On Tue, 28 Oct 1997, Jason Murdock wrote:
> Couple of other things to. Red Hat is generally better giving support.
> You might even want to consider talking to Red Hat about this. Since they
> are the only ones that support (with a commercial OS release anyway) the
> SPARCLinux and Linux/Alpha ports, they might consider offering it to
> customers and corps as an semi-alternative to say SGI workstations.
> POVRay, The GIMP, MicroStation (assuming they or you can convince the
i though microstationcad was commercial, in fact i though it resaled for
about 4k.
> makers of it to make a commercial release) and other programs on a 366Mhz
> DEC Alpha system would be a pretty nice alternative to a ten thousand to
<little note, decs not selling graphics boxen less than 533 now, they
match sgis octane quite well for being roughly 1/5th the price. these new
ones are cheaper than the old 500s, at least in hollywood, and use much
faster ram>
> one million dollar SGI graphics workstation. Even SGI realizes not
> everyone can pay that much for a graphics workstation. A Linux graphics
thats why they have plans to start making NT machines for the "low end"
(what the O2 was originally aimed at)
> package might be able to compete with it. The Amiga has already proven
> that high end graphics aren't the domain of high end workstations anymore
> with the early work on B5 done all Amiga. Linux _might_ be able to tap
> that market as well.
Linux still lacks the acceptance to gain developers capable of making
it a viable alternative to SGI. thier market is in 3d. as long as they
have the apps and the hardware acceleration, were still going to boot to
NT for work. the gimp is good enough when im not doing print work to
replace photshop unless i need paths. povray does not compare to high end
packages for animation (character animation can be done in povray, i had a
friend who almost tore out all his brain cells doing it, and it did work,
but it takes me hours to do with lightwave what it takes him weeks to do
in povray)
now, if only we could convince SGI to go with linux instead of NT...
(it could save them alot time recoding) after the ports of all the alias
wavefront software and the old IRIX tools, the other stuff could follow.
the other complaint SGI had was that they were hard to use, but i never
found that to be true.
sun is starting to make some progress, and solaris binaries are supposed
to run under sparc/linux. I can personally vouch for how beutifull
lightwave is on an ultrasparcII. but they are also so expensive that it
defeats the pupose.
decayed kisses,
The Pixel Fairy
http://www.pitzer.edu/~zkazi
