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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.)
I dunno. Why are you not asking a similar question of Debian???
Because Debian has pre-built images and source packages for up to and including 2.6.5 and 2.4.26?
"Madness is something rare in individuals - but in groups, parties, peoples, ages it is the rule." -- Nietzsche
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
JDS isn't really another distro; it's preconfigured SuSE. What JDS offers, which no one else does, is ready plugability into Sun's Java Enterprise System server stack. (Unlike JDS, JES actually is substantially Java-based).
The usefulness of JDS would hinge on how good JES is. So far I haven't found a good review of it, either alone or in comparison with similar stacks from Novell, IBM, Microsoft, etc.
C'mon, OSDN, let's get with the program.
Google confirms: Ruby is the world's most beloved programm
3) Suse is still non-free-beer. Come on Novell, letting hobbyists dabble with it at home isn't going to hurt anyone.
SuSE is free-as-in-beer, but you don't get an ISO install. Got to use the FTP installer, which is a pain but works. Novell also opened up YAST, the only bit of special sauce that had another license recently.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
Hmm, you do realize that Java has almost nothing to do with the Linux-based Java Desktop System... right?
Don't let Sun's use of Microsoftian branding throw you, big guy.
BTW, You should probably let IBM know that Java is a dead language. I'm sure Big Blue would be interested in hearing about that.
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.
Their hardware is more expensive, and slower.
Slower for single-threaded cache-bound apps, absolutely. But Sun hardware has superior multiprocessor performance, scalability, and memory bandwidth. It is also far more reliable. I point you to this anecdotal story about what happened when photo.net moved from Sun to Dell hardware.
Their OS is less feature rich, but has more bugs, and doesn't perform as well in most cases as Linux.
Oh man, Solaris has far more enterprise features than Linux. Intimate shared memory, a performance counter interface, hot-swappable CPU support, a solid device driver interface, the list goes on and on. And the future is multiprocessors...Sun has a huge advantage with Solaris as it readily scales beyond 100 processors out-of-the-box. The Linux stock kernel scales to what, 8 processors maybe, until falling flat on its face due to lock contention.
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
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!!
For 9.1?
5 67 (mind the gap) for notes on doing it with the 9.0 version. The same will apply to 9.1 when it hits the public. Nothing to stop you from posting your ISO image other than the god awful bandwidth bill. Better to try the live 9.1 image, make sure it plays nice with your hardware. (it should, I know it picked up everything I tossed at it) Things work much smother if you FTP all the files to a local server and then install off that. If you have to have an ISO, they do sell one for a reasonable amount of cash. I agree, however, Novell should just let you download media rather than have you deal with the goofy FTP install.
Novell also opened up YAST, the only bit of special sauce that had another license recently.
9.1 will be made open for free download in June. They usually wait a few weeks between putting the retail iso's out there for sale and allowing the free ftp install. All the directories are already there for private/authenticated users.
If you must have a free bootable CD media, you can make one. Take a look at http://www.linuxiso.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=13
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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.
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.
Solaris is available for basicaly free. $75 last I checked. This is for up to 8 processors. That and above they license separately.
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.
Even the Altix doesn't touch this - its a supercluster system. The suggested configuration for individual nodes is pretty small - a max of 12 or 16 processors. You can specify up to 256 processors, but its unlikely to scale well unless you are using specialised application code.
Since another poster was kind enough to address most of your software points, I'll address the hardware:
2 004q1 /cpu2000-20040112-02710.html
s 2004q1 /cpu2000-20040112-02709.html
s 2004q1 /cpu2000-20040209-02854.htmls 2004q1 /cpu2000-20040112-02709.html
Chip for chip the UltraSparc is slower:
1.28Ghz Ultra IIIi (the newest Sun chip for which
I can get spec benchmarks):
Specint: 704
http://www.specbench.org/cpu2000/results/res
Specfp: 1063
http://www.specbench.org/cpu2000/results/re
Opteron 146:
Specint: 1354
http://www.specbench.org/cpu2000/results/re
Specfp: 1394
http://www.specbench.org/cpu2000/results/re
So the Opteron is about twice as fast at int and 30% faster at float. So while you can get more processors from Sun than an x86 base, you may not get more performance.
RH doesn't upgrade versions. They backport patches. Version of kernel stays the same in RH, the only number in version that changes are cumulative patch versions.
/. topic for those who don't know.
It was even
p.s. I don't know who marked you insightful. He needs his brains checked more often
Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
Sparcs have more HW contexts (registers) than x86, so process switching is zero-overhead for more concurrent processors. While x86 must copy CPU registers to RAM and back again for each switch. That really eats up performance.
--
make install -not war
No it DOES NOT fucking BEG the QUESTION. Google for that phrase to see why not.
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>
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.
With sun you have the obvious OpenOffice and NFS. They've also open sourced a lot of other software and have provided resources for other projects. Have a look at http://www.sunsource.net/ to see how much Sun contributes to open source projects. People don't like some of the licenses Sun uses because it gives Sun too much control still. Having something GPL'd doesn't make that any better. Just look at what happend with Emacs and XEmacs when a company started paying the FSF to make enhancements to Emacs that they needed but had an uphill battle with RMS who had final say into what happened with Emacs. That's when XEmacs was forked out of it.
Sun has contributed a lot of code to Gnome (accessibility api, work on sawfish, improved usability, tons of documentation and help). They do provide kenel patches, Tim Hockins used to be very active on the linux kernel mailing lists when Sun was working on Sun Linux and still supporting Cobalt servers.
Also Sun is pushing a linux desktop, JDS. And it's pushing hard in different areas. Where is IBM in this? IBM's take on linux, provide it with our servers since we can run websphere on it so that websphere seems cheaper because you don't "have" to buy a Windows Server OS.
Also do a search on the kernel mailing lists. You'll see more references to Solaris than to AIX. Sun had published a lot of papers regarding how they did things and these served as a good guide for many linux kernel hackers. You'll see lots of comparisons to how sun does things. Not just how well it performs to solaris but actually details on how it was implemented in solaris, especially in the case where solaris performed better.
Not saying that linux is a rip off of solaris in case anyone misreads that. I'm saying that Sun has a history for supporting open standards and shares a lot of what it knows and people could benefit from that. Tanenbaum
Everyone needs to remember Open Source is not Linux. Sun does a lot with the Apache Software Foundation.
Sun even provides "scholarships" for open source projects and non profit entities to pay for licensing of some of it's technology that for profit entities have to pay for.
Pointing to a list of kernel changes made in one version to indicate that IBM is the better open source participant is a limited view of open source.
I don't listen to much that RMS has to say. Only so many people in this world can be college proffessors, develop software for free and eventually get a few 100k every so often in awards and money in speaking engagments. The majority of software developers need to be able to make money developing software, they don't have the luxury of clinging to such lofty ideals. How far would all of this gone if RMS had a family to support? Maybe this is why RMS has no family to support? According to him, his child is the GNU project. How many of you can do something like that? Nothing against RMS, it takes a lot of dedication to do what he's doing but it's not very practical for everyone to be doing that.
The Java Community Process Sun set up is pretty good. Individual membership is free. You can help guide the direction of Java. It helps keep things from really going to far astray the way Sun set it up. Which is good for the people that build apps on Java.
Open sourcing Java doesn't really do much for the developer community as most developers build on top of Java, not in it. The people that would benefit would be people like IBM, BEA and Oracle as well as OS companies. The majority of the developer community is made up of the ones building their apps on top of j2se and j2ee. Open Source some great tools and then you're talking. Sun opensourced NetBeans. There's a lot of debate over NetBeans vs IBM's Eclipse. I'v
Open Source Java DAO Generator
Myth. Perpetuated by people who don't buy Sun hardware. In the past 5 years Sun has drastically slashed prices right across the board. Their hardware is now CHEAPER than equivalent hardware from IBM and HP and so on. That's even including PC hardware. In fact, the only UNIX vendor still beating Sun on price is Apple with their Xserve gear.
Example: recent customer bought a "ruggedized PC" for running Linux. This is a Pentium 4 2.4GHz in an industrial rackmount case. Ultra160 disks. ECC RAM. Dual power supply. Red Hat Enterprise 3 (they want vendor support and security updates). Even ignoring the cost of the Red Hat license, the cost of the PC was $6200. Throw in the Red Hat license and it costs $7400. An equivalent V240R from Sun costs $5800 and the software (Solaris) and updates are free.
Here's the kicker. They ended up buying the V240R anyway (so many issues with Linux and SCSI) and despite 1GHz CPU on the V240R versus 2.4GHz CPU on the PC, it ran faster on the Sun hardware! 64-bit with huge cache really does make a massive difference.
Don't perpetuate the myth. Sun is comparable in price to IBM, Dell, HP/Compaq. If you're buying your "servers" in desktop cases from the local whitebox store, waiting in the same queue as 14 year old schoolkids buying a new Radeon for their home computer, then you're not in the right market to comment on Sun's prices. You're trying to compare cheap disposable PC hardware with the server market. Look at the server market; Sun is extremely good value for money.
-- "I can't tell the future, I just work there." -- The Doctor
Umm... if you check their financials you'll see they only have about 2.7 billion in cash:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=SUNW
And they are carrying about 1.47 Billion in debt. Given that they ran a negative cashflow of -20 million dollars last year, they could keep this up for some time. You revenue is irrelavent, it's your earnings and cash flow that count.
Do 400,000+ transactions per hour 24/7 on your home built pc and get back to me.
That must be why there are no Sun boxes in the TPC-C top ten.
http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_perf_results. asp
I guess if you want your corporate IT department to rival that of a medium sized College, you could squeeze extra performance out of Linux.
Or you could field twice that many people managing your relationships with the proprietary providers of the software you need. In most cases it's the proprietary code that is the bottleneck (in my experience in industry). Or you could also field extra sysadmins to work on compiling and integrating all the FOSS programs that your users actually need that Solaris doesn't ship with.
Oh... and working around the issues and problems with Solaris, like the fact that they screwed up their version of BPF so badly that the libpcap folks found it was faster to filter in user space. Or the fact that their packet sniffing interface doesn't hand over the whole frame received, but trunkates it for you to the size indicated by the ethernet header making them useless for certain kinds of tasks. Or the million and one other little things that are broken in Solaris that will NEVER be fixed.
"which still won't handle complex msoffice documents well"
Neither will MS Office...
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.
Care to explain that logic to me?!
We are comparing RH's enterprise only distro (in fact, the only thing they "officially" make these days) to SuSE's desktop distro - is it no surprising that RH's has more backported stuff as it has a 5 year lifespan???