Solaris 10

[Spinflight]

I'm 1 minute and 31 seconds away from completing the download ( 2.127 Gigabytes of data and thats zipped!).

Anyone else tried this O/S out? I figured that quite a few companies might end up using it now its open source so good to get some exp on it, not to mention the JDS looks rather nice...

(Can't believe someone was giving away some sparc servers earlier this year too!)

[drauk]

Actually I still am (all but) giving away a hi-spec rack mount 220R server or two. Free to a very good home, very cheap to any other home.

[Spinflight]

Well I was going to volunteer to help out in some way with the Open Solaris project till I saw the system requirements (14 hour compile time on an AMD64 with 1 gig of ram).....

Could do it on a Sparc though.....

Tempting..... Very tempting.....

[Stoney X]

Spinflight, you are going to have to tell us how it goes with this O/S. What machine you run it on, what you use to for, and does it work.

I'm also highly tempted by drauk's offer, although I'm not sure I would qualify as a "good home".

Regards
Stoney

[Spinflight]

Stoney,

I havn't installed it yet, have to get a new HD in first.

I'll be runing the x86 version on a 1600 Athlon however I suspect this OS is going to be a big thing in my industry.

I used Solaris workstations at university for Java development but hardly scratched the surface of its server oriented capabilities. It seems there are problems due to the lack of drivers / support for cheap commodity hardware however porting drivers from other Unix systems to expand the user base is going to be a major part of the Open Solaris project.

Solaris, (Free)BSD, AIX, Linux etc all share the same roots and are all different flavours of Unix. The proprietary versions (AIX, HP etc) tend to be used serverside on big iron servers bought from the hardware vendor (IBM, HP) whereas BSD is mainly a hobbyist and academic flavour.

The different distros of Linux have been slowly gaining acceptance, though only Red Hat and Debian are really considered commercial products.

Solaris is slightly different in that all of the other flavours are optomised for either serverside (RH, AIX, HP) or hobbyist workstation use (Mandrake BSD etc). Solaris does both equally well and is reckoned to be the most stable and certainly the most secure.

I reckon security is going to be a big issue in the next few years, the
Witty Worm (http://www.computerworld.com/networkingtopics/networking/story/0,10801,93584,00.html) ealier this year destroyed every single machine that posessed the vulnerability it exploited on Win32 architecture. And this was a virus that targetted the software of Internet Security Systems Inc.

[Stoney X]

Spinflight, I'm interested in how it runs on an x86. I use SunOs at work and have various Linux machines at home, so this might be another toy to put on a machine hidden under the desk while the missus isn't watching.

Regards
Stoney

[uid0]

Solaris does both equally well and is reckoned to be the most stable and certainly the most secure.

i thought the most secure would be OpenBSD (www.openbsd.org).

Was down under a couple of months ago and the Solaris 10 was on one of the companion disc from a magazine. Bought the magazine but had not installed it though.

[Spinflight]

Solaris is pretty much developed from BSD (Berkeley distribution of Unix) uid0.

The difference between Solaris and the other flavours of Unix is mainly that Sun have been developing it inhouse for the last 15 years or so.

Now its not that the open source brigade are bad coders, quite the opposite, but the way open source communities work dosn't necessarily lead to a good commercial product. Also companies that buy operating systems need a support infrastructure which the open source distributions can't really provide.

If you're looking at seriously high security systems, usually huge multiprocessor Unix boxes, such as banking and financial systems then they wil generally be running HP, AIX or Solaris.

Should have me HD tomorrow so will install the beastie and report back.
:ok:

[pmills575]

If I remember correctly SunOs was based on BSD 4.3.
In the early 1990's Sun decided to move to the AT&T version.
This was a System V based Operating System at that time released as AT&T System 5.4. Sun had some very limited experience with the earlier SYS 5.3 when they bought a company called Inertactive. In the event AT&T sold the Unix souces rights to Novell. Sun then purchased a once only sources code version from Novell and used this as the basis of their new 5.4 port, now called Solaris. It is this code that has been developed over the last few years, they dropped the 5 prefix a few years ago.

[Spinflight]

Well I finally got around to installing Solaris. :ok:

Overall impressions so far are exceptionally good. Installation would have been smooth but for a great deal of ****wittedness on my part ( I mislabelled the 5 CD-Rs which combined with problems reading them (burned on a PC with fast broadband ) resulted in a few weeks delay whilst I burned a new set after a great deal of swearing).

It did take quite a while to install though if you used a DVD rather than CD-R's you could just leave it running for a few hours.

I've been checking out the JDS rather than the CDE desktop so far and it seems to be remarkably easy to use for most workstation purposes. Havn't yet had to download a single application, had any problems reading office type files or had and crashes or other upsettings. No need for anti-spyware checkers, third party firewalls etc.

StarOffice 2.0 is out now which, from the reviews, seems to have fixed many of the problems from previous versions.

I've only scratched the surface and theres a whole lot more I'm going to have to do before I could give it a considered opinion but I havn't yet seen anything which would preclude Solaris from being used as a home PC (other than games at any rate).

It'll be interesting to see how difficult it is to set up networking etc.