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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."
Did anybody notice - it's running through vmware http://shots.osdir.com/slideshows/slideshow.php?re lease=279&slide=4
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.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
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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.
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.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
What $50? It is a free download, which also includes Star Office.
f course if you want support.....
furthermore ..
http://www.blastwave.org/articles/BLS-0016/index.h tml
Looks pretty real to me :)
Actually, Windows 2003 Datacenter scales to 32 processors. Still much less than Solaris. Still Windows.
"It's too bad stupidity isn't painful." - A. S. LaVey
See : http://java.com/en/everywhere/lookingglass.jsp
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/
Sadly, PS/2 was yet another victim of USB, which doesn't care what you plug into it, the electrical slut.
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!
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
Try this:
h tm l
http://www.docbert.org/Solaris/Jumpstart/linux.
The author knows what he is talking about - I havent tried it myself but this ought to be what you need.
"If everybody is thinking alike, somebody isn't thinking" - Gen. George S. Patton
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)
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.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
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..
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
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
"If everybody is thinking alike, somebody isn't thinking" - Gen. George S. Patton
'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.
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.
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.
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.
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):
By not wearing a shirt and tie, I was actually following their own dresscode.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. :)
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.
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.