Blackbird In Use 1
==================
I have been preparing to use of my Blackbird workstation. I switched
off my ODROID ARM desktop so I have had to set up the Blackbird for its
role first. It means it must be able to handle modern WWW pages, to
handle my photos and ebooks, to connect my USB devices and to run my
custom software (mostly written in the C but also in the Tcl/Tk).
After these things will be finished then I will able to thing to move
some tasks from my SGI O2 to ths computer.
So what is done:
* WWW browsing - there is the FireFox. IT is not optimised but its
speed is good (there are exceptions like the Czech on-line shop Alza
[1]). But it is manageable.
* Lightweight WWW browsing and Gopher. This works (Links/Lynx).
* Control (update/upload scripts) my NumWorks calculator [2]. It has to
be done via the Chrome/Chromium browser There is not such thing for
Fedora/ppc64le. So it's an unresolved issue (I will have to use my GPD
Pocket laptop for this).
* View and manage my photos. This works (Geeqie+shell).
* Interface for USB devices (USB drives, camera). I have had to install
the fuse-exfat driver from an external repository [3]. Now it works.
* Manage and read ebooks. It works (FBReader, Calibre).
* Run my software. The C stuff (even stuff that uses Gtk+ and/or
OpenGL) works The OpenGL stuff is slow on the 2D on-board graphics
card, of course. Unfortunately, my Monte Carlo code does not run in
parallel (I use the SPRNG library [4] in versions 1 and 2 but they are too
old; I have to adapt my code for the current version 5). I should also
port my stuff to the Gtk 3.x one day.
References:
[1] http://alza.cz
[2] http://numworks.com
[3] http://rpmfusion.org
[4] http://sprng.org