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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."
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.
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.
Note to self: No more arguing with the faithful.
That makes it a hell of a lot easier to take screenshots when you're booting.
Slashdot - Mutual Assured Discussion
Eh, it's alright.
_________
The world doesn't just disappear when you close your eyes, does it?
(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.
sorry here is the real picture
serenity now!
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!
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?
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.