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The review didn't address desktop vs. server and as a "lightweight" review doesn't look any deeper than the distro package for answers to the questions and objections raised.
OpenSolaris works well as a server OS - that /is/ it's heritage. It's easier to run OpenSolaris headless and on a serial console than any of the *BSD and Linux distros that I've used over the years. All of the "standard" server packages are available to run web and net services out of the box. For truly lights-out server rooms it's still necessary to choose hardware that implements some sort of remote power cycle or remote system monitor capability.
The ZFS filesystem is interesting for desktop installations - it does allow seamless use of the 1-2 terabyte desktop disk configurations that are now possible. ZFS was designed for the datacenter - eliminating the need for the time-honored but fragile combination of journaling filesystem over software volume manager (usually over HW RAID). It's the first real innovation in filesystem architecture since journaling filesystems were developed.
Additional software packages are available from 3 well-known (in the Solaris community, at least) sites. Sun has it's own freeware site, blastwave.org and sunfreeware.com
http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/freeware/s10pkgs_download.xml
http://www.blastwave.org/
http://sunfreeware.com/

The package manager for blastwave.org is their own, the others use the standard Solaris pkgadd commands. The package naming convention is a long-standing convention - each vendor uses a different prefix, making it easy to differentiate the source of packages.
OpenSolaris commands, where Sun hasn't replaced stock UNIX commands with their own, reflect SVR5 standard rather than the more Linux-ish BSD syntax.
One of the places where Sun has replaced "normal" functionality is the init process. SMF is Sun's attempt at fixing the long-standing problems and in-efficiencies of the BSD or SVR5 init process. Apple has launchd, there's openrc and gentoo's baselayout that all have similar goals. SMF works well and there's a fair amount of support on the net for integrating non-distro apps.
One of the "why OpenSolaris" answers is that there is value in running the same OS on the desktop as on the server. For Solaris shops OpenSolaris on the x86* servers provides a common platform that enables system management efficiencies to be extended.

We had Joomla on Solaris working neatly also. That needs to be started up again as a simple to install package for OpenSolaris and Solaris 10. http://www.blastwave.org/dclarke/blog/?q=node/77

Latest OpenSolaris comes with full GNU tools, you just have to set PATH properly. The "rest" is available from http://www.blastwave.org/, although those sometimes are a bit old.

YMMV.

You have compiled KDE on Solaris? Go, shame yourself. After that visit the Blastwave repository.

Solaris isn't linux, don't try to use it that way. That's one of the major mistakes any linux-guy trying Solaris can do. It is hard to explain since linux is pretty widespread among the home users and the curious - but there is a complete unix world that you might not see, hence linux is not the standard. No, I'm not saying Solaris is it, but I also don't try to use linux on a solaris way. And no, I don't want Solaris on my desktop. (okok, I do, but that's my freak business, and I dont keep complaining about X rendering...)

Blastwave is a collective effort to create a set of binary packages of free software, that can be automatically installed to a Solaris computer (sparc or x86 based) over the network. Blastwave has a substantial build server farm for the use of the software developers and maintainers in the Solaris community. All software is built and tested in a standardized build environment using Sun ONE Studio 8, Sun ONE Studio 10, Studio 11 tools as well as GCC.

To sum it up, there are no complete alternatives for SF Compile Farm
at the moment, and it will be missed a lot.

The suggested alternatives can partially alleviate the problem:
http://www.testdrive.hp.com/
[FreeBSD, HP-UX, HP OpenVMS, HP Tru64 Unix,
Mandriva, Debian, RedHat]

http://www.blastwave.org/ [Solaris]

But a lot of stuff is left out (at least NetBSD, OpenBSD, Darwin,
Linux on POWER, AIX).

Please prove me wrong and provide links for alternatives to the CF for those
systems.

As I use both Linux and Solaris, I often go to Blastwave and Steve Christensen's Sun Freeware site.

If the type of program I'm looking for is there, it's popular enough for people to have asked for it to be prepackaged for them.

Consider it "voting with their feet" (;-))

--dave

see http://www.blastwave.org/efika/index.html for a really small power supply. The pico-PSU on the PowerPC EFIKA
also referenced in the ComputerWorld article :
http://computerworld.com/action/article.do?command =viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName=hardware&articleId= 9009122&taxonomyId=12&intsrc=kc_top

This is not a direct reply to your post, but anyway, http://blastwave.org/ provides a pkg-get program which, for all intents and purposes, works like apt-get (I know, this is not ports). A good and big collection of packages too!.

To clarify, where I work we run a mix of Solaris, Linux, and OS X, with a sprinkling of BSD (ok, and a couple of Windows machines and the old Netware cluster, but that's not my problem). I don't dislike Linux. Most of our new deployments run Linux. That doesn't mean that Solaris sucks, in any way, especially once you've installed the [plug] Blastwave community-provided software, which makes SunFreeware look rather inconsistent and incomplete.

There was a release of Solaris 2.5.1 for PowerPC that was discontinued around the middle of 1996 (I think). Just like Apple, it's not unthinkable that Sun keeps a version ported to a few select architectures like the PowerPC

Or maybe they're just letting the Polaris project (re-)do it for them. (Note that, unlike the original PPC port, the new one is big-endian.)

mplayer is available for download at Blastwave and you could try asking for mencode.
Check SunFreeware for precompiled packages as well.

If you want to build things yourself, Solaris 10 and the Sun compilers are free for download and use. gcc is also included with the OS but is slower.

You can find OS source code at OpenSolaris.

POVRay has already runs on Solaris 10 on x86-64 hardware.

http://www.blastwave.org/packages.php/povray

I'm sure a bunch of other people have binaries too.

An excellent browser that runs well on old Sun Solaris sun4m hardware all the way up to the latest builds. I have been using Opera for years and bought and paid for the licenses. It is a real loss to see a brilliant creator pass. I surely hope that his legacy lives on in world domination of the mobile browser market.

Dennis Clarke from Blastwave.org
http://www.blastwave.org/

RedHat, Suse, Mandrake, etc all offer linux as OSS

OpenSolaris has an OSI license. It is called the CDDL. Welcome to open source.

This includes not just the compiler but a very wide array of tools.

Sun offers the Sun ONE Studio tools for free. Vastly superior to GCC in every measurable way. Of course that is my opinion based on years of code crunching. The fact is that these are available for free. Download and go.
I believe that the source is being made open also.

ALL of the source code of anything marked OSS is available

Absolutely. All of the components under the CDDL are open. Have fun.
More on the way.
Heck, Sun just spent FIVE years working on an entirely new filesystem called ZFS and they released it and open sourced it at the same time. How cool is that?
See : http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/2005-11/sunf lash.20051130.1.html

Now, you mention DELL and IBM. Well they both sell hardware with services.

I have heard that .. somewhere. I think Sun does that too. So does my corner store.

Neither of them directly deal with Linux

see : http://www.redhat.com/sundown/
Why is there an IBM logo on that page? Why is there an edition RHEL for POWER but not for Sparc ? Why does it say in big BOLD graphics there "Migrate to Linux with IBM + Red Hat"?
Now go look at : http://www.redhat.com/en_us/USA/rhel/compare/serve r/
The absolute cheapest edition is $349 and the top is $2499 !!
I can get Solaris for FREE.
For UltraSparc or for Intel or AMD Opteron.
The cost of an OPTIONAL software support contract is less than 34 cents a day.
I ought to know .. I bought one because it was five times cheaper than my daily coffee intake and I can't live with that either.
See my blog : http://www.blastwave.org/dclarke/blog/pivot/entry. php?id=107
While you're surfing, look at the three guys at :
http://www.novell.com/linux/unixtolinux/
They are all parked on a bench outside the IT Directors office waiting to tell how reiserfs screwed up their data again and they lost the corporate database because of some messed up kernel patch.
But that is just me guessing.

You can buy just about any size machine from these 2 companies that
is both smaller/cheaper to larger/more expensive than what Sun offers.

Sure. I agree with "cheap".
Show me a 64-bit Opteron that is faster, cooler and less costly than a SunFire X2100.
Really. Anyone can make junk that is cheap and monsters that are massively expensive.
Show me a 64-bit machine that has more horsepower than an 8-core 1.2GHz SunFire T1000 or a 64-bit AMD Opteron machine with more horsepower than the SunFire X2100.
For less money.
Oh, and the Opteron gear has to be certified to run Windows as well as Linux as well as a real UNIX.
Good luck.

when I look at the top 500 fastest computers, where is Solaris in there?
Does it hold the majority of the top 10, let alone the top 500?

Take a long hard stare at my blog from a little while ago :
http://www.blastwave.org/dclarke/blog/pivot/entry. php?id=113
I count, what? 16 e

RedHat, Suse, Mandrake, etc all offer linux as OSS

OpenSolaris has an OSI license. It is called the CDDL. Welcome to open source.

This includes not just the compiler but a very wide array of tools.

Sun offers the Sun ONE Studio tools for free. Vastly superior to GCC in every measurable way. Of course that is my opinion based on years of code crunching. The fact is that these are available for free. Download and go.
I believe that the source is being made open also.

ALL of the source code of anything marked OSS is available

Absolutely. All of the components under the CDDL are open. Have fun.
More on the way.
Heck, Sun just spent FIVE years working on an entirely new filesystem called ZFS and they released it and open sourced it at the same time. How cool is that?
See : http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/2005-11/sunf lash.20051130.1.html

Now, you mention DELL and IBM. Well they both sell hardware with services.

I have heard that .. somewhere. I think Sun does that too. So does my corner store.

Neither of them directly deal with Linux

see : http://www.redhat.com/sundown/
Why is there an IBM logo on that page? Why is there an edition RHEL for POWER but not for Sparc ? Why does it say in big BOLD graphics there "Migrate to Linux with IBM + Red Hat"?
Now go look at : http://www.redhat.com/en_us/USA/rhel/compare/serve r/
The absolute cheapest edition is $349 and the top is $2499 !!
I can get Solaris for FREE.
For UltraSparc or for Intel or AMD Opteron.
The cost of an OPTIONAL software support contract is less than 34 cents a day.
I ought to know .. I bought one because it was five times cheaper than my daily coffee intake and I can't live with that either.
See my blog : http://www.blastwave.org/dclarke/blog/pivot/entry. php?id=107
While you're surfing, look at the three guys at :
http://www.novell.com/linux/unixtolinux/
They are all parked on a bench outside the IT Directors office waiting to tell how reiserfs screwed up their data again and they lost the corporate database because of some messed up kernel patch.
But that is just me guessing.

You can buy just about any size machine from these 2 companies that
is both smaller/cheaper to larger/more expensive than what Sun offers.

Sure. I agree with "cheap".
Show me a 64-bit Opteron that is faster, cooler and less costly than a SunFire X2100.
Really. Anyone can make junk that is cheap and monsters that are massively expensive.
Show me a 64-bit machine that has more horsepower than an 8-core 1.2GHz SunFire T1000 or a 64-bit AMD Opteron machine with more horsepower than the SunFire X2100.
For less money.
Oh, and the Opteron gear has to be certified to run Windows as well as Linux as well as a real UNIX.
Good luck.

when I look at the top 500 fastest computers, where is Solaris in there?
Does it hold the majority of the top 10, let alone the top 500?

Take a long hard stare at my blog from a little while ago :
http://www.blastwave.org/dclarke/blog/pivot/entry. php?id=113
I count, what? 16 e

> Should I guess where you are from

Why guess? Dennis told us who he is and he's not shy about his devotion for Sun/Solaris,
and he is NOT a Sun employee as far as I know.

>> Dennis Clarke
>> http://www.blastwave.org/ [blastwave.org]

How often do you see Slashdotters left their real name?

I actually agree with you on the sorry state of Sun for _the last 5 years_,
however, I think Dennis is commenting based on Sun _today_ and the future.

I also think it's absolutely true that Sun is offering better deal today
on both SW and HW sides than some of the companies he mentioned, at least
in some segments of the market.

I am not a registered user (hence Anonymous Coward), just felt necessary to
support Dennis as he and his blastwave crews have done so much for the Solaris community.

Personally I enjoy watching Red Hat, Novell/SUSE, Dell and IBM all squirm as Sun undercuts their prices in every product line. I can get Solaris for free, Sun Cluster for free, the tools for free, Java for free, the source code to Solaris for free and a dual core Opteron or multi-core UltraSparc for dirt cheap. The FUD being sprayed by Red Hat/IBM and Novell is just staggering.

Dennis Clarke
http://www.blastwave.org/

Personally I don't get it. I can achieve the same effect by simply asking them to take out the trash.

Honestly, I was just over at the server room with my teenage step-son and he is totally cool. He washed the white board, helped me install some servers, then I let him drive the Jeep around the parking lot and even go off road. I don't understand all his stuff and he doesn't understand all mine but we have fun together and thats all the counts. Hey, we even played HALO for an hour after school.

A high freqency buzz to drive away teens? Something seriously wrong with this invention. Yet another examply of soulless empty technology. I am happy that God watches over my family and both my teenage kids are a gift. I would never drive them away. If we keep and hold the communication channel open then we will never have them feel that they can't talk and we can't listen.

Dennis Clarke
Director Blastwave.org
http://www.blastwave.org/

- ditch the forte crap and vendor lockin scheme

Done. Sun released Studio 11 (http://www.sun.com/software/products/studio/index .xml) on Tuesday. It's completely free to use unless you want support. They also ship lots of GNU tools included in Solaris (under /usr/sfw) in case you would rather use them.

- ultrasparc performance is terrible. Address it.

Done. The UltraSPARC-IV+ chip (http://www.sun.com/processors/UltraSPARC-IVplus/) is up to five times faster than UltraSPARC-III and up to twice as fast as the initial UltraSPARC-IV. And the UltraSPARC T1 chip (code-name Niagara http://www.sun.com/processors/UltraSPARC-T1/index. xml) delivers incredible throughput (in my testing, often faster than a V40z with four Opteron 850 CPUs) while consuming much less power and generating much less heat than any other chip delivering anything close to the same performance and throughput.

- get the X11 libraries and headers fixed - completely

Done. Solaris 10 (at least on X86) uses the Xorg implementation. The previous Xsun implementation is also available if you need it, though.

- Get ldap working without so many support applications

I can't say that I understand this one. Sun's Directory Server is the best performing and most scalable server available. It's very in-line with the standards so any LDAPv3-compliant application should work with it just fine. It is the preferred directory for use with most commercial LDAP-enabled applications.

- make your platform work better with OSS software (eg: gcc)

What else needs to be done in this area? Solaris 10 ships with a lot of OSS software, including GCC, and Sun makes a lot of additional OSS software available on the Companion CD (http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/freeware/). If that's not enough, you can use the SunFreeware (http://www.sunfreeware.com/) or Blastwave (http://www.blastwave.org/) collections to get what you need.

I've been running my Blastwave packages[1] of the betas and RCs since the first snapshots became available, and I've been massively impressed with this release. Moving autovacuum into the main package is a really nice touch - all you have to do now is uncomment a few lines in postgresql.conf and it handles it all for you.

The new roles system is also amazingly useful. You can set up a range of roles with a variety of permissions, and then let users "assume" those roles. So you can log in with a day-to-day account, and when you need to do some admin work just SET ROLE [name of your super-user role] and then revert back once you're done. Great if you want to give a junior DBA the ability to create databases, but not the ability to modify other things (such as creating new roles).

Congratulations to the PostgreSQL team anyway - for doing things "the right way" :)

[1]=http://www.blastwave.org/testing/

I have installed Windows, Debian Linux, and Solaris 10 on my ThinkPad. Usually I use Solaris (Now I'm typing on it), I have installed 2 Zones on it, one for my personal web server, the other for My Desktop, in it I have installed many many applications from blastwave.org using pkg-get; The global zone is not used yet, because if there was something wrong with the 2 local zones, I could easily setup a new zone! I'd like to say Solaris is very, very stable and like very power efficient (comparing with Linux)
But there is lack of perfet media players on Solaris, i.g., I cannot play any rm/rmvb video files, so I have to switch to Linux to play them.
Comparing to Windows, Linux is not of course perfect. If I want to play PC games, then I would reboot to Windows.

I have installed Windows, Debian Linux, and Solaris 10 on my ThinkPad. Usually I use Solaris (Now I'm typing on it), I have installed 2 Zones on it, one for my personal web server, the other for My Desktop, in it I have installed many many applications from blastwave.org using pkg-get; The global zone is not used yet, because if there was something wrong with the 2 local zones, I could easily setup a new zone! I'd like to say Solaris is very, very stable and like very power efficient (comparing with Linux)
But there is lack of perfet media players on Solaris, i.g., I cannot play any rm/rmvb video files, so I have to switch to Linux to play them.
Comparing to Windows, Linux is not of course perfect. If I want to play PC games, then I would reboot to Windows.

You know, solaris has packaging tools (solves dependencies, etc) and there're packages for lots of software. http://www.blastwave.org/

Not installable by you, of course. But not installable?

Haha, yeah, I don't even know how to go to SunFreeware or Blastwave and download a copy of GNU textutils in Solaris package format. You can think that if you want to, but in the enterprise world, every software package I want to install has to be approved by about 3 levels of management. They want to know what it does, why we need it, how much it costs, and who else will know how to maintain it after I leave the company. The chance of providing them a list of all the GNU utilities necessary to compile your single average open-source app and getting approval for that is close to nil. Forget Perl modules and CPAN. These are real-world systems that might handle lots of real-world money, and they don't necessarily trust code that's been written by anyone on them.

Anyway, I'm just (hopefully) educating people on some of the problems that a real-world sysadmin runs into on a daily basis.

Hey .. the author is a great guy and I was talking on the phone with him recently and we both agree that a lot gets lost in translation.

He speaks fluent German and can translate into English as needed. On the phone he hesitates a bit and generally we are able to talk. This guy is not only funny but wickedly smart. Like really really smart and I think people just need to smile more and try to see that translation to english can really mess up a message. Face to face is the only way to talk, but when forced we can talk via the phone. Then we lose facial expression but we heve intonation and the occasional smile somehow can get through the phone. But the bottom of the rung for communication is the written word that has been translated from some other language.
So give the guy a break.

Dennis Clarke
Director Blastwave.org
http://www.blastwave.org/

Ckeck out Blastwave.org http://www.blastwave.org/ for some torrents, apps, guides, and other goodies.

Additionally, SunFreeware http://www.sunfreeware.com/ is another great site for getting applications.

If you need a nice packet-manager (though not for the whole system, but for apps) then have a look at www.blastwave.org they have the r33l pkg-manager called pkg-get, woth all dependencies and stuff. Installs everything unde /opt/something, just update your PATHs. I installed solaris 9 on my notebook, and with this thing even mplayer worked out of the box

just fyki. HAND.

However, from just trying to install software on a Solaris box I can tell you, I don't like it one bit. When I install software, I don't want to have to manually copy files and go in and edit config files myself. If this was 1980 I wouldn't mind.

Blastwave
NetBSD pkgsrc
Sun Freeware

"It will get released when everything is ready.

I don't work for Sun but I have been in the OpenSolaris pilot from Day One and I can tell you that I have been working like mad with it as have others. Myself and James Dickens worked night and day over the past weekend to build the OS on an E4000 as well as a LX50 machine for both enterprise class implementations and server room work. You can see the results of the workstation build at Blastwave.org and you need to watch James Dickens blog as well as mine to see progress that happens OUTSIDE of Sun. Not to mention the PowerPC port project at BlastWare which will also make progress when some other bits are in place. There are partnerships in place to work on the PowerPC port and GENESI is behind this as well as others.

Power is a big deal folks. Think of OpenSolaris on your IBM big iron also.

So go make a coffee and relax. Its coming real soon now.

Dennis Clarke
Director Blastwave.org
http://www.blastwave.org/"

Now wait a minute! How am I supposed to track your progress? I don't think you plugged your website in your post.

FYI - The header on your page http://www.blastwave.org/articles/BLS-0026/index.h tml links to opensolaris.com (looks like a domain squatter owns that) and not .org like your other pages.

It will get released when everything is ready.

I don't work for Sun but I have been in the OpenSolaris pilot from Day One and I can tell you that I have been working like mad with it as have others. Myself and James Dickens worked night and day over the past weekend to build the OS on an E4000 as well as a LX50 machine for both enterprise class implementations and server room work. You can see the results of the workstation build at Blastwave.org and you need to watch James Dickens blog as well as mine to see progress that happens OUTSIDE of Sun. Not to mention the PowerPC port project at BlastWare which will also make progress when some other bits are in place. There are partnerships in place to work on the PowerPC port and GENESI is behind this as well as others.

Power is a big deal folks. Think of OpenSolaris on your IBM big iron also.

So go make a coffee and relax. Its coming real soon now.

Dennis Clarke
Director Blastwave.org
http://www.blastwave.org/

It will get released when everything is ready.

I don't work for Sun but I have been in the OpenSolaris pilot from Day One and I can tell you that I have been working like mad with it as have others. Myself and James Dickens worked night and day over the past weekend to build the OS on an E4000 as well as a LX50 machine for both enterprise class implementations and server room work. You can see the results of the workstation build at Blastwave.org and you need to watch James Dickens blog as well as mine to see progress that happens OUTSIDE of Sun. Not to mention the PowerPC port project at BlastWare which will also make progress when some other bits are in place. There are partnerships in place to work on the PowerPC port and GENESI is behind this as well as others.

Power is a big deal folks. Think of OpenSolaris on your IBM big iron also.

So go make a coffee and relax. Its coming real soon now.

Dennis Clarke
Director Blastwave.org
http://www.blastwave.org/

It will get released when everything is ready.

I don't work for Sun but I have been in the OpenSolaris pilot from Day One and I can tell you that I have been working like mad with it as have others. Myself and James Dickens worked night and day over the past weekend to build the OS on an E4000 as well as a LX50 machine for both enterprise class implementations and server room work. You can see the results of the workstation build at Blastwave.org and you need to watch James Dickens blog as well as mine to see progress that happens OUTSIDE of Sun. Not to mention the PowerPC port project at BlastWare which will also make progress when some other bits are in place. There are partnerships in place to work on the PowerPC port and GENESI is behind this as well as others.

Power is a big deal folks. Think of OpenSolaris on your IBM big iron also.

So go make a coffee and relax. Its coming real soon now.

Dennis Clarke
Director Blastwave.org
http://www.blastwave.org/

It will get released when everything is ready.

I don't work for Sun but I have been in the OpenSolaris pilot from Day One and I can tell you that I have been working like mad with it as have others. Myself and James Dickens worked night and day over the past weekend to build the OS on an E4000 as well as a LX50 machine for both enterprise class implementations and server room work. You can see the results of the workstation build at Blastwave.org and you need to watch James Dickens blog as well as mine to see progress that happens OUTSIDE of Sun. Not to mention the PowerPC port project at BlastWare which will also make progress when some other bits are in place. There are partnerships in place to work on the PowerPC port and GENESI is behind this as well as others.

Power is a big deal folks. Think of OpenSolaris on your IBM big iron also.

So go make a coffee and relax. Its coming real soon now.

Dennis Clarke
Director Blastwave.org
http://www.blastwave.org/

http://www.blastwave.org/articles/BLS-0026/index.h tml

Look at Blastwave's article http://www.blastwave.org/articles/BLS-0026/index.h tml for a good glimpse of OpenSolaris.

These guys seem to want to make it their business to do a port.

Oh, BTW, don't forget to finish off the system with Blastwave. They provide a BSD-like package retriever that's integrated with Solaris' package system. Pretty slick.

"GNU/Linux has some advantages over it, for example debian's package system and free organisation."

Install pkg-get from blastwave. Then it's just pkg-get -i desired_package. Unlike Debian's packages, you get everything at once, the way MOST people like it, rather than having things chopped into 30 pieces.

Yes, I understand Debian's package management philosophy. That doesn't make it any less annoying.

furthermore .. http://www.blastwave.org/articles/BLS-0016/index.h tml Looks pretty real to me :)

or better yet http://www.blastwave.org

GCC and many other open source tools are included in /usr/sfw/bin. I'd recommend adding /usr/sfw/bin to your PATH. And if you install the companion CD, then add /opt/sfw/bin and /opt/sfw/kde/bin. If you use packages from blastwave then add /opt/csw/bin or /opt/csw/kde-gcc/bin (note: don't try to use both KDE from the companion CD and from blastwave -- I'd recommend the one from blastwave over the one on the companion because it is newer).

I agree that pkgadd is less full-featured than RPM, but it has improved since earlier releases of Solaris. And blastwave's pkg-get utility is very much like apt-get or emerge (except that it is for downloading binaries, not downloading and compiling source).

As I mentioned, KDE is available on the companion CD or from blastwave. I'm typing this now on a laptop running KDE from blastwave on Solaris 10 at 1680x1050 resolution.

Oh, and by the way Gnome is included, but it's called the Java Desktop System in the menu. It's pretty nice, and I did run it for a while, but I prefer KDE in general.

F/OSS software precompiled, and apt-like (with dependenices) installable from Blastwave

FYKI

Huh!?

This gets a +5??? WTF, over!.

This statement reminds me of that stupid TV show with Jessica Simpson and her duffus husband. She rents him a Lamborghini for his birthday. His dreamcar.. and when he takes it for a drive, he doesn't know how to drive the standard and its too low to sit in and scrapes the bottom going over curbs!! He hates it.

Geez! Solaris is a server operating system. If you really want to appreciate its strengths use it for a year. Also use package tools such as pkg-get from http://blastwave.org/. You can get the latest firefox release as well as all the GNU tools in something as good as apt-get. Solaris default tools are meant to be backwards compatible for those corporations still living in 1996. btw.. why doesn't slashdot have a spell checker??

You are absolutely, erm, right?

You forgot to list Blastwave!

http://www.blastwave.org/

Much better than all the others!

The pkg-get stuff at http://www.blastwave.org is fantastic. I use it a lot.

Tp.

For example, we have a working Gnome 2.6 (or 2.8 -- not sure if we've released that yet) build that fully integrates with dtlogin and doesn't interfere with Sun's Gnome packaging. There's a full KDE build as well. Sun is including a newer gnome with the current build of solaris 10 - IIRC 2.6, from JDS (Java Desktop System) 3.

Especially with the EA releases of 10, you'd probably have better luck using Sun's compilers over GCC. At the minimum, I'd build GCC using Sun compilers on the Solaris 10 system and not use a binary for 8 or 9. You can get a free trial license (60 days) from Sun for the compilers, and (like VMware) you can keep getting trial licenses if you need to. ;)

To my horror, once I finally got the thing installed I learned that it doesn't even come with a compiler.

True, but to be fair, no other enterprise UNIX comes bundled with the corresponding proprietary compiler, either.

Sure you can add GCC to it, but there must be some art to making GNU's tools work properly with Sun's libc that is beyond me.

This is a known "issue": AFAIU, the headers included in the GCC package you installed were meant for Solaris 9. Since Solaris 10 is still in beta, this ought to be forgivable, and the blame should go to the mainatiners of the GCC package you used, not Sun. However, Blastwave, the excellent Solaris package repository you missed, has GCC packages that work for Solaris 10/Express.