6 Jun
2005
6 Jun
'05
1:21 a.m.
Hi,
Scott Stevens said;
On Fri, 3 Jun 2005 00:28:31 -0400 (EDT)
der Mouse <mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca> wrote:
Including the monitor and the license fees for all the necessary bits
of software? And including someone to be its sysadmin? I'm certainly
not about to baby along a machine running closed-source software.
I bought a few skid of Dell Optiplexes at auction about this time last
year. I got approx. 80 machines for $40. I've sold 30 or so of them
for from $20 to $80 each on eBay.
All of the above machines are very capable of running NetBSD. There is
a useful NetBSD package in the pkgsrc collection called xpdf that will
read and (somewhat) manipulate PDF files. It is trivial to print from
xpdf to any common postscript printer, or to almost any non-postscript
printer with a printer filter script that uses ghostscript.
This machine is an Optiplex GXpro - Pentium Pro 200 - running Linux and
I do almost everything on it that's not done on the Macs. Excellent
reliable computer, it's been running continuously 24/7, barring hardware
and kernel upgrades, since November 1999. A 10 quid ($18) Brother laser
printer takes care of printing - actually the printer is attached to
an even older 486 running FreeSCO to act as a print server for the
entire network. You *can* do these things real cheap!
--
Cheers,
Stan Barr stanb at dial.pipex.com
The future was never like this!
You are making life difficult if to don't have a
tool for reading
PDF files. I think you can buy a nice one for a few hundred
dollars.
You can buy a used PC for tens of dollars.