[3424] in testers
O2 thoughts
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Michael Whitson)
Tue Apr 14 17:12:55 1998
To: testers@MIT.EDU
From: Michael Whitson <mwhitson@MIT.EDU>
Date: 14 Apr 1998 17:12:46 -0400
So, I've had an O2 on my desk for a few months, and I have some
issues. I don't know that there's a good place to bring them.
1) The O2s I have used are slow. athyra as an O2 is qualitatively
about as fast as dzur, which is a 150 MHz intel clone, with half the
memory of an O2 and a crippled FPU. It's *slower* than the 64 MB Indy
it replaced. It audibly spends a huge amount of time accessing disk
(swapping? unclear), and commonly locks up for whole seconds when
doing anything complex with graphics or sound. So far, I've also
noticed this on not-a-guppy. I haven't had a chance to
comparison-test on other O2s, since they're not exactly easy to find.
I haven't really had the time or inclination to sit down with system
performance utils and try to figure out what's causing all the
slowness. I hope, I pray, that this is just a configuration issue and
we're not having slower hardware or a slower OS foisted on us.
2) Netscape. Netscape as a concept is gross enough to begin with, but
the version that comes with irix 6.3 is even more annoying. Probably
the reason it's so annoying is that the key bindings are all different
from the unix versions in infoagents, and the Irix app-defaults file
is apparently *first* in priority, since running
/mit/infoagents/arch/sgi_63/bin/netscape gives you similarly annoying
behavior. I've managed to mostly get something that works by nuking
the netscape binary and every netscape app-default I could find from
my local disk, but the infoagents netscape still loses in some ways.
Suggestion: spend some quality time with the Irix netscape's
app-defaults file, and make it behave more like "standard" netscape.
-wrong mike
