No GNOME For Solaris 9

Nailer writes: "Subject says it all really. A (very brief) Linuxgram article claims GNOME 2.0 won't be ready for Solaris 9 and the OS will ship with CDE and Motif as defaults. I'm just waiting for the inevitable announcement the GTK port of OpenOffice has been cancelled."

Comments

Sun should use Java

[mj6798]

Sun already has a mature, powerful toolkit and component architecture in Java. Sun should put their money where their mouth is and sponsor the open source development of a desktop environment based on Java.

Unfortunately, Sun's OS group seems blissfully disconnected from their Java side; in fact, their OS group seems stuck in the C-mindset of the traditional BSD/UNIX world. And Sun's Java group seems more focussed on Windows than on adding value to Sun's own product line. Sun's lack of coordination and their lack of in-house and open source application development in Java gives people the impression that Java isn't ready. That may have been true two years ago, but today, Java is more than up to the task of building a zippy desktop with a footprint smaller than either Gnome or KDE.

Of course, Sun can't give up completely on C/C++ toolkits, but they have that pretty well covered with Motif and its C++ wrappers, tools that are still much more widely used among Sun's customers than either Gtk+ or Qt.

Sun always seemed like Sun's worst enemy. They need a little of that Gates/Ballmer top-down coherent management and energy. McNealy barks a lot, but he doesn't seem to bite much.

Re:Does Solaris Need Gnome?

[Jay Carlson]

Don't get excited about the Ultra 5/10 and the Blade 100. They have the heart and soul of a PC---IDE disk, ATI video, PC133 memory, (mostly) standard case and chassis. Unfortunately, they don't have the performance of a PC.

I ran around running my Linux cross-compile benchmark on a bunch of Sparcs. The 1G RAM, 440MHz Ultra 10 checked in with performance that was strictly worse than the 320M 450MHz iMac DV+. The 500MHz Blade 100 was around 10% better. Now, these figures are probably a tad low; I realized after the fact I was using an SMP-enabled kernel, and that adds overhead even on a single-processor machine. So credit them with another 10% until I get publish-worthy numbers. The Sparcs are still crushed by the 733MHz P3 el-cheapo Dell Optiplex, and the (badly-configured) Athlon 1200 has nothing to fear.

The Blade 1000 is a different beast. It's a real workstation, with 8M caches---can't get that in the beige box x86 world, and there are a lot of workloads that are just screaming for it. I don't have numbers yet, but I expect they'll be much more competitive. Of course, for $15-20k for a dual processor box, they'd better be.

So why buy a Blade 100?

1. Binary compatibility with bigger machines. If you think your app is going to have to scale up to mainframe size, you won't have to recompile your system to take it there.
2. Commercial software compatibility. No Purify for Linux, for instance. Or maybe you already bought big-ticket software like RealServer, or a GIS.
3. Compatibility with collaborators. In some communities (especially research), Solaris on SPARC is a very common environment.
4. 64 bits. The Blade 100 is the cheapest 64-bit PC in the world. Some people need to develop for a 64-bit world. (It's not the cheapest 64-bit Linux hardware; although current kernels don't support it, the Agenda VR3 hardware is a full 64-bit MIPS implementation.)

By the way, newer kernels improved the Mac performance substantially, and SMP provided around a 60% speedup on the tests on the dual 533MHz PPC. I think I know where to borrow a dual 800MHz PowerMac, which should finally beat the crap out of the Athlon 1200. Of course, now I'm curious about dual Athlon performance, but I dunno if I really need a new machine just to run some benchmarks...