Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
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
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.
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
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. :)