Sun Microsystems makes new releases of Solaris about every four to six months, in many cases all the new release contains is bug fixes and some changes in functionality. More often than not most releases go by without a great deal of fanfare. Just as Solaris 10 3/05 broke new ground with Zones, Dtrace and the Service Management Facility. Solaris 10 6/06 introduces ZFS or Zettabyte File System and the SATA framework and Xorg 6.9, which will be the primary focus of this review.
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Member since:2005-07-08
The nVidia card is the only one I didn't have to fight with in order for it to work (the 7300 GS). The motherboard integrated 6100 and the ATI card is where I had the problems.
I know nVidia has a Solaris x86 driver, but it appears to be for the Quadro series of cards that are used in the Sun Ultra workstation series, so I never tried it.
Member since:2005-10-09
Member since:2006-09-20
>I know nVidia has a Solaris x86 driver, but it appears >to be for the Quadro series of cards that are used in >the Sun Ultra workstation series, so I never tried it.
Actually the Nvidia Solaris x86 drivers should work
with all versions of Nvidia chipsets. I have a
7800GTX Nvidia in my Sager 9750 laptop that works the
Solaris x86 Nvidia driver. Much of the embedded
Nvidia mortherboars (video) seems to work with the
drivers from Nvidia.
As for Xorg drivers not coming up with the correct
initial resolution during installation you could
consider this a bug and log the bug on opensolaris.org
site and they do address these types of issues. Heck
they address more than that I had a bug with my Nvidia
7800gtx 6months ago causing a panic and Sun fixed
that also. I've never seen them not address a bug
with a good description and feedback just like any
other open source platform. But than again Xorg
is not Sun or Solaris specific to begin with. Sun
does have engineers in the X organization.
I wish ATI would become more active in the Unix/Linux/BSD community. Maybe with the AMD
byout they will.
---Bob
Member since:
2006-09-20
>Not a bad review. You did hit on some of the nice >selling points of Solaris. It seems you are targetting >the developer-type audience, and if that was your >intent, you hit on the big issue - X/video card support. >It's something Sun does need to work on tremendously.
I'm supprised the Xorg Nvidia drivers didn't work I thought they where upgraded already. Never the less
Solaris has the same issues with video drivers as say
Linux of BSD they use the same source base. Or close
6.9 and 7.0 isn't tied to any video driver. One thing
you don't even care about using the native Nvidia driver
with Solaris x86/x64. You want to download the drivers
form the Nvidia site and take advantage of OpenGL
and all the hardware excelleration. Now it would be
nice if Sun just delivered the Nvidia drivers with
the system and I think they are working on this. You
can do it with linux distributions no reason why
you can't do it with Solaris.
By the way the OpenSolaris discussion site has a
pretty good list of the changes that go into Solaris
x86/x64.
http://opensolaris.org/os/community/x_win/changelogs/changelogs-nv_...
You can see when/if your bug gets integrated. Even logging the bug is free and getting the status or asking questions about if and when it would be fixed
is free. Actually I just wish they take Xsun out of
the picture altoghther for the x86/x64 platform but
I think Xsun is needed for the SunRay servers.
---Bob