Maybe Going Palomino?
Well... I've found a place that will basically build my system from the individual components that I want. It's not going to be as sexy as the Blackbird, but it will be as nice on the inside... For about $2500 I can get a dual Palomino 1.2GHz machine with all the memory and drive space I can ever need. Also it'd have dual NICs to make it easier to bridge my two networks, and a CD-RW for those times when I want to burn CDs.
Now I'm back to wondering when...
I'm supposed to be getting a Sun box for work soon. I think it turns out that a guy left, and it was his box, but now that he's gone, it's free to be re-used. So I put my name in and why I need it and we'll see. I think it'll help a lot in developing/debugging the middle-tier that's coming from the InfoReach guys this fall. I just hope things work out - both with the box and with the code.
I have been searching and fiddling around on the net today because we're just so darn good! Really, the app is running well, we have to wait on others to do things for our next steps, and so all's quiet. Nice, but it can get to be a little too quite as well...
So I've done a little bit of looking, first at the system that I was looking at. I read up some more on the motherboard, and it looks very nice. This might actually be a really good system to get! I'm more impressed with the box and my ability to configure it the more I think about it. The other thing I was thinking about was the Sun box that I'm hopefully going to get in the near future. It seems as though someone else has put in a request for it, but I thought it was tagged for me... Oh well... we'll have to see how things work out.
Speaking of Sun boxes, I've tried to track down my Solaris 7 disks with Joel... I'm almost certain that I left them at his house. Let this be a lesson to me... never leave disks lying around. You never know when you're going to need them.
Anyway... when I get the Sun box the conventional wisdom is to get the machine name, any configuration information off it, and then rebuild it from scratch. Then, install what I need and properly put it back into the NIS network. Nothing that hard, but it's something that needs to be done. What I'm thinking about is GNOME 1.4 and Sawfish window manager. It'd be really nice to be able to put GNOME 1.4 on this new box and let Ximian's Red Carpet take care of keeping things up to date. The Ximian folks say that it's coming, but have no date as to when it'll be ready. The alternative is to get the sources and build them with the tools from SunFreeware and go that route.
If I go the manual build route then I'm going to have to get Sawfish as well... Also, if I want to build anything with KDE, I'll need to get that. There are a lot of details that need to be thought of, and Ximian's installer was nice in that it took care of the GNOME and Sawfish part. All you had to do from there was deal with KDE and any other tools you wanted - gEdit, etc. that weren't included in Ximian GNOME.
So... I'll first have to get the Solaris 7 CDs from Joel, then see if I actually get the Sun box, then worry about rebuilding it from the disks, then getting the essentials from SunFreeware, and then getting GNOME from either Ximian or the sources. There's a lot of work there, and it's going to take time to work through it all. No rush on the GNOME issue today.