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Previewing the Next Solaris OS
Eric Boutilier writes "Amy Rich has written an excellent Solaris Express (Solaris 10) how-to and general overview. It covers how the program works, using the community web site, and what's new in Solaris Express." Among many new features, the TCP/IP stack has been redesigned, IPv6 support improved, and both NFSv4 and USB 2.0 support added.
(In case the first post is modded down to hell, that's what it said :-)
:-)
The market for Solaris is very different from Linux, it's datacentre-land, not home user. I still don't see it lasting too long though... One of the microsoft lines that really is true is that Linux is a larger threat to Unix than to MS, at the moment (MS forgot the 'at the moment' bit
Two wars: The desktop and the datacentre. Despite the cliche of fighting a war on two fronts, Linux is porbably uniquely positioned to fight a war on N fronts (where N is a positive, large integer). The way it's set up is to leverage groups of people whilst folding the advances back into the core.
SGI are turning to Linux, Sun will too. There'll be a few releases of both OS's first, though, IMHO.
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
Hopefully this will be a better release than 9 was, which should really have been called 8.5. Apart from the addition of the god-awful GNOME desktop, the best things in 9 were the improved hardware support. Other than that, I can't say I was much impressed.
I know this is a trivial thing, but it's a real pain in the butt to have to use ksh all the time because most Solaris boxen I've worked on don't have Bash installed by default.
The same goes for OpenSSL and a bunch of other tools that would be great to have but that I cannot count on being there.
On the other front, having Gnome as a gui readily available is definitely deserving of kudos. If only I had more than ssh access to most of the boxes I work with, I could actually use it. We have Hummingbird Exceed, but it's such a HUGE pain to set up. Neither myself, a reasonably good programmer, nor any of the sysadmins at the very large bank where I work know how to set it up.
Alas.
-- Kevin J. Rice
Unitarian Church: Freethinkers Congregate!
So you won't run linux because of the license philosophy, but Solaris, Windows, and OSX are OK? That's pretty screwy.
Don't know if your flaimbait was intentional or not, but you should have at least elaborated on why it's "god-awful". In my opinion, Gnome is far less awful than CDE. And although it is less feature-rich and configurable than KDE, its behaviour seems more consistent. That is what businesses and Solaris' market wants. Assuming that KDE is your awe inspiring desktop of course.
Sun's move from CDE to Gnome is a good move, if not from Solaris to Linux completely.
VIVA1023.com | Political Fashion.
Any OS that is out there that can take away from the 90%+ market share that Microsoft holds is a good thing.
Of course Microsoft's market share won't go down if this OS just replaces one *nix variant with another, but that's another story.
In the datacenter for a good while yet. Several years, at least 3 and probably longer. Basically the hardware is better than Intel for the non sparcified PC clones anyway. Bigger caches, more I/O, more memory bandwidth etc. Linux isn't yet trusted on this stuff and it won't kill Solaris off until 3-5 years after it is trusted on the big iron.
I have no problem with Solaris and Linux side by side and neither do the management. We are actively and with prejudice trying to kill off HP-UX as soon as possible though.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
> And when they finally got them here, one of
> the V100s did not boot.
> That's it, we almost ended up with a
> network-enabled FORTH compiler that cost us
> $1500.
My friend bought a new car, and the dealership accidentally gave him the wrong set of keys. That was it, he almost ended up with a sealed glass and metal box that cost him $35000.
One little tiny, easily rectified mistake does not mean the product sucks. If someone dismissed linux because they bought a preinstalled box which didn't boot because of a wrong jumper, would that mean linux was crappy? No. Of course not.
> I'm still glad we didn't wait for tech support
> to react (and I'm pretty sure it would take
> them several more weeks)
Have you ever *used* Sun support? To answer your later question, that's one of the reasons Sun are so expensive. They have great support. If you were on a decent support contract there could have been a guy with you inside an hour with a bag full of V100 parts. If you don't need support, go with linux/bsd or buy Sun kit off ebay.
Once more, FUD-ish Sun-bashing gets modded up as interesting/informative. Replies which dare to defend Sun are usually modded down. Flamebait, troll, whatever. (They should have a "-1 heresy" tag.)
> Have you ever *used* Sun support?
I have tried to. When I started my first professional C++ project, I bought Sun C++ because at the time it had the reputation for being the best C++ compiler available. Unfortunately, the license key they send me didn't work, so I was unable to actually run the compiler. I spend the first three month of the project simply trying to make Sun send me a working license. And, to be able to do something meanwhile, I downloaded and installed G++ which obviously requires no license to run. After three months I decided g++ was "good enough" and stopped pestering Sun to deliver the goods I had already paid for. In any case g++ was quickly improving, and no new versions of Sun C++ were forthcomming (for years, I later learned).
Morale? Sometimes freedom is more cost efficient than technical quality and professional support. I have certainly since then tried to avoid dependence on single source suppliers of hardware, software or support.
Seems like most people are missing one of the major points of having a Solaris workstation: development and platform scalability.
You can design, write, compile, and test an application on your little one or two-processor workstation. Once you're satisfied that it'll correctly calculate the national debt to 100 significant figures, you can copy it over *completely unchanged* to a 108-CPU Sun E15K and it will run exactly the same. Exactly. Just a little faster.
Platform scalability of that sort is not available from any other vendor that I know of. It's also darn nice when you've got a 4-CPU server that is swamped and want to upgrade to a 32-CPU box. You don't have to change anything. I know a sys-admin who once upgraded their machine by literally swapping out the boot drive. Not exactly elegant (and he didn't tell his boss how he did it so quickly), but it worked for him.
So, you're right: if you're looking for a desktop machine that'll run web browsers and still give you all the CLI goodness of a UNIX or a work-alike, you can get it cheaper elsewhere, although the difference is less than most people think. Have you priced one out recently? Really? Oh yeah, and the support is simply awesome.
--Mid