SPARC2 or LX ?

[Darrell McCauley]

Laxmi Prasad Musunur (mlp at forestry.auburn.edu) writes on 11 Apr 93:
>>	We're going to buy a new workstation for running GRASS.
>>The choice could be either a SUN SPARC2 or a LX. Could someone

>	I think LXs come with Sun Os 5.x, also known as Solaris 2.x .
>But that shouldn't be a concern.

no, it shouldn't, but it is. I hasten to recommend "old"
technology, but if you plan to get started right away with
applications other than GRASS, you may want to consider
buying the SPARC 2. This is because most commercial vendors
(there are exceptions) have, for some reason, not ported
their applications (even though Sun told everyone that this
day was coming years ago).

It really depends upon your other needs. If you tend to rely
on the generosity of netland to provide software for your
work (as I do), then I would advise you to get the LX.

For example, for my work (engineer/programmer/research), I use:
  GRASS as my GIS                          TeX for writing papers 
  'sc' for any spreadsheet work            'gcc' for programming
For each of these, svr4 poses no problem (gcc may be a problem,
but a precompiled version is available; TeX compiled *easily* for me
a few weeks ago). If something doesn't work/compile, I can usually
fix it. This (the svr4 thing) doesn't bother me that much.

If, for example, your shop doesn't like to be bothered with "details"
(i.e., you would much rather pay someone for software to do X, load it,
do X. Done. Next job...), you may run into the problem of software
not being available yet if you choose the LX.

There was a recent Sun conference for software vendors (on porting).