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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."
What is to become of the looking glass theme I saw a while back? It was definately cutting edge.
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...
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
(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.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
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!
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.
"It's too bad stupidity isn't painful." - A. S. LaVey
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.
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.
/proc/$$/maps | while read addr prot junk;
/proc/$pid/maps doesn't show the mmap'd sections that libc creates for large mallocs or something...
/proc/something/maps I can't see *any* segments marked as sharable. They're all r-xp (readable, executable, private; code segments) or rw-p (readable, writable, private; data segments).
I just came up with this rather nasty shell script to find out how much memory on my machine is being used for non-code segments in my processes:
sum=$(for pid in $(ps aux | awk '$1 == "sam" {print $2}');
do cat
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
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
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.
007: "Who are you?"
Pussy: "My name is Pussy Galore."
007: "I must be dreaming..."
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 /. /. /. 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!!!
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
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.
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.
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.
Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
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.
r ent/
http://cdimage.ubuntulinux.org/releases/hoary/cur
Give it a try!