Summary of X for SPARCstation 1 [Very Long]

[Nicholas Jacobs]

Well, demand for this summary has been fairly high, so here it is.  Once
again thank you to the people who were kind enough to send me their
thoughts on the subject.

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# Original Posting 
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   We are currently evaluating workstations, one of which is a Sparcstation
   1.  Eventually we may want to run X windows on the machine and we are
   concerned about a suitable configuration of hardware. One of the possible
   configurations is a machine with 8 Mbytes and a single disk (~100 Mbytes)
   for local swap and personal files for the user of the workstation.

   Is this sufficient? Obviously, the more memory the better but we would
   like to keep initial costs down. Please email me any responses.
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X-From: uunet!cs.brown.edu!pbg
X-Subject: Suitable Sparcstation 1 for X

We have over 150 sparcstations, so we're pretty knowledgable about
configurations :-).  It wasn't clear from your message if you are planning
on having an NFS server with a larger disk or not.  If not, I'd say that
100mb is not enough.  We run our systems with 100mb local and 12mb memory
(needed to run X/NeWS) but depend on some servers to hold parts of the OS
(man pages, include files, extra compilers, etc) and home directories.
That way our workstations are "dataless" and don't need to be backed up.
If you really want everything local, you'll need 200mb.

Peter Baer Galvin       		      (401) 863-7623
Systems Manager, Brown Univ. Comp. Sci.       pbg at cs.brown.edu
Box 1910 (115 Waterman Street)                uunet!brunix!pbg
Providence, RI 02912			      pbg at browncs.bitnet

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X-From: uunet!SJ.ATE.SLB.COM!poffen (Russ Poffenberger)
X-Subject: X on SS1, recent posting

The configuration you describe should work. Note that this would be the
absolute MINIMUM configuration you should attempt this at. I have run it
on an SS-1 with a local swapping disk (90 Meg) with 12Meg and it works OK,
the more memory the better.  BTW, you should put root on the local disk
also.

Russ Poffenberger   poffen at sj.ate.slb.com

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X-From: uunet!usc.edu!khale%aludra.usc.edu (Abhijit Khale)
X-Subject: Re: Suitable Sparcstation 1 for X

You need about 50 MB for /usr and the root partition. 20-30 MB of swap. X
can take (depending on how many apps you have) about 10-20 MB. Doesnt
leava much space. Id suggest getting two 100 MB disks ..

Abhijit
akhale at jerico.usc.edu

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X-From: uunet!acsu.buffalo.edu!pjg (Paul Graham)
X-Subject: Re: Suitable Sparcstation 1 for X

i use a 4/60 with 8M of memory and 18M of swap.  it makes quit a snappy
x-term (much better than my 3/60 with same mem. and swap).  however i do
lots of things besides have it act as an x-term so i plan an getting more
memory.  another 4M should only run you about $500, not much compared to
the 4/60.  just don't buy it from sun.  as an aside sun says the 4/60 is
not the NeXT killer everyone was waiting for, perhaps future product
announcements will be interesting.

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X-From: uunet!ihlpf.att.com!dwm (Daniel W Meeks)
X-Subject: Re: Suitable Sparcstation 1 for X

8MB is more than enough to run X. --dwm

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X-From: uunet!cs.brown.edu!wsd
X-Subject: Suitable Sparcstation 1 for X

If you plan to use xnews, 8Mb is not enough.  12Mb is over the hump.  With
MIT's X, 8Mb is acceptable.  I don't think you'll have much room left over
on the local disk for user files.  We configure ours with 32Mb of swap,
leaving ~15Mb for temp files.  I don't really see much leftover.  A sample
df:

Filesystem            kbytes    used   avail capacity  Mounted on
/dev/sd0a              15428    3813   10072    27%    /
/dev/sd0g              49470   41683    2840    94%    /usr

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X-From: Mark Moraes <uunet!csri.toronto.edu!moraes>
X-Subject: Re: Suitable Sparcstation 1 for X

You didn't specify which version of the X Window System. We run MIT
X11R[34] reasonably well on Sun2s, Sun3s, and Sun4s. 4Mb is adequate if
you are the only user on the machine, 8Mb is very comfortable (we have an
8Mb Sun3/60 with attached SCSI that runs MIT X.V11R3, and supports one
user logged in from a terminal, plus one diskless Sun3/110 client, and
it's fairly pleasant and responsive even then)

On the other hand, Sun's X11/NeWS server doesn't run too well on an
8Mb Sparcstation or a 24Mb Sun3/160.

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X-From: uunet!Central.Sun.COM!Jim.Thompson (Jim Thompson)
X-Subject: SS1, X11, and memory

I've got a color SS1 (cgsix) here with only 8mb.  Its great with X11R4,
but a little sluggish with OpenWindows.  Just a datapoint.

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X-From: jim at kanga.lcs.mit.edu (Jim Fulton)
X-Subject: Re: Suitable Sparcstation 1 for X

MIT's R4 server (watch comp.windows.x for announcements) runs quite nicely
on a 16meg SPARCstation 1 with a vanilla cg3 8-bit framebuffer.  We
haven't tried it on an 8meg system, but since the server's working set is
much smaller than R3, it should pretty usable.

##############################################################################
Nicholas Jacobs
Merrill Lynch Municipal Securities Systems Development, NY
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