Speaking of Ramen, I never seem to be able to find those combo packs any longer, the 36(?) case with 6 different flavors in it... miss those. Also, never try mixing ramen and the other staple of the starvation diet: tuna. That's just some evil mojo right there.

Actually as I begin to think about it, the $20 covers a 5 machine license with an email address to ask for more, a real person email address too, and I can't think of a better reason then: oh, say a bunch of moderators at a Linux/Unix forum want to become more fluent with the last great bastion of proprietray unices. Think Jeremy might pop for that? I've got about 4 machines that meet the spec, and if they run like sludge I'll just rip a drive out of one of them and throw it in my athy 1.2.

Ah, just a thought
Cheers,

Finegan

forgot the mac and cheese, a big part of the starvation diet.

$10 for a case... not bad.

I tell you what fin, when they go with the full version and not the test/early access edition, I'll plan on getting it and I'll share with ya.. Especially since the page is not found anymore, but they still have a link up for it.. Hmmmm...

Deal,

oh, and more news, 1.4 million downloads:

http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn...pensolaris.xml

Cheers,

Finegan

seems as if i read in some lin* magazine this weekend that it would be 99 usd for a licence

I've used Solaris x86 in production for just under 5 years now. It's every bit the stable scalable operating system Solaris Sparc is.

For a workstation, I'd skip it and use Linux. Solaris is too much of a pain in the ass to get configured with a decent Window Manager, its driver support sucks, and it's lacking the myriad of preinstalled utilities that most Linux distros come with.

However, for production use it's tough to beat, especially if you're deploying a Java application. Linux's JVMs are all horrible. You can either have a fast one, or a stable one, but you can't have both. Solaris x86's is acceptably fast, and yet rock solid.

I haven't really had any significant stability problems with either OS, but I'd have to lean towards Solaris x86 as a little more solid than Linux at this point.

I'm not sure where this "myth" that Solaris x86 isn't "real Solaris". It's the same operating system.

I'm also not sure why you're saying you're not sure how powerful Solaris x86 is "going to be". It's been out since 1992 (5.1.. though it took a hiatus in 5.2 and 5.3)

I think that GTKUser was pointing out was SolarisX86's rather high hardware requirements when compared to other Nix'es.

I had Solaris on my Ultra 5 for a few days, it ran slow, and the only reason I ditched it, aside from complete and utter newbie fear, was that the monitor hated it. (a cheap regular svga monitor). This was back before 9 came out, it came loaded with 8... and after I had spent 20+ hours downloading it over a cable modem! hehe!

Regardless, my point was going to be that Solaris ran like sludge, admitedly this is with a Sparc IIi(?) 270Mhz and only 256MB of RAM. Under SuSe it was much happier, and under OpenBSD its a tank! I still have a friend begging me to Solarize it again so he'll have a Sun platform to play with Java.

When playing with Solaris 8 x86, it was also rather kludgey, but this was on a AMD K6-3 450, again with 256Mb of RAM.

Since you've been using it for a long time, have you tried out the x86 9 preview yet? Despite what Sun claims, what would you call the decent machine specs to run it?

Cheers,

Finegan

It's not high. In fact, it doesn't support anything expensive like a GeForce 4...

Ultra 5's stink as workstations. The video is about as fast as my old 8086. They make wonderful cheap servers, though! Linux is peppier on Ultra 5s as a workstation OS, no doubt about it.

Video performance, again, blows dead bear. I wouldn't wish a
Solaris workstation on anyone. I guess at one time I had it running "okay" using Xfree86 and it's drivers with a Matrox G450, but for all that hassle, what's the point? Develop with Linux, deploy on Solaris...

I haven't. I'll wait for the release of 9. I seriously doubt it's requirements are really any higher than 8. It'd run fine on a PII as a server.

http://wwws.sun.com/software/solaris/binaries/get.html

Yep, finally, its out!

x86 Solaris 9

Cheers,

Finegan

I think if you compared solaris/sparc to linux/sparc you'd see about the same difference you see with solaris/intel vs linux/intel. Remember that Sun hardware is much beefier than an x86 system of the same clock speed.

Sun and Intel both work on getting Solaris to run and run well on x86 architecture. Although the Solaris groups at Intel and the x86 groups at Sun have inherient issues because they are "dealing with the enemy" they still manage to work together and keep IA32 Solaris a good OS. There are many organizations that swear by IA32 Solaris, enough to keep Sun and Intel working together and remember these guys are processor making rivals which makes them mortal enemies.

Solaris has been known to have a slow graphical interface and this is true on sparcs as well as intel platforms. As for "support" this is a server based OS so you won't find say your el-cheapo lite-on network cards supported but sparcs have PCI slots too so most of the good hardware does have support. As for stability, I've seen an IA32 Solaris system run for days under insane loads that would bring linux to it's knees. System wise, you can't really expect a modern server OS to run on your old 486, sure Solaris bogs down when you throw it on an old x86 PC but find me a commercial unix that doesn't.

You can still find many a Unix admin who thinks of x86 Solaris as a real server OS and your Linux that is light enough to run on your home PC as a toy best left in the toybox and out of the backoffice

Nice to see that Solaris 9 for intel is out, the only problem I have now is downloading it with my dial up connection..............

Well, I had to download some homebrew drivers for my oh so generic Linksys lnx100, then I had to get the XFree86 Binary compatiability kit in order toi convince Xsun that a Mtrox 550 was a do-able vid card. Next I've gotta get all of the companion goop in order to get Gnome or something running, this CDE crap is just bugly, and I haven't even tried to get the second monitor working yet...

Cheers,

Finegan

I'm not going to quote a whole bunch here, but just some comments on x86 solaris. I have worked in a large variety of environments and here are some thoughts;

- develop on x86 solaris, deploy on sparc solaris

I don't imagine that many testers would be happy with this scenario. I know none of the testers I have worked with would accept this. They wouldn't even accept developing on Solaris 7 and deploying on 8. I have even had a tester refuse to develop on a machine with 16 procs, because the production machine only had 12. Testers are wierd beasts and are not subject to rational thinking, use caution when approaching.

- using x86 solaris in production

many x86 hardware parts are manufactured with extremely inexpensive chips and memory which are more error prone than sparc hardware. I would not recommend using x86 in production unless you are using something like a dell poweredge or hp/compaq proliant/netserver. These systems are designed with things like ECC memory, etc...

just my 2 cents, but seeing as I am a consultant, that will cost you 100 USD/hour

many? If it were only most the world would be a much more stable place, let's run with "almost all?" maybe... You're being far too kind.

Also, 2 cents.. er, 186 words at 100 an hour (oh I can dream... one day...), means if you type about as I do, LQ owes you $3.

Where was I going with this? Oh yeah... I gotta give Solaris x86 credit though for being a pretty brilliant learning system, heck you have to patch it 5 times before CDE even displays right, and although it may be kludgey, masochism breeds competence.

Cheers,

Finegan

yes I was being a little generous, at first I was going to say "all x86 HW", but then I remembered that there are the xeon chip, ecc memory, redundant systems manufactured by some of the big names for people who have nothing better to do with their money.

I was content with learning on Solaris x86 until I needed to learn the OBP stuff for the exam. Then it was time to cough up 380 USD to some dot-com bankruptcy liquidator on e-bay.

@ 65 words more, please add another 1.25 to my total.