The UCC has a variety of computers running a multitude of different operating systems. 1999 saw the appearance of a number of SGI13 (formerly Silicon Graphics) machines12 running IRIX14 -- the SGI Unix variant.
The staple OS for the UCC is currently Debian15 GNU16/Linux17. It is being used to run some of our user machines and several servers. Also present are FreeBSD18, Sun19 Solaris20, and Digital Unix21. Non-Unix operating systems include various versions of MacOS22, BeOS23 and Windows24.
You may hear a machine being referred to with such terms as ''console box'' and ''user machine''.
Referring to a computer as a console machine indicates that members can sit down in front of it and use its keyboard, screen and (if present) mouse and speakers. Some console machines have special uses in the clubroom such as raster image scanning or playing to the loudspeakers.
A user machine is one which all members can log in to or otherwise access (though you may have to ask a wheel member to set up your login on some machines). Console machines are user machines, as are morwong25, mussel26 and mermaid27.
Some computers are not user boxes. These machines perform dedicated functions and are administered by wheel members (see table 1 ).