Which was too much for a typical small to medium sized business, so not sure what your point is.

Sun, in fact, would even sell you the hardware with their name on it, unlike Linux, the BSDes and Windows, so that's a pretty big difference there.

Solaris 10 is the first version you could use commercially for free. While they did make 9 a free download the license was for non-commercial use only. So again, that's a big difference and I'm not sure what your point is.

Solaris always has been and still is primarily a server platform and as such it makes a poor desktop OS.

Compared to what ?
You mean a small or medium size business couldn't afford a less than $800 O/S ?
That's not my point, you incorrectly stated Solaris required Sun H/W.
Solaris 9 cost was $99 for commercial use, I believe that was cheaper than Red-Hat.
You tend to forget Sun was leading the Unix workstation market when Solaris started.
Moreover, I fully disagree about this statement, especially when considering Solaris 10 latest release, or Solaris Express.

Please explain what would make it a poor desktop O/S ?

Ok, here goes my 2 cents.

1. I hate windows but I have an xp box at home that my son uses for games. Windows is by far the best os for games. Not the os, companies just write the games for Microsoft.

2. I use linux at home and love it. My personal choice for my home pc.

3. I work for Sun, am surrounded by high-end servers and mid-range boxes as well.
You can't compare the kernel in solaris with any other kernel (even the linux one). If you truly understand the solaris kernel, then you know exactly what I mean.

However, c'mon, solaris (even now) can't compare to other operating systems for the desktop. To answer Jlliagre, here are the reasons.

1. Even with blastwave and sunfreeware, the amount of packages does not compare to the ones available to linux.

2. Poor drivers, even when you find them, there are less of them available. That may change someday. But not yet.

Case in point, I installed solaris 10 06/06 in one of my test pcs. Although the same
box works flawlessly with linux, I had issues with the sound card, had to tweak X, had issues with the scanner (even with xsane and other packages installed), wireless issues. Even kde (from blastwave) is much buggier than it is in linux.

To summarize, I will not risk my job by putting my databases (for instance) in linux but I am not a true unreasonable fanatic that is blind to see how much further we (sun) has to go in the desktop market. Do we all forget that the x86 version was even discontinued once (that I recall) until McNealy reinstated it? Even when sun came up with its version of linux (you could see the word SuSE) all over the place, we never
seem to push it much.

But I'll take my e25k with 72 (dual core) cpus with 18 domains with solaris 10 (with zones) anytime over any, I repeat any cheap dell running any other OS.

I guess it was 4 cents after all

no worry ... desktop solaris will reach there one of these days , preferably with those "requirments" you have stated in the bottom first and second point ... probably the day will come when microsoft gone sunken a little bit more and that would be a blessing ...

//





________________________________________________________________________

i got lots of problems , email me your solutions if you wanted to ...
thanks in advance :: EMAIL

Nobody can contest that.

I use both Linux and Solaris at home.

Currently I'm running Solaris Express, Nexenta and CentOS simultaneously on my laptop.

I'm exactly in sync with you here ...

Well, it certainly can compare, I agree it is not leading in every metric, but it does in some.

I don't think the "number" of packages means a lot, but technically, 11997 packages are running on top of the Solaris kernel with Nexenta.

This is a good point, but acknowledge the gap is quickly being narrowed.

Yes, blastwave's kde is known to be a mess (mixture of different versions parts).
Thats me ? Unreasonable fanatic ... I save that !

The public announcement was the Solaris 9 FCS was only to be released for SPARC, nothing that stated the architecture was abandoned, although many thought it was the case.

Actually some sun officials told at that time future Solaris 9 releases may support x86.

A site was created to have Scott changing his decision: http://www.save-solaris.org/

Indeed.

You love linux, and nobody is going to blame you for that, especially on LinuxQuestions , but the arguments you are using against Solaris are quite exactly the same ones that were used a decade ago or so against linux by Windows fans.

Fortunately, there was at that time Linux "unreasonable fanatics" that manage to overcome the numerous hurdles (drivers, applications, ...) to make Linux what it is now.

I wholeheartedly agree with most of your points, apt-get-dude. Indeed, Solaris is primarily a server OS and we all know that x86 version has been treated as a step-child. But it is developing fast, and the missing bits are being integrated as we talk here. It is not unexpected, after all the neglect, that Solaris x86 is lagging behind Windows
and GNU/Linux dsitributions on desktop/laptop.

Those, who want to try Solaris, are recommended to install Solaris Express rather than Solaris 10. The express supports more hardware, comes with latest software like GNOME 2.14, and performs better on desktop/laptop than Solaris 10. In fact, I'm running SXCR43 on my ThinkPad and have nothing major to complain about. Graphics, sound, touchpad/trackpoint, USB Wireless optical mouse etc work beautifully. Given that I had problems with SUSE 10.1 not detecting the refresh rate of the LCD panel properly, and Fedora Core 5 (kernel 2.6.17) failing to detect the optical drive, Solaris Express is far more reliable and has less to worry about.

There are only a few things I miss, namely bluetooth and WiFi support. But, that's coming. Power management is being worked on. And I have concrete information, that Sun Studio and NetBeans will be bundled with Solaris in near future.

While Solaris may not be particularly suitable for desktops/laptops now, the future looks bright if they implement the missing bits as fast as possible.

Here's another snv_43 user
Dtrace, ZFS, Zone, all make using OpenSolaris super fun!

Linux and (to some extend) BSD have much larger number of follower at this time, and it won't change any time soon. However, OpenSolaris is also going stronger than ever, and we certainly need a lot more "fanatic" like jlliagre ;-)

Frankly, I don't "hate" Windows, I prefer Windows XP as my primary desktop OS, on one PC and one laptop, everything else is Solaris

One othe rthing why people and esp. home users dislike Solaris, is because of ...you guess it, **LACK** OF HARDWARE HARDWARE HARDWARE support. Other than that, Solaris 10 is eays to use and install better than FreebSD because FreeBSD does not thave that GUI installer....Thats why I like about it. And in Solaris 10, you do a little amount of partitioning and it selects the partitions automatically for you...Thats why I like it.

As for more hardware support, where can I download the Solaris Express...??

And another thing...If one cannot do many things on Solaris...Install Windoes or even SUSE LINUX which has more hardware support and alot things to play around with like in Windows. SUSE Linux to me is just like Windows. And if you cannot do what you wanna do in Solaris, then dual-boot with Windows or SUSE Linux like I do....with System Commander...

For example, I cannot burbn CDs under Solaris, so I need to boot Windows in order to do that...

So I think thats why people are scared in Solaris because of these things I mentioned. And Solaris is YES..for meant for servers..

Please elaborate on what H/W support you want that is missing.

I strongly doubt you are unable to record a CD because of missing H/W support.

Now Solaris is free and is more popular that past because home users can use it. In opensolaris home site celebrate 1 year anniversary with success.

OpenSolaris make a Solaris more popular, and because of that now 5 solaris distributions are available for free download.
So, I think solaris is more popular now than the past and probably in near future will be more popular than *BSD.

If you notice this section for solaris has close post numbers to all *BSD section. For me that is enough reason for the good days in solaris now ...

That's quite the same thing, provided that you consider any commercial Unix was an expensive thing.

EDIT: I have used Solaris only a few times so maybe it was time I tried it on my own PC..

Sure, and actually any commercial server O/S, whether Unix or not, was an expensive thing for home users.

Most of them were not that expensive for a company though.

Hi Jillagre,

Can you kindly explain how you partitioned your drive while installing nexgenta? I tried the manual install and it is asking for the start cylinder and so on. I found it too cryptic to hazard installing it to dual boot on my machine. Just to make it clear, I have installed OpenBSD and have partitioned the drive using its partitioner successfully in the past. So I am not new to using fdisk.

Can someone explain what makes Solaris different from other *nixes that makes it intersesting?

ZFS, RBAC, Zones, BrandX, Dtrace, Fire Engine, upward binary compatibility guarantee, Self Healing, Resource Management, Live Upgrade, and certainly more.