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Linux to Replace Solaris at Duke

Posted by timothy on from the post-pepsi-generation dept.

wwhsgrad2002 writes "At the end of the 2004-2005 academic year, the Sun Solaris computers available in public computing labs at Duke University will be replaced. The replacement computers in these spaces will be Dells, running a version of Centos 3.3 as supported by Linux@DUKE. Pragmatic and technical considerations have driven this change, as Linux continues to gain a greater userbase and more third-party commercial software is made available on the platform. Are other universities eliminating Solaris in favor of a Linux distribution?"

6 of 462 comments (clear)

  1. Dunno about universities by RayDude · · Score: 5, Informative

    But my company is moving away from Solaris because the new Dell Boxes are at least three times as fast as the fastest Sun we have.

    And cost one third as much!

    Raydude

  2. Centos 3.3? Why? by NitroWolf · · Score: 5, Informative

    Not that the CentOS distro is bad, but it's really more for a server, not a user box. Since this is going in the computing labs, and presumably the students will be logging into the box(es), it would seem to me that using another distro more geared towards users would be appropriate, since the CentOS 3.3 is geared towards enterprise servers.

    I'm sure it can be tweaked to be just fine, but it seems kind of an odd choice to me, for a computing lab.

  3. UMD by ltbarcly · · Score: 5, Informative

    The math department at University of Maryland, College Park recently decided to replace it's Sun workstations with linux computers, probably Dell's.

    I for one welcome our Educational Linux using ahchchhc cough cough.

  4. Re:Sun=good hardware Dell =cheap hardware by general+hapablap · · Score: 3, Informative

    I work as a Unix admin at a major school of medicine in the midwestern US. We have a pretty large amount of Sun equipment on campus, and also a lot of Linux on Dells.

    Sun's hardware, especially the old SparcStations, are nearly indestructible. We literally have old Sparc 5s plugging away still. Dells are, as others have pointed out, inexpensive to buy and run pretty well.

    Basically, the way it works around here is, if you can afford it, you buy a Sun. If you don't, you buy a Dell and throw Linux on it. With NIH funding slowing down in general, buying cheaper hardware for use now makes sense to me. But basically anything serious (that I have seen) is done on either Solaris or Linux. We'd also be interested in Xserves, but we do a lot of statistics, and that means SAS, which isn't available on OS X.

  5. university of texas at austin CS dept stays split by fool · · Score: 5, Informative
    i'm a sysadmin for UT's computer science unix machines and our longterm plan is to stay with linux and solaris. we've already junked IRIX, HPUX, and AIX a long time ago. there are a couple of reasons for this continuing two-forked path:

    • monoculture is bad. people say this all the time on slashdot; nobody likes a windows-only world. linux monoculture is maybe not just as bad, but it's not a win. anyone who tries to build some of the stuff from sourceforge on non-linux platforms and discovers it to be completely linux-centric and non-portable will probably agree with me here--we want code that runs on unix, not code that runs on linux, and students will matriculate hopefully with a broader sense of what that can mean with more opportunities available to them. furthermore, solaris has been 64bit for far longer than (mainstream) linux so even though linux is catching up now, there was a time when the platform gap was even larger and more "useful" in a research-and-education sense. finally stuff like timing cache hits and instructions-per-clock-cycle become more interesting when you have some true platform contrast.

    • sun's pricing is still competitive for us (they do a lot of matching donations and cheating on already-low edu prices to make it so) and in certain niche markets (thin clients, >=16-way servers), they are just easier to cope with than trying to homebrew a sufficiently sturdy solution (we use their thin clients in labs that are unlocked 24/7, for instance.)


    do students massively prefer the PC's to the sunblades and sunrays? sure. many professors care less. but do we want to limit any of them to a single platform? definitely not.
  6. Re:Now hear this by turgid · · Score: 4, Informative
    How the hell can you be a unix OS and not include gcc?

    Er, um, well...

    Did you look on the Companion CD that comes in your media kit?

    Well did you?

    Did you look on www.sun.com?

    Did you hell.

    But you still get modded up.

    And for what it's worth, if you are running the 64-bit AMD Solaris 10 kernel, you are running a Solaris kernel compiled with gcc 3.4.x

    --
    Stick Men