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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???
Wow, they really shortened it.
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.
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.
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
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...
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
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.
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.
- 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!!
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.
Do we really need another distro?
A few years ago when Gentoo popped up, a lot of people said "Do we really need another distro? We already have RedHat, and Debian, and SUSE."
Now, a few years later, RedHat has abandoned its consumer line to a group of volunteers (Fedora), Debian is just.. years behind the other distributions in terms of installed software and catching up at a snail's pace (leaving its excellent toolset and great stability a bit frustratingly useless in practice for the main distro), and SUSE has been purchased by Novell (which has turned out to be benevolent, but it might as likely have turned out not to be). Meanwhile Gentoo, while still not yet a general purpose solution, is maturing at a great rate and is currently a far more attractive solution for many people's purposes than any of these.
I'd say then that the answer to "Do we really need another distro?" Is always yes. The more the merrier. Choice and redundancy are good things.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
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.
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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>
How is it useless? If the only reviews I read of JDS2 were "wow its awesome on my P2/333 box d00d" and then I bought it for my systems and it didn't work, then I'd feel that review was a failure.
If you read the review carefully, I didn't blast Sun on anything except licensing, support, and the poor decision that led to the old kernel. The included software, the new utilities and the customized UI I thought were great... but useless to me because my hardware isn't supported.
It's not a very flattering review of the product, but at least it is honest. I shouldn't have to go hunting for a computer that will work with the software. The review reflects my experiences which could very well be your experiences too if you have similar systems.
-Jem
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.
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.
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.