Kent West wrote:
David S. Miller wrote:
What exactly do you want to "go fast" on this sb1000 machine?
I want the machine to feel zippier than a Windows-based computer in a
typical dorm room. This machine is one of four that will be in a
university Computer Science lab, along with 16 SunBlade 100s running
Solaris 8 that have been in place for a year. The 1000s will be
running Debian. The 100s will be mostly used for Java programming
classes, and some web browsing, etc. The 1000s will be more for
tinkering.
I was hoping the students could see Debian in a very responsive
fashion, so it's more attactive than Solaris on the smaller boxes, and
more attactive than their (expectedly but no) slower Windows boxes
back in their dorm rooms.
After a few more updates/tweaks on this box, the sluggishness doesn't
seem so bad anymore. It at least doesn't feel any slower than the
SunBlade 100s running Solaris 8.
And speed issues aside, while I was working on cloning this SB1000 to
the other three, a student poked her head in and asked if the machines
were about ready. I told her "Only this one, but here, log in; it'll let
me get a better idea of what's broken for students." So I sat with her
for about an hour and showed her some of the neat features of Linux,
such as the ability to have more than one X session going at one time,
and different window managers/environments, and the eye candy of KDE,
etc. She was oohing and aahing and "I love this!"ing the whole time. As
she was leaving the lab, one of the instructors passed by and she told
him "I love Debian!" and he looked at me and tongue-in-cheek accused me
of corrupting the students away from the grown-up OSes and the
Microsoft-wannabe OSes. I just looked back and said "Yep. Another convert."
--
Kent
