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.)

Comments

Kernel versions are very often "behind"

[Anonymous Coward]

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???

Re:Kernel versions are very often "behind"

[gorre]

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?

Seven page license document?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, they really shortened it.

Disclosure

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

The problem here seems to be hardware support...

[TexasDex]

but for once this doesn't appear to be the manufacturers' fault.

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.

Media Bias

[turgid]

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.

Re:Media Bias

[KimiDalamori]

It's one thing to assume that us "Linux bigots" are going to tell you that Sun's product is harder to use than Linux, or that their desktop is uglier than GNOME or KDE. But if the product does not install correctly, that's probably a bit more serious than just "media bias".

Re:Media Bias

[njcoder]

Sun has open sourced a lot of products. JFS is good but I don't know of many people using it and can't think of any distributions that use it as their default filesystem. What else has IBM open sourced?

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

A bit irresponsible

[mariox19]

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.

pretty sluggish on a relatively powerful machine

[very]

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

Re:This begs the question

[Tarantolato]

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.

Re:I tried the OS and...

[clk23]

I would generally agree that many distribution reviews are lacking in actual content. However, I don't believe this review is pointless.

The guy tried four different systems, two of which were 'hot-rodded,' one of which was a pretty standard budget PC config, and the last of which as an older laptop. I think it's a valid point to illustrate that he couldn't get the thing to successfully install on any of those systems.

And, further, I think it's a valid point to describe the support structure and quality of support he received when trying to resolve the problem.

The install process is important. I've personally grown tired of encountering install processes which require pseudo-arcane knowledge, loads of custom configuration, and hours of hand-holding. Show me something that offers an install that is functional, intuitive, while still offering options for customization, and I'll be impressed.

I can understand the problems but...

[the melon]

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.