Thanks for the tip. That motherboard is probably more than I can afford. If I weren't on Medicare, I'd be either dead or buried in debt. I'm looking for a whole barebones unit at that price, possibly SLI-ready and with RAID 0+1.
I'm sorry, did I give the impression that I was doing biological research? It's actually a feasibility study for a solar energy concentrator idea, to see if it is patentable. Right now, my worst problem is finding a graphics package that will work with my old Absoft Pro 5.0 compiler package and Win2000. I'm looking at OpenSolaris and Solaris Studio for down the road when I can demonstrate to possible supporters/grantors that I have something real. Or at least demonstrate it to myself before I blow my last piddling little retirement account on hardware and software. If I don't get all the bang for the buck that I can, there may not be a second chance. I burned and tried out the Belenix Live CD last night. Unlike OpenSolaris, it can tell that I have three fat and five ntfs partitions. Like OpenSolaris, it can only see the files on the C: drive. Every other drive is a "0", and trying to mount any of the fat drives produced only errors. If I understand correctly, unlike Apple OS X, and to a lesser extent MS Windows, these operating systems seem to require command lines for a majority of the setups and program operations. Those of us who have problems with that may not be road kill on the information superhighway, but we crawled off it a little maimed. I'm used to being able to teach myself from a manual, as for Adobe Photoshop, or the first DOS incarnation of Lotus 1-2-3. But this stuff. In order to get any programming done, I would have to go down to the level of C code to understand how to make the connections. When I get there, I find this sparsely commented octopus, with with six to a dozen headers leading to a score more other modules, each with their own headers. Either that, or a statement that seems to define a function with itself. Talk about recursion. In reading up on Fortran 90, I found a very useful structure statement that defined a three-byte type of variable for RGB, for which I would have to program loading and unloading subroutines for integer*4 in Fortran 77. That's great. I get that and will use it. But all the headers and structures and definition statements that seem to be there just for the sake of having pretty (undocumented) code? That, and the proliferation of command lines, are a real barrier to those of us who have had learning difficulties from grade school, and took extra years learning how write solutions with finite differences in Fortran to solve nonlinear PDEs and the like. I was starting to do pretty good scoping out my OpenWatcom fortran algorithms with the plotting program DISLIN. Until I found that OW could jump over an execution line and run an execution line that was commented out with a c in column one. At least in the debugger. I had been trying to get a program working right for most of two weeks with little result. I was lucky to find that and would never have found it in a command line compiler. I can't install OpenSolaris and try Sun Studio until I get another HD and rearrange my partitions. And I'm being a Scrouge about it because I'm paying down a hospital bill. The whole thing is driving me a little nuts, because I'm not getting work done. I'm spending my time messing around trying to find tools I can afford and learn in short order. I'm going to put in the Ubuntu live CD next (one day) and see what that does, and if it might be compatible with all the Sun Studio PDF manual files I've just downloaded. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
