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XFree86 Drivers For Solaris

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the sincere-flattery dept.

tnorbye writes: "On Sun's Intel site today there's a link to a new XFree86 porting kit. Essentially, you can download binary XFree86 drivers which run with the Solaris X server! So any graphics card you can use with Linux you can now use with Solaris. Sure makes Solaris x86 more widely available!"

2 of 129 comments (clear)

  1. Read the article by Legion303 · · Score: 2, Informative
    Before there's a stampede of open source fanatics screaming, "WHAT? NO SOURCE?!" you should mention that there is source as well as binaries available.

    I might check this out. x86 Solaris 8 is free to download from Sun.

    -Legion

  2. Re:x86 solaris demand? by isa-kuruption · · Score: 4, Informative

    Superior desktop environments? What? GNOME doesn't run on Solaris x86 all of a sudden? I thought this was the reason for Open Sourced code. In fact, Solaris 8 comes with a software CD with a bunch of nice GNU utils which include GNOME and KDE window managers.

    Why would someone want to run Solaris x86 on an Intel box? Various reasons, but I think the original reason I did was to learn Solaris. Not all of us can afford Sparc hardware, especially 3 years ago when I was first starting to learn Solaris. I know you can get a Sunblade for $1000, but still, not everyone can afford to dish out $1000.

    Another reason someone might want to run Solaris x86 is for stability. Solaris x86 and Solaris sparc differ greatly. There is enough differences between the x86 and ultrasparc architectures that it required Sun to make more than just a "few" modifications to run Solaris on x86. Granted, I would agree Solaris does not run as well on x86 as it does sparc, but I can say the same thing for Linux as well, because UltraSparc is (arguably) a better hardware platform (stability wise).

    In fact, I saw an article recently stating that Linux runs faster on a Sparc than Solaris does, which is understandable. So why use Solaris at all? Because it's dependable.

    I, personally, recently had a problem installing Solaris x86 on a machine with an Promise ATA100 controller.. and because of this issue, I had to reinstall with Debian 2.2 instead (which, btw, didn't have support for the controller in the install kernel either.. which meant doing the base install and kernel recompile on another machine). I think Sun does need to have better support for Solaris x86 hardware, but I don't think Sun is really interested in supporting x86 hardware (yet). They do, as you know, have a processor they'd like to sell. One of Sun's "value-added" is how well and how much effort Sun puts into optimizing Solaris for their hardware.

    And although Solaris isn't a system for the average "I hate windows; I'll run Linux" user, it is a system run by professionals who are used to running Solaris on their UNIX workstations. For them, it increases their productivity.

    As a reply, this is nothing against the original post directly. I just knew there would be a bunch of Solaris bashing and I got tired of it by the time I got to your post ;)