Slashdot Mirror
Sun Rays For Linux
Tarantolato writes "According to an eweek story Sun Microsystems will be debuting a Linux port of their Sun Ray Server at Linux World this week. This would allow Sun Ray thin clients to be run off of a SuSE or Red Hat box, where you previously needed a Solaris-SPARC setup to do that."
If you've looked into Sun's Sun Ray Technology it's pretty neat. It offers a lot of features that similar windows technology does not.
Open Source Java DAO Generator
This is VERY interesting, considering there are rumours about Sun thinking about buying Novell (which recently bought SuSe). Time to hit trading accounts! :)
Simpy
The most impressive part of the Sunrays is definitely that they don't feel like thin clients. Things zap around like as if you were on a local computer -- in contrast, a terminal server running Windows feels extremely sluggish, even with a powerful server and dedicated thin clients (which is basically what you have with the Sunrays :-) ).
/* Steinar */
(This comment is of course GPLed.)
There is another scarcely mentioned, but equally great feature of the Sunray stations: they have no fans!!
If you think that is no big deal, enter your standard computer lab again and pay attention to all the noise... I have worked in a large institution where the whole building was Sunray-based. A completely silent computing environment. You can actually hear the birds chirping outside. You have no idea what it feels like until you've tried it!!
If you actually look at pricing between the Sun Ray's vs someone like Dell, with required software like Antivirus and Ghost (for a larger networking environment) and add them all together, you'll see that you're wrong. Don't believe me? Price 40 machines at the small to mid level business pricing bracket at Dell, Gateway, Compaq/HP, IBM, etc with Enterprise licenses of Ghost and Antivirus and you'll find that you actually save money by buying the Sun Building blocks.
As for portability - sun also has a laptop version of these things with wireless capability. Oh yea, they have batteries that actually last 6-8 hours compared to your normal laptops...
Just another AC thats shooting their mouth off on something they know nothing about...
The most impressive part of the Sunrays is definitely that they don't feel like thin clients. Things zap around like as if you were on a local computer
You have obviously never been to the Technical University of Denmark, or the CS Department of Copenhagen University.
Those places, especially DTU, almost soil them selves from the sheer joy of deploying hundreds of SunRay thin clients. Problem is, people want their browser, their java apps, their animated gifs and (shudder) their Xitrix Windows sessions.
End result is a very thin client like experience. When I matriculated in 2000, we had a large, bad Sun server (24CPU/24Gig IIRC). This has now been demoted to lowly X-server, and it still runs slow as mollasses.
I think SunRay is a kickass technology, I would love to have one on my desk, quiet, cold, connected to a powerful Linux server in the basement. And I would love to see them in action where there was sufficient power for a good user experience.
I totally understand the Universities that deploy them. A three man team and a bunch of cable plugging monkeys can administrate a four digit seat deployment. But the fact of the matter is that users, in my experience, tend to find other alternatives (the Windows Lab, bring their own laptops.), because the responsiveness is so low.
Well, I'm ranting, and it's pre-coffee, so it's probably coming out a little more bitter than it should. This news about SunRays being able to run off linux is good news in my world, as this will allow administrators to buy very powerful commodity hardware at a fraction of the price of Sun iron.