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Weekend with friends (Beowulf, chix), Debian on Sparc64

Another weekend spent out with friends (I’ll post about PhilCon soon)!

I left home on Saturday around 2PM, after a morning of goofing off online and being lazy (which I have been doing more than normal lately). I headed down to the King of Prussia Mall where I met up with PinkFreud who was driving in from Jersey to see Beowulf in 3D in the IMAX. I’ve known him for ages on IRC through #irc-security which I found via the irc/unity mailing lists, so it was nice to meet up and have some dinner, trade SysAdmin stories and catch a movie. I was pleasantly surprised by Beowulf, I guess I didn’t know what to expect, it was very enjoyable. I’m glad I saw it in the IMAX with 3D too, that was very fun.

Delaware was my destination on Sunday, when I took a drive down to Wilmington to meet up with my friend Ashley who I know via the PhillyChix. We mostly just hung out and talked, I briefly met her girlfriend, and we grabbed some pizza. It was a really fun afternoon, and it turns out I desperately needed some girl chat time from someone outside of my normal friend group, and a fair amount of Linux geeking out happened too! Before I knew it 7PM had rolled around and I made the trek home.

Yes, I did get some computer stuff done this weekend too, I played with my Sparc Ultra10 a bit. Michael ordered me a gig of RAM for it off of ebay and now this machine is blazing! The plan was for me to learn Solaris, perhaps get samba set up, Windows installed on the SunPCI card and a couple other projects. After wading knee-deep in Solaris documentation for a few days I quickly realized that “learning Solaris” was going to be a bigger task than I honestly have time for right now. I should probably be spending my time learning how to set up samba (or playing with exim, or a thousand other useful things) on Debian so the next time such a project rolls around at work I have a clue what I’m doing. So I’ve changed my mind about learning Solaris, put it on the shelf for now, and after a talk with a woman at PhilCon who is running OpenSolaris I’m thinking I might go that route when I attempt it again anyway. I ended up tossing Debian on the Sparc, the base install was completed pretty quickly and I’m quite pleased with the result, in spite of having to remove the Creator3D card, which isn’t supported out of the box by Debian (or Ubuntu) and I’m suspecting might require a recompile of the kernel, but I haven’t looked into it. I installed samba on it, will configure it soon, and am now sorting out whether I want to make it a backups machine for my desktop or toss a bunch of music onto it. I am very happy with how this machine is running, Sparc64 is very nice.