Do you have SunRay client licenses for 3.1 or 4.0? That'd be a reason not to upgrade to 4.0.

If you already have the SunRays running fine under Solaris I wouldn't change. I was only trying to point out an alternative that I have used. The Ubuntu version of the Gnome desktop is, in my opinion, nicer.

Re. full screen movies, I have not tried to do this with either version.

Darryl Keller

Please try to stream full screen movies under Ubuntu and tell me? When I try to do that under solaris, I get lag in full screen. If the movie window is ~500x500 pixels big, there is no lag - it flows smoothly with Solaris.




Thanx for trying to help with another alternative, but I prefer not choosing an operating system on how nice the desktop is looking. For me, the kernel and stability and enterprise functionalities are more important than a fancy desktop. Besides, I run Compiz (the rotating desktop cube) with Solaris which looks good enough. The professional sysadmins says if you are using Unix seriously, you probably dont want GUI at all - you only use text mode. GUI sucks up precious RAM and CPU. Command line is better then. They say. Probably Jilliagre could elaborate more on this.

No, I have no licenses at all. I just downloaded the server software from sun.com.

The server software is indeed a free download, but you do need to purchase access licenses for each SunRay that you intend on using (per SunRay, server count doesn't matter), and those licenses don't allow for upgrading. So, if you buy a SunRay access license now, it's good for the current version. If you want to upgrade server software in the future, that's free... Until you actually want to use a SunRay with it... Then you need a new access license.

http://www.sun.com/software/sunray/getit.jsp

I can't try this anymore since I just quit my job where we had both Solaris and Ubuntu running Sunrays. The one thing I do know is that Solaris does a much better job of balancing the loads between multiple processors. I have my home system running Ubuntu 7.04 and many times I see one processor running at 80-85% while the other is only running at 2-5%. Of course in your case I believe you are running into a network bandwidth problem and not a processor problem.

Darryl Keller

Ok thanx for your reply.

Regarding Ubuntu and load balancing, do you have dual cpus, or one cpu with dual core?