Xfce4 and SunFire X4100
I’ve been a Fluxbox and Openbox user for quite some years now. They have never let me down. The past few months I’ve been hooked on Openbox3 because of it’s openness in configuration and perfect Xinerama integration. The only thing missing was a decent panel. I’ve tried them all but none of them really cut it for me. yesterday I remembered an old long forgotten friend of mine, Xfce. Xfce had a panel and it worked like I wanted it to. Damn, Xfce has changed since my Xfce days. So I got curious about the entire Xfce4 system. Debian currently provides Xfce 4.4 BETA2. It really rocks. It’s window manager is quite similar to Openbox in a lot of ways. It’s fast as fck and looks pretty standards compliant. It even has it’s own compositing manager. It didn’t work on my nVidia Xinerama setup, but that’s nVidia. The Xinerama setup is wonderful, even the wallpaper setter was fully Xinerama aware. No more image stiching. It has built-in support for Gnome and KDE background tasks. I’ve said before I love XML, well, the entire config is XML based and neatly stacked away in ~/.config/ as it should be. The final thing Xfce4 has Openbox doesn’t is looks. It uses GTK2 making it smoother and just nicer on the eyes. At work I’ve installed both Xfce4 and Openbox3 on a PIII laptop. Xfce had no problems keeping up with Openbox. I think I’ll stick around Xfce4 for a while.
As you already might know I’ve been hired by ViaViela to polish up their IT infrastructure. Because their web services are running on the same machine I left to die a while ago they are looking for a new host. They want security, uptime and professionalism. So it became pretty clear they had to move to our network. To supply the service and uptime our network will be reinforced with a SunFire X4100 machine. This will be a machine fully dedicated for their services. It’s a really nice machine. Dual Opteron 248, 3GB of ECC memory, 4x 36GB 10krpm SAS disks in RAID 0+1, quad gigabit ethernet, remote management chip, the works. It’s going to beat the crap out of our own grebbehout machine, a SunFire X2100. This will be a nice addition to our server park and I hope we can get some more Sun machines in there. So does the company providing the machinery. They actualy asked me what kind of job I have since I’ve ordered two massive Sun machines in the past few months. I think they think I’m a potential heavy weight customer. Maybe, if HP or IBM doesn’t beat them by the time I actually need more headroom.
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