Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Hardware

What To Do With An Ultra 60? 51

Posted by timothy from the allocation-of-resources dept.
V_IL_Len writes: "I'm the administrator of a university NT based animation lab. I have a Sun Ultra 60 sitting unused in the corner which seems like a travesty. I don't have any Unix experiece but am willing to learn. I'm not sure what the best use for it is." Read on for more on the circumstances here; perhaps you've tried something similar?

"We currently use Maya. The students want to use Maya because it makes them more marketable. My boss and I would like to move away from a commercial package so the students would focus more on content rather than software proficiency. Unfortunately, the lab is under a grant which keeps it a Microsoft lab for at least 18 more months. My boss and I have talked about at the end of our software license contract moving the whole lab to Linux and using Blender and gimp as our primary tools. Still it seems a waste to let is sit antoher 18 months doing nothing. We don't need a web server because we don't maintain a web presence right now. So the question is what do you think is the best way for me to use an Ultra 60 in the short term? The follow up being, with 18 months to learn and prepare, how hard/practical would it be to create a Linux/Solaris based animation lab?"
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

What To Do With An Ultra 60? More

What To Do With An Ultra 60?

Comments Filter:

  • Huh? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 25, 2001 @03:02PM (#2610640)

    Your students want to use Maya because it helps them get a job, but you want to take that away from them.

    You're going to lose students.
    • This isn't troll folks, its a valid point.
      teaching the principles behind something is important, but also do it with software that is current. to me learning to use a peice of software well takes longer then learning the principles of animation.

      Dont take away a usefull skill from your students. for the sake of removeing microsoft. (that said maya runs on Mac OS X which is built on bsd unix and runs oh so sweet)

      • Re:Huh? (Score:2, Insightful)

        by 1101z ( 11793 )
        Well you don't have to take Maya away to switch to Linux, as Maya runs on Linux. Plus, people like Dreamworks and Digital Domain thing Linux is the future and are moving to Linux as fast as they can.

      • Re:Huh? (Score:2, Interesting)

        by thedude ( 13214 )
        Not really. I work in a similar (but non NT thnak god) environment. Students loose track of the forest for the trees. They think that "knowing Maya" will get them a job, but they end up learing what buttons to push and how to model and not how to animate, whihc in the end makes them less marketable.

        In the end you need a good mix of low end platforms where you concentrate on simple animation, modeling, texturing and lighting before you can stp up to physics, hair, particles, etc..the Good stuff that Maya offers.

        Also, a lot of shops aren't going to be Maya based, it's fscking expensive for a full production license (even an edu license is pricey) You'll most probably see a mix of 3DSMax, Softimage, Lightwave and maybe one Maya staion so learning Maya just ain't all it's cracked up to be.

        Worry about your feet sliding through the floor before worring about learning packages.
        • Everything in the parent is correct, except that it leaves out a key fact:

          Any shop that has fair amount of maya seats won't care whether you know maya or not. They'll take a look at how you draw. If they think you're a good artist they'll teach how to use whatever program they want you to use. Nobody ever got a job because "maya" was on their resume. Especially if the word "maya" means that you used it college.
  • The company I am working for needs a new Sun box and money is tight. We could use one. ;-) We are actually looking on ebay. If you want to sell it ebay or some other site would be good. If you want to keep it it would be good to run Sun OS on or Linux possibly. Then you could set it up as a mail server, web server, gateway, firewall, whatever. Or even a test box for students who need more freedom on a box.
    • Nope, sorry. It wouldn't make a good mail/web/gateway/firewall. It's way too powerful-- it would be 99.9% idle (no joke), which is too close to being a waste. Hopefully that's not what you need your sun for, right? An old intel box should work just fine to handle a lab. Assuming, of course, it's just the lab and not the whole university.
      • No we need it for a test box. We ported our app to Sun and while we have one sun box we need another for systems to muck with.
        • That's what we used ours for... we needed it to support Sun driver development with PCI cards.

          I was also wrong about the speed. Our box was quite something in its day (at least relative to the other ancient (386) suns we have); I guess things moved on and I didn't notice. I thought it was much faster. Oh well. I checked the spec95 ratings and it's on the order of a 400 MHz PIII.

          I guess I was just trying to emphasize that a good portion of the money originally paid for the box wasn't for performance, but for Sun compatibility... it would be a shame just to not take advantage of this feature.
  • Here is an outlandish thought: Why don't you use the Ultra 60 to learn Solaris and Linux over the next 18 months. Like that your boss and you could use Blender and see if there are any advantages with the open source way, and when you see there are, use it as a Debian install server for the other machines in the lab.
  • You can get a SunPCi card [sun.com]. Then your lab will be 100% NT!

    Seriously, though, have you thought of installing Maya Studio on it? Expensive, but maybe they'll give you a discount, since you're helping create a user base.

    From your point of view, there's not that much difference between Solaris and Linux, so you might as well start learning Solaris now. And all the open-source stuff that Linux is known for runs on Solaris. So for all practical purposes, the Ultra will just be a supercharged Linux box.

    One thing you can do is start installing the apps you want for your future Linux lab on the Sun right now. This will give you useful experience, and start you thinking on how your want your Linux boxes configured.

    • Re:This and that (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Install Solaris or Linux on it.
      Then install blender and gimp(if you chose solaris), then install vnc and samba
      on it(of course if solaris start pulling down GNU software to make it useable). Then install vnc client on the
      windows machines in the lab and mount
      part of the Ultra 60 filesystem on the
      NT machines. Now you can offer those
      alternatives(blender,gimp, other) or if that
      violates your grant, just become proficient
      administrating the configuration. Then
      also work on converting your NT maya licenses
      to Linux maya licenses, if possible.

      Then in 18 months convert half of the lab to
      linux on the PC's and either use X and nfs to
      access the Ultra 60 or continue to use vnc and
      samba. Then eliminate the remaining windows
      boxes or keep one around as a reminder of why
      you converted the lab linux. I'd probably
      continue to use solaris 8 on the ultra 60.

      But I have to ask you this, what are the
      details of this crazy grant. Is this a grant
      of pc's and software from Microsoft or something?

  • Then you could have a local tool for sharing ideas about how to do stuff and also to showcase peoples work.

    If nothing else you might want to put Samba on it and use it as an fileserver. Also look into WebNFS for kicks.

    one more thing, it's a faster stonger box then any PC you have. (Even a AMD XP) If you want to do compiles for animations thats the box to do it on.

    64bit vs 32bit

    • Re:Put Apache and Slashcode on it..... (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      bzzt. sorry. a single 450MHz Sun Ultrasparc-ii (or even two if its a SMP Ultra60) are easily outclassed by even the slowest gigahertz class processor out there (e.g. Pentium-4) in both specint and specfp. 32 vs 64 bits just means it can address twice as much space than a 32 bit processor but it doesnt triple the speed magically or make it super fast or something. if anything it takes more instructions for a RISC chip to do the same job as a CISC chip.
  • I got my former employer, some time ago, to order an Ultra 60 as an uberworkstation. Two CPUs. 1/2gb RAM. And best of all, a Creator 3D card and the Sun HDTV monitor. (That's right. High resolution, wide aspect ratio.) I believe the resolution was something outrageous like 1920x1200. Lots of real estate for applications. [After I left, the Ultra 60 went to another Sun admin, and the HDTV monitor went to a person who was visually impaired.]

    I agree with the first poster here, in that if you can't find a good use for your Ultra 60, it isn't that bad of an idea to eBay it (if allowed).

    I don't know enough about animation to say what software it is and isn't capable of running, but the first thing you'll want to do is to figure out how good of a video card (okay, framebuffer!) it has. If it isn't that hot, maybe you want to stop right there.

    BTW... just something to note. You could install Linux on the Ultra 60, but given the Sparc architecture, you're not going to be as good off as running it on a PC, which most programs for Linux are targeted to, and supported.

    A Google Search [google.com] for GIMP and SOLARIS seems to indicate that there is a version of Gimp that'll work under Solaris.

    Seems like you have a number of options here.
  • seriously. Email me.

    Brian

  • Dedicate it to Rendering? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ikekrull ( 59661 ) on Sunday November 25, 2001 @06:28PM (#2611189) Homepage
    Perhaps you should set the machine up as a batch-renderer using PRMan/BMRT to give your students a chance to play with the kind of system they will encounter in a large studio.

    The more technical among them will enjoy playing with shader code, and the less technical will appreciate the fact they can simply submit their render while they get on with interactive tasks.

    Asset management is another application that is often neglected in 'school', so maybe you could look at buying or building a web-based system to handle storing and indexing tutorials, documentation, thumbnailing textures and animations (i.e. clips are subitted to the system, automatically downscaled and compressed to MPEG4/DivX etc.) so your students can easily browse a large repository and fetch the items without hunting through disks and CD's wondering where those preview renders they did 3 months ago went.

    This may be a mid-to-long-term project, but will certainly make that Ultra-60 useful as a server.
  • what you probably want for an animation lab is an SGI machine which is still what a lot of people use.

    That said, Solaris isn't a bad skill to learn, and it might be worth playing around with for a learning experience. Bear in mind that an Ultra 60 will only be equivalent to something like a Pentium 600-ish (dependant on what kind of CPU or CPUs are installed) for most tasks unless its been optimised for a SPARC based architecture.

  • Did you sell your last brain cell for beer money? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by cooldev ( 204270 ) on Sunday November 25, 2001 @09:26PM (#2611607)

    The students want to use Maya because it makes them more marketable. My boss and I would like to move away from a commercial package so the students would focus more on content rather than software proficiency. . . My boss and I have talked about at the end of our software license contract moving the whole lab to Linux and using Blender and gimp as our primary tools.

    Are you INSANE? You have an animation lab with software such as Maya [aliaswavefront.com] and you want to switch to Blender and Gimp? Sure, those are decent packages if you're an amature on a low-low budget, but if I were a student interested in computer animation I'd raise a huge ruckus if some open-source advocate switched the lab from Maya to those inferior tools without a really, really, really good reason.

    This isn't a troll. A few years ago I was seriously interested in computer animation at one time and got to wet my feet with Lightwave and Alias|Wavefront (before it became Maya). I still play around, even though my object modeling skills have stagnated. I've tried nearly all free and inexpensive commercial 3D packages (including the latest Blender as of about 3 weeks ago) and none can come close to even early versions of Lightwave. Unfortunately that does matter, as inferior tools put a low ceiling on students' creativity.

  • If you have any intention of switching the entire lab to Linux, and you don't have any experience with it, then this is a great opportunity to learn. There are pretty good resources on the web for learning Solaris. If you have the Solaris media, try uninstalling and reinstalling the OS. Then, try installing some apps that can add value to your network; including the NT machines. Create a file server, possibly a local webserver for documentation? You could eventually install some X Server software like Exceed or XManager on the NT machines so they would also have access to apps on the Sun machine...

    Its a great way to learn some basic Unix, and learn about X Windows. Whatever you learn will be 90% applicable to Linux or any other Unix.
  • My understanding is that one of the main strengths of Sun hardware is bandwidth, so why not put that to use and make the Ultra be a file server, providing supporting files/clips/etc. for client installs of Maya, or whatever. Or make it the render box (as someone else proposed) as that too will enjoy the high bandwidth of the Ultra 60.

    Check out Sun newsgroups and web boards to see what strengths your machine in particular has, and use it geared to those strengths. I mean, if the idea is to just find a use for the machine, you either want to add functionality or capabilities to your existing way-of-doing-things, or simplifiy and make more effective current way of doing things. It doesn't make sense to duplicate functionality or move functionality to a box that's less suited to the task than some other existing machine.

    I am by no means an expert on Sun products and have no experience with Maya whatsoever, so take this howevever you like.

  • Isn't this typical of a sysadmin, especially for a university? He and his boss want to do things just for their own purposes with no regard for the students or faculty.

    I'm watching one of these unfold right now in another department. Their new IS guy spent a bundle on Microsoft stuff and moved everything (mainly web serving and e-mail) from a functional Solaris server to a clumsy multi-server setup. Didn't even provide POP3 from the Exchange server, so everyone has to run Outlook or not use their university e-mail (which is becoming a popular choice). He can't get IIS configured properly, so all the promised additional functionality of Frontpage/ASP is still missing. And to top it off, the servers have been infected at least once in the past 6 months. Not once through this did they solict any other technical person's opinions and they ignored the unsolicted ones. Now the latest blow is coming. The university wants to consolidate and move all departments to one e-mail server and one web server. So now the department has spent 6 months struggling with this new configuration, plus the expense of the machines and software, for nothing.

    • Ooops your bias is showing. I actually am working hand in hand with the faculty involved.The professor states his primary goal is to teach content not software. His grant, his lab, his decision. We also have way more student demand than we can handle. The stated goal of the lab is to push the frontier of the animation medium as a fine art. Which does not necessarily require fur, clothes etc... We have a decidedly non-commercial slant to the type of work we are trying to encourage. There are plenty of places where students can learn the software. Our local technical college has a very good two year modeling program that teaches maya and lightwave. Therefore this is not a thoughtless egocentric casual decision. It is a well thought out decision to explore the options within the philosophy that the lab is founded on.
  • Maybe your students will get lucky and some bright administrator will fire your ass.

    Seriously, get a life. You are going to "save the university's money" by buying Sun workstations to run GIMP on?

    I hope this article is another troll.
  • Well Maya only runs on Irix,NT,Linux,OS X. Just buy a whole new lab of G4 and keep the apps they need in the enviroment that you want. Gimp and Blender are fine but if we are talking about students then you might want to think about not using non standard apps.
    • I would love to buy a whole new setup but we can hardly keep up with our current expenses. We had to really compromise just to maintain our maya edu licenses. Also we have no desire to be a production lab. We want to teach concepts and content. We have no intention on being a software training center. Which tends to be the problem we get a lot of students that just want to have Maya on their resume. So using non-standard apps may help us attract the type of student we are looking for. Specifically those that want to do fine art which is what we teach. Which is not a slam against other forms of animation. It is just that is our chosen agenda and program. If we lose the students that want to recreate the dodge truck adds to get a modeling job great. We have 40 seats (2 classes) and a waiting list of of over 450 students. But that is a different post. Thanks for the input.

Slashdot Top Deals

Solutions are obvious if one only has the optical power to observe them over the horizon. -- K.A. Arsdall

Close