21 Mar
2000
21 Mar
'00
4:16 p.m.
I *think* I've got enough other boards to populate
the others with 16Meg,
but I'm not quite sure... My tough parts are hard drives... I've only got
2, an RZ24L & an RZ25. Are there utilities to make a non-DEC hard drive
work in a VAX? I need to put in an order for a couple of SCSI drives
anyway... and I could get a couple 1 or 2 gig drives at the same time.
OpenVMS V7.2 is a lot more forgiving about that than say V5.5, however,
there is no guarentee until you try it. If your best system is a
VAXstation 3100 M38 you're probably limited to 1GB on the *BOOT* disk.
I'm sure this isn't a Truism, but I've *never* had problems with plugging a
SCSI drive from a Mac into a piece of DEC gear.
I do want to see what the box will do with
DECwindows... are there any good
spreadsheet/presentation apps for that? Erm... this might be a stretch, but
There is at least one spreadsheet'ish app available, though I've no idea
how good it is. No idea on the Presentation apps. For Word Processing
there is DECwrite.
isn't there a Netscape or Mosaic for that too?
(I'm not too interested in
turning the box into a 'net appliance, but mainly just to show people --
"Look! I got Nutscrape to run on this!" I co-own an ISP, and I'd bet that
none of the other ISP's could get that working, so it might make a strange
but helpful bragging point - "We support VAXen!")
OK, both run, BUT the current version of Netscape is V3.01 :^( I'm not
about to count Mozilla (besides I don't believe it supports VAX), as I've
tried it on my AlphaStation 500/333 and it had major problems (of course a
friend at work showed me it on Linux and it had major problems). Another
problem with Mozilla is it seems to require more than 8-bit colour.
I've no idea how Netscape or Mosaic run on a VAX though, as none of my
VAXen are running DECwindows, and only one is running TCP/IP. For that
matter I think only one of the Alpha's (the AlphaStation 500/333) is
currently running DECwindows.
On the
DECserver, I'm actually inclined to recommend NetBSD as it's
doubtful you've got the Y2k version of Ultrix. Beware a standard install
of NetBSD seems to want well over 500MB of HD space.
I'll be lucky if I have any time before 2001 to tinker with the server... I
have a house to build this year, and what (very) little leisure time I'll
have will prolly be spent puttering with VMS.