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Few companies, no matter how well-funded, seem to have the nous to keep a stock of spare cables. And the concept of crossover cables (e.g. "null modem" RS232, cascade UTP)? Well, that just blows their little minds. I told those guys that Sun boxes need a null modem serial link for the console port. I mailed them a link to the wiring diagram. I said it at every opportunity before the machines arrived. And when they came, they still tried to plug in every combination of serial lead and adaptor they could find bar a fucking null modem cable!

Get hold of these cables, keep 'em with your laptop and never let anyone borrow them.

I also second the tools CD idea, particularly if you're visiting a lot of different client sites. Burn pre-built GNU binaries (for Solaris, the Sun Freeware site is a good source of pkgs) of things like gzip, bash, perl and less because most corporates who haven't got the open source religion won't even have heard of these tools. (But don't leave them installed after you've left if it's not standard policy.)

Ade_
/

Install VIM for Solaris.

It's easy enough for a VI proofed user ;-)

Download here for example

Link is for Solaris 2.8. But you'll find the same stuff for other Solaris version an www.sunfreeware.comtoo.

(btw. emacs is here

Bye egghat.

Install VIM for Solaris.

It's easy enough for a VI proofed user ;-)

Download here for example

Link is for Solaris 2.8. But you'll find the same stuff for other Solaris version an www.sunfreeware.comtoo.

(btw. emacs is here

Bye egghat.

Install VIM for Solaris.

It's easy enough for a VI proofed user ;-)

Download here for example

Link is for Solaris 2.8. But you'll find the same stuff for other Solaris version an www.sunfreeware.comtoo.

(btw. emacs is here

Bye egghat.

SunFreeware

If there's not a Sol8 package for you, try backwards. Generally, outside of gcc (because of header files) and kernel structure dependant stuff (top) everything is forward compatible.

If you start by installing libgcc, gcc and make then compiling and installing source will be relatively simple. Hell, we use gcc for our third party apps that need a compiler, rather than buying Sun's C compiler.

For desktop use I agree that Linux is much superior to Solaris, although Sun is goint to move from CDE to Gnome for their GUI and that should improve things dramatically. For application support (especially databases) I cannot imagine that Linux would run better on SPARC architecture than Solaris does.

What version of Solaris are you replacing?

The fact that Sun asked you to do this gives me a good deal of respect for who Sun is and what they stand for. While I have my own issues with Sun (having to do with the fact that Solaris barfs on code which every free *NIX can handle); I respect them for making OpenOffice available, and for striving to make *NIX the standard desktop environment for their users.

Now, of course, if I was your manager, I would let you use Windows, a Macintosh, or whatever else makes you productive. While I do respect people who are able to be productive in a strict *NIX environment more than people who need to use something else to get their work done, I understand that Linux is not for everyone.

As one of the other people who posted a follow-up pointed out, Windows is a real roach motel. You have made a decision to not learn how to use the proprietary tools well enough to be productive with them. As a result, you are stuck using Windows or a Mac to do productive work. People who can be productive with libre software tools and not tied down to any particular OS environment.

I have no problem using a Windows desktop, since the free software tools I use have been ported to this environment. All I need is a Windows machine with a net connection to get something very close to my Linux environment again.

Nor do I have any problem being productive in MacOS X, which is a single terminal window away from being essentially identical to my Linux setup.

Solaris can be made productive by a simple visit to sunfreeware

. Other proprietary Unices have similiar binary ports sites.

Of course, I prefer working in Linux; it is nice to know that I can fix small annoyances like this one as needed. An option I do not have with proprietary software.

- Sam

When I finish the installation of a Solaris box I spend many hours installing by hand things so it's
more like linux. So it's easier to work with.

We're lucky there are things like sunfreeware

Recently, one of my co-workers, who only had used linux, had to install a Solaris box. He couldn't believe it was so bare-bones. At last even the user of the host decided he prefered linux in the Sparc !

Sun's move is towards have these linux tools handy and should bring a more complete solaris installation.

Well, Solaris sucks compared to Linux in the ease of use and ability to script your work easy, man pages, utilities, ... and many more aspects.

What makes you say that?

You're using CDE, aren't you?

You're aware that OpenWindows will happily run any window manager, right? And that any utilities you want to install will almost definitely build straight out of the box? And that you can use NetBSD's Zoularis if you want package management?

At least, you must know about http://www.sunfreeware.com/, I hope?

Solaris is actually a very good OS for a workstation. Its X implementation is really fast. Granted, the window manger they ship completely blows, but nobody in their right mind would ever user CDE anyhow.

Give it a chance before you just presume it's crap because it looks like crap on the surface.

I've been working and needing GNU tools on Solaris and the best site that I've found to date is www.sunfreeware.com. The site rocks in terms of the software you need as well as how it's organized. Try it once and I promise you will be hooked.

And, oh yes, Yahoo! Messenger now has an officially supported client on Solaris (as well as updated clients for other Unixes 0.99.17), available at in.messenger.yahoo.com. And for more human interest value, this version was built by a bunch of folks in India :)

http://www.sunfreeware.com/

Everything will come with the OS !

--- I'm a 20th century digital boy
--- I don't know what to do by I got a lot of PROGS

Anyone else notice that he's dropped GNU/Linux altogether? Now it's just GNU. No credit given at all to the kernel. I guess it's just not important.

That's because the issues are the same, whether you run GNU/Linux, GNU/Solaris, GNU/Win32, GNU/DOS, or any other port of the GNU userland.

He isn't pro-Free software in the least. He is simply pro-GPL and anti-everything else.

He's pro-free software. He understands that BSD-class licenses (especially for noddy programs under 2 KLOC or for software used in embedded systems), weak copyleft licenses (especially for free clones of common libraries), and GPL-class strong copyleft licenses all have their place.

There's countless others, but I don't feel like looking for them.

I remember back when binary packages weren't released for damn near anything - after all, with gcc, everyone could have a C compiler. Wanted to run the newest afterstep or fvwm? Guess what? Download the source.

For linux, it's the distribution's job to provide binaries. For other systems like solaris and HP-UX there are places like Sun Freeware or HP-UX Software Porting Archive to get it. Some projects do so as a courtesy, but it's hardly required.

For something like XFree86, a binary distribution would almost certainly screw up your linux distribution's packaging system. Very few people would be able to utilize a binary distro of X that isn't tailored for their flavor of linux.

Besides, if you run something like linux from scratch then you don't want to download binaries anyway.

...so as to guarantee that libiberty and justice for all I heard so much about in my high school Government class? It didn't make much sense to me then, but this latest essay by Stallman sure makes it sound like a great idea.

Last time I looked, Solaris cost absolutely nothing. You can download ISO images of the latest release from Sun, burn them yourself, and run it without any license fees, etc, at all on any Sun box with less than eight CPUs, no matter what you're using the machine for (business or personal). If you want a development environment, you can get the Forte compiler suite and a 30-day license (which can be renewed indefinitely) as a free download, or you can get all the GNU goodies at Sunfreeware. When it comes to applications, the StarOffice suite is also a free download. All you have to pay for is the machine itself, electricity to run it, and an Internet connection for the downloads.

I personally think linux is an awesome server OS. I find that it's interface, especially remote, is far better than Windows, BSD, Solaris, and other UNIX systems.

What? How is SSH on Linux any different from SSH on any of the BSDs? Or Solaris? Or any other UNIX system?

With other OSes, like Solaris, their stock tools are horrible

So they don't ship with GNU tools. (By the way, many of them for Solaris can be located here). That's because you just bought a Sun box, not a Linux box. If I bought a Linux box, I wouldn't expect it to have smitty, now would I?

I can't help but feel your big complaint is: "all of those other Unixes are nasty because I'm not familiar with them". That's a fine opinion to have, but please don't try to take your personal preference and use it to prop up some Linux Rocks argument.

I really don't recommend using the binaries from KDE.org on non-linux systems as they are usually nothing more than tarballs. Generally, getting a copy in a proper package format for your system works much better. In this case, grab them from the freeware CD or from Sun Freeware.

As for compile time, I can't say I've ever seen KDE compile all that fast on *any* system. However, if you really want to see a Solaris box put its back into it, renice it and watch it scream. Unfortuantely, until GCC is fully multithreaded, you probably won't see what a SPARC box can really do just by compiling.

If you check the Sun Freeware disk that comes with your Solaris 8 media kit, you'll find an option to install KDE. I haven't done it myself, but I hear it works pretty well. And if you don't have a media kit, go grab a copy at Sun Freeware, a Sun sanctioned site.

Linux' native file system, EXT2FS, is known to lose data like a firehose spouts water when the file system isn't unmounted properly ... All the drawbacks of the ancient EXT2FS file system remain in EXT3FS

But not in ReiserFS.

Linux advocates try to hide this fact by denying crashes ever happen. Instead, they have frequent "hardware problems".

Cheap hardware designed to be put in a $500 PC that a user shuts down every night is generally not designed to run 24/7. Try doing your tests on a quality workstation or server. Yes, Linux has bugs. Yes, you can help by documenting them so that kernel developers can reproduce them consistently. No, this doesn't stop Google from using a Linux system.

A Linux user has to live with badly coded tools which have low performance, mangle data seemingly at random and are not in line with their specification.

Are you referring to the GNU tools? In that case, why do Solaris admins routinely install GNU software on their machines?

a lot of them spit out the most childish and unprofessional messages

Example?

If you don't answer these questions in the next version of this troll, even more of us will refuse to bite.

Thanks to sites like freesolaris ( once openly linked by SUN, but now no more ), I already have somethink like this ( also because most SUN software has orrible price/quality ratio. Take Forte, for instance ...).

Go to www.sunfreeware.com, download and install with pkgadd. Takes about five minutes (plus download time).

Where exactly can I find a GNU CD compiled for VAX?

Okay, you've got 2, maybe 3 buyers there...

Or HPUX?

Google?

Or Solaris?

sunfreeware.com

The only platforms where one would actually need to buy binaries from GNU are platforms that virtually no-one uses. And even then, you don't have to go to GNU. You could get the source and build it yourself. The fact remains that GNU wouldn't exist without donations. That isn't viable for non-RMS software developers...

I've had Solaris 8/KDE on my Ultra 10 workstation since I set it up 6 months ago! KDE and Gnome ship with Solaris 8 in the install media kit, on the same cd with GCC, gtar, gnu/emacs, Ethereal, and an entire cd of GNU tools. Don't y'all use SunFreeware or Sun BigAdmin for your Solaris/GNU packages?

He cited the history of Unix, which has been replete with incompatible versions.

Yes, partially due to the fact that each vendor was restricted from building on the work of others, and partially due to the fact that there were multiple vendors. You won't see "Bob's Win32", simply because Microsoft actively works to prevent such compatibility.

Once solid platform-independent implementations of the various UNIX tools became available, people began switching to them. For all the complaining people do about the various Linux-based OSen, they are remarkably consistent at the most basic user level (drop me on any GNU system and I will be able to at least find my way around the system, write code, etc). And this toolkit is available thanks to the GNU GPL and the enthusiasm RMS roused in the various developers.

Secondly, free software actually enables integration with closed platforms. For example, see Samba or Cygwin, which allow tight integration between Windows and Unix (no thanks to the "open" and "developer-friendly" Microsoft). And the first thing I and most other people do when confronted with a fresh Solaris box is to install a decent userland.

"It is innovation that really drives growth," Mr. Mundie said, arguing that without the sustained investment made possible by commercial software, real innovation would not be possible.

Uh huh. Sure. Let's take the WWW as an example, since everyone lately seems convinced it's the most innovative thing since sliced bread. It was invented by a guy at CERN, and Mosaic, the first massively popular graphical client, was written at NCSA. Since Web stuff became a commercial thing, exactly what "innovation" have we recieved? Bigger and more offensive ads and horrifically noncompliant HTML, that's what.

--

I am a linux fan, but have you ever read dot-truth.com? There are links to magazines that tell about the problems of Sun computers. It took forever for them to get ECC ready, while it's been on Intel's for years.

Uh-oh. Looks like we have a State 7 Linux User on our case.

Sparc is a lousy processor. 400 megahertz? And software support and development problems are also bad.

Cycle speed isn't everything, sport. Sparc processors are designed for high amounts of processing, higher than Intel. If Sun doesn't come out with a better-bigger-greater-faster CPU every two weeks, that doesn't mean they're falling behind; The latest UltraSPARC-2 and UltraSPARC-3 chips are EXTREMELY beefy processors, I'd rather be using one of those than this pentium 3 any day of the week (if cost wasnt an issue). Sun's software and hardware support is phenominal, by the way, if you've purchased a contract. I'll admit, I work for sun as an SSE, so take from this what you will... but usually you can't get a Compaq or Dell technician to your house because your PC won't deliver an email.

Solaris is so stripped down and has an inferior program for each part of it. Commercial X, csh, plain old vi, etc. are standard and it does not have standard Linux tools like Gimp. I would rather have a server which is similar to the workstation. My whole school is Sun, it's Northern Arizona University, and they have the slowest network!

*sigh* Do you honestly think that someone wants GIMP on a production Oracle/Informix database server? vim? and yes, it has csh. What's wrong with csh? If you want another shell, obviously you havent looked. Solaris comes with everything from ksh to bash. You can change it in /etc/passwd with plain old vi too. Since most of these high-end servers aren't sitting next to someone's desk with a nice pretty 21" flat-panel LCD, why would you want something like vim? I don't recall WYSE terminals displaying syntax color-coding very well. Besides, even if you did want something like that, the Solaris package is available for download. I suppose you're going to complain about the lack of RPM, too.

[some content removed] Sun computers are expensive, unreliable, slow, of a bad design, and are falling more behind each day. 500 MHz? A whole bunch of CPU's in one box? Scale out, not up.

Expensive, yes. But look at the market. Sun is not shooting for a demographic of a 13 year old kid who wants a nice computer to run this nifty program that the neighbor put on his computer called Linux. They're aiming to put out number-crunching, I/O passing monsters used for serving up lots and lots of data. The solution to being able to handle this amount of processes is not to make a single CPU be bigger, its to spread the processes out. Unreliable? if these were unreliable, why have people been buying Sun machines since the early 80's? I'll give you a hint: it's not because they suck.

Each person who ties their company into Sun is tying themselves in to ridiculously expensive proprietary technology. Amazon is now on Linux.

Amazon is on linux? Where did you get that idea?

For selling, hosting static pages, sharing information, databases, etc, Linux or Windows 2000 rules!

Thats great for a mom-and-pop ISP who needs an inexpensive solution to get themselves started and to have a good deal of room to grow with. Go to work for a company like AT&T for a few years and see the kind of data they push through their datacenters, and I'd dare you to say that again without laughing. ;)

Die, Commercial Unix!!!!!!!!

No comment.

--
Dave Brooks (db@amorphous.org)
http://www.amorphous.org

There are Solaris package archives available, such as the Solaris Package Archive and Freeware4Sun, and Freeware for Solaris. And if you really want to get something compiled and running, you can do it. But overall, my Linux software install experience has been much more convenient.

On the other hand, if I were in the high-end-server market rather than the geek market, there would probably be many apps I could run better, more conveniently, or only on Solaris. And I guess that's the market Sun is mostly going after.

Another issue is that Solaris is more bloated (in terms of disk usage) than other free Unixes, in my experience.

You can get samba pre-packaged for Solaris 8
at the Sun freeware site. The site is actually sponsored by Sun.

Solaris 8 includes Perl & Apache, and the media
kit contains a CD-ROM with lots of their freeware
packages.

First, this is not a web-only service. We do like to provide web interfaces to as much as possible, but we do realize that for some things, program compliation and testing included, nothing can substitute for shell access.

A lot of people are asking about other hardware architectures and OS's. For now, the Compile Farm is i386 based, and contains several Linux distributions and FreeBSD. This does not mean that we have ruled out other possibilities. This is just another step in what we hope can be an expanding feature set for Open Source developers on SourceForge.

There is a lot of setup involved in something like this Compile Farm, not the least of which is having thousands of skilled Open Source developers with shell accounts on a set of boxes. We're attempting to keep things as secure as possible while also offering enough features to make this thing useful. One reason for the limited number of distributions/architectures/OS's now is the limitation of variables in a very complex system. Hopefully, we can work out the kinks in this system soon so that it can become a valuable resource to developers who might not otherwise have the capability of getting their hands on so many different machines.

Please be patient as we test this new system. We're definately open to criticism, but please also be constructive with it so that we can continue to improve these services. Thanks to all of the SourceForge users who have contributed patches, criticism, and helpful suggestions. Every day my confidence in the Open Source model increases...

You should visit www.sunfreeware.com .

It's true, Sun does charge extra for its development tools. This is in my personal opinion pretty silly, but less of a problem than you might think. There might be advantages to using Sun's tools I don't recognize, not being a developer, but I haven't noticed the lack. Cross compilation, maybe? I haven't done very much of that.

I use gcc and friends instead. Apache on Solaris is also quite lovely, and where would we be without ssh? Or bind? How about the ever-lovin' sendmail? Okay, okay, someday I'll get with the times and try out qmail or postfix.... but note the commonality here? And I almost forgot to mention Perl! What was I thinking?

If you don't feel like compiling things today, you can get a selection of packages from http://www.sunfreeware.com/. They're already out with Solaris 8 packages.

If it makes you uncomfortable to use gcc because it's unsupported, there's ways to buy support. I've never bothered: things just compile cleanly for me, with no fuss or muss, other than the occasional need to tell Make you're using gcc instead of cc. On the other hand, I'm a system administrator, so I use it to build my usual suspect tools, and I'm hardly pushing it to its limits. It's possible that hard-core developers have other opinions of whether or not it has quirks under Solaris.

I don't know what's shipping with Solaris 8; my knowledge peters out in Solaris 7, since I'm a very conservative weasel and tend to run a rev or two back (no matter the source!) unless there is a pressing reason not to, or unless the changes are minor or fix a security flaw.

I just installed Solaris 7 for the intel, and had a hell of a time (as you did) finding the tools that makes linux so great. You can go to Sunfreeware.com to get loads of software for Solaris for both the intel and SPARC platforms. (Don't forget to download gnuzip first so that you can decompress the other files) You can install the packages with the ``pkgadd'' command like this ``pkgadd -d ./'' and that should prompt you to install all of the available packages in the current directory.

And, in case you noticed, the HotJava browser that is included with Solaris 7 sucks. You can go to Java.sun.com to download it, and although an intel version is not listed, you can follow the instructions for the linux version, and get it going very nicely.

I believe it to be extremely stupid, as well, for Solaris 7 to include a Glade-type GUI tool, but not to include a C compiler! I have successfully used gcc, and gmake to build a very simple test application (IE no functionality, just a GUI shell) with this tool, although I haven't tried more complicated programs.

Free Solaris is the complete package - not crippled in any way. Some dev. tools come with it (like ksh, sed, awk, lex, yacc, and it's public knowledge that Perl will ship with Solaris 8)... just no C compiler. That's easily remedied with a visit to sunfreeware.com ...

And depending on what you want for system management tools, it's there, or available as a separate product (to paying customers).

Whenever I find myself on a bare Solaris machine, I snarf gcc and build a bunch of programs (essentially making my system into GNU/Solaris) before I'm happy with the user interface... I'm happy with what's under the hood right off the bat.