it was neat.) > > Can anyone point me to a good resource (not the vendors please) on how to > buy one of these machines? Any recommendations from experienced > users/admins on what to stay clear of? Sun hardware is generally cheaper for a given performance level. The existence of Sun hardware clones also gives you a better buying position. For less than a thousand dollars you can get a reasonable secondhand Sun-compatible system that will probably run your application OK. Eg. we just bought an Axil 311 with a single SM61 processor module, 128M of memory, 2GB of disk and an accelerated 8-bit framebuffer for about $800.oo. You would need to add a monitor, keyboard and mouse to this combination for a complete system. Systems from Axil and Ross generally offer excellent value for money. A good place to start in the Sun world is www.sunhelp.com, also check out sellers in misc.forsale.computers.workstation (something like that). > Are these machines really any better than Intel based hardware? Is beer better than beer? The question is uselessly vague. Some is, some isn't. > Is there any hope of FreeBSD being compatible with any of these OSes. I > see the SVR4 emulation shows some hope of running "SysV executabls taken > from Solaris/x86 2.5.1 and 2.6 systems". I am wondering if this will > translate into the ability to run a Solaris Sparc binary. No, see the "x86" in "Solaris/x86"? That means "Intel". -- \\ Sometimes you're ahead, \\ Mike Smith \\ sometimes you're behind. \\ mike@smith.net.au \\ The race is long, and in the \\ msmith@freebsd.org \\ end it's only with yourself. \\ msmith@cdrom.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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