I had the fortune of learning "unix" on an early version of linux so I'm far from a solaris admin turned linux advocate. For job reasons I had no budget and had to fix a tomcat problem on solaris 8. My only option was to buy the x86 version and hope to replicate it on non-sparc hardware (which I did and is not the point of this post)
Solaris 8 for x86 first contains the a sun freeware cd so during my installation on a laptop of all things, I had solaris running a bash shell with gcc, gnome, and other "usual suspects" of our linux favorite, in about 20 minutes - about the equivalent of a userfriendly redhat install.
I have to say, solaris has come a long way to a) install conveniently on a laptop, b) ship gnu tools with every distribution or at least every x86 distribution, and c) make serious strides in os installation in the same fashion as the linux community has.
I seriously doubt any linux user who compains about the latest x86 distribution has actually spent the $49.00 (about the same as mandrake or RH)for the cd distribution and tried the install. They're just making judgements on previous solaris releases which weren't so friendly.
I'll stick to debian in the long run but I won't trash sun's effort to improve Solaris' capabilities on mulitple processors. Try before you trash!
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I had the fortune of learning "unix" on an early version of linux so I'm far from a solaris admin turned linux advocate. For job reasons I had no budget and had to fix a tomcat problem on solaris 8. My only option was to buy the x86 version and hope to replicate it on non-sparc hardware (which I did and is not the point of this post) Solaris 8 for x86 first contains the a sun freeware cd so during my installation on a laptop of all things, I had solaris running a bash shell with gcc, gnome, and other "usual suspects" of our linux favorite, in about 20 minutes - about the equivalent of a userfriendly redhat install. I have to say, solaris has come a long way to a) install conveniently on a laptop, b) ship gnu tools with every distribution or at least every x86 distribution, and c) make serious strides in os installation in the same fashion as the linux community has. I seriously doubt any linux user who compains about the latest x86 distribution has actually spent the $49.00 (about the same as mandrake or RH)for the cd distribution and tried the install. They're just making judgements on previous solaris releases which weren't so friendly. I'll stick to debian in the long run but I won't trash sun's effort to improve Solaris' capabilities on mulitple processors. Try before you trash!