Would be interested if you elaborated a bit on the problems you have experienced. From your perspective and from your users perspective. This is not a, I'm going to argue with you post, but rather a request for more detail - as what you have to say sounds interesting.
I used opensolaris 2008.05 for a month and stopped as it was too rough round the edges to use day to day. But it got most of my hardware just fine. Only sound was missing and OSS handled that just fine.
I just upgraded to 2008.11 RC1 - snv-101a - and find it a whole different experience. I have one app, which runs on linux only at the moment, and I run that on virtual box, which is a breeze to install and configure in seamless mode after the guest os additions are installed.
Mplayer, with all its codecs, does the video, but is inconvenient compared to totem, which is useless as it has no day to day codecs.
My video card is an old ati 2400HD pro card. Sun and ati don't have a relationship so I use the stock xorg support which works, though my initial login screen always ends up odd no matter how I twiddle xorg.conf. The desktop and gnome come up just fine.
The perl upgrade from 5.6.1 to 5.8.4 broke CPAN and I can't fix it - a problem for me which I have to report and hope will be fixed in the the next RC.
Gnome theme changes don't recognize custom icons. Evolution won't play a wav file when mail arrives; but it does beep.
The system clock is set to zulu by ubuntu and I was unable to set the time within opensolaris after the upgrade.
My permissions from 2008.05 didn't migrate. It was a bit of work to figure out how to set that right.
On the way I got to see suns role based access control in its Gnome user and groups configuration implementation and found it much more accessible then the sel-linux approach.
Openoffice 3 and firefox 3.03 complete my story. Both are fine, though I did tweak the firefox ui through about:config for better font rendering. I think there is freetype issue here.
Other then that it just works and works so well that I'm switching to it for day to day work.
My system is a vanilla desktop system built - and rebuilt - over the years from parts from fry.
PC power and cooling 600 watt power supply core 2 duo 6550 2 GB kingston ddr-800 ram ati hd 2400 pro maxtor ide drive intel/realtec motherboard hd audio various usb etc which all work kds monitor - a problem as xorg doesn't seem to figure out its capabilities correctly memorex dvd - broke after 6 months of limited usage - tech support - doesn't - "as there are too many linux versions to support" - so no rma for a broken drive still under warantee - stay away from memorex.
Thats what my hardware looks like.
I connect to the net through a vonage router which acts as a firewall and dhcp server. The modem is a cable modem. I've had no connectivity problems. My phone runs via Vonage VOIP.
Printer is an old hp 3200se which works via cups.
Current versions of Azuereus don't work because it has dependencies on eclipse which opensolaris doesn't support.
I think this will likely continue to be true for a while as eclipse is IBM and netbeans is Sun (opensolaris) and well, Sun and IBM have a disfuntional relationship history.
There is an earlier version of azureus that may work, but I haven't tried that yet.
The linux app that doesn't work on opensolaris and which reqiuires virtual box/ubuntu to run - is an application based/built on mozilla.
In theory it should recompile without problems on opensolaris, but in practice it hasn't.
However, compiling a mozilla app is a little like building emacs - they are separate words unto themselves; and I am not knowledgeable about building mozila apps.
I will contact the developers. In theory I just have configuration problems for the compile - in practice, it may be opensolaris has some work to do on what gets installed in their gcc environment.
Their first year's production was sold before the end of january. At the time their capacity was 480 mega watts a year.
The new machine will up that. But it is a new machine. I expect it will work in parallel with existing equipment and as it ups either the density or the speed (or both) of printing, it would not be unusual to have initial teething problems in proof of concept testing before it goes into full production.
One of their investors is the largest distributor of photo-voltaics in Europe. There is evidence that shipments are headed there. Nano solar is also building another plant, in Germany, I think.
However much solar gets installed this year around the world, a large portion of it will be from nano solar.
A problem I see is that this will not reduce the end user price for solar.
So long as other technology is selling for $5+ per watt, there is no incentive for distributors to drop the price.
Buy in quantity at $1 per watt and sell at the same price as the competition. Keep the profit and hire thugs to ensure no one else is able to get an allocation from nanosolar.
Demand far outstrips supply.
However, were 10 1 giga watt machines online, I expect things might begin to change. Up the print speed from 100 ft per minute to 2000 ft per minute and the market will probably have more capacity then there is ability to bring new plants online.
I also expect this would have major repercussions for the industry.
Already, an additional political problem has turned up.
In the US, it suddenly became necessary to suspend applications to build new solar plants for two years so that the environmental impact of new solar capacity could be studied and appropriate policy developed.
I realize this attempt to stymie distribution was rolled back, but I think it is just one of the problems disruptive technology like nano-solar's has to face.
Things will get interesting when some huge ny stock exchange type firm tries to buy nanosolar and when refused, simply steals the patents.
Litigation is just part of the cost of doing business for firms like that. And provides welcome publicity for their new product.
Such a firm would then roll out a brand name and trade on public recognition, while orders dry up for nano-solar and litigation goes on forever.
Eventually nanosolar would win in court, but by that time manufacturing will be in china or india etc and no one will care.
That's why you hear nothing now.
There is an opportunity in micro generation for nanosolar, but I don't know if they are pursuing this approach.
Whatever happens, I wish them well.
They have shown that a million half wits babbling in a room will never produce a line of Shakespeare - or more particularly no matter how many half wits are working on a problem, they will never do the work of one truly intelligent person.
What is it about nanosolar - nanosolar.com - that nobody seems to get.
Nanosolar sells solar cells at $1 per watt today. It announced production shipments in Jan 2008 It sold out its entire production capacity before the end of Jan. Its production capacity in January of 2008 was 430 mega watts per year This figure is larger then the combined production capacity of all other companies in the united states - I repeat - combined. It manufactures in northern california It is privately financed by a who's who of private capital investors
Werner Dumanski, Executive Vice President of Operations, was IBM's top manufacturing executive prior to joining Nanosolar, responsible for the company's $4.5 billion storage components business, a world-wide organization of 12,000 people, and a billion-dollar equipment budget.
Panels have a 25 year waranty Panels operate at up to 14.5% efficiency
Has announced the availability of a new non vacuum thin film production technology based on printing technology - nanosolar uses printing technology to make solar cells - which produces solar cells at the rate of 100 feet per minute - rated at 1 giga watt of production per year - see it in action below: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClLKVs9oSxE&eurl=http://www.nanosolar.com/blog3/
Machine cost - 1.65 million dollars - nice profit for self financing of growth.
Has said that this solar cell printing technology can be scaled to 2000 feet per minute - and are on track to do so.
cons:
Has not yet reached production capacities Actual efficiency of production panels has not been released
Could it be that nanosolar is a private company - and intends to stay that way - which ensures its lack of mind share?
Could it be that nanosolar developed a thin film production technology that does not require vacuum technology and has potentially threatened research budgets.
Still - the panels ship - validating the intellect and vision of one person - martin roscheisen - against all the nay sayers.
And no - I have no connection with either nanosolar or roscheisen.
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Would be interested if you elaborated a bit on the problems you have experienced. From your perspective and from your users perspective. This is not a, I'm going to argue with you post, but rather a request for more detail - as what you have to say sounds interesting.
I used opensolaris 2008.05 for a month and stopped as it was too rough round the edges to use day to day. But it got most of my hardware just fine. Only sound was missing and OSS handled that just fine.
I just upgraded to 2008.11 RC1 - snv-101a - and find it a whole different experience. I have one app, which runs on linux only at the moment, and I run that on virtual box, which is a breeze to install and configure in seamless mode after the guest os additions are installed.
Mplayer, with all its codecs, does the video, but is inconvenient compared to totem, which is useless as it has no day to day codecs.
My video card is an old ati 2400HD pro card. Sun and ati don't have a relationship so I use the stock xorg support which works, though my initial login screen always ends up odd no matter how I twiddle xorg.conf. The desktop and gnome come up just fine.
The perl upgrade from 5.6.1 to 5.8.4 broke CPAN and I can't fix it - a problem for me which I have to report and hope will be fixed in the the next RC.
Gnome theme changes don't recognize custom icons. Evolution won't play a wav file when mail arrives; but it does beep.
The system clock is set to zulu by ubuntu and I was unable to set the time within opensolaris after the upgrade.
My permissions from 2008.05 didn't migrate. It was a bit of work to figure out how to set that right.
On the way I got to see suns role based access control in its Gnome user and groups configuration implementation and found it much more accessible then the sel-linux approach.
Openoffice 3 and firefox 3.03 complete my story. Both are fine, though I did tweak the firefox ui through about:config for better font rendering. I think there is freetype issue here.
Other then that it just works and works so well that I'm switching to it for day to day work.
My system is a vanilla desktop system built - and rebuilt - over the years from parts from fry.
PC power and cooling 600 watt power supply
core 2 duo 6550
2 GB kingston ddr-800 ram
ati hd 2400 pro
maxtor ide drive
intel/realtec motherboard hd audio
various usb etc which all work
kds monitor - a problem as xorg doesn't seem to figure out its capabilities correctly
memorex dvd -
broke after 6 months of limited usage - tech support - doesn't - "as there are too many linux versions to support" - so no rma for a broken drive still under warantee - stay away from memorex.
Thats what my hardware looks like.
I connect to the net through a vonage router which acts as a firewall and dhcp server. The modem is a cable modem. I've had no connectivity problems. My phone runs via Vonage VOIP.
Printer is an old hp 3200se which works via cups.
Current versions of Azuereus don't work because it has dependencies on eclipse which opensolaris doesn't support.
I think this will likely continue to be true for a while as eclipse is IBM and netbeans is Sun (opensolaris) and well, Sun and IBM have a disfuntional relationship history.
There is an earlier version of azureus that may work, but I haven't tried that yet.
The linux app that doesn't work on opensolaris and which reqiuires virtual box/ubuntu to run - is an application based/built on mozilla.
In theory it should recompile without problems on opensolaris, but in practice it hasn't.
However, compiling a mozilla app is a little like building emacs - they are separate words unto themselves; and I am not knowledgeable about building mozila apps.
I will contact the developers. In theory I just have configuration problems for the compile - in practice, it may be opensolaris has some work to do on what gets installed in their gcc environment.
So thats how things are working for me.
Time will tell.
Their first year's production was sold before the end of january. At the time their capacity was 480 mega watts a year.
The new machine will up that. But it is a new machine. I expect it will work in parallel with existing equipment and as it ups either the density or the speed (or both) of printing, it would not be unusual to have initial teething problems in proof of concept testing before it goes into full production.
One of their investors is the largest distributor of photo-voltaics in Europe. There is evidence that shipments are headed there. Nano solar is also building another plant, in Germany, I think.
However much solar gets installed this year around the world, a large portion of it will be from nano solar.
A problem I see is that this will not reduce the end user price for solar.
So long as other technology is selling for $5+ per watt, there is no incentive for distributors to drop the price.
Buy in quantity at $1 per watt and sell at the same price as the competition. Keep the profit and hire thugs to ensure no one else is able to get an allocation from nanosolar.
Demand far outstrips supply.
However, were 10 1 giga watt machines online, I expect things might begin to change. Up the print speed from 100 ft per minute to 2000 ft per minute and the market will probably have more capacity then there is ability to bring new plants online.
I also expect this would have major repercussions for the industry.
Already, an additional political problem has turned up.
In the US, it suddenly became necessary to suspend applications to build new solar plants for two years so that the environmental impact of new solar capacity could be studied and appropriate policy developed.
I realize this attempt to stymie distribution was rolled back, but I think it is just one of the problems disruptive technology like nano-solar's has to face.
Things will get interesting when some huge ny stock exchange type firm tries to buy nanosolar and when refused, simply steals the patents.
Litigation is just part of the cost of doing business for firms like that. And provides welcome publicity for their new product.
Such a firm would then roll out a brand name and trade on public recognition, while orders dry up for nano-solar and litigation goes on forever.
Eventually nanosolar would win in court, but by that time manufacturing will be in china or india etc and no one will care.
That's why you hear nothing now.
There is an opportunity in micro generation for nanosolar, but I don't know if they are pursuing this approach.
Whatever happens, I wish them well.
They have shown that a million half wits babbling in a room will never produce a line of Shakespeare - or more particularly no matter how many half wits are working on a problem, they will never do the work of one truly intelligent person.
right -
by the way, did you know that titus the tailor told ten tall tails to titania the titmouse?
What is it about nanosolar - nanosolar.com - that nobody seems to get.
Nanosolar sells solar cells at $1 per watt today.
It announced production shipments in Jan 2008
It sold out its entire production capacity before the end of Jan.
Its production capacity in January of 2008 was 430 mega watts per year
This figure is larger then the combined production capacity of all other companies
in the united states - I repeat - combined.
It manufactures in northern california
It is privately financed by a who's who of private capital investors
Werner Dumanski, Executive Vice President of Operations, was IBM's top manufacturing executive prior to joining Nanosolar, responsible for the company's $4.5 billion storage components business, a world-wide organization of 12,000 people, and a billion-dollar equipment budget.
Panels have a 25 year waranty
Panels operate at up to 14.5% efficiency
Has announced the availability of a new non vacuum thin film production technology based on printing technology - nanosolar uses printing technology to make solar cells - which produces solar cells at the rate of 100 feet per minute - rated at 1 giga watt of production per year - see it in action below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClLKVs9oSxE&eurl=http://www.nanosolar.com/blog3/
Machine cost - 1.65 million dollars - nice profit for self financing of growth.
Has said that this solar cell printing technology can be scaled to 2000 feet per minute - and are on track to do so.
cons:
Has not yet reached production capacities
Actual efficiency of production panels has not been released
Could it be that nanosolar is a private company - and intends to stay that way - which ensures its lack of mind share?
Could it be that nanosolar developed a thin film production technology that does not require vacuum technology and has potentially threatened research budgets.
Still - the panels ship - validating the intellect and vision of one person - martin roscheisen - against all the nay sayers.
And no - I have no connection with either nanosolar or roscheisen.