Today it was a really amusing day…<\/p>\n
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 :)<\/p>\n
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<\/a>, to see how much traffic does it generate.<\/p>\n 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 :)<\/p>\n 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…<\/p>\n 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…<\/p>\n 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…<\/p>\n