|
Thanks for making this thread. I actually bought a Raptor Computing Systems Blackbird (with the 8-core CPU) back at the start of the pandemic when I was afraid they might go out of business if there was a recession. Fortunately they haven't, but I have also barely even booted that system since I put it together (partly because I didn't have room in my apartment for another proper desktop PC setup so it's incredibly uncomfortable for me to actually use the system). You can AMA about it, but due to using it so little I probably won't be able to answer any questions about "daily" uses. One great resource I found was the Talospace blog, made by the (former) maintainer of Classilla and TenFourFox (for Classic MacOS and PPC OSX respetively). He has both the big boy Talos II workstation as his main daily-driver PC and a Blackbird as an HTPC (!) and he's also (slowly) working on porting the Firefox JS JIT to POWER.
|
#
¿
Jun 19, 2021 20:17
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 14, 2024 21:03 |
|
|
Hasturtium posted:What are your general impressions? What were you hoping to use it for? Have you considered setting up a little USB switch to toggle between desktops, and feeding different inputs into the monitor to facilitate swapping between them? My general impression is that it makes for a decent, if quirky, little desktop Linux PC. Since I just bought the mobo and CPU I had to supply the rest of the parts and put it together myself, which mostly went smoothly. The few issues I did run into were that the front panel connector seemed to be designed specifically for whatever case they use and wasn't totally ATX compatible (I think I ended up just leaving the power and disk LEDs disconnected because I couldn't figure out how to get them working) and the HD Audio front panel connector was right at the very back of the board so the cable that came with my case barely reached. On the software side I installed Fedora since the general consensus was that RedHat-derived distros have the best POWER support (since IBM paid RedHat to maintain it, even before the acquisition), even though I usually go with Debian-based distros. I don't recall having any difficulties with the install, though afterwards I did have to manually tweak the kernel options to disable the built-in video output so OpenGL would work on the cheap Radeon R7-240 I threw in it (because a modern desktop without graphics acceleration is just painful) and every time the OS would update the kernel I'd have to redo that. I think there were a few other software tweaks I had to do but I can't recall what they were off the top of my head. The main reason I got it was just to have a non-x86 system that was (theoretically) on par with desktop-class x86 systems (at least at the time it released). I grew up in the 90s reading about all the exotic architectures of the time, and then in the 00s reading about people getting to snap up the machines using them for next-to-nothing because they'd become obsolete. By the time I'd actually got enough money to get into that, the window of opportunity had already pretty much passed and the machines had become expensive collector's items. I'm actually eyeing getting one of those HiFive Unmatched boards from SiFive for the same reason, and I would have done it already I'd I wasn't moving soon. As for a KVM, I considered it but my main desktop PC is on a custom-built cart with literally no room for another computer and my work-from-home setup uses a janky Thunderbolt dock that barely works even without a KVM in the mix so I don't want to mess with that. As I mentioned, I'm in the middle of moving to a bigger place so I will probably be able to get the system set up in a manner that I can actually use it without getting neck and back aches and hopefully find something useful to do with it.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 19, 2021 22:43
|
|
|
The prices on Raptor Computing stuff is eye-watering these days. The Blackbird bundle today is nearly twice what I paid for it in 2020. I understand that they have a really niche product and they've probably been hit really hard by COVID and all the supply chain fuckery that caused, but at today's prices put buying a second one completely out of the question. I'm not expecting their POWER10 stuff to be any less expensive.
Mr.Radar fucked around with this message at 04:17 on Oct 18, 2023 |
|
#
¿
Oct 18, 2023 03:42
|
|