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This is a "Sun TV" video stream with today's news from sun - it tells us that only early registration has been opened today to get Mad Hatter - it will not be formally unveiled until the Sun Microsystems conference which it talks about.

So, let's see, Sun's proposition is that they will "enhance" the Linux desktop by throwing Java in there.

Now, Java is about as proprietary a platform as they come; just to download the specifications, you have to agree to a license that requires any implementation you base on it to pass a Sun conformance test (I'd like to link the license itself, but the Sun site uses some dynamic content that makes that difficult; just click on the download next to the documentation to see the license). If you dare to download the JRE or JDK, the license gets even scarier, with having to donate pretty much everything you do "based" on that to Sun.

Well, it's par for the course, I suppose: the same cast of characters from Sun Microsystems has been trying to replace open UNIX desktop GUIs with something proprietary before, most notably with NeWS. (As an aside, one of the main Java movers and shakers, Gosling, actually sparked the creation of the FSF and GNU Emacs by creating a proprietary version of Emacs.)

Maybe there would be some argument that this is a deal one had to live with if Sun actually had something to offer in terms of user interfaces. But look at what Sun's history of user interfaces: SunView, OpenWindows, and NeWS--not exactly stellar success stories, either in terms of technology or in terms of industry adoption. These days, Sun is shipping Swing, which manages to be bloated, slow, and thoroughly unintegrated with the Gnome or KDE desktops, and OpenOffice, which also manages to be bloated, slow, and thoroughly unintegrated with the Gnome or KDE desktops.

If Sun wants to ship MadHatter, that's their business: Gnome is open source and as long as they comply with the GPL/LGPL, they can do whatever they want. But I think the Linux desktop and UI needs help from Sun about as much as the US needs economic advice from North Vietnam.

It's the GTK2 version of Mozilla.

It doesn't use the GTK "stock icons" like Galeon or Epiphany, so yes it still uses the "Modern" theme; but it sure renders everything nicer than GTK1 Mozilla.

Look at the font along the title bar being the same as the Evolution screenshot

So the only thing that is perhaps not unified is the appearance of the "forward"/"back" buttons, and what other application uses forward/back buttons? They're obvious to anyone who has ever used a web browser and I'm sure they'll be fine for new users.

It's the GTK2 version of Mozilla.

It doesn't use the GTK "stock icons" like Galeon or Epiphany, so yes it still uses the "Modern" theme; but it sure renders everything nicer than GTK1 Mozilla.

Look at the font along the title bar being the same as the Evolution screenshot

So the only thing that is perhaps not unified is the appearance of the "forward"/"back" buttons, and what other application uses forward/back buttons? They're obvious to anyone who has ever used a web browser and I'm sure they'll be fine for new users.

Over at LinuxWorld, Sun was demonstrating the Mad Hatter desktop. However, it wasn't just Mad Hatter on a single computer, rather it was set up on dummy terminals connected to a network computer, with a login simply being a smart card inserted into a reader within the terminal.

Over at LinuxWorld, Sun was demonstrating the Mad Hatter desktop. However, it wasn't just Mad Hatter on a single computer, rather it was set up on dummy terminals connected to a network computer, with a login simply being a smart card inserted into a reader within the terminal.

Yeah - I fully expected Sun to continue with its Java Look and Feel [java.sun.com] in Mad Hatter. Now that would have made an excitingly modern desktop!

From the article:
Project Mad Hatter will include a Web browser based on code from mozilla.org.

Looking at the screenshot, that appears to be Mozilla itself, not a browser "based on Mozilla code." It seems to me like Sun is trying to to make it sound like they wrote the frontend themselves, which doesn't appear to be true. Anyone know about this?

Anyone knows which fonts they are using on this screenshot for This Computer, Documents and other headings under the icons?

It is really amusing how Sun goes on to spread FUD about Linux in enterprise in light of the SCO lawsuit, yet they go on to employ Linux related solutions whenever it cuts the operating costs and overhead. Mad Hatter is a good example of this. Sun is stabbing Linux in a back when releasing press releases by pushing their queer Solaris/Unix in news reports how Linux might be dangerious in terms of IP infringment, yet you see them deploy Gnome and praise it for own gain.

and lets not forget, Linux is Unix, by Sun.

Is it flamebait if it's true? (See Paragraph 2)

Maybe the BSA should carry out more raids

C'mon, you can install Linux on a single harddrive, too!

But I wouldn't mind them carrying this baby or something alike to me. :)

I wasn't actually expecting SP2 this year, because as a beta tester for the last SP, I'd have heard if they were even thinking of beta-testing a new drop.

One thing nobody has picked up on is why are MS delaying the service pack. Could it, perchance, have anything to do with the judgement requiring them to ship Java with the next Service Pack?

I would always get very nasty-looking fsck errors on my Solaris machines whenever they crashed. Although the messages looked nasty, the filesystems seemed to be fine after being repaired by fsck. The problem was that the fscks interrupted the boot process until manual intervention was given.

One day, I discovered a journaling mode for UFS. The journaling feature had been available since Solaris 7. See mount_ufs(1M).

You simply add logging to the mount options of your UFS volumes in /etc/vfstab. Reboot once so that you remount those volumes (presumably including your root partition) with journaling turned on.

That's all! I haven't had to fsck since I did that.

Sun keyboards are pretty good, and you get some extra keys to play with as well. I'm sure you should be able to remap them to something in XFree, dunno what Windows does with them.

You probably just forgot to mention it, but surely there is a fairly big company that has a supported office suite based on OOo. So should someone choose to pay for the product and support, there is a viable option. Now, OOo and SO are reasonably compatible (Mozilla vs. Netscape 7 kind of situation), most importantly of course having same file format and core codebase... so switching between the two is fairly painless.

dear reader the gnome armageddon has started,

first of all i want to clarify that this text was meant to be a source of information otherwise i wouldn't have spent so much time into writing it. belive me it took me a couple of days writing this text in a foreign language. even if you don't care at all for gnome, you may find some interesting information within this text that you like to read. please try to understand my points even if it's hard sometimes, otherwise you wake up one day and feel the need to switch to a different operating system.

on the following lines i'm trying to give you a little insight of the gnome community. the things that are going on in the back, the information that could be worth talking and thinking about.

many of us like the gnome desktop and some of us were following it since the beginning. gnome is a promising project because it's mostly written in C, easy to use, configurable and therefore fits perfectly into the philosophy of u*nix. only to name some of its advantages.

unfortunately these advantages changed with the recently new released version of gnome. the core development team somehow got the idea of targeting gnome to a complete different direction of users. the so called corporate desktop user. in other words they're targeting people that aren't familiar or experienced with desktop environments. usually business oriented people who are willing to pay money for getting gnome on their computers.

having this new target in mind, the core development team mostly under contract by companies like redhat, ximian and sun decided to simplify the desktop as much as even possible by removing all its flexibility in favor of an easy clean simple interface to not confuse their new possible customers. so far the idea of a clean easy to use desktop is honourable.

some of the new ideas, features and implementations such as gconf, an evil windows registry like system, new ordering of buttons and dialogs, the removal of 90%-95% of all visible preferences from the control center and applications, the new direction that gnome leads and the attitude of the core development team made a lot of users really unhappy. these are only a couple of examples and the list can easily be expanded but for now this is enough. now let me try to get deeper into these aspects.

you may imagine that users got really frustrated because their beloved gnome desktop matured into something they didn't want. during the time, the frustration of a not less amount of people increased. more, more and more emails arrived on the gnome mailinglists where users tried to explain their concerns, frustrations and the leading target of GNOME.

but the core development team of gnome don't give a damn about what their users are thinking or wanting and most of the time they come up with their standard purl. the reply they give is mostly the same. users should either go and 'file a bug' at bugzilla or the user mails are being turned so far that at the end they sound like being trolls or the user feedback is simply not wanted. whatever happens the answers aren't really satisfying for the user. even constructive feedback isn't appreciated.

if you gonna think about this for a minute then things gonna harden that they are directing into the commercial area. the core development team actually don't care fo

It's problems relating to 'javah', not java. A quote from the manpage for javah : "javah produces C header files and C source files from a Java class. These files provide the connective glue that allow your Java and C code to interact. " Sort of useful. the javah manpage for solaris

Hey wait a minute! What was it we were talking about?

Want what?

They want someone to talk to them in PostScript. (Otherwise they feel lonely.) I bet these platforms would be keen for both people on earth who might be eager to write games in PostScript. Y'spose?

Even if we don't use "Adobe's brand name", it seems to me that the folks who gave us various printer control languages (which are useful to convert things to vectors that lasers inside laser printers like) would be keen on this kind of thing. Then again, I would suppose that (A) an extra chip or two and (B) the kind of assembly language programming that even I can do should be able to convert back and forth, raster versus vector, most of all if there is some kind of "nearly instruction level" programming interface to write directly to video RAM when necessary.

Hmm... Ok. IIRC, Sun has done stuff to make graphics happy in general purpose circumstances... Yup. Hey. Kill two birds with one stone. Sun's for-geeks literature has bragged up how flexible the low end Sparc chips are vis a vis hardware memory architectures. I bet we could kill two birds with one stone here. Toss the weak processor of this XGameStation-or-whatever, and put in a low end (but VIS-ready) low power Sparc of some sort. The only drawback I can think of is the crowded namespace. Let's call it a Shirkstation! Yeah. finallyHasANickname has "prior art"ed ya. :-p

Boy, Sun would be eating crow if that happened. Imagine The Register with headline,

In Yet Another Humiliating Change of Strategy, McNealy Flogs High Tech Open Bleep-Bloop-Boom Architecture for Tomorrow's Misspent Youth ("TMY" technology, love child of Jini) Whilst The Beast (Still) Flourishes and Pixellated Virtual Aliens Perish En Masse (as always, mind you) (Sun Microsystems Suddenly Has Long List of Disparaging Things to Say about X Box, Naturally.)

"I can't think of any sane reason why a kid would choose CISC achitecture to blow up androids," McNealy was quoted saying to both attendees at the San Jose press conference, "It's worse than a room full of rack mounted throwback 32-bit x86, acting more as a furnace than anything," he added with a sneer and a roll of his eyes. Industry insiders have long known that focus groups of ten-year-olds have found nothing determinate in the marketing of CPU's brand names and part numbers nearly as much as the AMPHTS quotient. ("Awesome, My Parents Hate This Shit.") Conversely, as Silicon Valley marketing executives know, TLA's do very well with CIO's, who have, until recent years, obediently invested shareholder wealth into all recent TLA tech instead of focusing (as do their children) on the end-user experience--splattering green guts of androids as the case may be.

One youth was quoted as saying, "Like, shit. Should I give two fucks if the green guts come from, like, from, like, y'know raster or, like, vector or like with pipelining and fully optimized superscalar architecture? It's like, um, well, I guess the Sparc chips with Single Instruction, Multiple Data are better 'n shit, but I just can't see myself getting laid any more probable, like, when I get old enough to get a driver's licence, and shit, and like, having this Sparc in my game. Like, I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's all the same to me. Know what I'm sayin'? I just want it to work. Androids, death, green guts on wall. Impress chicks. Get laid. It's all in line, like poetry, see? I just can't see the connection with this fancy, like, Sparc architecture. Know what I'm sayin'?"

As previously reported, upon hearing the news, McNealy promptly fired 60% of the consumer hardware marketing staff at Su

It's possible to solve this problem in a Unix-like environment. Solaris already has implemented part of it in a command called "lockfs". It gives you the ability to lock a filesystem, so that according to the command you give, all accesses to the filesystem will be blocked or will return an error.

So, on Solaris you can say lockfs -h /cdrom/cdrom0 and you will have hard-locked the first CD-ROM. You will then be able to eject it. The programs which have open files on that CD-ROM will not be killed, although they will receive I/O errors if they access those files. If those programs are properly written, they may continue to operate. If they're crap, they'll crash, but the O/S can't force people to write good software. :-) For further info on lockfs, see Sun's documentation.

The point is that here we have proof of concept that reasonable semantics for removable media are compatible with the Unix-ish API. The same kernel functionality could be implemented on Linux, and from there, it would naturally be possible for a removable media manager to offer the user the option of forcing an eject without killing any programs.

So, while this may be a Linux annoyance, there is an obvious way forward here.

Well, you can (and I will) make the arguement that Java has a slightly finer-grained approach to what you just described. In addition to the class Exception, there's also the class Error, and both implement the same interface Throwable.

IMO, the names are appropriate. An Exception means that a method encountered a condition that it can't express in terms of its return value (thank god we don't have to deal with all those result-structs of C/C++). We generally associate this with "bad", but really it doesn't have to mean anything other than "out of the ordinary". An Error takes one step closer to "bad" with it's harsh-sounding name.

Note that, in your examples, the running out of memory condition causes an OutOfMemoryError, not an Exception.

The issue becomes recoverability; an application could probably recover nicely from a FileNotFoundException (perhaps by creating a new file and continuing on merrily?). However, most apps (more specifically, their programmers) wouldn't have any idea what to do if they ran out of memory; hence, you generally don't catch Error, even though it's possible to do so.

I agree that exceptions are a fundamental part of Java and other languages, and they should definitely be covered by any good Java book, but any book that covers exceptions should take the time to teach the user how not to use them as well as how to use them.

I agree with your agreement. :-P Too many tutorials gloss over them. They are very powerful and make a programmer so much more productive, but yet aren't really all that complicated. I'm usually "disappointed" (to borrow a recent cliche) to see how often they're considered a specialty feature.

FYI, here's some javadoc links:
java.lang.Exception
java.lang.Error

Well, you can (and I will) make the arguement that Java has a slightly finer-grained approach to what you just described. In addition to the class Exception, there's also the class Error, and both implement the same interface Throwable.

IMO, the names are appropriate. An Exception means that a method encountered a condition that it can't express in terms of its return value (thank god we don't have to deal with all those result-structs of C/C++). We generally associate this with "bad", but really it doesn't have to mean anything other than "out of the ordinary". An Error takes one step closer to "bad" with it's harsh-sounding name.

Note that, in your examples, the running out of memory condition causes an OutOfMemoryError, not an Exception.

The issue becomes recoverability; an application could probably recover nicely from a FileNotFoundException (perhaps by creating a new file and continuing on merrily?). However, most apps (more specifically, their programmers) wouldn't have any idea what to do if they ran out of memory; hence, you generally don't catch Error, even though it's possible to do so.

I agree that exceptions are a fundamental part of Java and other languages, and they should definitely be covered by any good Java book, but any book that covers exceptions should take the time to teach the user how not to use them as well as how to use them.

I agree with your agreement. :-P Too many tutorials gloss over them. They are very powerful and make a programmer so much more productive, but yet aren't really all that complicated. I'm usually "disappointed" (to borrow a recent cliche) to see how often they're considered a specialty feature.

FYI, here's some javadoc links:
java.lang.Exception
java.lang.Error

Free J2EE implementation here!

Actually, this pretty much solved all my obscure or arcane C++ questions. In fact, while referring to that I haven't once had trouble figuring out if I was implicitly causing a conversion which caused a deep copy which in turn caused a memory leak since.

Of course, "Why did my program just pause for a 1/10th of a second, and how can I avoid that?" comes up more often now.

Trusted Solaris is about the most secure commercial grade OS out there. It's the de-facto standard for most secure OS installations in the Government. (check out www.sun.com)

No the Enterprise is a decendant of this product, the Cray Superserver 6400 which was acquired when SGI bought Cray.

That's consistent with their FUD campaign. But I wonder how selling an allegedly tainted version of Linux fits into this.

Peter

You could ask them what JRE they are using. I doubt the 60 Mb footprint of 1.4.2 will run on a cell phone. Then we get to basic point again: "What is Java?", besides being a Sun Microsystem trademark to cover multiple unrelated things.

OK, Java is a language. It's slightly confused with the JVM, which, of course, supports multiple languages. 'Java 2 Standard Edition' is the Java language bundled with a collection of standard libraries. But Java is not the same as J2SE. Java is just a language. J2ME and J2EE are the same language bundled with different sets of standard libraries.

In my opinion Java is at least a brilliant grammar. If you strip the bloat, the class libraries are also nicely done.

<rant>You've obviously had nothing to do with java.util.Date, then. Or java.util.GregorianCalendar. Or the fact that java.sql.SQLException can't distinguish between a bad connection, an authentication failure, and a fscking syntax error. Or...</rant>

However, for the most part, it sort of works...

You could ask them what JRE they are using. I doubt the 60 Mb footprint of 1.4.2 will run on a cell phone. Then we get to basic point again: "What is Java?", besides being a Sun Microsystem trademark to cover multiple unrelated things.

OK, Java is a language. It's slightly confused with the JVM, which, of course, supports multiple languages. 'Java 2 Standard Edition' is the Java language bundled with a collection of standard libraries. But Java is not the same as J2SE. Java is just a language. J2ME and J2EE are the same language bundled with different sets of standard libraries.

In my opinion Java is at least a brilliant grammar. If you strip the bloat, the class libraries are also nicely done.

<rant>You've obviously had nothing to do with java.util.Date, then. Or java.util.GregorianCalendar. Or the fact that java.sql.SQLException can't distinguish between a bad connection, an authentication failure, and a fscking syntax error. Or...</rant>

However, for the most part, it sort of works...

You could ask them what JRE they are using. I doubt the 60 Mb footprint of 1.4.2 will run on a cell phone. Then we get to basic point again: "What is Java?", besides being a Sun Microsystem trademark to cover multiple unrelated things.

OK, Java is a language. It's slightly confused with the JVM, which, of course, supports multiple languages. 'Java 2 Standard Edition' is the Java language bundled with a collection of standard libraries. But Java is not the same as J2SE. Java is just a language. J2ME and J2EE are the same language bundled with different sets of standard libraries.

In my opinion Java is at least a brilliant grammar. If you strip the bloat, the class libraries are also nicely done.

<rant>You've obviously had nothing to do with java.util.Date, then. Or java.util.GregorianCalendar. Or the fact that java.sql.SQLException can't distinguish between a bad connection, an authentication failure, and a fscking syntax error. Or...</rant>

However, for the most part, it sort of works...

Of course the JVM itself is written in C. If it were written in Java, it would need another JVM underneath it at the machine interface layer.

You really, really don't understand computers, do you?

Of course the JVM must be a native executable for the platform on which it runs. That's a very, very different thing from saying it's written in C. It could be written in any language which is capable of being compiled down to native object code. That, obviously, includes Java (the fact that Java isn't normally compiled down to native object code does not mean it can't be). I don't know for certain that the whole of the JVM you use is written in Java, but JVMs entirely in Java certainly exist.

I've had sun boxes on my desk for years, and from what I've seen, this hasn't been true for quite some time. If you opened up a Sun Ultra5 you'd find that it was made almost entirely out of low-end commodity components. The drive was a Seagate IDE drive, the power supply was relatively cheap, the graphics chipset was ATI/rage, and although the RAM was nonstandard it wasn't ECC and it wasn't superior in quality.

I think this bit is wrong, Ultra 5s take 50ns 168-pin JEDEC DIMMs, ECC error-correction. In fact I'll stick my neck out and say all Sun machines take ECC RAM only.

Perhaps what threw you was that they don't even take SDRAM (it's what I used to call EDO FPRAM I think).

See Ultra[tm] 5 Workstation: Hardware Specifications

Have a look at that (3rd time I post this link in /.)

Sorry guys, but Sun is a great company. They have supported open standards before anyone had a clue about it and they have already given a lot to the community. Java gains groud where microsoft still tries to enter the market (mobile phones etc), solaris is a mature product (solaris 10 is being used/tested inside sun for almost a year) and their hardware may soon fill the performance gap.
I do not see why it may be too late for them.

My guess is that sun lacks a mascot who stands for liberty, love and the pursuit of happiness all the while standing up for the little guy.

A mascot should enjoy being a super hero, fragging, and sports and should appeal to the geek, the freak, the n00b and those corporate types.

And no! Duke is not cool. Duke thinks that he is cool. But he only reaches cute. And cute is for sissies.

My guess is that sun lacks a mascot who stands for liberty, love and the pursuit of happiness all the while standing up for the little guy.

A mascot should enjoy being a super hero, fragging, and sports and should appeal to the geek, the freak, the n00b and those corporate types.

And no! Duke is not cool. Duke thinks that he is cool. But he only reaches cute. And cute is for sissies.

My guess is that sun lacks a mascot who stands for liberty, love and the pursuit of happiness all the while standing up for the little guy.

A mascot should enjoy being a super hero, fragging, and sports and should appeal to the geek, the freak, the n00b and those corporate types.

And no! Duke is not cool. Duke thinks that he is cool. But he only reaches cute. And cute is for sissies.

Sun was the de facto standard 3 years ago - HP and IBM now are taking big chunks out of this market.

Nope

Too bad independent sources agree, Solaris is still #1.

The revenue of Sun Microsystems in the quarter ended June 2003 fell sharply from the revenue in the same quarter of 2002

There is no mention of this in the article you posted.

The revenue fell far short of Wall Street expectations, and the stock promptly crashed.

"Crashed"? Come on, quit with the exaggerations. Look at this graph. Thus far they have sunk $1 per share or ~20%. When your stock value is that low it's easy to lose a large percentage over a small amount.

I find it strange that Red Hat's stock is higher than Sun's and yet Sun brings in billions every quarter and has 6.6 billion in the bank. I think it says a lot about the relavance of using stock prices as a note for discussion.

For years, Sun has hidden its performance-poor servers behind its Solaris operating system.

Please, tell us about your experience with Sun. Have you administered it and if so for how long? Are you a user and if so for how long?

They have one of the most stable OSes out there, superb hardware and some of the best support which I'm sure amounts to nothing.

The IBM machine and the Sun machine are running the same operating system, Linux. Then, the comparison of the two machines comes down to performance

Once again, you seem ill informed. The Linux offerings are on x86 servers, not SPARCs. With x86 hardware there aren't many ways to differentiate one box from another at a hardware level.

In other words, the customers will be forced to look at the quality of the basic hardware.

You forgot cost and what's most important to companies, support.

or the "TPC-C benchmark"

Sun hasn't submitted a TPC-C benchmark since late 2001, and it was on old hardware. This may or may not be a good thing, but you cannot tell.

Before you keep bashing Sun I would seriously consider doing two things: Getting out into the real world to see how many people trust and use Sun/Solaris and do some research.

Until Sun is unseated as #1 in the UNIX server market (as reported by Gartner) and has less than it's 6.6 billion in the bank along with 13 billion in total assets I don't think Sun is too concerned.

Your post is nothing more than the often repeated "Sun is dying" chant that is not backed up by any relavant facts.

I have a degree in computer science. The day you will get a college degree, or at least some formal qualification, you won't need to go around saying: I am a "Java programmer".

What utter garbage. I'd describe myself primarily as a Java programmer, and I've got a college degree, a masters degree and a bucketful of professional qualifications.

Who are you that you can say what can be important in someone else situation?

I don't know. Who are you that you can say the same? There are plenty of cases where Java can be used in shell scripts, or where the same functionality can be achieved using a tool such as Ant (which is very widely used these days). Startup time isn't always the be all and end all of what people need from their programs. If it is, then obviously there are better tools than Java. I'd have hoped that at some point they'd have taught you in your college degree that there are plenty of tools out there and that there's such a thing as picking the right tool for a given job. That tool may be Java, it may be perl, it may be lovingly hand-crafted assembly code.

The fact that you seem to ignore that means that you also ignore the things that you can do with the JDK that you can't do with gcj, and ignore the requirements people may have that your preferred way of working doesn't address. And also, it seems, the fact that some people don't agree with your blanket generalisations.

In the meanwhile, we can do everything that you can do and everything that you can't as well.

Like writing programs plagued with buffer overflows? Why anyone uses C/C++ to write anything besides system software is beyond me. Especially when safe languages like Java, .NET, and Python exist. Java is fine on the desktop. Its even better on the server. Its definetly here to stay, and gets faster all the time. Quit yer yowling and go here.

There's a technical paper on HotSpot technology that covers much of the ground. It does mention range checking removal, but also some of the complications: dynamic loading of classes, runtime reflective method calling, and adherence to the Java security model. From a quick read it suggests that flow analysis is appropriate for inlining virtual method calls, and that de-optimization has to happen when the environment changes. Complicated stuff.

I know enough about compilation optimization to appreciate how complicated a subject it is, and that many optimizations can appear to be counter-productive. I'm always going to have an interest in it, but don't think I'm ever going to be working on it from the inside by doing software research.

Cheers,

Ian.

It is a shame that Sun isn't capitalizing on this -more- (yes, I know, Sun is Bad, pheh). Unfortunately for now the only way you can buy Linux from Sun is to buy it in addition to one of their x86 servers. While the price and performance of those servers seems actually quite good, I doubt that everyone who wants to have a legal-trouble-free Linux needs another server. Plus, currently Sun's only offerings are Red Hat Linux Server editions (ie, RHAS2.1, etc).

It would be nice to see Sun not only offer more distros, but offer to resell them without hardware. Charge an extra fee to cover their licensing costs.

Part i like best

# If you do actually go to the trouble of figuring out how to download # the files without registering, what you'll end up with is 1 or 2MB of # stuff that is meaningless to you unless you have purchased an # Ultra AX board from Sun. So, please do purchase an Ultra AX board, # but then you might as well use the URL you'll be given along with it.

Additionally docs.sun.com has all the information you could possibly want about ANYTHING Sun (even REALLY old stuff).

I think this book has somewhat poor timing. Solaris 10 is already being released for piloting. And if I weren't writing for Wiley (*not* a Dummies book) I would say that I hated the Dummies name as well ;).

Additionally docs.sun.com has all the information you could possibly want about ANYTHING Sun (even REALLY old stuff).

I think this book has somewhat poor timing. Solaris 10 is already being released for piloting. And if I weren't writing for Wiley (*not* a Dummies book) I would say that I hated the Dummies name as well ;).

In it, it makes no mention of Java3d, which is a scene graph API with bindings to OpenGL or Direct3d. Is this announcement going to be a thin binding, or a new version of Java3d? Or will it replace Java3d?

Inquiring minds want to know! :)

Indeed. Officially unsupported hardware that still
works with Solaris 9 x86 may be found here.

Solaris 9 is only free on single CPU machines for educational, development, or evaluation purposes. The SPARC version is a free download, the x86 version can be downloaded for $20 or so. This was the last time I looked at their page, anyway.

You'd probably be better off switching to *BSD from Linux, unless you use a lot of Java stuff, for example.

At any rate, the reviewer also said the book was for end users, not sysadmins. There are tons of books available on administering Solaris; my advice, though, would be just to download a copy of it for evaluation purposes, install it on a spare machine, and experiment with creating setups similar to your production servers, referring to the online documentation for guidance when necessary. This probably would be more effective than reading a book and wouldn't take much more time, but of course YMMV.

Solaris 9 is only free on single CPU machines for educational, development, or evaluation purposes. The SPARC version is a free download, the x86 version can be downloaded for $20 or so. This was the last time I looked at their page, anyway.

You'd probably be better off switching to *BSD from Linux, unless you use a lot of Java stuff, for example.

At any rate, the reviewer also said the book was for end users, not sysadmins. There are tons of books available on administering Solaris; my advice, though, would be just to download a copy of it for evaluation purposes, install it on a spare machine, and experiment with creating setups similar to your production servers, referring to the online documentation for guidance when necessary. This probably would be more effective than reading a book and wouldn't take much more time, but of course YMMV.