The Future of Linux

14 July 1998

Door Prizes

Due to the problems with registering, the door prizes were handed out on the basis of birthdays instead of tickets. They included quite a number of copies of Red Hat, not only for Intel but also for Alpha and SPARC, some red hats, possibly some t-shirts and at least one boxed, stainless steel mug with an Intel logo on it. In addition, there were free VA Research t-shirts and copies of the July 1998 issue of Linux Journal for (almost) everyone, and Intel was busy handing out Bunny People key chains in the demo area.

Demos

VA Research had a number of lust-inducing machines on display, all running Linux and a host of interesting window managers and applications (including Quake II, the Persistance of Vision ray-tracer (POV-Ray), the GIMP, a Linux kernel compile, SMP-aware xosview, some image viewers, possibly Rasterman's Enlightenment GUI, etc.). All of the machines were running 400 MHz Pentium IIs; the Xeons each had 1 MB of onboard L2 cache (per chip, that is) running at full (400 MHz) system speed.

VArStation YMP: a dual Xeon-400 with a Symbios Ultra2 SCSI subsystem
VArServer 1000: a dual PII-400 with the 440BX chipset, 512 MB of RAM and 5 hot-swappable SCSI disks
VArServer 4100: a quad Xeon-400 with 1 GB of RAM, a Mylex DAC960PJ RAID controller, 10 (12?) 9 GB Quantum Atlas III SCSI disks, and a $43,750 price tag, according to the web page
VArStation 28: a PII-400 with the 440BX chipset, 256 MB of RAM, a 16 MB Matrox Millenium II and a 4 MB(?) Diamond Monster 3D (3Dfx Voodoo) running Mesa for accelerated OpenGL support and Quake II at 640x480 at a high frame rate (apparently the 3D card was incapable of higher resolution, even though Quake's settings screen claimed it was running at 1280x1024)

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Last modified 20 July 1998 by , you betcha.