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Today it was a really amusing day…

In the morning I finished up my presentation, with some help from Mom and Zhoro, and even chervarium didn’t have any major remarks… All that’s left is to make a general rehearsal tomorrow, and to survive until saturday :)

Then I did some magic, to make the streaming server to send constantly one image, and in the end I crafted an avi file, that just displays the picture at a low frame rate, and started sending it to the server. Because of this Zhoro’s machine is probably working at 100% CPU, because I use it to send the stream… In the moment there’s even a graph at marla’s stats, to see how much traffic does it generate.

Then Rumen brought in the sparc for installation (an old Ultrasparc I, 167 mhz, with 128 mb RAM), and it started to get interesting :) At first it didn’t work with the small monitor (a measly 15″ CRT), so I had to connect my 17″ LCD, which worked (looks like it supports the required sync-on-green). Then began the installation, which was one of the most painless and easy ones that I’ve made. All I had to do was to start rarpd and tftpd on the alpha, to get a netboot image from the nearest mirror (with the new installer), and to tell the sparc Stop-a and ‘boot net’. It ran the kernel, loaded the installer, and not-long-after-that I had a base system installed (the link wasn’t really fast). Then I told it to do apt-get install some-really-important-packages, it downloaded about 200mb packages, installed them (for about 1-2 hours), and now the machine has a working Debian with Gnome, which is even localized :)

The machine is pretty good, and for a workstation it’s better that the alpha, no matter that the display support only 256 colors, and is a bit slow. It even has a full power off when you halt it – something, that took the PC engineers a lot of time to get right with the damn APM BIOS-es. And it’s really nicer to work than the Itanic, on which I did some work through the day…

At the same time I was finishing the configuration on Rumen’s laptop, to have a good enough environment for work (and I’m thinking about getting another external mouse, his sucks), I found and somewhat fixed a problem with the transformer’s cable, with duct tape (but he’ll have to take it somewhere for repairs, I hope the patch holds until the end of Openfest). I had the strange idea to try KDE, while doing the configurations…

There was a period in the beginning of the sparc installation, that I found myself sitting between it and the alpha, working on both – one of them is 9 years old, the other one ~14, they aren’t mainstream, and in fact they work great…

I’ve put pictures from all this here (in the beginning the idea was to show Velin what’s at home, for him to be prepared). One can see the serious attempts to cover everything with used tissues, I really hate the beginning of the winter…

The night finished with Velin at “Divaka”, because we both haven’t eaten. He has to start writing a blog, IMO…

This entry was posted on Friday, October 22nd, 2004 at 02:44 and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.