Blackbird In Use 1
==================

I have  been preparing to use  of my Blackbird workstation.  I switched
off my ODROID ARM desktop so I have had to set up the Blackbird for its
role first.  It means it  must be able to  handle modern WWW  pages, to
handle my photos  and ebooks, to connect  my USB devices and  to run my
custom software (mostly written in the C but also in the Tcl/Tk).

After these things will  be finished then I will able  to thing to move
some tasks from my SGI O2 to ths computer.

So what is done:

* WWW  browsing -  there is the  FireFox. IT is  not optimised  but its
speed is  good (there are exceptions  like the Czech on-line  shop Alza
[1]). But it is manageable.

* Lightweight WWW browsing and Gopher. This works (Links/Lynx).

* Control (update/upload scripts) my NumWorks calculator [2]. It has to
be done  via the Chrome/Chromium  browser There  is not such  thing for
Fedora/ppc64le. So it's an unresolved issue  (I will have to use my GPD
Pocket laptop for this).

* View and manage my photos. This works (Geeqie+shell).

* Interface for USB devices (USB drives, camera). I have had to install
the fuse-exfat driver from an external repository [3]. Now it works.

* Manage and read ebooks. It works (FBReader, Calibre).

*  Run my  software. The  C  stuff (even  stuff that  uses Gtk+  and/or
OpenGL) works  The OpenGL  stuff is  slow on  the 2D  on-board graphics
card, of  course. Unfortunately, my  Monte Carlo  code does not  run in
parallel (I use the SPRNG library [4] in  versions 1 and 2 but they are too
old; I have to adapt my code  for the current version 5). I should also
port my stuff to the Gtk 3.x one day.


References:

[1] http://alza.cz
[2] http://numworks.com
[3] http://rpmfusion.org
[4] http://sprng.org