samoht.com home This Old Sparc Archives SunHelp.org SolarisGuide.com Suns-at-home Mailing List geekish.com This Old SPARC The story of a man and his Sun SPARCstations (and an Ultra), and the trials, tribulations, and victories that go with the care and feeding of such a menagerie. Saturday, September 30, 2000 I installed StarOffice 5.1 a couple of days ago. I was thinking that maybe I'd use it to record my training activities, rather than Excel. However, in playing with it, I've discovered it's a little shakey. I dumped my current Excel spreadsheet onto a floppy and tried to manipulate it in StarOffice. It locked up good and hard when I tried to format a large range of dates. It must have been in a tight loop because the CPU was pegged at 98% for about 2 minutes. I finally just killed it. Too bad: I was hoping to make a switch. I still might -- God knows that Excel isn't a model of stability, either, but it's been pretty reliable on this particular spreadsheet. posted by Mike Thomas 9/30/2000 08:58:38 PM Wednesday, September 27, 2000 A couple of nights ago I realized that Solaris 8 apparently comes with, and automagically installs (at least I don't remember asking for it), the Apache web server. This is great, since I didn't really feel like obtaining the binaries, etc. to get it installed. Once I realized it was there, it only took a couple of seconds to configure it with the example configuration and have it serving up the documentation pages from localhost. Pretty cool. Today, I added 128M more memory to buzz. It was brand new memory I got from eBay, for what I consider a steal: $80! It was a dutch auction for 64M pairs at $40 a pair. I bid on, and won two. I've seen 64M go for $80 and I got 128M for the same price. I'm very pleased :-). posted by Mike Thomas 9/27/2000 08:30:51 PM Tuesday, September 26, 2000 An online Solaris Journal: Inside Solaris / Home Page posted by Mike Thomas 9/26/2000 01:30:39 PM Sunday, September 24, 2000 I finally got around to attempting to get 'zap', my SPARCstation IPC up and running today. He's actually the first SPARC I bought - an impulse buy for $25 on eBay. He's got 24M of RAM and a 400M+ hard drive. When I bought him I didn't have a monitor or keyboard, so there was little I could do with him. By the time I had a monitor and kb I also had sparky, so zap languished on the desk as a paperweight. Anyway, I decided to hook up a kb and monitor to him today and see what he has to offer. Well, he has an OS. I actually get to a login prompt, but unfortunately, he's got a "used" configuration. That means I don't know any of the passwords, and my guesses didn't work. So, he's basically useless as he sits. I spent a lot of time looking around for tiny linuxes that would be easy to install from floppy (that's all he's got), but didn't have any luck with "tiny" ones. Looks like Debian probably is a decent option, since they have tons of documentation on their site about installing from floppy. I have other options - I could break down and buy a bootable CD-ROM and install from that, too. But when it comes down to it, it's going to take some time to get old zap up and running. It'll be something I get to eventually. posted by Mike Thomas 9/24/2000 03:38:50 PM