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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.)
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.
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.
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.
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
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...
- 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.
I was there when the reviewer did the install, and I believe everything I write.
I tried different hard drives on different computers. I tried four different configurations, three of which were distinctly different. Sun could have easily updated the kernel in JDS2 but they chose not to.
It's not my fault they shipped a prehistoric kernel. Did you expect me to write a puff piece on an operating environment that doesn't work on all of my test equipment?
-Jem
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.
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.
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Biography provided by the author, October 2002
from here : http://www.scifan.com/writers/mm/MatzanJem.asp
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.