[tech] Console boxes.

[Leighton Haynes]

On Mon, Nov 29, 1999 at 04:07:04PM +0800, Grahame Bowland wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Just a quick suggestion. My home PC is a PII/400 with
> a Matrox G200 card. Now the Leighton has helped me get
> the AGP module and GLX working, it is capable of doing
> quite cool OpenGL graphics.
> 
> >From what I've seen of the O2 my box can beat it it terms
> of frame rates for quite a few things.
> 
> Why don't we set up a reasonably specced box - in the order
> of 200Mhz - and put the console outside of the machine room?
> Give it a G200 or G400, and let people do cool stuff (TM) with
> it? If it was set up properly there would be no need for people
> to have root access to use it effectively.

*giggle*

I've been trying to get this done for a good 2 years so far. I think
the chances of it happening are vanishingly slim due to a small number of
extremely vocal people who seem to be massively opposed to doing anything
fun or interesting with UCC hardware. (Well, anything that negatively 
impacts their ability to run rc5 or seti at home, those wonderful paradigms
of useless cycle wastage)

Nevertheless I'd like to put support behind this idea, it should be done,
and would be very useful. And don't give me crap about the SGI's being good
for this sort of thing. They're not. Besides which, things like GGI and glx
are good projects which we could quite possibly contribute towards. (I know
i've personally started getting my head around the matrox-glx stuff, and 
plan on fixing bugs in it, or if i can working out the WARP stuff).

But I know, it's not going to happen, I'm just going to have to keep 
coding from home, because UCC isn't going to get a decently specced
box for coding. Well unless you plan on coding things which don't
use sound.. oh, or decent keyboard and mouse handling... 
umm, or anything device related.. but you can code the other stuff.. 
graphics is fine.. umm oh wait a second.. as long as you don't need multiple
frames a second you're fine. Doesn't leave much does it? 

The point of this.. a lot of people in the club need to understand that
they're view of whats fun to program doesn't coincide with lots of other
peoples. Lots of you like coding non-graphical non-sound stuff. You like 
fiddling with mail-readers or web-backends or whatever. Lots of us don't.

UCC really should try and cater to as many people as possible.

(Yep, I know, this is a pre-emptive rant, aimed at various comments
which have come up every time we've had this debate, just thought i'd get 
in early)

> Just an idea :)
Hah! You should know better Graham. Ideas were outlawed in a Constitution 
change mid eighties, or at least appears to have been, if you check club
activities in the past 10 yers :P

Leighton...

--

4th Year BE(IT) Hons. student.
UCC Sysadmin.