Extra Pepperoni

My group is currently scheduled to move on May 1, and it looks like the Super-Tent will be ready. It isn’t yet, but they’re pretty close. This week I learned about VESA monitor mounts. VESA has a series of (poorly named) standards for monitor mounting; both my Samsung monitors use a 100×100mm VESA mount, and (with a small adapter) my new Apple 23″ display does as well. I have a VESA mount of some sort on order, but have not been able to find out what they actually purchased yet.

I am now wondering if I would’ve been better served by a taller monitor, instead of the widescreen aspect ratio, but it doesn’t seem like our space will be so tight that this is going to be important. Fortunately, even though I am using different displays, they are both silver, both 1200 pixels high, and both use the same VESA mount, so I should be fine.

• http://www.vesa.org/
• http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore?productLearnMore=M9649G/A

The Mac Pro arrived today, and it does seem substantially snappier, although it’s the “low-end” Mac Pro (4 2.66GHz Xeon cores), compared to the original fastest PMG5 (2×2GHz G5s).

I have already salvaged the 120gb drive from my old 700MHz Microway Linux machine; nothing else was worth keeping, although it was a fine Linux test box for several years. I got rid of the Sun Blade 100 (500MHz), which was invaluable for testing (and net installing) Solaris 8-10, even though it never got much TLC. I’ve tentatively decided to keep the Windows Dell, as much so I can test p2v conversions as because I haven’t yet installed the Remedy “Action Request” (help-desk ticketing) client in a Parallels VM yet.

I’ve seen my RHEL5 VM fail to respond to input on the MacBook Pro a few times, so if that continues to be a problem I’ll switch to the VMware “Fusion” beta. I very briefly played with several of the VMware pre-built “appliances”, but for my work it’s as valuable to run through the installer as to actually log in, so I will be installing Solaris 10 x86 (my first x86 Solaris install) tomorrow under Parallels.

With the frosted glass (still under paper) the partitions are taller than I expected, and the 4-person cubes are larger than I expected, but there is still going to be a major lack of privacy. With 60+ people in the tent and HVAC turned on, it is also likely to be quite noisy. We’ll know soon!

And my current office; the new Mac Pro & 23″ CD are on the right; the old PMG5, 19″ Samsung & Apple 17″ LCD are on the left (all going away). The Windows Dell is out of sight on the right floor. Ironically, I will actually have boxes for the two nicest/most expensive pieces of equipment because they’re new — assuming I don’t give up and throw the boxes out in frustration at the crowding first.

[](http://www.reppep.com/~pepper/album/ru/super-tent-20070417/Pages/21.html “My current / old cube”

I installed several hundred megs of patches, am right now copying over my MP3s, and am now installing XCode (should be standard on Mac Pros!) to install Fink next.