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Sun Java Desktop 2 Review
Anon. writes "Linux.com is carrying a pretty damning review of Sun Java Desktop System version 2. JDS seemed to have issues with almost each and every machine the author tested it on, support was quite bad - and to top it all, the software comes with a seven page license document. Something seems to be terribly wrong somewhere - otherwise why would Sun decide to ship JDS with kernel 2.4.19 at this stage?" (Slashdot and Linux.com are both part of OSDN.)
Something seems to be terribly wrong somewhere - otherwise why would Sun decide to ship JDS with kernel 2.4.19 at this stage ?"
I dunno. Why are you not asking a similar question of Debian???
Is that A4 or A5?
Wow, they really shortened it.
meh..i would have thought that they are one of the few people who stand to lose out from linux becoming more usable
I have discovered a truly remarkable sig which this post is too small to contain.
Corporate clients are far more interested in stability than in the latest & greatest. Look how long RH goes between updates of their workstation and advanced server lines.
Java Desktop R2 seems to be more of an upgrade to the bundled apps. Nothing really major here.
Paper documentation would be nice. How are you supposed to read PDF files on a CD if you can't even get the system working?
Maybe they have to say in the box to use any Windows PC to read the manual before install.
Trouble with hard disks, especially SATA but also regular ATA, seems to be a common problem this guy is having. That should not be a problem with any modern Linux distro, and why Java Desktop manages to screw it up I suppose we'll see.
I'm waiting for the next version.
The Cheese Stands Alone.
Do we really need another distro?
Fedora seems to have all the capabilities of JDS, and more. We have an overabundance of distros, far more than would be required for "choice". Choice is great, but really when one choice works perfectly well, why use another?
I'm amazing. You aren't. SUCK IT
Sun isn't flavour of the month in the media just now, and especially in the "Linux" media, where Sun is considered to be in league with Microsoft and SCO. To expect a fair and balanced review from linux.com is therefore misguided.
Stick Men
I guess Sun deserves what it gets, but I think the reviewer was a bit irresponsible. Perhaps he had a deadline and couldn't wait around for replacement media (assuming that you still couldn't rule out defective media) or for Sun support to resolve the issue. I think however that it would have been a much more useful review if the reader found out exactly why the reviewer couldn't get it installed on all but one machine and couldn't get it to run on the machine on which it did install.
I'm left wondering if it wasn't in fact defective media, and just how bad Sun's support is: meaning, what does it take to get a problem resolved.
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
Used it on P4 2.4GHz, Geforce4 Ti 4200, 1GB RAM
It's so sluggish on this particular machine.
SUSE 9.1 Live CD works better on this particular machine.
That's what I've experienced.
asdf
Sun's pretty much a dead company walking.
Their hardware is more expensive, and slower.
Their OS is less feature rich, but has more bugs, and doesn't perform as well in most cases as Linux.
Look around, everyone who possibly can is getting off of Suns and onto Linux x86. The major things holding most of Suns customers back in this regard are proprietary software support, and that's improving all the time.
And as to Java... I'm not sure exactly how they intend to make money there... IBM does the Java services market SOOOO much better than Sun does.
In the past, I've had lots of problems with ATA hard drives, as well as controllers, in Solaris x86. YMMV, but I've only successfully installed it on two controller/drive combos. The five or six that failed were nowhere near top-of-the-line, but they weren't generic cheapo product either. I dunno. Long-standing problem with Sun x86 products, though.
The Linux distro scene is in a rather bad state ATM:
:-(.
1) Debian sarge release was pushed further on - and you have to go via knoppix to install Debian on a modern SATA machine, leaving the system in a messy state. Obviously the Debian (non-)release is a standing joke, but Sarge will be so late, it's not even funny anymore
2) FC2 was released, and it has several showstopper bugs (it keeps on crashing for me, it eats partition tables for dinner, keyboard layouts don't work, etc, etc). I'm sticking with FC1. FC1, OTOH, seriously rocks, once you beef it up with KDE 3.2 and kernel 2.6. FC1 is the best Linux I've ever used, and I was hoping it wouldn't stay that way after FC2
3) Suse is still non-free-beer. Come on Novell, letting hobbyists dabble with it at home isn't going to hurt anyone.
So what's left, then? Mandrake, Gentoo? Warez version of RHEL? WBEL?
And on the topic of JDS: they are always thrashed in reviews, but the media keeps hyping how "integrated" the system is, and finally Linux is of commercial quality. Go figure.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
what hardware would it run on, then? Seems like the guy tried quite a lot.
All these distro reviews are so superficial. This one was worse than most. Rather than complain about how his fave window manager isn't included, he complains about how he couldn't intall it on his hot-rodded PC. So having not installed it, he doesn't have too much to bitch about.
I'm probably the only one around here who wants to know how a distro functions for the purposes of doing usefull work. Reviews of the install process are pretty pointless, unless your interest is in cloning large numbers of X clients or servers. Next!
With all this abysmal hardware support and horrid tech support, I often recall that Sun has made many a conficting statement in the past, and also that Solaris, Sun's glowing flagship, is still Top Dog as far as this 7-page-license company is concerned.
I would believe that running JDS on linux is just a prototype, to generate hype especially among the linux crowd.
Sun seems to be going out of its way to implement this on Solaris...perhaps the final incarnation of JDS will be on Solaris itself, without any Linux or GNU code at all, and completely proprietary. It seems that they will say "Linux just isn't up to par, but if you upgrade to the $599 Solaris JDS, all your hardware will work."
Or so it seems.
Defenestrate Windows...
to all you CSCI students whose curriculum centered around Java (not unlike those who studied ADA), or those of you who jumped on that bandwagon because it was the hot new thing and you could charge three times more for app development, or you had goofy managers that insisted on the use of the technology, but please... can we put this puppy to rest?
I'm totally in support of an open applications suite to compete with Office for *nix, but something being Java-based might as well be written in Fortran or Cobol. I know I'm going to get flamed for this, but as a developer that's written commercial software for 20+ years, I still have yet to see any great advantage to using Java. Yes, there are a few narrow, client-side applications where some of Java's abilities make it the most appropriate development environment, but in 95% of most scenarios, Java is not the most suitable development environment for applications.
There are plenty of more portable, higher performance languages to use. Java is dead, thanks in no small part to Microsoft, but even so, I believe it never really had much of a future.
When a new language comes out and requires massive marketing efforts to make people recognize it as a viable platform, that's a bad sign.
Software
Hardware
- 600 Mhz Intel Compatible processor or better
- 512 MB of RAM
- 160 GB hard drive, at least 400 MB of free disk space in the directory
/var
- 10/100 Base-T Ethernet network interface
Kinda steep on the HD size. Plus, what the deal with requiring Red Hat? Doesn't Sun have its own linux or Solaris for x86? For what's it worth, Sun has a great opportunity in the corporate desktop market. I hope the can get some traction with this effeort.Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day.
Teach him to eat and he will fish forever.
So Sun is hoarding Java in the interest of not 'diluting the trademark' and then proudly slaps it on this...
or has never used modern Solaris on Sun hardware.
An email was sent to SUSE to settle an ongoing discussion on the legality of copying the CDs in the local unix/linux newsgroup chile.comp.unix :)
This is from the response email from Frank Schmachel of the SUSE sales team:
Many thanks for your inquiry to our SUSE PreSales Service and your interest in SUSE LINUX.
Most applications that come with the SUSE LINUX distribution are licensed with GPL or LGPL, some have their own licenses.
Each of these licenses applies to the single package it comes with and allows you to make as many copies of the software as you want and give them to whoever you want, provided you do not _sell_ the software. You may sell support for the software, but not the software itself. Also, you have to make the source code available for free.
SUSE LINUX as a Linux distribution is a work with its own rights. Our license can be found on CD1 as /COPYRIGHT.yast. This license too allows
you to make as many copies and installations as you want from one set of
discs, provided you do not long for or get any kind of reward for it. Reward implies value in money, benefit in kind and supply >of services.
This also implies that it is _not_ allowed to install SUSE LINUX on machines that you will sell except that you will sell a full license (boxed CD set and books) with the machine to the customer.
So you can copy the SUSE cds. Why don't they offer the ISOs directly is beyond me. More user familiarization with the product would lead to more recommendations when it comes to buying enterprise-supported linux.
Something seems to be terribly wrong somewhere - otherwise why would Sun decide to ship JDS with kernel 2.4.19 at this stage ?
Keep in mind JDS was a rebranded SuSE distro. SuSE Server 8 ships with the same kernel, so no real surprises there. I'd chalk it up to Sun wanting to invest the minimum amount of skin to get something up and running that also had a fair amount of application support.
As for why they did not just fold in the latest-greatest 2.6 kernel, I have an idea. I recently rebuilt my workstation and decided to go the Gentoo route with the 2.6 kernel. Got a new laptop and installed the new SuSE Server 9 beta with the same. All was good, until I tried shoveling on the first of the commercial software. DB2 v8.1 just had a fit with the GUI installer. With a wee bit of elbow grease I got it going, but I don't even know if my code is going to work yet, much less the app server and ldap. It should, but...
(Stir Crazy voice)The 2.4.19 kernel - safe, not sexy.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
Sun wants strict control over their own trademark so that they can do things like this. They are trying to establish Java in the consumer's mind as a trademark connected with quality. They may not be entirely achieving this, but they have the right to at least have any negative connotations associated with the name "Java" be their own fault and not because of malicious interference by Microsoft.
- Not science folks like me, given the lack of (f2c or g77) fortran, which means no Octave for my analysis and no R for statistics.
- Not home users, given the non-inclusion of e.g. a working movie viewer. (Their java media player was completely busted -- it showed a few frames and then died.)
- Not cutting-edge linuxers, given the use of
the 2.4 kernel.
- Not the home market, given the use of
soffice (aka openoffice) which still won't handle complex msoffice documents well, and given the use of a stumbling movie viewer.
- Not future java-app users, since the java
apps included (movie viewer, text editor) are ugly and slow.
Having noted the above in my own tests, I switched back to Fedora for my home box [my work boxes are osx and solaris]. Using fedora [core 2] gives me (a) a newer kernel, (b) newer versions of software such as openoffice and mozilla and (c) easier updates.The real advantage may be in work-groups that have loads of existing Suns as well as linux boxes; there is benefit in having a similar GUI and similar software on each. This reveals the answer to the question of my subjectline, I argue.
We had a rep into our office to demo JD from SUN. I haven't tooled around with the live CD that we were given, but to be honest I wasn't very impressed. We asked about why everything is so old on it and they said it was designed that way for stability. The market focus in their mind was for large numbers of very simple desktops, like call centers. The strength of the system is that it can be completely remotely managed on the fly. Application and OS properties can be manipulated on a central server which are then replicated to the desktops. This was demonstrated by changing the desktop colors on the central repository. After a few minutes the background magically changed on the desktop machine. The modifications can be made to a set of standard apps like mozilla, evolution and staroffice. For example you could push out a new proxy server setting to every client. The limitation is that you can't add to the managed apps. For example if you wanted to use KDE instead of the default Gnome you could no longer remotely manage it. Or if you wanted to use opera instead of mozilla, etc. Keep in mind this is still a very young product and they were frank in telling us that a lot of work is still being done. That being said I just don't see this desktop catching on. Suse 9.1 on the other hand is a terrific product that Novell is spending a pile of development dollars on. SUN shouldn't be wasting it's time fragmenting the desktop competition. Let RedHat and Suse duke that one out.
WURD!!
even linux 2.4 could handle more than 8, and now you can google people running 2.6 on 64. So it's getting there, but you're right, Solaris still scales better at the high end.
no complaints. why do you seem to think it's not a viable option?
That's quite an facile editorial but you can't expect better from normal users. My screenshot looks better than yours. Evolution is better than KMail, GNOME looks more polished than KDE and so on. I do use XChat, Abiword, Rhythmbox.... ...usually you get stuff like these from normal users. And this is ok since you can't blame them for stuff they simply don't know about or don't have a slighest knowledge about.
Such editorials are hard to take serious since they are build up on basicly NO deeper knowledge of the matter. Most people I met so far are full of prejudices and seek for excuses or explaination why they prefer the one over the other while in reality they have no slightest clue on what parameters they compare the things.
If people do like the gance ICONS over the functionality then it's quite ok but that's absolutely NO framework to do such comparisons.
I do come from the GNOME architecture and spent the last 5 years on it. I also spent a lot of time (nearly 1 year now if I sum everything up) on KDE 3.x architecture including the latest KDE 3.2 (please note I still do use GNOME and I am up to CVS 2.6 release myself).
Although calling myself a GNOME vetaran I am also not shy to criticise GNOME and I do this in the public as well. Ok I got told from a couple of people if I don't like GNOME that I simply should switch and so on. But these are usually people who have a tunnelview and do not want to see or understand the problems around GNOME.
Speaking as a developer with nearly 23years of programming skills on my back I can tell you that GNOME may look polished on the first view but on the second view it isn't.
Technically GNOME is quite a messy architecture with a lot of unfinished, half polished and half working stuff inside. Given here are examples like broken gnome-vfs, half implementations of things (GStreamer still half implemented into GNOME (if you can call it an implementation at all)) rapid changes of things that make it hard for developers to catch up and a never ending bughunting. While it is questionable if some stuff can simply be fixed with patches while it's more required to publicly talk about the Framework itself.
Sure GNOME will become better but the time developers spent fixing all the stuff is the time that speaks for KDE to really improve it with needed features. We here on GNOME are only walking in the circle but don't have a real progress in true usability (not that farce people talk to one person and then to the next). Real usability here is using the features provided by the architecture that is when I as scientists want to do UML stuff that I seriously find an application written for that framework that can do it. When I eye over to the KDE architecture then as strange it sounds I do find more of these needed tools than I can find on GNOME. This can be continued in many areas where I find more scientific Software to do my work and Software that works reliable and not crash or misbehave or behave unexpected.
Comparing Nautilus with Konqueror is pure nonsense, comparing GNOME with KDE is even bigger nonsense. If we get a team of developers on a Table and discuss all the crap we find between KDE and GNOME then I can tell from own experience that the answer is clearly that GNOME will fail horrible here.
We still have many issues on GNOME which are Framework related. We now got the new Fileselector but yet they still act differently in each app. Some still have the old Fileselector, some the new Fileselector, some appearance of new Fileselectors are differently than in other apps that use the new Fileselector code and so on. When people talk about polish and consistency, then I like to ask what kind of consistency and polish is this ? We still have a couple of different ways to open Window in GNOME.
- GTK-Application-Window,
- BonoboUI Window,
- GnomeUI Window,
Then a lot of stuff inside GNOME are hardcoded UI's, some are using *.glade files (not to mention that GLADE the interface buil
In future, if Sun really wants something it can call the Sun Java Desktop, it would have all the applications in Java, and a Java runtime which is perfectly integrated into the OS, like OS X's Java environment.
-----------
WAP Apache software
We call this hugetlb, or did. The name keeps changeing. All this really means is that you support shared memory locked into RAM, hopefully with some sort of large-page notion.
a performance counter interface
We call this oprofile. We also have the user-space kcachegrind and the perfmon patch, so you get some choice on Linux.
hot-swappable CPU support
We have this too. It works great on IBM's zSeries mainframe. Oh, PC hardware? Solaris can't do that either because the hardware will die if you go ripping out a CPU.
solid device driver interface
Nice non-factual FUD there... you work for Sun? Linux has a sane, clean, simple, and high-performance driver interface. This is because the kernel developers don't contort the design to be more tolerant of binary drivers.
And the future is multiprocessors...
Your "beyond 100" is nothing to a 512-way SGI Altix running Linux. There are 1024-way systems under development. Sun can't touch this.
that this server serves over 500k database-backed pages (not hits) per day. So it's no yahoo, but it's a bit more than the average falls-over-when-it-smells-slashdot-coming hobby site can brag about. :)
yeah...
I have not tried the JDE, but i wasn't able to get Suse 8.1 and even Suse 9.0 installed as delivered on my machine due to SATA issues. Pretty much same error - installer couldn't find a place where to drop the OS.
My suspicion is that it may be the same issue.
SATA only got seriously addressed at the end of 2.5 kernel tree, as i recall Redhat had its own version of kernel 2.4 that incidentally supported serial ATA, but Suse was behind on this front. Of course, for Sun not to include such support is just a shame, since more and more users switch to Serial ATA storage.
Just my 2c
Maybe you're right about the deadline, I hope so anyway.
But you can download the freakin' media. The reviewer doesn't say how he got his copy (download and burn or order), or mention grabbing new media, or even askin Sun for new media.
Really, that was a poor "review" more like a rant...
...why the windows crowd continues to dismiss linux users as a bunch of fanboys with so much success. :-|
I think the reviewer needs to take into account the target audience of JDS. The reviewer certainly dose not fall into this category.
I have installed JDS 2 on a Emachines 6805 Athlon 64 notebook with almost no trouble. The only issues were ACPI, built in wireless and Video. The video was an ATI Radeon 9600 that was not supported by the version of the XF86 driver in JDS. Simply download the ATI FGL drivers from ATI and install/configure. Worked great. As far as ACPI is concerned your just going to have to disable it. Most mainboard implementations of ACPI are horribly buggy anyways and Linux kernels have not until 2.6.3(read the change logs, almost everything was from Intel and ACPI related) had very good/complete support of it anyways. The built in wireless was something that had windows only drivers and I did not have the time to try the NDIS wrappers tool.
I have people in my office that have JDS2 running with little effort on IBM T40's, Toshiba Tecra M1/S1, Toshiba M100, various desktops including Dell PW650, Tyan K8W based Dual Opterons, HP XW4100 workstations, plus all kinds of misc homebrew machines.
As I believe someone else has pointed out, JDS is not intended to run on the latest hardware, it is designed to run very well on slightly older but much stabler hardware. It is intended to be a corp desktop, easy to deploy from a reference image to tens or thousands of similar machines and then work consistently. How many people need a 3.2Ghz P4 Prescott to run StarCalc? Mozilla? Your certainly not going to game under it.
This really brings up one of my favorite aspects of Linux, its adaptability to different tasks. The Sun JDS "envronment" servers a different purpose than Fedora or Gentoo. It dose several things much better than either of those two do with minimal work on the users part. Sure you can probibily get Gentoo or Fedora to do the same thing that JDS dose but it would take a great deal of work and even more so to make it easily reproduceable.
On a slightly differeny note I do really get tired of all the Sun bashing that goes on. Just as I have grown tired of all the Microsoft bashing the used to go on at the top of Sun. Sun is just a company with a great deal of excellent people working there that generally are working towards a common goal: building better software and hardware that makes peoples lives easier and more enjoyable and have a good time in the process. Sun is not dying. Far from it. They are only becomming stronger.
I must insert this disclaimer: I work for Sun in Solaris OS Engineering. I have for the last 8 monthes and been enjoying every day of it.
is they recently moved to a dual-release model.
A few months ago Mandrake 10 "community edition" was released. Then when the bugs were shaken out they released "official" which is what I'm running. So you get the cutting-edge software (I really, really wanted a 2.6 kernel) but it's not as half-baked as some of their old releases infamously were.
Clusers don't share memory, making them a pain to program for. Clusters require more space, power, parts, and so on. SMP is getting cheap. Linux does a damn fine job with a few dozen CPUs.
First of all, you can get hyperthreading. By treating one CPU as two, you typically get an extra 30% of performance. (it varies greatly by load)
Second of all, multi-core chips are coming in about a year. This gives you multiple fully-independent CPUs on a single chip.
Third of all, glueless SMP is making SMP boards cheap. Making an Opteron board support 2-way SMP just requires an extra socket and a larger power supply. (extra memory sockets are nice too) I recently saw a cheap 4-way board.
Now put all that together: 2-way hyperthread, 4 cores per chip, and 4 chips per board. That's a 32-way system squeezed onto a normal-sized server motherboard. For a desktop, maybe it will be 16-way due to having only 2 CPU sockets.
Beyond that, sure, cluster away if your app has the features to allow doing so.
Using subtle clues and hints in his first-person narrative to imply emotion and intention, Jem Matzan's critically acclaimed writing style is truly unique among fiction authors. Jem's extraordinary characters and distinct dialogue decorate his fantasy universe while coaxing readers' imaginations into providing the specifics.
Also a professional actor and model, Jem spends much of his time performing in such productions as television commercials, stage plays, and interactive variety shows.
Biography provided by the author, October 2002
from here : http://www.scifan.com/writers/mm/MatzanJem.asp
Thats simple. Thats the version of Linux kernel they have licensed from SCO.
Lord folks - why was this even posted? After three machines it's pretty obvious that the install media had a problem. What possible use is a "review" that basically says "Well, I couldn't get it to install, and now I'm going to whine about it."
The support system doesn't sound like it's much better or worse than what most companies offer these days, although there is a legitimate discussion to be had about support desks that don't speak english (or your language) adequately.
Next time let's wait until someone get's a reasonable install and can talk about what JDS actually does and how it performs. "It didn't work for me" is pretty much useless.
Three Squirrels
This kinda sounds like Fedora Core 2... Immediately crashes when I try to install it (because of a well known but ignored issue with Asus P4P800 motherboards), but on the other hand if I had been able to install it, it would have trashed my Windows XP installation anyway...
SATA drives are a problem with this kernel, but I have no idea why this reviewer had so much trouble with ATA drives. I've seen installfests where dozens of users installed JDS on _laptops_, all were successful. I've never seen it fail on a non SATA desktop.
QNX? Their kernel is dog slow. memcpy's at each and every boundry rather than using a 0-copy IPC mechanism.
Also they charge a lot for licensing. the IDE has some slick microkernel oriented tracing and diagnostic tools though.
"Those who do not agree with me are sycophants."
Before you all think I'm a doofus, hear me out:
1. There are a bunch of already-existing and very high quality Linux distributions, all of which make a huge number of very useful packages available. So, Sun weighs in with a Beta distribution which includes almost no packages other than their custom Sun stuff?
2. With all the aforementioned very high quality Linux distros out there which are more or less unencumbered by license issues (besides GPL, which we all like), Sun encumbers its new O/S with a seven page license agreement?
3. With all the downloadable distros which can be had for no more than bandwidth costs, Sun goes with a subscription model? And then provides shaky support to boot?
4. With all the other distros offering a league of choices, KDE, Gnome, Blackbox, etc, configurable on a user-by-user basis, Sun forces you into using only one specific window manager across the board?
5. And, sun releases this system without (apparently) adequately testing their installer against popular types of hardware?
Like I said, maybe it's me, but this is kind of a "WTF" moment for me. Why is Sun trying to reinvent the wheel like this? Why are they doing so much to make their distro much weaker than existing ones? What's going on?
I thought their rotating windows trick was kinda cool, but I think I'm going to stick with Slackware and OS/X on my machines. I've got the JDK installed on both, and Eclipse, too. It seems to be working a lot better than their new setup...
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
Blatently copying and pasting, leaving in the Slashdot auto-inserted URLs where links were (but are no longer)... tut, tut...
And tomorrow the stock exchange will be the human race
- The bracket syntax: Objective-C uses "[object method:arguments]" for method calls. Java uses object.method(arguments).
- Java is garbage collected
- Java uses objects of type Method where Objective-C uses opaque data entities called "selectors".
Whereas a host of differences at the conceptual and practical level exist betweeen C++ and Java.It's very easy to be mislead by the fact that ObjC uses [object method] rather than object.method() into thinking it's widely different. However, if you actually learn the language it isn't at all, you just type certain things differently. If you were to run a couple of regexps on an objective c program to make a very small number of syntactical changes ( [] =>
I've heard decent things about it and it will be supported for like 5 years, so worth a look. It will be going on my main server at home but I just haven't got around to it yet.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
SPARC contexts run out. Then you are faced with more registers than x86 or x86-64 has to deal with. The register stack engine isn't a bright idea; see the intro of the Alpha architecture manual where the DEC engineers tear into it. You're saving more, or less, context than you need to save. This is wasteful. When you run out of on-CPU resources, you take an expensive trap. What's more, recent chips from AMD have a hidden context mechanism that works entirely without OS help.
The features may or may not be cool and all, but it's the end result that matters.
Linux also supports IBM's POWER4, the IA-64 systems from SGI, and so on. Solaris doesn't.
You'd think this following statement he made would have been a clue that there was probably something wrong with the way he partitioned the 80 GB drive he claimed should have been able to handle the install:
The guy says the partition configuration he used for the JDS didn't work for SUSE 9.1 either, and had to repartition it to have enough space to complete the install! It appears to me that the only difference between this and the problem he had with JDS was that it sounded like JDS gave the warning a bit earlier in the install.
I believe that a JDS install should alleviate the user as much as possible complications from partitioning. Yet, we don't know if he had used "advanced" options that permitted him to create the limitted partition sizes, or a default install. In fact, we know nothing about the options he was given and the options he chose for partitioning.
Open Standards Portal
Because the feature freeze was six months ago. That's how commercial UNIX works, and SUNW are traditionally a commercial UNIX company. If you want to be an über-l33t Linux h4>
The statement was the disc was partitioned without problem then there was an error message saying there was lack of sufficient space. Could one of these partitions been too small for the installation?
At least one of the responses claimed they had no problem with what seemed to be recent hardware.
I am no fan of Sun, but I will await other confirming assessments prior to fully believing their product is a complete disaster.
And vice versa. Which makes it hard to compare the two.
And the future is multiprocessors...
According to whom? Sun? There's a lot of high end work that's massively parallel, and clusters on commodity hardware are becoming huge. That said, if you want to pay for a 256 CPU Linux box, SGI will sell you one. Including hot swappable CPU support.
I wouldn't be surprised if page locking wasn't available in Linux too.
If you want the system management utilities and development tools they must be installed afterward.
I wonder when Sun are going to get their act together and start fixing the basic toolchains available on their environments. We work on Sun slices at work, and we're prevented from having access to all sorts of basic tools we need.
Now I can understand wanting to restrict access to compilers, scripting languages, etc.
But perl *is* available on the environment, yet the halfwits who set policy in our server sections prevent us from having access to tools like less (yes, we have to use more, tail and head forall of our gigabyte-log-scanning needs because the version of vi on these environments won't read long lines or too-long files); vim (sigh) or (perhaps less controversally) lsof.
And the reason?
These are disallowed for 'security reasons'.
This is the second place I've worked at where my team has been limited like this. When are Sun going to get a clue and learn to install the basic tools geeks need to be happy?
Until they do - avoid Sun.
Believe with me, my saplings.
I wonder what the "even more heavily accented Indian" thought when he heard your probably heavily accented whereeveryoucomefrom accent eh?
It's a great shame to me about the prejudice on accents, I was reading that review with some semblance of interest, but when the person goes on about the heavy Scottish accent or the even heavier Indian accent is reaks of prejudism and if I may say so borders on racism and devalues the entire review.
You can stuff your non-working Sun Java Desktop 2 or whatever it's called and your four machines firmly up the place where the sun doesn't shine. No pun intended.
Sun is still Microsoft's enemy, and Sun has been selling a lot of Linux on the desktop (especially in China), so Sun's JDS is a target of Microsoft FUD.
And, JDS runs Gnome, so, like Red Hat, Sun's JDS is a target of Trolltech FUD.
So it doesn't surprise me when journalists and posters attack JDS.
As to this particular journalist, I think he's full of crap.
Sun's JDS is the SuSE distribution, with a Sun-customized desktop.
But the journalist never reached the parts that Sun customized -- the only thing he tested was the install procedure, which is SuSE.
Have you ever seen any other reviewer complain about this many problems with SuSE? Neither have I, in fact, I have seen nothing but praise for SuSE's installation.
Therefore, I can only conclude that the journalist had bad media, or he intentionally chose hardware combinations that he knew would fail. Hopefully it's the former.
That's not the way to get users to pick up your product. SuSE is the only linux distro that's wholly "pay for product" -- and even they have a liveCD and an ftp-installer ISO available. I understand Sun wants to get the product out...but does Sun understand that?
FreeBSD for the impatient.
this is my first post to /. with my new system, FC2. I just finished installing it awhile ago, been customizing, got my mp3 media streams working. Now here's the weird part. At first, it would NOT install. Got it in the mail this afternoon and went to it. Kept aborting some where's near the beginning of the install. Now I don't have a lot of new machines to try, mostly I have this old PP200 with 228 meg ram as my "main" machine, this is what I use. What I found out, it wasn't the media, it was the dang Cd player! I tried 4 different old Cdplayers out of the junk box until I found one that was smooth as silk, zip bap boom, I did a custom install, here I am. Same old crummy small HDD of 8 gigs, same old 1996 computar, but, it wouldn't read the disk *well enough* except with one of these other (old no name brand whatever, "aafrey" on the label for a name)Cd drives, which I will now permanently install in the machine. Right now it's hanging on the top by the cables. Now, why would that be? All the CD drives *work*, just not with these install disks, not good enough anyway. The one that was always with the machine always worked before, and managed to start the install fine, several times, just wouldn't finish it.
You tell me, I know not why this is. I will say the only clue I can see is it is the alleged fastest cd, at 40x. The others are all older 2,4,8 whatevers, but still functional.
FWIW
BTW, FC2 is *very nice*. A scosh faster, default fonts seem nicer, all in all like it better than FC1 so far. I did an all Gnome install, then some other stuff, the newer gnome is nice as well, but I don't like the newer gedit layout arrangement, but it's still useable. Haven't looked much past that yet, though, just browsing and listening.
Anyway, one of my little bros is a small boss-action honcho at sun, I will be sure to razz him a good one on your experiences... heh heh heh
It's a single system image. It runs exactly one
copy of Linux. Call it what you like, but it acts
like a big NUMA box -- which is, aside from
memory latency differences, just SMP.
> It's not my fault they shipped a prehistoric kernel.
And since you knew that, why didn't you try JDS on an older PC? After all, JDS is SuSE -- you know that it will install just fine on 90+ percent of the office PCs out there.
And if you _had_ installed it on an older PC, then you could have actually _reviewed_ JDS (which would have served your readers), and you could have explained about the older kernel (also serving your readers), and then you could have complained about that specific point, instead of trashing the whole thing.
But what you did was dishonest, and did'nt serve anybody (except Microsoft, of course).
I think you purposely chose hardware that was too new to be supported by the Linux kernel included in Sun's JDS.
I think you're just another damned FUD writer.
I agree with choice, but I agree with gparent, we have enough redudancy. I might agree with you if every problem inherent with linux were properly solved, but they're not. At this point, we have far too much wheel reinvention, and that's not generally a good thing.
For those that rememeber, the LX50 server came with a similarly rebranded version of
Red Hat Linux 7.2 - just with an english installer that would only install on LX50 hardware.
To make matters worse, they used the Workstation [!] installation (for a server) and were a month behind
on all important security updates. While they still did any updates that is, it was all cancelled after a year...
Sun just has no clues about Linux.
I cannot really say anything about the 'Sun Java Desktop System'. I have not yet been able to run the live demo CD !!! On an old AMD K6-2 400 MHz I get an illegal instruction error during startup. Under VMWare 2.0.1 I get something about an illegal video mode. When I try setting one of the syggested modes I get a kernel panic shortly after. So IMHO the minimum configuration described on the CD does not fit the bill, and I could not be bothered to spend more time on the CD.
After further thought, I think we are talking at cross purposes here. Number of processors that can be attached to a system image is not at all related to the scalability of the operating system. The operating system itself (functions such as filesystem and memory access) may show no effective speedup after the addition of a relatvely small number of processors. This number of processors is a lot smaller for Linux than for Solaris (although the 2.6 kernel is far better). Those additional processors can be used by user software, often using specialised multiprocessing facilities such as PVM.
ITYM "is it good or is it whack?"
Three suggestions: /etc/hosts so that gnome doesn't have to round trip to your DNS server to gethostbyname.
3) Try another theme.
1) If you don't have a configuration server, turn off APOC 2) Add your hostname to