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I just tried solaris 10 yesterday, and I must say I'm impressed. Had the same hardware setup as my fedora box and it did seem a little faster (though as everyone seems to be noting the boot time is very slow). JDS3 is very nice, and dtrace is one of the best utilities ever. Not as usable (read less applications, bad package management) as linux currently, but it seems very well suited for mission-critical applications, or java development.

Indeed, why doesn't Sun maintain a package collection on their website? I wish there was BSD portupgrade analogue for Solaris 10.

Is your system IDE or SCSI? If it's IDE, you might want to modify your /platform/i86pc/kernel/drv/ata.conf:

Change this
#
# for PIO performance upgrade - set block factor to 0x10
#
drive0_block_factor=0x1;
drive1_block_factor=0x1;

To this and reboot:

#
# for PIO performance upgrade - set block factor to 0x10
#
drive0_block_factor=0x10;
drive1_block_factor=0x10;

I found that disk performance improved some with this change.

Like most Linux distributions these days the fonts in JDS3 are very blurred and smoothed. Turning antialiasing off produces jagged and barely readable fonts. I don't understand why the whole Unix family (except Mac OS X where you can turn off antialiasing and fonts do still look good) has such awful fonts. The situation was much better with Helvetica and friends but unfortunately Helvetica looks as awful as Vera Sans under JDS3. Very bad indeed.

Is the CDE in Solaris 10 still?

I hear ya. Tired of the fuzzy look. Would also wish you could just click a button to install an app without having to go into terminal and untar into some weird directory where your packages are at ... which is why windows is still around.

Yes.

which Linux distro do you u reckon has the best rendering of fonts.
i sort of know what you mean, i've came across a lot of distro with bad fonts, while others quite good.
but i am curious to know which is the best
maybe redhat/fedora ?

a very small price to pay
for security and stability.

i hope they never ever EVER make executables installable through a double click.
we don't need Linux to be plagued as well.

still depending on your distro you dont need to do that
just type the name of your app in the package manager
and it will fetch the program you want from the server
and install it for you - without a hitch.

windows can't do that.

I use Gentoo and fonts look very good (and Helvetica is Helvetica not a fontconfig alias to Vera Sans or some other fake). Redhat/Fedora are as bad as JDS/Solaris. I guess Redhat and Sun don't enable the truetype interpreter in freetype and instead let their customers suffer ;-)

gcc is included?? i don't think so... i did a full install and it (along with all of the other 'standard' tools) was nowhere to be found.

In other words--every distribution that turns the bytecode interpreter on in freetype should produce good results (and you can recompile freetype if it isn't).

That's funny. I've found that the fonts on Linux are much better and more readable that Mac OS X fonts. OS X fonts look too blurry for me. You don't really notice it until you use GNOME with autohinting turned on.

But I agree that most Unix fonts look bad when anti-aliasing is turned off. Which is why it's turned on in the first place :-)

gcc is in /opt/sfw/bin.

I guess Solaris is not shipping with source code yet. Still is it possible to tune kernel somehow? If a newer version of compiler suite comes along, can you recompile it or download specialized kernels?

$ uname -a
SunOS sunrise 5.10 Generic i86pc i386 i86pc
$ /usr/sfw/bin/gcc -v
Reading specs from /usr/sfw/lib/gcc/i386-pc-solaris2.10/3.4.3/specs
Configured with: /builds/sfw10-gate/usr/src/cmd/gcc/gcc-3.4.3/configure --prefix
=/usr/sfw --with-as=/usr/sfw/bin/gas --with-gnu-as --with-ld=/usr/ccs/bin/ld --w
ithout-gnu-ld --enable-languages=c,c++ --enable-shared
Thread model: posix
gcc version 3.4.3 (csl-sol210-3_4-branch+sol_rpath)
$

What was so hard about that?

No, you do not recompile kernels like in Linux or HP-UX. You make modifications to /etc/system and reboot, or if using projects can be added dynamically.

Anyone seen reviews of Solaris 10 that focus more on performance testing than the install process and the GUI, especially in relation to older versions of Solaris?
I would this to be more relevant to this type of OS!

Why has this become yet another thread on fonts and install methods (its because of getting source packages duh) instead of actually discussing the article in question?

My question if the reviewer is listening is what benefit does Solaris have for using for a home user vs. using Linux? From what I understand its so limited in software that all it runs is Sun's Star Office, some java apps and server software - which begs the question -- why a desktop solution if its main job is still server?? /boggle

More specific: what benefit would Solaris bring to me by using it as the OS for my Folding@Home dedicated computers over Damn Small Linux which is what they are using now? That's a small specific science like use that these alternative OS's typically find their nitch in.

thanks,

Rob

I just tried Solaris 10. Have to say, I am impressed. My current workstation is RH AS 4. But Sun needs several things to make it a clear winner.

1. More hardware support
2. Management tools -- YAST for Solaris anyone
3. As others have stated, the dismal package managemt situation needs fixing.
4. Last the installer sucks -- Anaconda for Solaris would be nice.

Looks to me like all missing things are fixable, quickly. As is it's a fast, stable well done *NIX OS and the JDS desktop has a nice polished look and feel, I am sold. Cheap and good, who can ask for more.

BTW: I like KDE and was surpised that with a few commands and presto, there it was in all it's glory -- Login and run.

Rob,

Most of what runs on Linux can run on Solaris, I can't possibly list every binary that works, but you can see what is available from www.sunfreeware.com, www.blastwave.org, and from Sun. And if you can't find a package, download, compile and install just like in Linux (with some possible dependency issues).

I don't know about Folding@Home or other distributed clients (I don't use them). Solaris would work for me as a desktop OS based on what I would use it for (web surfing, e-mail, writing documents, system administration). For gaming I obviously have a Windows box.

I am also looking at RedHat Enterprise Linux 4 and it has similar desktop tools as Solaris and Fedora Core, and it is being marketed as a server OS. Go figure.

eh, sun's compilers are faster

The ugly fonts problem is because most? distros still aren't turning on autohint.

Try blastwave.org for a BSD-like package system. It works really well and installs everything under /opt/csw.

I've been playing with Solaris 10/SPARC for a few days, now. One thing is the movie player doesn't have codecs installed? In the meantime, I installed a Totem/Xine replacement from blastwave that works just fine. Otherwise, everything else seems to work pretty good.

Overall, JDS is a big improvement over CDE, although I have to admit that GNOME is much more resource-intensive than CDE. I can tolerate CDE on older SPARCstations, but GNOME is hard even on my Sun Ultra workstation.

I think Sun does deserve a lot of credit with Solaris 10. They took their kernel, integrated GNOME, StarOffice, a recent Mozilla, etc. and made a really nice setup out of it. It's actually laid out well, which the Sun bashers at Slashdot always gloss over in their flamewars.

@10ksnooker
2. Management tools -- YAST for Solaris anyone

They already have quite a few. "smc" for example, the Sun Management Console. There are more, read here:

http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/817-1985/6mhm8o5j3?q=administratio...

I installed it for the x86 system, looked impressive right up to the point were I couldn't figure out how to get my SIS 900 PCI card to work. After that I kind of gave up. Maybe in time once they get more hw support I ll give it another go. Or if someone can explain to me how to install my card

My question if the reviewer is listening is what benefit does Solaris have for using for a home user vs. using Linux?

Probably none at all, just like there is little benefit with one Linux distro over another if you're comfortable and happy with the one you have.

The primary benefit is more in the commercial sector, than for the individual home user or hobbyist.

In the server market if you were someone who likes the central organization and perceived stability that organization brings to a system such as FreeBSD versus the perceived chaos of Linux and its multitude of distributions, then you may well be very interested in Solaris 10 because it offers much of the same as a FreeBSD style of development -- a very stable one stop shopping style of UNIX system.

If you're happy with your Linux system and it does what you want, I'd stick with it and not worry about it.

If you have complaints about things like library stability, the fast pace of new kernels, and scouring the net to "keep up", then you might want to look at Solaris 10, becase those aren't really going to be issues with the standard install. Solaris 10 will have different issues. :-)

I bought a Sun Blade of eBay a year ago and I'm using it as my primary desktop. I installed Solaris 10 on it a week or two after it came out.

Eventually it'll just be a server since it's fairly quiet and I have two decently sized hard drives mirrored (although I used a tutorial I found on the web that wasn't as quick as the review made it seem possible, nor did I do it during the install). But until then, I'm using it for everything . . . or at least all that it can manage.

One really interesting thing I noticed, though: I remember from a review on this site of a Sun Blade 100 that installing the media libraries for SPARC's SSE-like instruction set could improve performance. It did some under Solaris 9. I noticed a nicer desktop experience immediately when I installed Solaris 10. I downloaded the media libraries packages, but when I went to install them it said they were already installed.

I guess since Solaris is only supporting later generations of processors that are all 64-bit, they all also include the VIS extensions? Maybe a lot more software was compiled as being aware of it?

Compared to Solaris 9, it's quite a bit better as a desktop, but still not wonderful. The only thing it doesn't do well is movie playback for more complicated stuff like divx or DVDs. Blastwave.org makes it all worthwhile, though.

but James you're on a Blade 100. They are slow and outdated.
It's not going to be wonderful when you're on that hardware.

I also installed it on a Sun Blade 100 where i work and it did ok, even though it's only got 256MB RAM. It suffers a lot because of the lack of RAM.

I installed it on my AMD XP3200+ (1 GB RAM) at home and it flies. If i could get my Realtek 8169 NIC working i'd be even more happy...but i'll save that for a rainy day.
cheers
peter

Hi,

Okay this is completely and utterly unsupported, but there is a driver, sfe, available for the sis900, see Masayuki Murayama's ethernet drivers page at http://homepage2.nifty.com/mrym3/taiyodo/eng/index.htm

It seems to have last been tested on build 72 of Solaris express, so thats only two builds behind what you got at fcs.

I don't have access to this chipset, so I have no idea if this works or not - but hopefully it will (fingers crossed).

- Fintan

@mooooo
I installed it on my AMD XP3200+ (1 GB RAM) at home and it flies. If i could get my Realtek 8169 NIC working i'd be even more happy...but i'll save that for a rainy day.

Behold, drivers galore:

http://homepage2.nifty.com/mrym3/taiyodo/eng/

I use the 8169 driver on that page there, works great.

Now UFS logging is turned on by default, and can be turned off by editing /etc/vfstab, making the appropriate changes, and rebooting.

This is a no brainer 300% increase is FS speed...why it took SUN so long to make this a default i will never know.

Because it probably wasn't stable enough or fast enough to justify it. The same reasons why Apple didn't activate HFS+ Journalling until 10.3 - it just wasn't ready yet (as mentioned by Eugina, when she tried it, and stated that the performance was slow).

Personally, the bigger thing should be ZFS. When is that going to be delivered?

Last time i tried to install Solaris 10 on a average AMD XP2500+ platform it couldn't even detect a realtek 8139 NIC,cmon.Now i migrated to AMD64 i don't even bother to try.

I installed Soll1+ EA (I think it was build 72) on a Sun Blade 150. I was very surprised at how snappy it felt. I am mostly interested in the Solaris Volume Manager and NFS performance, and while I didn't benchmark it, the system just felt much more repsonsive and fast than with Solaris 9. Maybe it's the rewritten TCP/IP stack.

I'm sad to say, though, this review is lacking: no mention of DTrace or Zones? I find that odd. However, the mirroring of the rootdisk during jumpstart is a nice touch! Thank you!

that was meant to be Sol10 EA, sorry for the typo.

Has anyone tested the drivers for the Intel 10/100 PRO VE NIC cards from that website? At least that's how I think its called. Anyway I tried installing Solars 10 and it recognized everything, even my graphics card works great under 16million color mode. The downfall is I can't get on the net. I double checked my settings and it says that I'm setup for a direct connection.

Thanks

The servers used in the review are really really old. Its like beta testing longhorn on 286. But again you never know how creative can you be when you have tooooo much time in your hands.

almost all distros render fonts exactly the same way: via freetype2 (usually the non-patent-encumbered build, with bytecode intepreter disabled) and fontconfig. Most use the same default font, too - the Bitstream Vera family (or one of the derivatives with extra characters, like Deja Vu). I don't see any difference between the rendering on Mandrakelinux, Fedora, SuSE, Ubuntu, Gentoo and Linspire in the screenshots I've seen.

Oh, and it'd be Red Hat and its customers who suffered if they shipped an enabled bytecode interpreter, because they'd get their asses sued off. It's patented and it's not legal to ship it in the U.S., period.

That is one of the benefits of Solaris 10, is that you can use it on older hardware as long as it meets the minimum hardware requirements (UltraSPARC II, 200 MHz or higher CPU). Also take into consideration this is my home test lab, the Blade 100's were boxes I could use at work (nobody was going to let me install it on our production 4800's).

And how many "individual" reviews do you read where they are using the "latest and greatest" hardware?

rtls(7d) supports Realtek 8139 NIC's directly. You may need to edit /etc/driver_aliases to specify the PCI address of your particular NIC if it's not one of the more popular ones.

Solaris' driver support has always been a "if we know it works, it'll detect it - otherwise you'll need to specify it yourself" system.

Earlier releases of Solaris 10, for example, wouldn't automatically detect the Broadcom 5701 based dual gigabit ethernet on some Dell systems. Once testers reported that it did indeed work, Sun patched the driver_aliases database to allow it to work out of the box.

The point is, just because something -doesn't- work right away doesn't mean it won't - it just means that Sun's bread and butter market, the data center administrators, hasn't really tested that hardware thoroughly enough for it to be "blessed" by the driver.

That said, the 8139 really is a cheap POS NIC ... Solaris is probably doing you a favor by not detecting it right away.

That is some nice information to know, thanks!

"Oh, and it'd be Red Hat and its customers who suffered if they shipped an enabled bytecode interpreter, because they'd get their asses sued off. It's patented and it's not legal to ship it in the U.S., period."

Do you want to tell me that companies like Redhat or Sun are unable to negotiate with Apple about a patent grant? If I would pay thousands of dollars for a Redhat product I'd surely expect readable fonts.

Btw. I know that all Linux distributions render truetype fonts via freetype and fontconfig but I was specifically referring to the bytecode interpreter which some distributions (eg. Gentoo) enable and others don't. And I find it rather embarrassing that the most expensive among them is unable to deliver nice looking truetype fonts. The situation in Solaris 10 is even more unfortunyte since the bitmap fonts (eg. Helvetica) are only aliases of other truetype fonts. But at least Solaris 10 is freely available without support.

Thanks for the info.Do you know by the way if Solaris 10 would run on a ASUS K8N motherboard (AMD64) with the nforce3-250 chipset? Can't say nvidia gigabit lan is cheap :-)

I'm running s10 on a gigabyte k8ns-pro motherboard. The only
issue I have is that SysKonnect don't yet have a 64bit skge
driver available for amd64. If you don't mind that, have a
look at
http://www.syskonnect.de/syskonnect/support/driver/htm/skgesol_x86v...

You pay for the support, not for the product that can be downloaded from Red Hat website. Since Red Hat is a open source company, they release the source code under GPL license(Red Hat did with Netscape administration tools they brought). You won't find any patented code. That is Red Hat policy.

Well if that is true, why can't I download Redhat's product for free without support? I can do that with Sun Solaris.

You can download free patches for Fedora Core, if you want to download patches for RedHat Enterprise Linux, you need to subscribe ($$$).

"You won't find any patented code. That is Red Hat policy."

Do they indemnify their customers? It's unlikely they can really guarantee Linux is completely free of infringements, but one thing they can do is defend their customers.

thanks all for your answers to my questions regarding Solaris.

Rob

Is it possible to force an install of Sunscreen 3.2 on S10. I am not satisfied with ipf, though I understand why the change was made. I prefer Sunscreen and would like to use it. S9 doesn't seem to like the Broadcom NICs in my Dell 1650s at all.

You won't find any patented code. That is Red Hat policy.

Actually, there is patented code in Red Hat's products. They even own some of the patents. Here is there actual patent policy: http://www.redhat.com/legal/patent_policy.html

And here is one of the patents they own: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p...'Red+Hat'.ASNM.&OS=AN/

Concerning patented code on Red Hat products, I stand corrected.

How does the pricing policy work for Solaris? Do I have to subscribe like Red Hat?