Solaris 10 Installation and Desktop Walkthrough

linuxbeta writes "On OSDir they've got a whole whack of screenshots of Sun's Solaris 10 from the first boot screen, through an x86 installation, and through either a Java Desktop System 3 or CDE (Common Desktop Environment) 1.6 desktop. It's nice to have a look at Java Desktop System 3 while it's not even available for Linux (yet). I dunno... looks like Linux to me. I know about the licensing issues with Solaris 10, but I think they've got something going on here."

Comments

Alright

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks nice. Makes me happy on the inside.

Re:Alright

[Anonymous Coward]

Liar.

Re:Alright

[iamacat]

Your insides must be running Windows. Have a care not have your security breached through any holes.

Seriously, there are better ways to launch a program than navigating huge hierarchical menus, praying your mouse doesn't wobble and lose couple of levels. Windows 95, NextStep and MacOSX each introduced serious improvements in usability of computers, but why stop innovation there and just rip off old ideas?

I wrote a little program for Mac that I think is easier to use than either Start menu or Dock. Not a rocket science or even a new idea, but I am not the one with billions for research. I am sure modern processing power, new technologies and research can yield interfaces that don't look anything like Xerox PARC and are dramatically more productive. Keyboards with dynamically changing LED key labels? Fuzzy logic to recognize faster, inexact user commands? Some hybrid of UI and command line to let user see information from many programs in a small space? I don't know, but Sun and Microsoft should find out.

Re:Alright

[IndiepoprockJesse]

well, that reply is not very on topic.. but i dig the idea.. it's somewhat mac already (like the search functions in itunes and stuff), is there something for linux available (besides typing it in the console)?

Re:Alright

[Fred_A]

There's a thingy for Windows that's the exact same thing I think (a port ?). It also lets you browse the filesystem apparently.

I only saw it once on someone's machine so I don't really know what it's called (and I don't use Windows myself). I recall it was a commercial app though (or shareware maybe).

The interface seemed comfortable enough though once that the user got used to it.

Anyway new interfaces are indeed *really* needed. Menus with submenus are really painful to use especially with crappy mice.

As far as I can tell, the only mildly successful "new" (it's not really new, more like 20 years old really but it only sort of caught on recently) interface is pie menus or their simplified child, mouse gestures.

Mozilla/Firefox users who haven't yet made the switch really should investigate the relevant extensions (Opera users have this available by default, otoh they can't customize it as much). My favorite being RadialContext found here http://www.radialthinking.de/radialcontext/.

Unfortunately pie menus don't scale when the number of items grows but I still believe that they could be used in more situations than just Web browsers (in image editing there certainly could be some things to do). Another drawback is that those don't work very well with the dreaded trackpads on laptops.

Anyway down with menus. Or multiple submenus at least.

Re:Alright

[Kubla Khan]

VERY GREY looking. C'mon, lads, if you want to be competing with other user desktops, then you've got to invest in some (just a couple) designers to make it look like soemthing I'd want to use, instead of a 3rd year students' OS project.

Re:Alright

[IamTheRealMike]

Theoretically GNOME already has this, go to the Run window, open up and focus the list of known applications then start typing. However on Fedora Core 3 the typeahead find seems to be buggy: I believe this is much improved in GTK 2.6 (no distros are shipping with that yet AFAIK).

Re:Alright

[Flamefly]

Hi,

I use "Daves Quick Search Deskbar" http://www.dqsd.net/.

It lives on the taskbar, just click it, type in an alias of the program you wish to run and voila. Shortcut for activating the screen is winkey+s. It's not initially set up to shortcut to programs, but if you install it, then go to options (>>) configure > local alias's you can add aliases to local programs in the format:

aliasname|run location

e.g. writer|run "C:\Program Files\OpenOffice.org 1.9.65\program\swriter.exe"

You'll have to reload the program (>> configure > reload) before the changes to the aliases file take effect initially. Also there is quite a good group of people developing extra additions to it, for advanced web searching easily. *Really* useful, 'tis a rare day I have to touch that start button.

Hope it helps!

Re:Alright

[Anonymous Coward]

Where is a Knoppix-like Live CD of Solaris?
Then we could try it as conveniently as Linux, and wouldn't need the screenshots.

Re:Alright

[Anonymous Coward]

Bayden SlickRun, perhaps? It's freeware, and I've no idea about the filesystem browsing. RunFast does a similar job...

Re:Alright

[Rank Outsider]

The Apricot Xi had an LCD panel on the keyboard which labelled the 5 function keys dynamically - and doubled up as a calculator. That was in 1983!

Re:Alright

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think changing the way the UI works would be as benificial as what it can do. The unix user world has X. X should be seen as the holy grail of application servers. Everything is there for you, it is completely accessible through ssh, and it can be leaned/extended to the administrators every desire. When someone builds a window manager that is fast and runs on any OS I will be impressed.

Re:Alright

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not exactly sure what the big advantage of this would be. Windows has the run dialog which can execute anything in your path. The KDE dialog is very similar. It doesn't give you an application list, but considering the vague bad names for most Linux apps, that probably isn't that helpful anyway, besides which the number of applications on Linux are too big to wade through in one big list anyway. It also displays a most likely match of apps as you type the name.

While this adds some nice functionality to OSX, it still has the OSX drawback that you can't bind this stuff to a key combination.

Glass

[Azadre]

What is to become of the looking glass theme I saw a while back? It was definately cutting edge.

Re:Glass

[blastwave]

See : http://java.com/en/everywhere/lookingglass.jsp

Re:Glass

[SlashdotOgre]

I spoke to one of the lead developers of JDS at LinuxWorld in SF over the summer and he had mentioned that the roadmap put JDS & Project Looking Glass meeting around the next iteration of Sun Java Desktop (JDS4). I don't know if that's still the plan, but you download the latest source of Project Looking Glass here: https://lg3d.dev.java.net/

Re:Glass

[Curtman]

What is to become of the looking glass theme I saw a while back?

You mean the one in the early beta releases?

Re:Glass

[Anonymous Coward]

"What is to become of the looking glass theme I saw a while back? It was definately cutting edge."

yeah, definitely.

Re:Glass

[Anonymous Coward]

I spoke to some devs at LinuxWorld in Boston last month when they were giving a Looking Glass Demo and from what I was told, some features will begin to bleed into JDS but it will take some time. There arent really any Interface Standards for 3d environments like that one and at least as far as some of Sun's govt contracts go they cant just go off creating their own standards in that respect. At least not in the core desktop they put into Solaris.

Take this with a pinch of salt

[Rupy]

IMO the whole "Solaris has gone open source" is just too little too late.

Re:Take this with a pinch of salt

[blastwave]

Well, I have been in the pilot project from the very beginning and there are builds of OpenSolaris up and running. We have the source and are working on a PowerPC port to the Open Desktop Workstation : http://www.pegasosppc.com/odw.php We all don't live in the Linux world. Some of us want an OS that can run on 128 simultaneous processors as well as one or four or twelve all with the same kernel. Not a cluster. One big computer.

Re:Take this with a pinch of salt

[node 3]

IMO the whole "Solaris has gone open source" is just too little too late.

How so? Sun's revenue last year was over $10bn, and their move to open sourcing Solaris, some impressive new features in Solaris 10, and their work on the Java Desktop as well as Project Looking Glass all show they are not standing still.

Sun's move to open source can only help them on the desktop. Java Desktop is really slick for the corporate environment. Project Looking Glass could really pay off big for them if they are able to refine it properly (think about OS X's aqua interface. 3d has a lot of potential on the desktop).

And if Sun manages to move Solaris to 100% open source, expect it to be *huge* competition to Linux.

Re:Take this with a pinch of salt

[blastwave]

furthermore .. http://www.blastwave.org/articles/BLS-0016/index.h tml Looks pretty real to me :)

Re:Take this with a pinch of salt

[SunFan]

They've actually been working on OpenSolaris for five years, and this summer it will be a genuine OSS _UNIX_. Not a work-alike UNIX but the real deal with more than two decades worth of production system use. It hasn't scaled to 64+ CPUs just this year, but more than five years ago. It hasn't just gotten solid virtualization technology, it's had it for years. For example.

Re:Take this with a pinch of salt

[SunFan]

Actually, the StarFire came out in 1997, so they've been 64-way for more than eight years, now.

Re:Take this with a pinch of salt

[Anonymous Coward]

sgi has taken linux to 256 already iirc

Re:Take this with a pinch of salt

[Man in Spandex]

You mean huge competition to Linux Distributors such as SuSE and RedHat.

I do agree that a slick interface does alot more than what linux enthusiasts think (the ones who think that gui isn't "all that"). These are computers that may or may not be used by savvy computer users so a desktop that looks nice and simple sure does a lot. Of course as long as flexibility isn't sacrified!

Re:Take this with a pinch of salt

[SunFan]

Yeah, but Sun actually has a market to sell to. SGI's box is custom hardware with a custom Linux kernel that really appeals to the smallest upper echelon of supercomputer buyers. Look in any common datacenter, and there's a good chance of seeing the Sun logo in there. The odds of seeing an SGI logo are slim.

Re:Take this with a pinch of salt

[Anonymous Coward]

Are there any university groups in the pilot program? It seems OpenSolaris would be pretty good for an operating systems course in addition to using Linux or NetBSD.

Re:Take this with a pinch of salt

[node 3]

You mean huge competition to Linux Distributors such as SuSE and RedHat.

No, I don't.

Solaris competes with Linux, Sun competes with the distributors (which one can call 'Linux' anyway, the same way you call all the oil companies 'big oil', or the TV and radio networks 'the media', so your point wouldn't be a correction anyway).

Re:Take this with a pinch of salt

[Afrosheen]

AFAIK, Sun and SGI play in different sandboxes. SGI originally focused on - surprise - high end Unix graphics workstations and servers that handle rendering. Hence the name Silicon Graphics Inc.

Re:Take this with a pinch of salt

[Curtman]

"No, I don't. Solaris competes with Linux

I think you're talking about Linux the kernel, and he's talking about the mythical "Linux Operating System".

Re:Take this with a pinch of salt

[Anonymous Coward]

You want to run Solaris on a 128 CPU system, but you're using a Pegosos system? You'll be waiting a long time for that.

Re:Take this with a pinch of salt

[Anonymous Coward]

Right now the vanilla linux kernel has been proven to scale properly with 64 proccessors.

Solaris may of been uber at one point, now Linux is in the same ballfeild and Solaris isn't nearly as impressive as it used to be.

OSS'ng Solaris may have come to late, or may have been at the nick of time. Not being GPL-compatable is going to screw themselves over unfortunately.

Only time will tell. Right now I'll stick with Debian on my x86 and PPC machines.

Re:Take this with a pinch of salt

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhhm, you might want to visit this web page. Or maybe this one.

"Scalable 64-Bit Production-quality Linux Platform" is about right. 128 simultaneous processors? They've been selling boxes that do that for a couple of years now. They run Linux. All with the same kernel. Not a cluster. One big computer.

More recently, they've been selling 256-way systems and made-to-order 512-way systems. One kernel.

Re:Take this with a pinch of salt

[Anonymous Coward]

On the other hand, Intel just announced virtualization technology will be in _all_ their future CPUs starting with Itanium "Montecito" shipping just a few months from now.

Which do you think Intel care about? Solaris, or Linux? Heh, heh. Go back to your SPARC box, sun boy. :)

Re:Take this with a pinch of salt

[Fred_A]

Just redefine the datacenter (or the building) as being a "computer".

For added effect, have the security goons at the front door mutter to visitors "behold, for the are entering the mighty computer!" while gesturing wildly. :)

Re:Take this with a pinch of salt

[supersnail]

When a hardware company makes a big deal about how many cpus they can support with SMP, you know the processers are slow.

About 1996 when IBM had trouble ramping up the speed of thier Power chips, all the sales bumf emphasised how good the SMP performance was.

Now the positions are reversed. Solaris has to scale to 128 processers to compete with the competitions 32 processor systems. With the next generation of Opteron chips Linux only needs to scale to 16 processors to compete with 128 processor Solaris/Sparc system.

Re:Take this with a pinch of salt

[gilesjuk]

Solaris (from my experience) has been a bit slow to modernise. Maybe that suits Unix purists, but there comes a point where you have to modernise.

Much of the Unix ethos is still buried in the 1960s. Linux could be considered a test bed for new ideas and I guess Sun is wanting to get a piece of the action.

Re:Take this with a pinch of salt

[diegocgteleline.es]

Some of us want an OS that can run on 128 simultaneous processors as well as one or four or twelve all with the same kernel. Not a cluster. One big computer.

That's fine. Some people, like say, the NASA guys, want an OS that can run on 512 simultaneous processors as well as one or four, or eigth, or 32, or whatever, they want it stable and all with the same kernel. Not a cluster. One big computer. A really big one.

Re:Take this with a pinch of salt

[jonadab]

> Well, I have been in the pilot project from the very beginning and there
> are builds of OpenSolaris up and running. We have the source and are working
> on a PowerPC port to the Open Desktop Workstation

That's all well and good, but it doesn't address the parent's point.

> Some of us want an OS that can run on 128 simultaneous processors as well as
> one or four or twelve all with the same kernel. Not a cluster. One big
> computer.

This does. I think Linux does do umpteen processors these days (though I
could be getting confused; I have no personal experience with such large
systems), but you're barking up the right general tree: the parent was
probably thinking in terms of the desktop (as, indeed, I have a tendency to
do myself), and as he notes, an open-source Solaris may indeed be too little
too late for the desktop. Server space is quite another matter, though.
Solaris is well respected there, especially for the relatively high-end stuff.

Solaris also has the best *name* of any operating system, ever :-)

I plan to experiment with Solaris a bit in VMWare, but in my case it's mostly
because I'm the sort of person who experiments with sundry OSes just for the
sake of experimenting. The high-end kind of scenerio you're talking about
has no direct and immediate relevance to my life.

Re:Take this with a pinch of salt

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, thats a load of bull. Check the UltraSparc CPUs from Fujitsu Siemens for better number crunching performance.

Re:Take this with a pinch of salt

[blastwave]

Wow.

And that is with the installation CD's ?

Just install and run ?

Re:Take this with a pinch of salt

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but that's bullshit. You mean SGI selling 256 cpu supercomputers running Linux means those processors are slow? What about Cray back in the day? Oh, wait, it runs Linux so it's automagically cool.

Re:Take this with a pinch of salt

[The Man]

Now the positions are reversed. Solaris has to scale to 128 processers to compete with the competitions 32 processor systems. With the next generation of Opteron chips Linux only needs to scale to 16 processors to compete with 128 processor Solaris/Sparc system.

Opteron is great. We all love Opteron. But Opteron only supports 8 CPUs per system (3 HT ports per chip) without some really serious hackery, and even if that limitation were removed, a 16-Opteron (I assume you mean 16 cores) system wouldn't be faster than a 144-core F25K. Sun sells Opteron machines alongside SPARC, so if you think SPARC is too slow and/or expensive, just choose another machine.

Scalability, whether horizontal or vertical, has to be a property of all the components of a system or it's not really present at all. If a 16-CPU XXX machine were as fast as a 144-core starcat (Hitachi might be able to say that, but I doubt it), why wouldn't manufacturer XXX want to make a machine with 72 or 128 or 144 of those CPUs, and be 5 or 6 times as fast as the starcat? They would, of course. And when they figure out hardware scalability, they'll need an OS that will scale up with them.

But really, what's any of this got to do with Solaris? It runs on Opteron machines too, whether made by Sun or not, and 32-bit x86 machines if you're stuck in the 90s. For that matter, Linux will run on SPARC machines. x86 boxes - even 64-bit ones - aren't the competition for the starcats, regardless of what OS they run. The lesson here is that scaling up allows you to take advantage of more CPUs in any kind of machine. Sooner or later it will become practically impossible to clock CPUs any higher, and if you'd examined your argument at all - and its basis on multicore Opterons - you'd realize that we're pretty much there now, which is why every CPU manufacturer, not just Sun, is looking at CMT and multicore as the paths to increased performance in the future. This is not a fringe technology - every vendor including Intel and AMD clearly thinks it's important. If that turns out to be true, OS scalability and workload parallelism will be the limiting performance factors for nearly all computers. Not CPU clock rate. Regardless of what you think of SPARC, considering your implicit admission that even Opteron clocks won't increase without bound, you ought to recognize that Solaris is probably in a good position to take advantage of an important ongoing cross-market trend in hardware design.

Re:Take this with a pinch of salt

[htd2]

Not really.

SGI's running embarassingly parallel applications scale to very large numbers of CPU's but then almost anything else does as well.

SGI's running commercial workloads scale embarassingly badly, on the only commercial workload test SGI have published SGI managed to get 13x the throughput (and scaling had stopped) with a 28 way SGI Altix 3000 running Linux, BTW thats terrible.

Re:Take this with a pinch of salt

[Anonymous Coward]

...starting with Itanium "Montecito" shipping just a few months from now.

What's this Itanium you speak of? Some sort of new metal?

Err...looks like Linux?

[deong]

Funny, I didn't see a picture of a kernel. It looks like Gnome, an event deemed less shocking by the fact that it is Gnome.

Re:Err...looks like Linux?

[Tarcastil]

Their desktop environment apparently uses nautilus: http://shots.osdir.com/slideshows/slideshow.php?re lease=279&slide=38

Re:Err...looks like Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's one, if it'll make you happy.

Re:Err...looks like Linux?

[fm6]

I didn't see a picture of a kernel. It looks like Gnome...

You've never heard of Colonel Gnome?

Seriously, though, Java Desktop is just Sun's version of Gnome. They must of done something serious with it to justify charging $50 for it. Not clear what though.

Oh yeah, and it is available for linux.

Re:Err...looks like Linux?

[Lisandro]

It is SO not. It's much uglier.. and... eh... it has a "Launch" button. Do you see a foot anywhere? I-didn't-think-so-mister!

Re:Err...looks like Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, the opinion of "ugly" from a bunch of smelly slashdorks really doesn't have much impact. Of course, since the mods all participate in the same groupthink, it's hardly surprising to see you modded "insightful".

Re:Err...looks like Linux?

[segfaultcoredump]

That $50 pays for the support and StarOffice (which includes support and a supposedly a few fonts lacking in the OO version).

You dont want or need support? no prob, just use your $LINUX_DISTRO_OF_CHOICE. That said, a lot of companies out there dont mind tossing $50 a year toward a desktop just so that they can call and yell at somebody when something goes wrong.

Personally, I'll stick with FC3 on my desktop and solaris (mostly sparc with a growing number of opteron based systems) in the datacenter.

Re:Err...looks like Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on, it looks like shit and you know it. Even the default gnome theme looks better.

Re:Err...looks like Linux?

[fm6]

hope the "of" above was just a typo...

I could claim it was a typo, but that would remove all meaning from your trivial little life, so I will remain silent.

Re:Err...looks like Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Take your antipsychotic and calm the fuck down.

Re:Err...looks like Linux?

[tonyr60]

What $50? It is a free download, which also includes Star Office.

f course if you want support.....

Re:Err...looks like Linux?

[blastwave]

You mean Linux looks like Solaris? Does it matter? The front end can be what ever you want it to be.

see : http://www.blastwave.org/

and

http://www.blastwave.org/howto.html

Re:Err...looks like Linux?

[Ohreally_factor]

You didn't bother to taste it. It had provocative hints of BSD, and a nutty aftertaste reminiscent of Warp.

Yeah, I thought that was an incredibly dumb comment, too, and I haven't RTFA.

Re:Err...looks like Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

In many American dialects, "of" is accepted as a substitute for "have" in some cases, specifically in the Midwestern USA.

Re:Err...looks like Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

what a steaming pile of bullshit

grammar has rules. this isn't nam...

Re:Err...looks like Linux?

[SunFan]

I'm typing this comment from my _free_ downloaded Solaris 10 with JDS3, right now. Great system, but just like other GNOME/KDE desktops, don't skimp on your RAM, though. Any computer better than say a 400MHz Pentium with 256MB should be okay (not super but okay).

Probably the best aspect of JDS3 is that everything is pretty well integrated, clearly laid out, and there are few problems with it. It really is as easy to use as Windows. It comes with Acroread, Mozilla, Evolution, and Staroffice, among other things, too. Add Moneydance for covering finances, and it really can replace Windows for a lot of people.

With these sorts of GNOME/KDE desktops maturing, Microsoft really needs to get their ship in order!

Re:Err...looks like Linux?

[SunFan]

Oh, BTW, don't forget to finish off the system with Blastwave. They provide a BSD-like package retriever that's integrated with Solaris' package system. Pretty slick.

Re:Err...looks like Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're an ass. "Of" and " 've" are pronounced identically.

Re:Err...looks like Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, we need a (-1, spelling/grammar nazi) mod. I would be absolutely fucking ecstatic if I could filter out this useless shit once and for all.

To the parent poster: NOBODY FUCKING CARES ABOUT A STUPID TYPO. GO AWAY. YOU ARE ONLY WASTING BANDWIDTH AND DISK SPACE.

Re:Err...looks like Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ya, rules like capitalization and punctuation.

Re:Err...looks like Linux?

[fm6]

... a lot of companies out there dont mind tossing $50 a year toward a desktop just so that they can call and yell at somebody when something goes wrong.

Not enough to keep Red Hat in the desktop business.

Re:Err...looks like Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ya!=yes

Re:Err...looks like Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

it ain't got no foot it sucks!

gimme back da foot, dammit Sun!

Re:Err...looks like Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

NOBODY FUCKING CARES ABOUT A STUPID TYPO.

1. It wasn't a typo. A typographic error is when someone means to type one symbol, and accidentally types another. For example, the (so-called) "7334" (or however those dickwads pervert "elite") spelling "pwned!" probably started out as a typo of "owned!". ("P" is next to "O" on QWERTY keyboards.) What the GGP poster made was a grammatical error.

2. Obviously some people care about using the English language correctly; otherwise, there wouldn't be so many people correcting these errors.

Personally, I don't correct typos, only errors where it appears to me that a person meant to use a particular word or phrase or punctuation, that use was wrong, and the poster did not realize that the use was wrong. About 50% of the time, it's the misapostrophization of the word "its". (Yes, I know that "misapostrophization" is not a real word.) Other common errors include using the wrong spelling of "there"/"their"/"they're", using "try and" instead of "try to", etc. (Yes, I know that "correct" American English states that the comma should be inside the quotes. "Correct" American English is wrong in this case.)

Finally, it's not "useless shit" if it has a positive effect. I very rarely see "for all intensive purposes" used any more. I believe that this is due, in large part, to people posting corrections when it was used in the past.

Re:Err...looks like Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, we need a (-1, spelling/grammar nazi) mod. I would be absolutely fucking ecstatic if I could filter out this useless shit once and for all.

Only if we can also have a -1, Lousy Spelling Or Grammar mod. I would be absolutely fucking ecstatic if I could read Slashdot without getting a headache from all the terrible English.

Re:Err...looks like Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

You could claim that, but unless you're a cripple and only type with a stick straped to your head I fail to see how you can aim to hit the keys h, a, v and e but end up hitting o and f.

Re:Err...looks like Linux?

[Mycroft_VIII]

re#2 above: That assumes most grammer nazi's actually do care and are not just trolling. I believe most grammer nazi's just a subset of trolls excepting the occasional person with an OCD type dissorder.
At least that's how it seems as 90% of the time (rough estimate) the grammer nazi's are NOT reducing confusion but rather creating a distraction from the actuall conversation. Since the POINT of this sort of forum is discussion and not formal communication the net effect of most grammer nazi's is counter the purpose and thus should be treated as off topic, the topic is NOT correct use of the ' or how to properly use an adjective, but rather the article in question.
I could probably fine tooth comb my posts and elimate most grammatical errors (not spelling though, pretty bad at that), but why? The point is the topic at hand NOT perfect english. If your message is clear enough to understand you did it right for this sort of forum. I've also read posts that had good grammar and spelling yet made NO sense, they failed as far as I am concerned.

Mycroft

Re:Err...looks like Linux?

[blackest_k]

The strangest notion grammar and spelling nazi's have is that English is one language with one set of rules.

English is a set of languages with regional and cultural sets of rules. When English first came to be printed an east anglian variation was used not because it was the correct form but because it was the form spoken and written by the printer.

English is a living language, that is it evolves and mutates as it is being used. That mutations occur is nothing new, which is why older written records in English can be difficult to comprehend.

Your form of English usage maybe correct to you and it might be the case that for you to accept me as a member of your social group I should form my words in the manner to which you are familiar with, but since I am not aspiring to join your social group I am not in error, you are. Since you seem to believe I wish to speak and write the same English variant as you.

If you were to compare two structured precise languages such as C++ and Java you might see a simularity in the code but java is not badly written C++ nor is C++ badly written java.

I can understand how distressing it must be for people, who are trained and write in a language with a precise syntax such as C++ or Java. People who find bueaty in the precise elegant expression of Idea's within a programming environment to have to come to grips with a language which has no such constraints.

English is buggy code gentlemen, Live with it.

Re:Err...looks like Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

It really is as easy to use as Windows

Surely this gives Solaris 10 a run for its money...

Re:Err...looks like Linux?

[MBGMorden]

With these sorts of GNOME/KDE desktops maturing, Microsoft really needs to get their ship in order!

Very true. It's a bit off topic, but I recently (on the release of 2.10) went back and tried Gnome. I've been using KDE on my Linux boxes since back around 1998. I'd always try Gnome whenever new versions came out, only to find that if felt clunky. I'd always end up reverting back to KDE. Amazingly KDE has come a LONG ways since I first tried it, but when I tried Gnome this time (first time in a year or so), it's finally caught up to be a pretty spiffy environment as well. I've actually been running Gnome as my main environment for close to a week now, and don't anticipate changing it anytime soon. When a few MINOR issues are sorted out (develop a few missing applications and simplify software installation) I can see Linux w/ Gnome (or KDE) seriously challenging Windows as a desktop platform.

Some of the newcomers look at Linux and see it as a little rough around the edges (and it is), but anyone who's stuck around for a few years can see the improvements that are made each year. The OSS Desktop is improving at a faster rate than it's competition, and it's only a matter of time before it overtakes them.

Text Based Install

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd like to see the output of a non GUI installation. Makes me have the warm fuzzies more seeing that.

Re:Text Based Install

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? It gives me wood. It's not as good as recompiling a kernel, but it's damn close

Another name for Java Desktop 3 is ....

[un1xl0ser]

Gnome.

Re:Another name for Java Desktop 3 is ....

[thryllkill]

Don't be such a troll. I use gnome everyday. It has a foot print looking thing. This one says JAVA right there instead of the foot. I hate having to point everything out for everyone all the damn time.

Re:Another name for Java Desktop 3 is ....

[Anonymous Coward]

but does it run linux?

Re:Another name for Java Desktop 3 is ....

[mrak and swepe]

And another name for OSdir.com is "Gnome screenshots and more Gnome screenshots, with a few Gnome screenshots thrown in for good measure".

Re:Another name for Java Desktop 3 is ....

[un1xl0ser]

Mine has a RedHat.. hmmm

Maybe I don't use Gnome at all.

I'm so confused.

Slashdotted already?

[OAB_X]

http://mirrordot.com/stories/48ae8a91c0515178981a2 23b6721551b/index.html

http://mirrordot.com/stories/1ffb4724d2b03ba41ed c9 790016d2b3c/index.html

http://mirrordot.com/stories/e1f77e936894905cc5b 8d 90e96d46066/index.html

http://mirrordot.com/stories/48ae8a91c0515178981 a2 23b6721551b/index.html

http://mirrordot.com/stories/b6d219bc646a2c95a1d a6 66659518e10/index.html

Re:Slashdotted already?

[peeon]

umm...they all didnt work...next please.

Re:Slashdotted already?

[Tony Hoyle]

Umm no.. just tried them, they all work.

Learn to copy/paste properly..

Re:Slashdotted already?

[woah]

remove the spaces.

Re:Slashdotted already?

[catalax]

Learn to copy/paste properly..

Learn to link properly!

Re:Slashdotted already?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, thanks OAB for adding those convenient spaces.

Re:Slashdotted already?

[catalax]

http://mirrordot.com/stories/48ae8a91c0515178981a2 23b6721551b/index.html
http://mirrordot.com/stories/1ffb4724d2b03ba41edc9 790016d2b3c/index.html
http://mirrordot.com/stories/e1f77e936894905cc5b8d 90e96d46066/index.html
http://mirrordot.com/stories/48ae8a91c0515178981a2 23b6721551b/index.html
http://mirrordot.com/stories/b6d219bc646a2c95a1da6 66659518e10/index.html

damn

[Anonymous Coward]

It's already Slashdotted,
FP 1101

Solaris for the masses?

[Anonymous Coward]

But is there any way that Solaris has a chance to grow enough to become any kind of threat to MS?

At least before Sun goes under, and it becomes a drain on Linux developers...

Re:Solaris for the masses?

[Mdalek]

But is there any way that Solaris has a chance to grow enough to become any kind of threat to MS?

What? People run Windows on big iron?

Re:Solaris for the masses?

[Anonymous Coward]

Insightful? More like RTFA. Java Desktop is designed for corporate desktops, not "big iron".

Re:Solaris for the masses?

[cold fjord]

What? People run Windows on big iron?

Yes, they do. You just need the right type of hardware, and the Datacenter edition of Windows.

Re:Solaris for the masses?

[digitalchinky]

Sun will not go under any time soon, unless they monumentially screw up by way of corporate corruption or some such - they have more government contracts across the world than I have hairs on my head. (ok, so my hairline is receeding a touch, but I still have hair)

DSD has sun workstations numbering in the thousands, plus a few hundred servers etc, etc, etc. These aren't going away any time soon. There are still sparc 5's and lower doing a fine job for their function. When a single workstation might cost upwards of $10,000 AU - that's quite an investment, even if it is at taxpayer expense.

(More than a few workstations are enterprise level machines)

Re:Solaris for the masses?

[SunFan]

But is there any way that Solaris has a chance to grow enough to become any kind of threat to MS?

Yes, because the technology in the Solaris 10 kernel blows Windows Server out of the water, and JDS/Evolution/StarOffice/Mozilla is quite appropriate to replace Windows XP in many situations.

Quite honestly, give a secretary/manager/call-center-person a good locked down JDS box, and he/she won't be installing ActiveX crap all over with fancy spyware screensavers.

Re:Solaris for the masses?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you were to walk into a room and mention Windows and more than 4 CPUs, you'd likely be laughed right out the door. For scaling, people just don't go to Microsoft. They go to IBM, SGI, Sun, HP, anything but Microsoft. There's a reason why datacenters that use Windows have racks upon racks upon racks of dinky Dell servers.

Re:Solaris for the masses?

[SunFan]

(More than a few workstations are enterprise level machines)

The only difference between a lot of Sun's workstations and their entry-level enterprise servers is only the case. The system board, CPUs, and RAM are often the same (Ultra60-E220R,Ultra80-E420R,Blade2000-280R,Blade2 500-V250). This also means the resourceful admin on a budget knows what part numbers will work, even if they aren't "official."

Re:Solaris for the masses?

[cold fjord]

Sorry, but that is more of a hardware issue than a software issue, at least up to 32 CPUs. There aren't many PCs/Windows boxes made that take more than 8 CPUs. Unisys is one of the few (only?) manufacturers that make them.

I will also point out that there are a lot of Linux based datacenters that look exactly like your description of a Windows datacenter.

Re:Solaris for the masses?

[Anonymous Coward]

The topic is Solaris, idiot.

Re:Solaris for the masses?

[cold fjord]

At least before Sun goes under, and it becomes a drain on Linux developers.

Like FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, etc., are "drains" on "Linux developers"?

Actually it is more like the reverse. Sun has underwritten the NFS v4 implementation that is in the Linux 2.6 kernel, as well donated large amounts of code that help make Linux stronger, like Open Office, Internationalization code for X, etc. If it wasn't for Sun, Linux would be weaker. A large amount of useful code in Linux today is only there due to the charity of large companies like Sun, IBM, SGI, etc..

Re:Solaris for the masses?

[rs79]

"What? People run Windows on big iron?"

Ebay?

Re:Solaris for the masses?

[Anonymous Coward]

You should be careful to call the contributions to Linux from companies such as Sun or IBM "charity". These companies gain from making Linux stronger. Large companies do not expend resources on Free Software and Open Source Software out of the goodness of their heart.

At the end of the day though we all win, and that's a good thing.

Re:Solaris for the masses?

[wild_berry]

I'm a UKanian, so http://www.ebay.co.uk/ has a link at the top to http://pages.ebay.co.uk/ebay_SUN.html, saying they're Sun hardware and Solaris users.

http://www.ebay.com/ has an IBM logo in the sam place, which links to: http://pages.ebay.com/ebay_IBM.html. That's not Windows, as far as I understand (and will apologise if I'm wrong).

the only thing going on

[Anonymous Coward]

is the massive amounts of HTTP traffic that the webserver cannot handle

Screenshots of an OS install...what next?

[Kenrod]

Screenshots of the writer defragging his hard drive?

Re:Screenshots of an OS install...what next?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or a screenshot of a slashdotter posting a message to slashdot?

Re:Screenshots of an OS install...what next?

[Kethinov]

Or a screenshot of a slashdotter posting a message to slashdot?

Indeed

Re:Screenshots of an OS install...what next?

[don.g]

Why not a photoblog of grass growing?

Re:Screenshots of an OS install...what next?

[Anonymous Coward]

mod up. you gotta admit that's funny.

Re:Screenshots of an OS install...what next?

[wild_berry]

Please save us from that. It's interminably dull. Don't aim so low: you at least have a choice of colours watching paint drying.

It looks like it's running through vmware

[drewz]

Did anybody notice - it's running through vmware http://shots.osdir.com/slideshows/slideshow.php?re lease=279&slide=4

Re:It looks like it's running through vmware

[Anonymous Coward]

No, too much slashdot effect.

Re:It looks like it's running through vmware

[drxray]

That makes it a hell of a lot easier to take screenshots when you're booting.

Re:It looks like it's running through vmware

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, that's really exciting!

Re:It looks like it's running through vmware

[PedanticSpellingTrol]

Not to mention a lot less "Lose all contents of your drive." Solaris is a stuck up bitch and won't go out with scrubs who can only give her a partition.

Re:It looks like it's running through vmware

[Nermal6693]

I noticed that too. It doesn't work with Virtual PC though.

Re:It looks like it's running through vmware

[Metzli]

I don't know, taking "screenshots" of my boot sequences are pretty easy, they're logged by the terminal server. Then again, I see no reason to run a GUI on my Solaris servers.

Re:It looks like it's running through vmware

[Horse Rotorvator JAD]

One more reason why Virtual PC is inferior to VMWare.

Re:It looks like it's running through vmware

[illumin8]

Not to mention a lot less "Lose all contents of your drive." Solaris is a stuck up bitch and won't go out with scrubs who can only give her a partition.

Funny comment, but you're incorrect. I have a brand new x86-64 box, and I was able to install Ubuntu, Solaris 10, and Windows XP, using GRUB as my boot manager, and I can triple boot (all off of ONE hard drive).

Solaris 10 needs a single primary partition. It puts all of your UFS filesystems, plus swap inside this same partition.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get it to share swap space with Linux, but that's not a big deal to allocate another 1GB given today's hard drive sizes (160GB in this box).

Re:It looks like it's running through vmware

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like you're talking about Red Hat, not Solaris. I've cursed more at Red Hat's partitioning tools than I have at anything, except Windows.

Solaris is actually very clear about what partitions it will install to, and it won't touch the ones that aren't selected. And multi-boot really sings on SPARC with OpenBoot driving things.

Re:It looks like it's running through vmware

[Nermal6693]

To me, Virtual PC is superior because VMware won't run on my system. Remember, one person can think something is great, while other people can hate it.

Re:It looks like it's running through vmware

[Nermal6693]

Hmm, just tried it again so I could see what the error was, and it seems to be working this time.

Re:It looks like it's running through vmware

[Mycroft_VIII]

You installed Ubuntu for amd64 and can boot something else? how did you manage that.
I tried installing it on the second hard drive, never once was anything said about boot options or the primary hard drive, yet it quite happilly overwrote the boot sector and set itself as the only thing to boot.
That and the fact that it couldn't keep straight what various file types were (I had a bunch of .iso files in one dir, none music cd's, yet it insisted that some were for burning to disc and some were mp3's, not mp3 cd's but actual .mp3 files, and gave me NO way to change these assumptions).
I did at one point try the 'expert' install, but that hit a point where it looped through the same 3 steps over and over again because I didn't want to set up a lan. Just because my mainboard (like most these days it seems) has built in ethernet doesn't mean a lan exists. If I couldn't give it valid networking info it would jump back about three steps or so and loop.
I was seriously dissapointed by the whole mess.

Mycroft

Re:It looks like it's running through vmware

[prjames]

I bet they didn't get VMWare-tools working though, there's no solaris.iso available yet.

Re:It looks like it's running through vmware

[illumin8]

You installed Ubuntu for amd64 and can boot something else? how did you manage that.

You are correct that Ubuntu blows away your MBR and replaces it with Grub. That's fine. This is how I installed everything:

1. Install Windows first.
2. Install Ubuntu second, then put this in your grub.conf file:

title Windows
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

3. Install any other OSes next, and simply add a line to grub.conf.

Re:It looks like it's running through vmware

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember, one person can think something is great, while other people can hate it.

Yup. And I hates Virtual PC.

Re:It looks like it's running through vmware

[Mycroft_VIII]

If it's that simple then why the hell isn't that built into the install, or at least a readme in an obvious place or a config setting (ubuntu's config app is nearly useless).
I could understand if it was a rare thing, but needing to dual boot is the norm, not an exception, let alone rare.
Not trying to be negative on ubuntu, but it's a bit upsetting to have it fail on a standard item like that, and not even warn you it's incapable of handling normal stuff. Like buying a new car and the dealership doesn't bother to tell you it lacks a working reverse gear by design.

Mycroft

Default CDE desktop

[moonbender]

What the heck - are they kidding? The default desktop background looks like on of those 3D images, which is to say it looks like ass. Maybe there's a subliminal message, I don't know, but I certainly wouldn't want that as my desktop background. Of course, the fact that CDE is running on top of it doesn't help. Sorry if I seem harsh, I'm still not sure if it's a joke. OTOH maybe I'm the only one who doesn't like it...

Re:Default CDE desktop

[DustyShadow]

A lot of people really like CDE. I consider myself one of those people.

Re:Default CDE desktop

[moonbender]

Okay, I can accept that. Sorry about the off-hand remark. But do you also like that desktop background?

Re:Default CDE desktop

[DustyShadow]

Actually no. I agree that the background is hideous.

Re:Default CDE desktop

[back_pages]

I heard one of the advanced features, available if you buy the upgraded deluxe version, is the ability to switch to a desktop background that ISN'T the default. So yeah, it's ugly, but if you fork over the premium dollars, then you can afford cutting edge, never-before-seen technology like switching the desktop background. (I heard there is some 1337 hacker trick to do this in Windows, but let's not kid ourselves - it's impossible with such a rudimentary OS!)

Re:Default CDE desktop

[mrchaotica]

Why?

Re:Default CDE desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

Where else can you get a pastel desktop in this day and age?

Re:Default CDE desktop

[hawkeye]

Umm... I don't think that Sun's "Java Desktop" has been based on CDE for some time now. I do believe that it's Gnome, not CDE, that you're looking at....mostly :-)

Cheers,

- hawkeye

Re:Default CDE desktop

[moonbender]

Hm? I linked to a specific screenshot, also linked to in the story. Image subtitle: "The default CDE 1.6 Solaris desktop." While many of the other screens are Gnome-ish, this one isn't. But that's beside the point anyway, Gnome would look terrible with that background, too - hell, Mac OS X and Enlightenment would.

Re:Default CDE desktop

[SunFan]

That screenshot in the link is CDE, not JDS/GNOME. JDS is really quite pleasing to look at.

Re:Default CDE desktop

[pikine]

Actually, that one is called "Looking Glass for CDE."

Re:Default CDE desktop

[m50d]

Well, gnome's even uglier :)

Here comes the sun!

[Error629]

Eh, it's alright.

Re:Here comes the sun!

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering it's been a long cold lonely winter...

I installed it

[delirium of disorder]

(Since this article is almost a re-post, my comment is too)

Solaris 10 is a great technical computing or server OS. GNU/Linux has some advantages over it, for example debian's package system and free organisation. Overall Linux is easier to get up and running. Knoppix is trivial to boot. Paths and default executable placement are simpler in Linux. Linux is more ported. X11 support seams better in most Linux distros. (X worked fine thoughout my install, but when i rebooted, my display was messed up and I had to console login and set X to a lower resolution) Virtual consoles are a big plus when X gets messed up, and solaris misses them badly.

But Solaris has some cool features. Zones, dtrace, exellent SMP support, and surprisingly, a great price/performance ratio. I donno how well sun will do (I would guess they'll make some money in the short term on Opeteron systems and probably in the long term with Fujitsu massivly multi-core SPARC). But the current market for used sun workstations/servers is great because of Sun's overall decline. I was able to get (on ebay) a quad 450mhz ultrasparcII box with 2 gigs of ram, and dual 36 gig scsi drives, quad redundent power supples (800 watt), etc: for a measily $200. Solaris 10 installed great. Sun hardware is built to withstand hell and admins, students, hobbiests, or whoever, who normally couldn't afford this quality should really check it out. I also actually like CDE and the old Motief look. It's clean, simple, easy to work with, and doesn't try to be Microsoft Windows or MacOS.

Re:I installed it

[Anonymous Coward]

Fujitsu massivly multi-core SPARC

Oh please for the love of God do not let people by any more Fujitsu SPARC boxes. I work for an enterprise software vendor, and nearly every time we run into a customer that runs into OS library coredumps with our product, they're invariably running Fujitsu hardware. Solaris simply isn't well tested against Fujitsu compared to Sun hardware.

Re:I installed it

[Metzli]

I'm curious, what about the paths and default executables do you find difficult in Solaris? I'll agree that /usr/ccs/bin appears goofy for the compiler (to me, at least), but I don't see what's odd about everything else. Then again, I'm used to running Solaris, AIX, Tru64, etc. and Linux seems weird to me. I expect most of my optional software to be self-contained, say in /opt, and not scattered about various other dirs. But, that's just my opinion.

Re:I installed it

[Anonymous Coward]

"GNU/Linux has some advantages over it, for example debian's package system and free organisation."

Install pkg-get from blastwave. Then it's just pkg-get -i desired_package. Unlike Debian's packages, you get everything at once, the way MOST people like it, rather than having things chopped into 30 pieces.

Yes, I understand Debian's package management philosophy. That doesn't make it any less annoying.

Re:I installed it

[rs79]

What we seem to want of an OS these days (besides GPL) is:

1) Runs well as a server
2) Runs well as CLI desktop
3) Runs ok as a desktop of you like to fiddle
4) Works seamless with random peripehrals (ie OSX)

I already know it does 1 and 2 better than (gasp) PC BSD, I'm assuming 3) but until it's at 4) Apple will continue to sell a lot of hardware. That's gonna be the one to beat and as OSX gets better (hire Brian Reid, you morons) Apple as a unix distro company will continue it's ascendancy despite the hardware lock-in.

Solaris' legendary stabiity and Apple's seamlessness and interface will be a great mix; I don't predict Linux or even BSD beating Sun there, I think Apple won this and will continue on an upward trest and will eventually dominate unix sales, again, despite the hardware lock in.

As somebody that could only use school's Unix (by '76 you could use it at almost every university if you poked around enough to find it and asked for an account, thank you Rob Beach) as they were the only ones who could get it, the choices we have today are stunning. There is no news and even less product coming out of Microsoft for a change, they wowed the world with their basic, c, msdos, windows, desktop apps and an almost endless series of bizarre mutations of windoes 3.1, (in tha order) none of which worked, but now they're done and we can get back to where we should have been in the early 80's before every asshole bought a computer - making unix ubiquitous, usable and cheap if not free by a generation that grew up with unix and wndows and know what things should look like and how they should properly work. Now that they're old enough to have some sway in the corporate world we're finally seeing some decent product, choices and pricing. It's quite refeshing.

Whereas in 1984 Digital Research sold operating systems (CP/M) and Microsoft sold languages (BASIC, later C that they'd bought) the unwritten truce was broken when DR went into langauages; MS decided to compete in the OS arena, the rest is PC history. Apple did that to sun by selling unix machines, Sun is now selling Mac's (buy your own hardware, ok). Solaris on an Apple now riases inertresting questions. Sun selling $500 OSX workalines even more. Bout friggin time boys, I could buy a color Apollo in 68K 87 for $3K and its taken you this long to even think about it? This is why Apollos were better than suns; Suns vision has always been the campus terminal room. That's finally changed. My God, it's full of... consumers.

Uinx had a rough sart of of the box; Bell Labs owned it, period and it took years of things like BSD and lawsuits to get it to the point where anybody could have it. But now in a world where there is Sun, Apple and the geek distros of unix (MS will get into the unix distro market eventually, they're just being more stubborn than they were about the internet, that's all) there is finally a criteria and to get work done sensibly instead of wowing the readers of PC Magazines cheap ad section and reviews. And the reasons colleges all switched to unix back then even though they had perfectly good legacy apps on their (GCOS, OS/360, etc) legacy systems was they a) could use unix and b) could get more work done due to it's elgance and simplicity. // execute my ass

But mom and pop have never had their chance. General PC flakines and current availability of OSC and soon Mini-Sun boxes that give you decent access to the music, video, camera, et. al. domain will change that.

As microsofts inept technology fades into oblivion with only their user base to keep them relevant, the next war is the home unix applance; unix may or may not be transparent to the user; for explicitly non-transparent ones there is not much serious competition for the everyman-better-UI than-windows-system but that changes now when people can buy workable unix-for-home from companies that are ancient in computer years.

Oh my what a lovely war it will be.

Gates deserv

Re:I installed it

[SunFan]

Yeah, I second that. pkg-get is one of the cleanest package tools I've used. Launch it, walk away for a while, come back, and all the dependent packages are there all nice and tidy.

Re:I installed it

[Nimrangul]

What's even more funny is I am a BSD guy and expect stuff that isn't part of the base system to be in the /usr/local directory. I'm funny that way, don't like adding directories for no real reason.

Some Linux operating systems use /opt though, so you just need to read up on them before using before using one.

Re:I installed it

[imroy]

I also actually like CDE and the old Motif look. It's clean, simple, easy to work with, and doesn't try to be Microsoft Windows or MacOS.

Really? I always though that Motif was modelled heavily after Windows 3. Certainly scroll bars, buttons, and menus were very similar. A simple change of colour scheme (in either one) and they looked almost alike, except that (IIRC) MWM used embossing on the system/minimize/maximize buttons and the window borders. If you like that, fine. Whatever. But I prefer a window manager and widget theme that uses more than a dozen colours on my 24-bit display. I find it nicer on my eyes.

Re:I installed it

[Rich0]

Usually the convention is that if you added it yourself you stick it in /usr/local. Package management systems almost never touch anything in there. /opt is usually used for stuff like closed-source binary-only software which a distro only packages to the extent that they ship you a tarball of what they were given. This stuff is semi-managed.

Distros like gentoo will use /opt for any binary-based software, /opt is the one tree that generally isn't well-definied in most linux distros...

Re:I installed it

[aurelian]

It's clean, simple, easy to work with, and doesn't try to be Microsoft Windows

Except that it does; the look was (unbelievably) based on Windows v. 3. It is of coures a hell of a lot more configurable than Windows however so you don't need to stick to the default.

Re:I installed it

[cerberusss]

[CDE is] clean, simple, easy to work with, and

... looks like shit :P

(j/k)

Re:I installed it

[mountain_penguin]

arg pkg-get and pkgadd is a very bad copy of apt-get
its very crufty try the following
almost fill up /opt
pkg-get a large package (that will fill up the /opt and still need more space)
watch the pkg installation fail (ungracefully)

free up some space
pkg-get install the package again hmm wats that its already installed to the latest version
ok so we need to remove it
pkgrm $broken_pkg
pkg-get -i $pkg
have it install successfully
argggg
(its even worse if this happens during a pkg-get -U -u as *lots* of pkgs will be broken and you have to manually remove them then reinstall them.

Re:I installed it

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet another Debian user trying to rationalize their idiotic package management system. Gosh, what if I run out of space? WHAT....IF?

Re:I installed it

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun's pkgadd program is pretty conservative and prompts you several times for confirming certain things. It's unlikely for it to really break like you say. Worst case is that pkg-get can get some of the packages, but if it fails, you can re-launch it and it will get only the remaining packages it needs.

Re:I installed it

[mountain_penguin]

my problem with pkgadd is that even if an installation fails it still thinks that the pkg has been successfully added ie there is no way of saying tell me what installations failed.
This is just wrong. If at any point the install fails then the pkg should not be installed (ideally it should back out)

Re:I installed it

[mountain_penguin]

good troll :)
but seriously this has happened to me 3 times so far and i am sure it will happen again
from <http://www.bolthole.com/solaris/> the source of pkg-get
pkg-get: An automated tool to grab solaris packages from sites that support its catalog format. Modeled after Debian linux's "apt-get".

Re:I installed it

[A beautiful mind]

Um, just a little nitpicking, about SMP.

In this story (slashdot article here) where there was a MySQL benchmark conducted, quite scientific one so not just three images + 5 sentences slapped together, which concluded that basically Linux with kernel version 2.6 outperforms every other platform in the matter of SMP, although Solaris is performing well regarding SMP to, just a few percent behind.

I'm not saying that Solaris' SMP support is bad, just that it's quite silly to point it out as a positive side, in comparison with Linux, when Linux performs even better.

"looks like linux"

[mickyflynn]

if by "looks like" you mean "cheap ripoff" and by linux you mean "Windows," then yes... it "looks like" "linux."

Seriously, I really believe the whole windows and "desktop" model has lost its usefulness and any room for innovation. Maybe its time to move on now, guys?

Re:"looks like linux"

[LnxAddct]

The whole idea of a desktop was first brought to mainstream by IBM. Microsoft illegaly backed out of the contract, stole the ideas, and implemented them in Windows 95. Give credit where credit is due. And actually the desktop model is great for nearly everything humans do and has a nice correlation to the physical world. Of course the typical slashdotter would have no idea. Only 5% of developers' needs and wants in a gui overlap with an average person.
Regards,
Steve

Re:"looks like linux"

[zappepcs]

"The whole idea of a desktop was first brought to mainstream by IBM" Can you explain this? I thought Xerox and Digital Research were doing desktop functionality before windoze 1.x ... and they were copying from Mac?

Re:"looks like linux"

[Anonymous Coward]

Wasn't it Apple/Jobs copying from Xerox?

Re:"looks like linux"

[LnxAddct]

I meant the desktop as implemented in windows 95, i.e. with a main window with a background and a start bar and you place common programs and files on this main screen. The start bar also "tracks" your windows. Think Gnome, KDE or Windows. IBM first drew up and implemented this philosophy in OS/2.
Regards,
Steve

Still with CDE?

[Coryoth]

Oh dear, CDE, what has become of you? Apparently nothing has changed since the mid 90's. Can anyone honestly tell me that they've looked through the CDE and JDS (GNOME) screenshots and would choose CDE? I've used CDE. It works well enough, but it really is lacking in functionality compared to GNOME.

Is it really that hard to transition people off CDE? Are there actually that many people that are that heavily wedded to CDE? Provide some legacy support, sure, but shouldn't GNOME (aka JDS) be the default by now? Why are they still mentioning CDE as anything other than a minor product they've attached on some extra CDs as support for legacy users?

Jedidiah.

Re:Still with CDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the kind of attitude that comes from Windows centric thinking. UNIX has been, first and foremost, a server. Just how many remote users do you think you're going to serve with the bloated monstrosity that is the GNOME desktop? The number of users you can support on the same hardware with CDE is going to be orders of magnitude higher.

Re:Still with CDE?

[Coryoth]

Any bloat that GNOME has is in shared libraries. Stick that on a server and serve it up to 10 or 100 workstations and you're really not putting much extra load on the server because all those shared libraries only need to get loaded once and then shared. When it comes down to it I very seriously doubt that the number of users you can support on the same hardware with CDE is all that many higher than GNOME, let along many orders of magnitude. Yes, you get gains from serving everyone CDE instead of GNOME, but you'll get gains over that by serving them blackbox instead of CDE. Given the increased functionalty offered, I think GNOME comfortably covers its costs.

Jedidiah.

Re:Still with CDE?

[cortana]

It's not all text. Each library will have a per-process segment for stack and heap, which therefore can not be shared between users.

Re:Still with CDE?

[cortana]

I reckon the people who still like (and use) CDE do so because they are happy with how it is at the moment. Those who want something else have already moved away to XFCE, Gnome, KDE, etc. So since the only users of CDE are happy with it... why change what works? :)

Re:Still with CDE?

[Coryoth]

Relatively speaking that's piss all though. It's hardly as if that's going to make orders of magnitude difference in the number of users supportable. You may as well force all your users to use sh instead of bash or ksh 'cause that'll save memory too. Who really needs interactive command line editing and history anyway? Feature crack I say!

Jedidiah.

Re:Still with CDE?

[Coryoth]

I reckon the people who still like (and use) CDE do so because they are happy with how it is at the moment. Those who want something else have already moved away to XFCE, Gnome, KDE, etc. So since the only users of CDE are happy with it... why change what works?

Because you are introducing all your new users to the "joys" of CDE. It hardly represents a good solution, not a migration path (handing new users something you want to migrate away from as the default is not exactly good). Sun can provide CDE updates and support for all those legacy people who still use it. That doesn't mean they need to make it the default desktop available immediately from the log in screen for every new version of their OS.

Jedidiah.

Re:Still with CDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Windows centric thinking

CDE is a licenced copy of MS Windows.

> UNIX has been, first and foremost, a server

CDE wasn't exactly svelte when it recieved it's last major upgrade in 1994. It was originally supposed to be a full-featured desktop for high-end workstations. Your point is only due to an accident of history.

Re:Still with CDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you saying that CDE is dying?

Re:Still with CDE?

[paxil]

I like CDE. But then my prefered environment on linux is Xfce4. I don't want icons on the root window, I'm not that into the pointy clicky thing.

The screenshots show the default CDE desktop at a low resolution. Yep, it looks like crap. But CDE is quite customizable. Probobly the first thing to do is just click the middle mouse button and iconify the ugly app bar, then change the background to something not ugly, then set the resolution to something reasonable.

I have CDE running on Solaris 10 on an old Ultra60 with dual 1600x1200 screens and it runs and looks great. I think it looks better than JDS on the same system.

Re:Still with CDE?

[cortana]

In theory it's piss all. In practice, developers are lazy. Readers of planet.gnome.org will have noticed the recent drive to reduce Gnome's memory footprint. For example, until a couple of days ago, every copy of nautilus maintained several copies of the desktop background in memory, so there's an instant 10-15 MB penalty per session. Pango and freetype were likewise egregious offenders.

I just came up with this rather nasty shell script to find out how much memory on my machine is being used for non-code segments in my processes:

sum=$(for pid in $(ps aux | awk '$1 == "sam" {print $2}');
do cat /proc/$$/maps | while read addr prot junk;
do test $prot = 'r-xp' && continue;
start=$(echo $addr | sed 's/-.*//');
end=$(echo $addr | sed 's/.*-//');
echo $(( 0x$end - 0x$start ));
done;
done | while read x;
do echo + $x;
done)
echo $(( ($sum) / 1024 / 1024 ))
155

So my session is currently using up 155 MB of non-sharable memory. Actually, this seems rather low, given that I have firefox, thunderbird and azureus all chugging away. Maybe /proc/$pid/maps doesn't show the mmap'd sections that libc creates for large mallocs or something...

Can code segments even be shared between processes on i386? I seem to remember reading somewhere that they can't (or, in Linux, aren't)... and looking in /proc/something/maps I can't see *any* segments marked as sharable. They're all r-xp (readable, executable, private; code segments) or rw-p (readable, writable, private; data segments).

Re:Still with CDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently you've never had GNOME bleed the colors out of your desktop because you have a crappy Sun video card. And yes, it does hammer the CPU a bit more.

Besides, when I'm in Solaris it means I'm programming. When I'm programming I could not possibly care less about window dressing.

Re:Still with CDE?

[Coryoth]

The last time I was using Solaris seriously I spent a while in CDE, got annoyed with its general lack ability to do anything useful for me, and switched to fluxbox. I get the same great lack of functionality in a lighter package. Heck, I even get to tab together my terminals and have window shading.

The time before that when I was using Solaris seriously I went straight to FVWM2 which, at the time, was the most featureful kickass window manager around. And it was still lighter than CDE.

CDE is light on functionality, light on looks (unless you really like Motif for some reason), and a bitch to configure. Yes it can be configured, but anything beyond the most basic stuff is not exactly intuitive or obvious. I had an easier time hacking whatever I wanted into my .fvwm2rc.

As I said CDE works fine, but it is old, ugly and lacking in features. There are still people out there tied to to it, but really, the world (and Sun!) needs to be moving on. CDE hasn't gone anywhere in 10 years, and it shows.

Jedidiah.

Re:Still with CDE?

[Coryoth]

Apparently you've never had GNOME bleed the colors out of your desktop because you have a crappy Sun video card. And yes, it does hammer the CPU a bit more.

I have had to deal with the fact that for some reason a lot of Sun workstations can't cope with more than 8bit color. Perhaps Sun should consider spending an extra 50c on a video card that can manage.

Besides, when I'm in Solaris it means I'm programming. When I'm programming I could not possibly care less about window dressing.

I care about window dressing when it means a difference in functionality, particularly in window handling. Having gnome-terminal or (preferably) konsole that can provide tabs is nice. Having a window manager that support window shading is nice. Having a window manager that supported window groups (to help manage, for instance, a variety of emacs frames) would be better (and yes, GNOME doesn't. Grrr). Having a pager that shows me my desktop layouts is nice. Having an easy way to bind menu items to key shortcuts on all my apps is nice. Having good utility software (like character maps, a decent email and calendar etc.) is always useful too. If you're that devoted to just focussign on programming with no distractions, boot to the console and use Emacs from there.

Jedidiah.

Re:Still with CDE?

[cold fjord]

I pick CDE, and I'm not alone.

Sure Gnome is pretty, but it runs like a pig compared to CDE on the hardware at my site, not to mention a variety of other shortcomings. Some people prefer functional and fast to pretty and hip. (And clutter??) Of course, for those that want to do so, CDE can also be customized, but few people bother.

About the only thing I really consider important about Gnome at the moment is the associated libraries since you need them for an increasing amount of software. Otherwise....

As to why they still ship it, CDE is still THE standard Unix desktop for commercial Unix (note: Unix, not *nix). More vendors are starting to make Gnome available, but they are picking different versions.

CDE will no doubt pass from the scene like OpenLook is / has, but it will be years in coming.

Re:Still with CDE?

[SunFan]

I have had to deal with the fact that for some reason a lot of Sun workstations can't cope with more than 8bit color.

How many Sun workstations since about 1996 don't do 24-bit easily? Anything with a Creator card or better is good to go. Before 1996 24-bit was still easy to bet by adding VSIMM chips to the SPARCstation 20. Earlier SPARCstations needed some sort of gargantuan video boards for 24-bit, though.

Re:Still with CDE?

[SunFan]

One of the absolutely huge advantages of Sun over, say, Red Hat, is that Sun doesn't pull the carpet out from under their users every three years. OpenWindows stuck around until Solaris 9, I think, which means CDE is good to be around for quite some time. Sun always provides predictable transitions and always documents what will happen in advance for customers to plan ahead.

Sun also has a good record for maintaining compatibility to older versions of Solaris. I was quite pleased to see that older SunPCi IIpro cards can still work under Solaris 10 with JDS (with Windows 98, at least). Officially, these cards are supported only up to Solaris 9.

If I were running a big shop with my behind accountable for more than a year in the future, Sun is not a bad bet.

Re:Still with CDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure Gnome is pretty, but it runs like a pig compared to CDE on the hardware at my site

Upgrade, your hardware is shit.

not to mention a variety of other shortcomings.

Such as? ...... Thats what I thought.

Some people prefer functional and fast to pretty and hip. (And clutter??) Of course, for those that want to do so, CDE can also be customized, but few people bother.

How is GNOME not functional? Its integration with GNOME apps is far beyond anything CDE provides.

Re:Still with CDE?

[digitalchinky]

If you've ever worked government, it is near impossible to transition people away from CDE - 5 years ago it was the only desktop supported by the sys-admin groups. There are some very smart admins, but there are also many procedural SOP following types that have no real clue about what they are doing unless they can mandate their own comfort zones.

CDE is the defacto standard, deviate and you get nasty looks - I use enlightenment, as far as I've seen, I would appear to be in a very small minority - even though it is a vastly more productive environment for the type of work done. (Yup, I spent a few weeks debugging and messing around trying to get it to compile - that was back in 1999ish)

Problem here though, is getting software through the import process and onto the internal networks. Secrets and all...

Re:Still with CDE?

[discogravy]

Upgrade, your hardware is shit.

"Hey, boss, I want to get new hardware."
"But we spent like 100 grand on racks and servers and a bunch of other unix bullshit not 4 years ago!"
"Yeah, but I want pretty windows on my servers."
"...you want MS Windows servers?"

Sorry, servers have one purpose and one purpose only. Anything else is window dressing. If it gets the job done, why bother upgrading? Because you want pretty pictures? Let me know how having a Sun blade server as a desktop works out for you, though.

Re:Still with CDE?

[cold fjord]

Upgrade, your hardware is shit.

LOL. Sorry junior, I don't work out of Mom's basement. When something works well enough, we use it until we need to replace it. Better eye candy isn't really a good enough reason to upgrade our systems which are older than I care for, but aren't that old. Thanks for the laugh though. (Do you think you would be willing to underwrite the port to new hardware for some of our apps? Some of them only run on 1 or 2 microprocessor families, X86 isn't one of them.)

Such as?

Excessive memory footprint? Excessive CPU use? Those get to be a drag on systems with 20 people on them. Well, actually it can also be inconvenient on a workstation with only 1 person on a graphical console and several others working remotely.

.... Thats what I thought.

No you didn't.

How is GNOME not functional?

Gnome is functional, but so is CDE, and that is the point. CDE is functional enough with lower overhead, better behavior, and fewer bugs.

Its integration with GNOME apps is far beyond anything CDE provides.

It provides pleny of things we don't gneed or care about while consuming more resources. No win there.

Re:Still with CDE?

[rs79]

"provide tabs is nice. Having a window manager that support window shading is nice. Having a window manager that supported window groups (to help manage, for instance, a variety of emacs frames) would be better (and yes, GNOME doesn't. Grrr). Having a pager that shows me my desktop layouts is nice. Having an easy way to bind menu items to key shortcuts on all my apps is nice. Having good utility software (like character maps, a decent email and calendar etc.) is always useful too. If you're that devoted to just focussign on programming with no distractions, boot to the console and use Emacs from there."

Man you smalltalk programmers stick out like a sore thumb.

Re:Still with CDE?

[James Youngman]

Sun also has a good record for maintaining compatibility to older versions of Solaris.

Not always; for example, the pixrect support in SunOS 4 was removed in SunOS 5. That made lots of useful things (espectially the console accelerator that made the console work at a reasonable speed) stop working.

Re:Still with CDE?

[Ben Hutchings]

Libraries don't need stacks and heaps. Threads have stacks, and heaps are usually shared across a whole process. However, each library does normally contain a certain amount of static data and relocation information that can't be shared between processes, and that requires at least a page of VM.

Re:Still with CDE?

[Ben Hutchings]

Code segments are simply mmapped to the executable files they come from; the pages are implicitly shareable with any other process that maps the same bit of the file read-only (or copy-on-write).

Re:Still with CDE?

[cortana]

Thanks for the replies... I guess it's true what they say, about how to get an answer on the Internet: post some incorrect information and someone will correct you. :)

Re:Still with CDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

>> One of the absolutely huge advantages of Sun over, say, Red Hat, is that Sun doesn't pull the carpet out from under their users every three years.

You must be a young lad; or at least, you did not own any Sun I386 just before the Sparc came. Now you see the carpet, now you don't.

Re:Still with CDE?

[Pathwalker]

For example, until a couple of days ago, every copy of nautilus maintained several copies of the desktop background in memory, so there's an instant 10-15 MB penalty per session.

Back in the 2.2.x days, there was a project called mergemem.

It was a set of kernel patches, and a daemon which would walk through pages resident in memory, and merge those which were the same into a single copy on write page.

I have to wonder if it would be worth resurrecting, as many applications today are getting rather bloated, and it's likely that they are caching the same data in several places.

Re:Still with CDE?

[gedhrel]

That sounds great. Genuinely curious: how does the interaction with shared libraries affect this picture?

Re:Still with CDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because CDE is fast and light, whereas GNOME is just laughably bloated and slow?

Becase CDE, as opposed to GNOME, doesn't basically try to make my computer sluggish, buggy and Windows-like?

See the recent discussion by GNOME devs (mentioning stuff like 300K XML files parsed just to set the volume. It's extremely poor, sloppy and bloated in many, many places).

Re:Still with CDE?

[sysadmn]

It's not at all hard to transition people off of CDE. The first time you login, Solaris 10 asks which windowing system you prefer to use - CDE or JDS. Either work fine, for both root and ordinary users. In our case, we have a pretty heavy deployment of HP-UX and Solaris engineering desktops, with lots of custom buttons (actions), preinstalled printer queues, etc. Eventually we'll transition those, but it's nice not having to do it right now.

Re:Still with CDE?

[GileadGreene]

Sorry, servers have one purpose and one purpose only. Anything else is window dressing.

Why on earth are you running a windowing system on a server at all then?

Re:Still with CDE?

[SunFan]

You can't possibly have expected everything to remain moving from SunOS 4 to SunOS 5. This revision was Sun completely gutting and rearchitecting their operating system! This isn't a secret, either.

Re:Still with CDE?

[SunFan]

"You must be a young lad; or at least, you did not own any Sun I386 just before the Sparc came. Now you see the carpet, now you don't."

Part of that is that basically no one bought the 386-based systems. There are rumors of Sun actually making 486-based systems only to not ship them (I read this in a FAQ somewhere).

Not selling 386 well probably was caused by their SPARCs being the fasest workstations available at the time. On the postitive side Solaris x86 never really went away, which is lucky for Sun now that Opteron is around.

Re:Still with CDE?

[Ben Hutchings]

What interaction with shared libraries? Their code is shared just the same as the code of the executable initially loaded into a process (it is position-independent). However some sections of a shared library may need to be relocated or otherwise modified when loaded, and so those aren't shared. This seems to mean at least 1 unshareable page (normally 4K) for each such section for each process the library is loaded into - hence the concern about the large numbers of shared libraries loaded into apparently simple GNOME programs.

Re:Still with CDE?

[gedhrel]

That's what I was wondering about. You can minimise the modification of shared library pages, I suppose, by (a) using jump table pages for relocation; (b) by having "preferred" locations that libraries can hint they like to be loaded at. Or (c), which is stick all your functionality into one executable and set of libraries, relocate once, and fork-and-call rather than fork-and-exec for child processes.

Re:Still with CDE?

[Ben Hutchings]

ELF shared libraries have (a) and (b). Use "ldd" to see where libraries are loaded and you'll find they load at the same address almost every time. Note that Windows DLLs also have these features, but most developers never bother to change DLL load addresses from the default, so their programs load slowly as the DLLs collide and have to be relocated.

Re:Still with CDE?

[discogravy]

That was my point.

Smells like...

[Anonymous Coward]

SCHPAM!

Mirrors that work

[compm375]

http://mirrordot.com/stories/48ae8a91c0515178981a2 23b6721551b/index.html
http://mirrordot.com/stories/bd9596e27c5d2177fc81b 2a5512c1927/index.html
http://mirrordot.com/stories/1ffb4724d2b03ba41edc9 790016d2b3c/index.html
http://mirrordot.com/stories/e1f77e936894905cc5b8d 90e96d46066/index.html
http://mirrordot.com/stories/48ae8a91c0515178981a2 23b6721551b/index.html
http://mirrordot.com/stories/b6d219bc646a2c95a1da6 66659518e10/index.html

Ughhh...

[Aquila Deus]

Terribly ugly....

Picture of the Kernel

[NoGuffCheck]

kernel picture

Re:Picture of the Kernel

[Anonymous Coward]

here you go

Re:Picture of the Kernel

[Anonymous Coward]

pi != 3.14259265
pi ~ 3.14159265

Such an elementary mistake should not go uncorrected.

Real Picture of Kernel

[NoGuffCheck]

sorry here is the real picture

Re:Real Picture of Kernel

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a Colonel.

Dumbass.

Re:Real Picture of Kernel

[Anonymous Coward]

He must be a KDE developer.

Re:Real Picture of Kernel

[Anonymous Coward]

you're probably wondering if anyone notices the error in your sig

Re:Real Picture of Kernel

[dancingmad]

"I will make him an offer he can't refuse...

...2 piece spicy, 4 regular."

Re:Real Picture of Kernel

[Cryptnotic]

He must be a KDE developer.

No, no, no. He's a KFC developer.

My own Solaris 10 experience

[Anonymous Coward]

I installed it and was basically extremely disappointed in it as a desktop. I imagine it's actually quite good as a server, but the interface is just nowhere near the level of GUI integration that something like Ubuntu or Fedora have. That is the ultimate appeal of Linux to me. It can (potentially) have the same level of GUI integration that Windows has, yet much, much greater flexibility, openness, security, stability, and eventually usability. It's actually really getting close. As soon as a project like http://www.autopackage.org makes some more strides and gets near universal acceptance among distributions and application developers, it could actually be there finally. As much as I had really high hopes for Solaris 10, it's just not going to cut it. Among other things, I think Sun really needs to fire whoever is in charge of marking and branding for the company. It's fine if you want to have your corporate colors as yellow and purple, but for god's sake, please keep those colors away from my desktop AND applications!

Re:My own Solaris 10 experience

[1_interest_1]

..."but the interface is just nowhere near the level of GUI integration that something like Ubuntu or Fedora have."

..."have the same level of GUI integration that Windows has"

Setting the bar pretty high there, don't you think buddy? ;-)

Re:My own Solaris 10 experience

[Metzli]

I actually like Solaris 10 as a desktop. I played with it on a test box for a few months. It's horribly slow unless it has a lot of RAM (I had 512MB on a Blade 100 and it was still slow), but it seems good. I changed the colors, background, etc. using the supplied tools (remember, it's basically Gnome) and it worked well. I still greatly prefer Solaris as a server OS, but it's acceptable as a desktop. Firefox, Gaim, Thunderbird, and most anything you want to compile just work.

Re:My own Solaris 10 experience

[tonyr60]

" I played with it on a test box for a few months."

Which suggests you were using an earlier beta/Express version. In which case try the GA release, it is faster.

Re:My own Solaris 10 experience

[Metzli]

Excellent, I didn't realize that the GA was more efficient. I have it running on a home server, but I've not attempted it as a desktop.

Re:My own Solaris 10 experience

[Anonymous Coward]

If you can bring yourself to look beyond the Java-everything branding, it is really a good system. And Sun can provide a system that at least has some internal consistency among revisions!

Re:My own Solaris 10 experience

[Anonymous Coward]

There was one thing I forgot to add. Sun may be happy to have an excellent server and leave the desktop to Linux. I think they've said as much on occasion. Well, guess what, that will royally screw them in the medium to long run. You can have the greatest performing server in the world, but if it's hard to use, it will eventually get overtaken by things that are easier to use and more open. Linux is performing a two pronged attack, one on Windows, the other on Solaris. It's becoming as powerful as Solaris while as easy to use as Windows. This is probably why Sun and Microsoft are trying to do everything they can to avoid Linux. They realize they can't compete given the inertia of their respective platforms, and their egos are too big to join Linux full heartedly, so they'll continue to get marginalized. Look at how far ease of use and control of the desktop experience has helped MS invade the server/datacenter space. Sure, they don't have a perception of being top enterprise class, but they don't seem to be crying all the way to the bank about that.

I know Sun is a big contributor to the Free Software and Open Source movements, so it's weird to lump them together with MS. It just feels like they're not doing as much as they can to promote Linux itself. Why not get *strongly* behind the Ubuntu/Debian communities? That's RedHat's big weakness right now, is that Fedora is perceived as a second class citizen in RedHat land.

Like it or not, RedHat has the perception they do and are in the enviable position they are because they have stayed behind the GPL more than most other commercial entities. Sun should one up them on that front! They should get deep within the Debian community, support autopackage (or something even better....not sure how well uninstalling works...) across EVERY SINGLE PACKAGE they themselves build for Solaris, support SWT, Eclipse, and especially GCJ, and just hammer it. Allow for really deep integration between OpenOffice, Java, SWT, Mozilla Firefox, and create all sorts of hooks with a java messaging/event/component layer between them, and let the community do the rest.

I swear they are so close. Sun could just blow things so wide open, but there's something holding them back. Anyone know what it is? Is it McNealy? Is it their historic BSD roots (instead of GPL)? Is is licensing arrangements that would prevent more GPL adoption across their properties? Is it a weird "we have the enterprise channel, we don't need the community so bad" attitude? WTF?

Re:My own Solaris 10 experience

[Sithgunner]

Don't know why you need to shout about default look. Just change it in preference. It's not locked up.

Re:Perfect OS world

[Anonymous Coward]

While we're at it, why don't we just make everyone look and think the same too.

Re:Perfect OS world

[Anonymous Coward]

Hell let's make it easy. There will be one and only one type of processor, one type of I/O, one type of network connection, one type of graphics, etc.

By the way, spam-n-idjit; Scitech's solution only works on x86 architectures. Certainly not what the text for your link says, Also, don't forget different OS's have different stack assumptions. No matter you try to alias around that, compiling for the target will get better performance.

Re:Perfect OS world

[eobanb]

Bitch bitch bitch. What you're proposing is simply impossible. You can't have purely high-level graphical-whatever software, because that's just an idea. You can't have ideas materialise as tangible things without some way to actually represent them. Source code is the form in which all software exists, by definition. Wouldn't it be nice if software was just an idea that computers could magically work with? Well, yeah. A wise man once said, the cooler something is, the less likely it is to happen. In this case, the idea is very very cool.

Upon further scrutiny...

[itistoday]

we have determined that the only difference between Sun's Solaris OS and Microsoft's Windows OS, is the executive decision to refer to the computer as "This Computer".

Re:Upon further scrutiny...

[elmegil]

Yeah, that's why Microsoft scales to...let's see...8 cpus or so (or was it maybe 16 more recently?), and Solaris scales to...128+. Yeah, I'd say those are functionally equivalent.

Re:Upon further scrutiny...

[Anonymous Coward]

HP 64p Superdome comes with Windows, if you'd like. It might not be Solaris, but it's the same leauge.

Re:Upon further scrutiny...

[Metzli]

Actually, Windows 2003 Datacenter scales to 32 processors. Still much less than Solaris. Still Windows.

Re:Upon further scrutiny...

[Spoing]

1. Actually, Windows 2003 Datacenter scales to 32 processors.

What's the curve on that line? Curious. (I don't know for that version of Windows.)

Re:Upon further scrutiny...

[UltimateRobotLover]

The Unisys ES7000 goes near-linearly to 32 processors. Of course, that's as much due to the backend hardware as Windows. I used to look after one of these puppys: you should have seen it fly on Seti ;-)

Re:Perfect OS world

[cranos]

So what you want is a layer above the OS but below the apps, designed by a comittee of competing OS producers that allows all apps to work on all OS's? And all of this without any sort of speed/grunt hit when doing the translations between the app/layer/OS?

I guess in a perfect world this might be possible but in the real world its not going to happen.

Install Walkthrough

[Metzli]

vi /etc/ethers
vi /etc/hosts
add_install_client
boot net - install

There you are, the installation walkthrough for jumpstarting Solaris. Tune in for our next episode, when we cover logging onto the console.

Should be Openlook

[bluGill]

Speaking as an old school sunOS fan (Anything pre-Solaris), CDE was almost as big a mistake as going sysV for Solaris. Openlook was much better. I never even looked at CDE, it was so ugly on my neighbor's desktop. (I was one of the last to get rid of the ELC off my desk, one of the downsides of being a intern, so I didn't have it as an option for years after a few switched to it)

Re:Should be Openlook

[rs79]

"Speaking as an old school sunOS fan (Anything pre-Solaris), CDE was almost as big a mistake as going sysV for Solaris."

Nothing's that big. But, what happened to NeWS? That's where we should be and we finally have the computing resources to make is snappy for cheap.

Re:Should be Openlook

[DrXym]

If it's any consolation, the screenshots suggest that the desktop has more than a pinch of Openlook in the theme - rounded controls and menus. Personally I think Openlook was a disgusting UI, but there you go.

Re:Perfect OS world

[zymano]

Did you understand what Scitech has done with SNAP ?

Your clueless.

They use something like a virtual machine thats FAST so a programmer only needs ONE driver to run on all operating systems.

Re:Perfect OS world

[Jerf]

The Slashdot crowd is about half as bright as it thinks it is, but come on, even we can tell you're shilling. With marketing lies, to boot.

Re:Perfect OS world

[zymano]

So it only works on x86 computers.

Big fricking deal.

It's a good start if you ask me.

Why are you so peeved ? I doubt you've been porting shit in your life.

From the bottom...

[Anonymous Coward]

From the bottom of the page:

So so is good, very good, very excellent good: and yet it is not; it is but so so. -- William Shakespeare, "As You Like It"

Re:Perfect OS world

[zymano]

So what the hell is Scitech doing then ?

Magic ?

We have plug and play hardware. We also need it for software.

Their customers

[Craig Ringer]

Because their customers are used to having it, and don't want to upgrade anything they don't have to. They'll often have heavily customised CDE environments, or be an ISV that integrates apps into the CDE, etc.

I imagine that once they have good management tools for GNOME they'll push it a bit harder, but even so they can't offer the same sort of stability (in terms of compatible changes only, etc) for GNOME.

Personally, I logged into CDE only to go "gah!" and log back out ... and I like XFCE. However, I'm sure Sun do have good reasons for keeping it around.

Re:Their customers

[Coryoth]

Because their customers are used to having it, and don't want to upgrade anything they don't have to. They'll often have heavily customised CDE environments, or be an ISV that integrates apps into the CDE, etc.

Believe me, I know - I've worked in exactly such an environment. That doesn't mean they need to keep providing CDE as the default desktop on every new version of the OS.

Back with Solaris 8 there was an extra optional CD that contained all the GNU tools and GNOME. It was easy enough to throw that CD in and install the GNU tools and GNOME if you desired it. The default install, of course, never installed any such thing. All I'm saying is that it is about time CDE got relegated to the extra optional CD. All those people who are still tied to it can install it, but all the people coming to Solaris 10 don't even have to know it exists.

I imagine that once they have good management tools for GNOME they'll push it a bit harder, but even so they can't offer the same sort of stability (in terms of compatible changes only, etc) for GNOME.

They can if they want to. It's not like they don't have access to the source or something.

Jedidiah.

Other features?

[lewiz]

I'd be much more interested to know how Solaris 10 handles things like:

CD/DVD writing,
wireless cards,
PCMCIA/Cardbus devices,
USB hotswapping (i.e. does it pop up and say you've plugged a USB HDD in and offer to mount it?),
Input types (i.e. Japanese, Chinese, etc.).

I've recently been trying out many Linux distros (FC3, SuSE 9.2, Mandrake (latest -- 10.1?), Gentoo and Debian) to check out how well they handle these things. So far I've been most impressed with Ubuntu. As a long-time FreeBSD user I have been very impressed how things have advanced with Linux in the last four or five years.

I'm aware how well Solaris 10 cuts it in the server arena but does it even come close to the likes of FC, SuSE and Ubuntu for desktop use?

Re:Other features?

[mnmn]

Its never been a server OS, and never really aimed to. Even the gnome desktop is due to pressures on solaris to act like a desktop, and due to people comaring solaris to everything else by virtue of its window manager alone.

It has a nice standardized kernel, many commercial drivers out there are designed to plug into its kernel, like the numerous telecom equipment. Solaris also has arguably the best threading implementation, and the kernel works better than most OSes, including Linux, on SMP and massively SMP systems. Like all unixen it was designed to be rock-stable, and has been as stable as BSD in my experiences (Linux crashed only because I fidgetted with the sources, and all the alpha drivers).

Grab a copy of BeOS, install Linspire, and buy a mac, and start comparing desktops. Please do not include Solaris or OpenBSD or minix or PDP/11 in the list.

Re:Other features?

[calvinandhobbes]

I have been using a Solaris 10 for 1.5 months now on an x86 and i can say, its solid. im not into the gui experience thing, so dont have comments on that.

1) USB plugging - dint work for me for a buffalo clip drive.

2) Input types for japanese with a japanese key board works great. not that i understand japanese, but my client uses it bigtime.

3) Im waiting to see the kernel source code.

4) read reviews about dprobes, but couldnt use it.
mdb is a good debugger i should add.

Re:Other features?

[Neo-Rio-101]

It handles Japanese quite well, only as long as you don't ssh into your Solaris workstation. If you ssh into Solaris and get the console, you'll find all of the manpages and other Japanese error messages are illegible.

Re:Other features?

[SunFan]

I haven't tried it, yet, but it looks like there is support for Windows-like CD burning in the Nautilus ("This Computer") application. There is also Windows-like printer management, which is nice.

Re:Other features?

[EduardoFonseca]

This is Gnome, not Solaris.

Cheers!

Re:Other features?

[SunFan]

JDS3 is based on GNOME, and it runs on Solaris. Quite well, too.

Re:Other features?

[Mycroft_VIII]

Just curious, how did you get Ubuntu to reliably burn disks? or was it just copying.
I tried Ubuntu 4.10/amd64 and it kept insisting half my iso images were acutally mp3's (based on an assumed mime type I couldn't find a way to change).
This in a addition to it's other glaring problems caused me to delete it.
I'm tempted to try the regular x86 version in the hopes it's better behaved (on the assumption the amd64 version is not as well done being newer), but I'm afraid I'll find it has the same problems.
I'd really like to have a working amd64 linux distro, but Ubuntu isn't what I'd call working yet.

Mycroft

Mycroft

Re:Other features?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd be much more interested to know how Solaris 10 handles things like:

CD/DVD writing

Well, since most people use cdrecord to write CDs and DVDs on Linux, and since Joerg Schillig, the author of cdrecord, vastly prefers Solaris and is quite open about that and has been writing code for SunOS/Solaris since the mid 1980's, my guess is that it's reasonable to assume that the CD-burning experience on Solaris is no worse than on Linux, and probably better in several ways!

Of course, it's entirely possible you're talking about GUI tools to drive cdrecord. I don't really know anything about those, but I can't think of a single GUI toolkit that's available on Linux and not available on Solaris, so I think that any GUI tool you'd use to burn CDs on Linux should also be available on Solaris.

Re:Other features?

[EduardoFonseca]

I know. I just said that the features you were mentioning were not from Solaris, but from Gnome, and works flawlessly, or even better, on any modern Linux distro.

Re:Other features?

[Zemplar]

Try the "hoary" release of Ubuntu! It's a great improvement over "warty" even though it is not yet officially released. I've been running the hoary codebase for a few months and it's certainly stable enough, IMHO, for general desktop use.

http://cdimage.ubuntulinux.org/releases/hoary/curr ent/

Give it a try!

Re:Other features?

[Mycroft_VIII]

No broadband available. So If I can't get it on disk it has to be small.
I'll probably wait a while before trying it again. From what I saw it looked a bit young and unmatured yet, to much of what little was there wasn't very well integrated and it has issues other distros have gotten past.

Mycroft

NT4 Green

[daniel23]

Well, I must have fallen victim to some serious hype aka marketing lie^H^H^H fantasy but looking at those JDS screenshots Im just disappointed.
Where did I grasp that idea that there was a 3D desktop concept growing - something that would in fact justify the financial and noise - toll of a "current" graphic card for me if I could dolly and rotate my desktop environment, building galaxies and clusters of desktop links, windows and whatever and let me dive through it like I dive through Celestia?
A pipe dream, nice dope though.

What theese screenshots show is a glorified NT4 green, a colour I associate with stability (+) and messages pointing out that there are no valid drivers for device %whatsoever% (--)

It looks to me like this might have been a cool thing to have as a desktop in 1998 or something...

Re:NT4 Green

[TelJanin]

You're thinking of Looking Glass. Looking Glass and Java Desktop are two seperate entities.

Re:NT4 Green

[agotterba]

Funny you should mention that; I recently tried running Solaris10 on my AMD64 3200 with MSI K8N Neo2 mobo.

But it couldn't find either of the 2 built in ethernet adapters.

So it's back to good ol' Linux!

Re:NT4 Green

[daniel23]

> You're thinking of Looking Glass. Looking Glass and Java Desktop are two seperate entities.

thanks.

Just the sort of answer I was hoping for - now, why is your comment rated at zero (while deserving a +3 informative)?

Re:Sun to kill Linux?

[lewiz]

If Sun is to kill Linux (at least on the desktop) they'll have to do a damn site better than this.

Still, I suppose this is the first ``real'' attempt so we can but wait and see...

When will people learn...

[mh101]

not to post pages full of screenshots or video clips here?

Or at least post a mirror instead?

Re:Perfect OS world

[hazah]

This isn't flaimbait!

And you don't have to have another layer in front of the apps to concieve such interoprability. You just need to follow standards. Preferably ones that make sense. There are many techniques, and a virtual environment is just one of them.

Re:Solaris 10 lies by Sun

[Tpenta]

Well, Anonymous Coward, I look forward to seeing you eat your words some time in Calender Q2 this year.

You make mention of www.opensolaris.org . Have you actually read anything on it?

I do hope you signed up for the notification.

You may also notice on that site that to show that we are not going to keep the new and cool stuff closed, that the entire source to dtrace is present on that site as a download. The work is ongoing to ensure that we open what we have the rights to open.

Tp.

Re:Solaris VS Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Any way you can prove you're Linus?

Re:Sun to kill Linux?

[Tpenta]

Excuse me, but where exactly does it say that Sun is trying to kill linux? With references please. Also note that Sun competing with companies who build distros is a completely different thing.

Tp.

pxe boot from linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been trying to install Solaris 10 x86 over the network using linux as the pxe server. No luck so far. Anyone done this successfully? In my case, nbp hangs after "Solaris Network Boot...". Doesn't even try to get inetboot from the tftp server.

And I *have* looked around on the web. Nothing that helps. If you've done this successfully, please post instructions.

Re:pxe boot from linux?

[asaul]

Try this:

http://www.docbert.org/Solaris/Jumpstart/linux.h tm l

The author knows what he is talking about - I havent tried it myself but this ought to be what you need.

Re:pxe boot from linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks but those are instructions for sparc. I have that working already. My problem is with PXE on x86 specifically.

Re:Perfect OS world

[cranos]

I have no idea what "Scitech is doing" as before now I have never heard of them. From a brief glimpse at the link in your sig, they are adding another step between a command being issued by the user and it being acted on by the OS.

So called "unified" driver schemes such as this, can never match, nor exceed a well written native driver for an OS. A native driver does not suffer from the penalty of having a middle man manage the calls between itself and the OS/hardware, and this is going to be the same problem with software and any middle man layer, just look at wine or Java or Mono.

Re:Perfect OS world

[zymano]

You might as well look at the performance benchmarks too while your at it.

I think their idea is superb. And i do not work for them.

Rewriting drivers for each operating system is a pain in the ass.

Re:Perfect OS world

[cranos]

Way to refute his argument with well thought out reasoning and intelligent remarks, dude.

You thoroughly rule dude </sarcasm>

Re:Solaris VS Linux

[blastwave]

And my hat is off to you Sir !

Well done.

Would you care to join the Blastwave project?

http://www.blastwave.org/

We have a lot of software ready for Solaris and all of it will run on OpenSolaris also. You could have a lot of fun with a Solaris disto project. Perhaps the future is a meld of Linux and Solaris in to a super UNIX of sorts? Perhaps we are going there eventually anyways due to market forces.

Re:Perfect OS world

[cranos]

As I said before, a unified driver scheme that relies on anything but native system calls is not going to have the same sort of performance.

If you can show me an independant report saying that their scheme works as well as a native driver then sure I will admit it works.

However until then Im sorry but Im going to stick with that I know.

Re:Perfect OS world

[zymano]

thanks junior.

I meant .........duuuuuuude.

Re:Perfect OS world

[zymano]

Go test it yourself.

http://www.scitechsoft.com/products/dev/sdk_down lo ad/snap_sdk_download.html

Looks like Linux?

[aCapitalist]

Uhh, how about it looks like Gnome.

Surprise, surprise Gnome runs on more than Linux. Geez

Re:Perfect OS world

[cranos]

Okay heres the kicker, I don't need it. My nvidia cards work wonderfully well under Linux (better FPS running UT2004 under FC2 than Win2k) and my other boxes either run win2000 or command line linux.

By the way, those performance benchmarks you pointed out are at least two years old, they might want to update them if they want to push this technology.

Re:Perfect OS world

[ky11x]

ROFL.

This may be the start of a new type of troll on /. You are really inspired. Look at all the people who are biting. I'm amazed.

This is like a combination of the "is it good or is it whack?" troll with a dash of universal "your os sucks" troll sprinkled with a bit of "not trying to be a troll here but can someone explain to me ..."

and you even manage to add in a signature troll. WOW. You are good.

Seriously....

[asaul]

"Look like linux" - what exactly does "linux" look like? Oh, you mean it looks like GNOME, which is available on Solaris and Linux and probably a host of other UNIX operating systems....

"know about the licensing issues" - what is that supposed to mean? That because it doesnt use GPL but another OSI approved license it is an "issue"?

"Have something going on here" - well, if that aint flamebait I dont know what is. Yes, Sun have a high quality OS that integrates GNOME and a host of other FOSS software with appropriate licensing and acknoledgements and because you think it looks like _your_ "linux" desktop (and not KDE or blackbox or fvwm or tvm) they are supposedly doing something dastardly?

And really, if OS install snapshots were news worthy, whatever you do dont look at docs.sun.com, there are just too many consipiricies there to report!

Re:Seriously....

[xgamer04]

what exactly does "linux" look like?

Like this:

"... 1010111000110 ..." (note: I'm sure that in with the size of the kernel these days, this bin string will probably come up somewhere. I hope.)

Re:Seriously....

[asaul]

Wow - such artistic expression, you captured it beautifully....

Re:Seriously....

[Anonymous Coward]

"... 1010111000110 ..."

Sorry, no match! This one is patented :(

Re:Seriously....

[iiiiiiii]

$ od -x /boot/vmlinuz | grep -c "a *e *3 *" 553

Re:Solaris VS Linux

[Mr Ambersand]

Your compeittion was invented by 'linus', not 'linux'; 'linux' is your competition, and it just so happened to be invented by one linus torvalds.

Clear on that now?

Huge competition?

[Anonymous Coward]

Having another open source OS is great, but if you think the two compete against each other you're wrong.

Almost as if you started to build a garage, your neighbor saw you and wanted to RACE, and finish one before you did. ooooh, WHO CARES.

People who have used Linux want something that THEY have worked on, THEY have started. SUN is getting into this to compete with companies that USE Linux, the people developing it usually don't care.

Besides the point, usually two open source projects will BENEFIT from each other. Gnome, X, Mozilla, Konqueror as in with Apple, etc.

Open source colaberates, Corporations Compete.

Re:Huge competition?

[Space Coyote]

People who have used Linux want something that THEY have worked on, THEY have started. The number of people who have actually 'worked on' linux, as compared with the potential market of users that Sun is thinking about, is very very small. And as the takeup of OS X among the Unix crowd shows, people want usability and new technology over some ideological purity that Linux / GPL seem to worry about. Most people who just want to get work done are rather more pragmatic about their software. As for Linux, though, Sun has shown that they are willing to use it where it makes sense to , and are just as happy to charge you for their services whether you want to run them on an AMD system running linux or one of their big Sparc machines. Besides that, I'm guessing Java Desktop will eventually find a happy home on Linux as well as Solaris.

Re:Huge competition?

[node 3]

Having another open source OS is great, but if you think the two compete against each other you're wrong.

Sure they do. They compete for both users and developers. This sort of competition seems far more noble than the nature of competition in the corporate world, but it's still competition nonetheless.

Almost as if you started to build a garage, your neighbor saw you and wanted to RACE, and finish one before you did. ooooh, WHO CARES.

Yeah, I guess the XFree86 folks don't care that everyone's moving to Xorg. Or the GNOME folks wouldn't care if everyone but them ran KDE. I also recall the Firefox team taking out an ad in the NYT asking people to try Firefox.

People who have used Linux want something that THEY have worked on, THEY have started. SUN is getting into this to compete with companies that USE Linux, the people developing it usually don't care.

What do you mean by, 'People who have used Linux...'? You clearly don't mean everyone who has used Linux, because that's obviously false. In fact, very few people who use Linux actually contribute to it.

Which, of course, has nothing to do with whether or not Solaris competes with Linux.

Besides the point, usually two open source projects will BENEFIT from each other. Gnome, X, Mozilla, Konqueror as in with Apple, etc.

I'm certain they will benefit from each other. That doesn't mean they don't also compete.

Re:Huge competition?

[rs79]

" And as the takeup of OS X among the Unix crowd shows, people want usability and new technology over some ideological purity"

Bingo.

"Linux is dying - Netcraft".

Sincerely
Bee S. Dee.

Install (from scratch) still a PITA

[kimanaw]

Had the (dis)pleasure of installing Solaris 10 on my SunBlade 100 recently (a prior power failure had zapped the filesystem, so it was a ground-up install). Not an experience I'd enjoy repeating again. On the upside, it only took *3* attempts.

I recall the same pain on the initial install of Solaris 8. I'd think by now they'd realize its tough to supplant the other major OS's if only certified Solaris Installation Engineers can get the damn thing up and running.

Since I can just drop my Fedora Core3's into a CD drive, boot, and get on about my life, I doubt I'll be switching to Solaris 10 for anything except compatibility testing any time soon.

Re:Install (from scratch) still a PITA

[asaul]

Gee - it took you 3 attempts to answer basic questions like hostname, IP address and nameserver, select what type of install you wanted and then hit install?

Can you please point me to where there is such a credential as a certified Solaris Installation Engineer?

Considering how many people got it going on thousands of machines allready, and your lack of any real detail as to why it failed, the only conclusion to make is you are unable to grasp the concept of using a mouse and keyboard.

Is someone posting for you?

Re:Install (from scratch) still a PITA

[TqUhpiQaw]

Don't despair, Solaris 11 will come with an installation option for the technologically impaired.

Re:Install (from scratch) still a PITA

[starfishsystems]

I'm not sure what specifically would have given you trouble, and you don't enlighten us with much detail. Perhaps the experience was a bit overwhelming.

Don't worry. I've been doing them for 20 years now, probably done a few thousand in that time on maybe twenty or thirty different hardware platforms. Never had a problem, and I tell you, it's all about having a system. That's what you have to do, figure out a system. And then never, never, depart from it, no matter what the voices say. Just be cool.

Sure, I admit that I'm tempted sometimes to just type random stuff, but I've been totally able to control myself, no problem, just answer the questions. Ever since they took me out of detox the last time. I didn't like it there. It's not just the smell, it's the people. They have such a bad attitude. They're not positive. I need positive energy.

I had to know a few things, like what language I spoke, what timezone I was in, did I want to install everything or just a basic workstation. It is all a bit irritating, I admit. You'd think the installation script would just know that stuff. After all, it's pretty pathetic. It's like you're stupid or something.

I wish it would ask me some hard questions when it did its localization, like whether there really were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, whether my girlfriend would really like to be in a threesome or is she just saying that to see if I'm faithful, whether virus recognition merely NP-hard (as someone once tried to argue with me) or formally undecidable.

I don't think I'm a "certified Solaris Installation Engineer"; certainly I never had any training. Maybe there was some kind of coupon in the packaging that granted me that title automatically. Sorry if Sun didn't ship you one of those, because I don't see why you wouldn't be equally qualified to reason about the questions asked during system installation. I know I am. I'm cool. I've got the system. Figured it out. Figured it out.

But then, I don't usually eat the dessicant pack either. Though it does look kind of edible, doesn't it? Those sparkly little crystals and all... Could be good, and how can you know for sure if you don't try them? The label clearly states "DESSICANT -- DO NOT EAT" but that's probably just legalese. See if they can suck you in, right. They all try that. It's a power thing. Don't fall for it.

Re:Install (from scratch) still a PITA

[Zemplar]

Simply login with CDE instead of JDS and you will find the Solaris Admin tools you need. Somehow a link to the Admin tools was not incorporated into the JDS.

There are a few problem points with the implementation as a desktop OS [all easily correctable] but the kernel really is top notch!

I think it would be great to have a Solaris "distro" incorporating the typical linux distro userland software and customizations. This would grealty enhance the desktop usability of the great kernel

Depending upon the output of OpenSolaris, I think a version of Ubuntu based on the Solaris kernel would be outstanding!

Re:Install (from scratch) still a PITA

[Anonymous Coward]

So you're a serious dumbass? Ok, looks like the professional admins can keep their jobs for a little while longer.

Re:Perfect OS world

[zymano]

ROFL.

Your so funny.

Rofl.

There are support groups, get help soon

[Anonymous Coward]

You are addicted to ancient crapware.

Their stock is $4 per share...

[itomato]

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=SUNW&t=my

I'm no stock analyst, but the trend that leads up to Sun's peak (96-2000) is mirrored in the performance over the last 2 years..

And their stock is $4. Four. Not $40, like Apple (whose stock follows a similar trend, only theirs went up an octave..)

Re:Their stock is $4 per share...

[Anonymous Coward]

And their stock is $4. Four. Not $40...

Then buy tens times more shares!

Re:Their stock is $4 per share...

[node 3]

'm no stock analyst, but the trend that leads up to Sun's peak (96-2000) is mirrored in the performance over the last 2 years..

And their stock is $4. Four. Not $40, like Apple (whose stock follows a similar trend, only theirs went up an octave..)

Here's the comparison between SUNW and AAPL:

SUNW v AAPL

Note that your description of Sun's chart is the same as for Apple's. You'll also note Sun's maket cap is over $15bn.

Sun is by no means on the brink of scrapping Solaris.

All you've done is shown that Apple is in better shape than Sun, which is something of an odd thing to do when comparing Solaris to Linux.

For the lazy..

[itomato]

Copypaste.. The mystery function.

Sun paid SCO money

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun paid SCO money. More money for SCO means more money to hire sleazy lawyers to try to kill Linux.

Reference: http://news.com.com/2100-1016-1024633.html

Looks like Sun, SCO, and Microsoft are in bed together to try to get rid of Linux.

Re:Sun paid SCO money

[Tpenta]

So what are are suggesting is that Sun should have acted illegally and not ensured that their licensing was correct? Come on, I am sure you can come up with something better than that old argument (which has been refuted so many times as conspiacy theory that I'm not going to mention it here again).

What I was asking for was references of Sun Folks saying that they are specifically aiming to kill Linux. The closest comment that I have come across was the reverse, and that was Linus saying that he'd like to see Sun die. The actual quote was

"A lot of people still like Solaris, but I'm in active competition with them, and so I hope they die,"

Ref: http://www.crn.com/sections/breakingnews/breakingn ews.jhtml?articleId=59300278

I am assuming that this is the same Anonymous Coward who wrote the initial post that I responded to. I would look forward to seeing those words (about Sun not open sourcing Solaris) get taken back, but I won't be terribly surprised if you don't.

Tp.

Re:Perfect OS world

[xgamer04]

Source code is the form in which all software exists

Use the source?

...sorry.

Re:Solaris VS Linux

[blastwave]

What do you mean by "competition" ??

It was easy to miss the spelling.

As for "competition"?

I too installed it

[reachbach]

I installed S10 on a test box at office, and the installation was pretty cool. If you want to compare it to linux for "user friendliness" of the installer, well,i'm afraid you're on the wrong track.Because, if you're talking about an installer made for a dumb user (as tech ignorant as your grandmom), you're tending towards windoze. You don't even deserve to be posting here on /.
In addition,it was good to see the slick JDS3. Two things stood out after the installation of S10 -
1) The installer was a lot easier than was made out by S10-flamers at /.
2)S10 is not just for admins who telnet to the machine and issue arcane incantations. JDS3 make S10 a strong candidate for a corporate desktop. Add a Sun Ray to it, and you have a sure-fire windoze killer.
And running my apps on S10 has been, without doubt, one of the greatest joys of life.There isn't enough room here on /. for me to describe the sheer thrill that i experienced when my first DTrace script gave an inside look into the system resources that my app was consuming. The rush of adrenalin has to be experienced to be believed. And if you want to learn operating systems from scratch, Solaris is your reference manual. Sun deserves countless belssings for such a beauty of an implementation. Long live Solaris!!!

Re:I too installed it

[Jedi Alec]

Because, if you're talking about an installer made for a dumb user (as tech ignorant as your grandmom), you're tending towards windoze

kidding right? press f6 if you need to load drivers for a raid or scsi controller? keep the filesystem fat32 or convert to ntfs? yah, i can just see granny work her way through that...a windows install from scratch is about as complicated as setting up something like redhat or mandrake.

Re:I too installed it

[reachbach]

kidding right? Yes and No. A geek's grandmom is supposed to be able to wade through all that "press F6", "Press Shift+F10" maze. :-)) But then, the layman still falls for the mesmerizing (read hypnotizing) gui and says, "ah! that installer was a breeze!" (before realizing that he just lost all his partitions to the devil). :p

Re:Solaris VS Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Look at his username... it's "Lunix Torvalds". What are the chances Linus registered as "Lunix Torvalds"?

Re:Solaris VS Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

This comment makes it halfway plausible.

Umm, there's something missing

[eamonman]

Ok, thanks for all the pretty pictures, but...

HOW DO I FRICKING ADD USERS?

What happened to admintool?

I spent god knows how long installing the developer's solaris install (I upgrading an old Ultra 60 with 2.6 on it). And now that I've installed all this crap from 5 CD's, don't tell me I have to:

groupadd blah blahblah
user_add blah blah blah blah

Geez.

I'm switching to Debian or Gentoo damnit.

Re:Umm, there's something missing

[asaul]

Sun Mangement Console has replaced admintool - its a little heavy on the Java but it does what you want - admin in a GUI: /usr/sbin/smc

Re:Umm, there's something missing

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm switching to Debian or Gentoo damnit.

Yeah, 'cause those distros are known for throwing all the GUI tools in your face, with pretty desktop icons named "Add user".

Moron.

Re:Umm, there's something missing

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, golly, smc. I used to give Solaris Administrator courses. One of the courses, I can't remember whether it was I or II, had a chapter on smc as well. I usually let the students start smc, then we twiddled thumbs for 15 minutes, and when it was finally ready I said, "that's why real admins prefer command line tools".

useradd or adduser (I can never bother to remember which OS uses which) will do the trick. Or vi /etc/passwd. Which works on any real OS.

Re:Umm, there's something missing

[rs79]

"HOW DO I FRICKING ADD USERS?"

useradd -g group -d /export/home/dir -s /bin/bash user

Pussy. Like you have users.

Whoops.

[Anonymous Coward]

There should be a comma after the word "Obviously". That was a typo.

Re:Whoops.

[Anonymous Coward]

Commas are a subjective thing. I don't see why you must place a comma there. It would not have been incorrect to do so, but it would have been no more correct than it already is.

Looks "Okay"

[SpinJaunt]

Yeah, Looks "Okay".. certainly does it for me.. ermm

is it April 1st yet?

Re:Looks "Okay"

[Anonymous Coward]

Did ANYONE notice how well that "swirly" thing (the background image) sits next to eachother; it's though it was ment to be

Yeah....

[Anonymous Coward]

everyone loves an eligant recursive function.

Re:Yeah....

[Minwee]

It's almost as good as a Debian desktop with the Red Hat logo on it.

Re:Yeah....

[Kethinov]

Hehe, yeah, thanks. I like that too. The reason for that is I like Debian as a distro better than Redhat, but I think Redhat's artwork is awesome. So I just did some scripting and aliening to get my GNOME and KDE Bluecurved. You can do it on your own Debian install using my installer

CDE is for Standards Compliance

[turgid]

CDE is still in Solaris for compliance with all the old UNIX standards so that Solaris can still qualify for US Government contracts and for other organisations that demand strict adherence to the standards.

Sun publically stated at the time of Solaris 9, nearly 2 years ago, that GNOME (in the form of JDS nowadays) is the official Solaris desktop.

solaris 10 is great (+ real world dtrace example)

[Anonymous Coward]

i've got it installed on a computer here, and it's not only solid but flexible. and dtrace makes it easy to shoot down any possible problem you're facing. for example (this is a dumb example, but useful) i was trying to samba share my dvd drive and watch a movie over it, and the player was just skipping on the first frame. so i'm sitting here wondering if it's an i/o problem, a network problem, a protocol problem, or what. i decided to test out dtrace and wrote a script to profile the reads from the dvd drive, and i find that it's only reading 59 bytes at a time. then it dawned on me that it was a commercial dvd that was css-locked or whatever and therefore the reads were failing.

had i thought to check the return codes on the reads i was profiling, i would have seen the problem immediately.

so then i do pkg-get -i vls (http://www.bolthole.com/solaris/pkg-get.html) and i'm on a roll. pkg-get is an automatic package downloader and dependency checker similar to apt or yum.

(of course, i haven't actually gotten videolan server *working* but i know what the problem and resolution is, thanks to solaris's profiling ability)

if you're running any high-demand system, you can see the obvious advantage of being able to exactly pinpoint any performance problem you're having.

anyways, i installed it when it came out (feb 1) and my uptime is 32 days. the only rebooting i've done so far is when i was trying to figure out the new svcs thing (which makes perfect sense and is way better than sysv-style init scripts once you get the hang of it)

in my book, solaris 10 gets 2 thumbs up.

Aint that sppppppppppeciallll

[Anonymous Coward]

The GUI looks like my window 2000... or XP

Maybe the world is trying to be like yet another Window XP OS

YUK YUK YUK

Re:Solaris 10 lies by Sun

[turgid]

Mark my words. I am certain that Sun will absolutely not open source solaris.

Well, I've had a 4-year tour of duty at Sun which has just come to an end so I know a thing or two. The Solaris source definitely will be coming out very soon now.

Unit of measurement?

[pgilman]

"On OSDir they've got a whole whack of screenshots..."

oh, thank goodness they've got a whole whack, because i'm so tired of websites that provide only half a whack or at best three quarters of a whack. i mean, what good is half a whack?

Re:Unit of measurement?

[qyiet]

i'm so tired of websites that provide only half a whack or at best three quarters of a whack. i mean, what good is half a whack?

You sir, have been surfing too many pr0n sites.

Re:THIS COMMENT IS A TROLL. PLEASE MOD AS SUCH.

[TractorBarry]

No no no...

Mod parent up for being informative ! (the post clearly stated it was a Troll after all)

Free as in beer

[pedestrian crossing]

Some observations:

I don't know that the open source aspect is a big sell (although it is nice, it isn't Free, only free), but free is pretty good too.

In the corporate/government environment, it is great to have the Solaris name/reputation available for free.

While I see more and more acceptance of Linux, there is still some level of cowboy/zealotry image associated with it.

Perceptions: Linux == t-shirt, Solaris == shirt and tie.

I'm personally for FOSS, but in some environments, it is good to be able to quickly and cheaply put up say, a sendmail server without the perceived stigma attached to FOSS. It is a way to save money and get the job done while staying under the corporate radar.

Re:Free as in beer

[Anonymous Coward]

Perceptions: Linux == t-shirt, Solaris == shirt and tie.

Really? I've been hired by SUN to give courses - both at a SUN educational center, and "specials" on-site at customers. I've never worn a "shirt and tie". To quote their teacher guidelines (I'm no longer certain of the exact wording of the first sentence, but I'll never forget the second one):

Match your outfit with what your students are wearing. Unix system administrators do not wear suits.

By not wearing a shirt and tie, I was actually following their own dresscode.

Re:Perfect OS world

[1s44c]

While you are at it invent books that can be read in any language that don't use words.

It's not Sun's site

[HR]

it's osdir.com

sorry

Re:Perfect OS world

[ceeam]

"While we're at it, why don't we just make everyone look and think the same too."

Here, on Slashdot, we are making good progress towards it.

Sun's target

[Thomas Miconi]

Until recently it was unclear how exactly Sun could differentiate themselves from the competition, seeing how they moved away from hardware and big iron, with the risk of becoming "just another vendor". But now it seems thay have a pretty neat business model to take on:

The power and flexibility of open source, with the reliability and dependability of a large, experienced company.

Note that here "reliability and dependability" does not only apply to the products themselves, but also to the relationship with your customers: when you do business with Sun, you know they won't pull the carpet under your feet the morning after (RedHat Linux -> RHEL comes to mind).

Thomas-

Re:Sun's target

[rubycodez]

when you do business with Sun, you know they won't pull the carpet under your feet

oh really? remember those older versions of Solaris x86? remember Sun Linux? For that matter, can you give all the names that Sun's web server product has had in the last 3 years and list the differences between them?

Re:THIS COMMENT IS A TROLL. PLEASE MOD AS SUCH.

[slickepott]

I'd say it is just off topic. We are not discussing about "trolling slashdot" or anything like that.

Re:Perfect OS world

[zyridium]

Pictures?

:)

Okay really, why OpenSolaris over Linux?

[syntap]

I downloaded the OpenSolaris images and was thinking about playing with it, but after looking at the screen captures it really hit home... why should I do it? To get StarOffice? If I want an OS that runs GNOME and says it is compatible with Linux but I need to carefully examine a hardware compatibility list, why wouldn't I just install just about any Linux distribution? I've read all the posts about supposed benefits of OpenSolaris but I still don't get it. Why switch?

Re:Okay really, why OpenSolaris over Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

• Because you prefer to use an OS from a vendor that actually cares about backwards compatability, and that plans incompatabilities a long time in advance? (For instance, in the late 1990s, even before Y2K, SUN had already a time line available when and how they where going from a 32-bit time_t value to a 64-bit, a process planned with steps between 2010 and 2020).
  
• Because you want to be able to run the same applications you are running on your servers, in a similar environment?
  
• Because it has features that Linux doesn't have?
  
• Because it scales better to high end servers (not just a shitload of CPUs, also a shitload of I/O channels)?
  
• Because Solaris installs easier than Linux? (Jumpstart).
  
• Because SUN is easier to spell than Linux?
  
• Because you've been around for a while, and Linux is a new kid on the block?
  
• To tickle slashdot people?
  
• Because you believe that a heterogenous environment makes you less vulnerable againts virusses and worms?
  
• Because SUN has a cooler logo?
  
• Just because you can?
  

Re:Okay really, why OpenSolaris over Linux?

[Zemplar]

Perhaps for a more secure kernel, a faster kernel, a more "advanced" kernel, ZFS (soon), dtrace, zones, etc...

Admittedly the current desktop implementation is lagging from some Linux distos, but this is arguably easier to "fix" than rewrite a kernel.

Re:Okay really, why OpenSolaris over Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Two questions - one how did you download an opensolaris image? There is no such thing - there is a Solaris image you can download from sun.com.

As to why switch? In your case there is no reason, as you most likely only want to complain that the installer isn't as pretty as xyz Linux distro.

But for people who actually do real work hmmm, DTrace, Zones, SMF, FireEngine, Event Ports, CTF data, things such as p* tools, being able to diagnose problems in minutes rather than spending four hours on an irc channel talking to a spotty nosed teenager, good documentation, mdb, gcc etc in /usr/sfw/, scalability that works without twenty kernel incantantions, binary compatability, should I go on?

Has anyone noticed...

[tilleyrw]

...that CDE 1.6 looks suspiciosly similar to xfce? Or is that the other way around?

Re:Has anyone noticed...

[Anonymous Coward]

CDE has been the standard unix desktop on Solaris/AIX/HP-UX/Digital Unix for years, even before XFCE was started. It's now outdated, but it got the job done back in the day.

Just installed on Ultra-60

[CrazyWingman]

I know I'm a bit late in the conversation, but anyway...

It's amazing that this story is up today, as I just spent the weekend loading Solaris 10 on my Ultra-60. It had been running Debian, but I thought it might be fun to run Sun's OS on Sun's hardware. :)

I have run Solaris 8 in the past. That just seemed like a bunch of junk to me. The main problem was that my main "unix" experience was Linux and IRIX. So, missing most of the commands and options I wanted, I was a bit dissapointed.

I'd just like to say, though, that it looks like Sun really has done quite a bit of work on this new version. The only reason it took me "all weekend" to install Solaris 10 was that the only SCSI CD-ROM drive I have is a 1x or 2x, and I can't trust my x86 box to stay up for longer than an hour any more (it's had a _rough_ life). The install process itself, though, is easy.

Once installed, I fiddled around a bit as root to make sure everything was working. I stuck with CDE for root loggin, just in case something was broken in JDS. CDE is exactly the same as it has always been, for those worried about it. I used the Sun Management Console to setup a new user - slick. The only thing I don't like about SMC is that it seems a bit lacking on features. What it has is good, but I think there could be a lot more in there.

With my normal user created, I logged in and setup JDS. I had been running Gnome in Debian, so I was pleased with how my desktop was setup. It runs very nicely. A bit of logging on to the web, and I had added Firefox. A bit more tooling around, and I had my printer working. It really does seem like Sun has gone to the trouble of making the things that people commonly do easy to do, or at least making them function like they would in other environments.

Now the only thing I'm missing is a way to move the data that I had in Linux over to the Solaris partition. Unfortunately I was using ext2/3 in Linux, so I can't mount it out of the box. I've found the LXRUN utils, but they say they're for x86. Probably a bit of hacking away at source code in my future. We'll see if that's even possible. If anyone here has a better idea - post it?

Next up for this machine: second processor and more RAM. Then maybe a SunPCi board ... just because I can. :)

Re:Solaris 10 lies by Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the other thing that you know? ;-)

Yes...

[Anonymous Coward]

* A "3D" desktop that is only good for a hollow feeling of "coolness", without actually delivering a meaningful advance over virtual desktops.
* CDE does still look like it's stuck in 1991.

Nothing to see here people, move along now.

Re:Alright - Same old Dashboard

[Anonymous Coward]

Who started that old multiple-desktop menu selector anyway? It's been around for ages. Personally I like the button-app-starter approach vs. the navigate-the-menu-every-time approach. I mean I tend to group work tasks together... And why is the background always so static! I got mine doing a constant slide show!

Solaris vs. Linuces

[Daedalon]

Microsoft sure got it right: Most of all things from software, people want features, everything else can be added afterwards. The parent sure did mention "Solaris has some cool features" when comparing to Linuces, and "Linux is easier to get up and running". Not a single word like security or stability, which really aren't things Linux could be proud of having. Yes, Linux is more secure than some alternatives, I guess, but comparing root exploits in Linuces and Solaris, BSDs, HP-UX and so on doesn't really display results nice for Linux enthusiasts.

That being said, I can carry out my responsibility as a basic human being and go on ranting about features and ease of use: The last time I checked, Solaris' tar couldn't handle j and z switches like GNU tar did; Solaris' ps didn't display nicely user's own processes with ps x but with a clumsier ps -u username; and both of these commands required dash in front of the switches.

So Linuces give me ease of use through GNU utils, and for what I've heard Solaris gives easy administratibility and excellent scalability. As I don't want to patch any kernels annually, but neither do I want my users to go on whining about how stuff works the wrong (hard) way around, the best option available seems to be to stick with BSDs.

By the way, does anyone have coverage on how Macs do as servers compared to Linuces / Solaris / (other) BSDs? Would it be worth the cost to buy a Power Mac and a Mac OS X license for the next server instead of sticking with x86 and *BSD? Why?

Re:Solaris 10 lies by Sun

[turgid]

What's the other thing that you know? ;-)

$5 will not get you very far nowadays.