Saturday, March 15, 2014

SPARCL13 - D.O.A., R.I.P.

I may have mentioned that SPARCL13 was the guts of an old laptop.  It belonged to Mrs. Dellroy, until she dropped it, hard, on one corner.  It wiped out the LCD screen and inverter.  It was an Intel dual core PC.  Apparently, the mainboard took some damage, too.  It was never very stable.  I got it to do a Fedora 20 install, but only a minimal install, in text mode.  Also, since the built-in LCD was the primary display, I could never get it into BIOS setup mode.  Or if I did, I couldn't see it
After several days of work, I finally declared the poor machine DOA, thus ending a career that never even got started.  Oh, well.
SPARCL14 is, as we speak, on its way.  The parts are en route, and should be in Dellroy in a few days.  It will be an AMD A-series APU, with good on-board video, and fast memory.  L14 will be the new dev machine.  SPARCL12 will go on the air with SPOCS 2.2, and L10 will go to cold-backup status, until it gets its upgrade.  L10 will be the last single-core machine in the Penguin farm.  Its upgrade will be the end of an era in SPOCS-land.