Sun Microsystems loaned OSNews the high-end version of the new Sun Blade 150 series workstation, which sells for $3,395 USD (no monitor). Since this Solaris 9/SPARC machine is intended as a workstation, it is here reviewed as such in this article and not as a server.The Blade 150 comes in three flavors (small, medium, and large), and the one we have here is the “large.” It features a 650 Mhz UltraSPARC-IIi CPU with half a meg cache, 512 MB of RAM, 40 GB of 7200 RPM IDE, a 10/100 NIC, USB, Firewire, DVD-rom and Solaris 9 pre-installed.
The machine is slick-looking, with a big Sun logo on the front between the DVD drive and the smart card reader & floppy. Booting Solaris 9 takes about 50 seconds or so. The first time you boot the machine, it will ask for the networking settings and after you enter them, it displays the graphical login prompt (OpenBoot and Solaris also boots in graphics mode). The only available desktop environment you will find installed by default is CDE.
The CDE version installed is 1.5, running on top of the proprietary Sun X11 server version 6.6.1. CDE hasn’t changed much the last few years. On one hand, this DE might look already dated for many, but for its old and loyal users, CDE “just works”. For me, CDE is simple enough and it doesn’t have to be pretty, but it is true that is is not intuitive or modern. Moreover, the desktop can be filled from apps written in Motif or in Java and they don’t look similar. In other words, there can be UI incosistency problems. Under CDE you will find a number of applications and tools, mostly written in Java, to help you manage your Blade. You will find developer tools, add-users, smart card readers and more. A full version of Star Office 6 is also included.
Though this is a workstation machine, actions easily done on desktop operating systems like Windows and Mac are not as easy on Solaris 9. For example, changing the resolution was one hurdle, changing the color depth was another. It took me about an hour searching on Google to find information and how to handle the non-integrated graphics card, SUN XVR-500. Basically. For each graphics card, you may need to use a different command line utility to adjust the resolution. The one that was for my card was easy to change the resolution (after I found which utility was needed, of course) but setting the color was not as straightforward because the naming of the attributes on the help pages are not standard. And to successfully change color depth, you had to log out and back in again (resolution could change on the fly though).
Installing applications with the included command line utility was not great either. I downloaded a third party apt-get-like app that could install applications for Solaris a bit easier. This is how I was able to install Gimp and some other libraries. But overall, there are not many third party applications for Solaris. They are limited in numbers and the GNU ones from the Linux world don’t always compile successfully on SPARC.
After a few days with CDE, I decided to install the latest beta of Gnome 2 for Solaris, beta 3 (based on code of the stable Gnome 2.0.x). Installation went well and the automatic configuration would allow me to pick Gnome 2 as the DE of choice in the login screen. Gnome2 is much slower than CDE on this $3,400 machine. For comparison, Gnome2 runs almost as it does on my dated Dual Celeron 2×533 Mhz PC, which these days wouldn’t sell for more than $340. Besides the fact that Gnome2 is still buggy and crashed on me twice already (which is of course expected being a beta), some applications are slow to open, moving windows around is painfully heavy on the graphics card and as you can see from the last screenshot, when I move the selection inside Nautilus the CPU jumps to 100%. In that screenshot, the blueish selection is extremely slow to redraw, it is jerky and far from smooth. Even my 4 year old dual Celerons are smoother than that on Gnome2 under Linux. Of course, there are many possible reasons why Gnome2 is so slow on the highest-end “cheap” Blade model: slow CPU or slow graphics or simply the fact that Gnome2 is making some assumptions that it runs on XFree86 and tries to base its performance on XRender or other XFree modules that are not available on the Sun version of X11. Personally, I do not expect that the final version of Gnome2 will be much faster on this machine. The problem doesn’t seem to be the fact that this is a beta (I have tried Gnome2 for Linux betas too, and they weren’t as slow) but something more. However, OSNews revealed last week that Sun is porting XRender on their X server and they also working on creating GTK+ widgets for Java, so the desktop will have a more unified look and it might get a speed boost. Update: A Sun engineer just informed me that installing the VIS MediaLib libraries would help out Gnome2’s performance. I don’t have the SPARC machine anymore though, so I can’t test this.
Despite its steep price, the Blade 150 does not employee a lot of the proprierty Sun hardware architecture, but it is a PC with a SPARC (IDE drives instead of SCSI etc.). As for the documentation and extras, I think Blade is great. There are a lot of docs either online or in electronic form (CD) that come with the machine itself.
Overall, I feel that Solaris 9 SPARC is a great Unix; it works well and it is very stable. But I would’t recommend this machine (and especially not it’s smaller models which are much slower mostly because of their even slower graphics card) to people who want to use Solaris on an everyday basis with Gnome2. If you are willing to use CDE instead, this machine can indeed serve you well. But with Gnome2 on it… I just can’t see it flying.
In conclusion, companies with Sun contracts might have an interest in the cheaper versions of Blade 150 (which weirdly enough are recognized by the OS and BIOS as a “Blade 100”, though they are Blade 150s) as cheap workstations for some Java work, or as thin clients, but I don’t see any individual buyer being happy with the overall performance on more demanding graphical environments like Gnome2, which is the environment that Sun wants to make default on Solaris 10.
I’m curious. What does Sun gain by sending you a $3000+ machine for you to review? The review was not a glowing one and basically after reading said, “Who would buy this thing?”
If I had 3 grand to spare, I’d get a MAC (or go on a vacation).
> What does Sun gain by sending you a $3000+ machine for you to review?
This is what companies do and what they should do. They send software, hardware and products for reviews. This is how they get the word out about their products, and OSNews is not a small site these days, so we can definately help.
As for the machine, it has already been returned to Sun. It was a loaner, for one week, for the review purposes.
Eugenia,
Can you explain the purpose of having Solaris instead of Linux?
*This is not an insult or anything, I just want to know her opinion*
As for the “3,000+ machine” you said, OSNews had for 3 weeks a $18,000 USD SGI Fuel machine, a loaner too of course. As I said, it is common practice and normal for big publications to get review units. Nothing weird about it.
I’ve often wondered how the Blade 100 $995 Web Special would perform (with Solaris 8 installed). Eugenia, at 500 MHz, do you have any feel for how CDE might run on it? Nice review!
Can someone tell me how a $3000+ Blade 150 is better than than a $1000 with linux?
Wasn’t this machine supposed to be reviewed as workstation, but instead it got reviewed as ordinary desktop machine. You don’t use a workstation for viewing files in Nautilus, you use it for heavy Math, CAD and Software Development.
Hoe does this machine compare to a Itanium, P4 etc. in these areas ?
$1000 x86 with linux that is
>Can you explain the purpose of having Solaris instead of Linux?
As I said in the article, this was a workstation review, not a server one. From a workstation point of view, there are ups and downs for both Linux and Solaris. For example, Solaris OpenWin X11’s implementation doesn’t crash. I haven’t experienced any problems with their X Server, while I have with XFree86. However, Linux supports AA fonts, while OpenWin doesn’t. Linux has more choice of desktop environments, while on Solaris is a pain in the butt to get them compile on SPARC. Linux supports more hardware in general.
As for Linux *on* the Blade 150, there is this project, Aurora Linux I think it is called, which is a Red Hat version ported to SPARC, but it is not complete and it doesn’t work as stable as Solaris does on SPARCs.
As for SMP scaling, Solaris has no match. Linux can only dream such scaling performance.
On the other hand, a P4 with Red Hat 8, would be much cheaper than this Blade and it would function better as a workstation, problem is that if you are in a corporate environment with Sun machines, you might prefer something like the Blade instead.
How difficult is it?
If the package is zipped
unzip packagename.zip
and then
pkgadd -d ./packagename
Believe you me, there is really not any more to it. It’s really simple.
sorry, but this was very uninformative. who cares how well gnome runs on it? how well do useful applications run on it?
> I’ve often wondered how the Blade 100 $995 Web Special would perform (with Solaris 8 installed). Eugenia, at 500 MHz, do you have any feel for how CDE might run on it?
CDE should be adequate, but don’t expect it to fly. Gnome2 will crawl.
My friend Travis has a Blade 100, and he is not happy at all with its performance btw…
Blade 100 runs fine with CDE, Gnome2, KDE2, XFE. Don’t expect the same graphics as a Nvidia card, put it performs well and looks good.
>how well do useful applications run on it?
Star Office runs ok. It doesn’t fly, but it runs ok.
As for math, CAD and other such stuff, I have no such applications, neither I was sent any to try out.
>Believe you me, there is really not any more to it. It’s really simple
This does not work for all the packages found on the web. I had to use that apt-get-like command line app in order to manage install Gimp and gcc for example.
Missed the point. The cheap sun hardware is basically there to allow developers to develop SPARC binaries that can run on the $$$$$$ servers. With that said… most would likely need to add about $3000 to the price tag for the Sun C/C++ compilers.
Oh another good thing about Solaris is that you are virtually gauranteed backward binary compatiblity.
Back to work…. quack, quack, quack….
> The cheap sun hardware is basically there to allow developers to develop SPARC binaries that can run on the $$$$$$ servers
Excuse me, but this is very hard to believe. Why? Because these machines are slow on compiling. They have SLOW-A$$ IDE hard drives and they are SHORT on memory (not to mention the one generation old CPU they use).
Compiling times will be MUCH worse on these Blades than they would be on a real Blade server. And time is money. The money one saves by buying the cheap Blades, he/she loses on the compiling time. No businessman/admin with his right mind would get these machines as ultimate development boxes, because they cost time.
You moderated your own comment down, I didn’t think about that, so I missed it. Sorry!
Eugenia clearly you have no concept of how large software projects are developed. If you are developing any decent (i.e. moderate complexity) tool/program you are going to employ at least a dozen or more developers. If those developers are banging on the servers for compiles, it is going to make everything crawl. Rather give those developers their own blade and they can develop on that. And yes time is money, that is why people do buy blades (100/150). IDE HDD’s are more than adecuate for single user environments, like the ones blades are geared towards. And most people here are yet to outgrow an ultraIIi processor… I would hope for a lower price tag, but most of the money in the 3K configuration is due to the gfx adapater. I still think that a solaris box for 1K is a great deal (the blade 100), and it gets the job done… at least it has worked for us. Plus they had lots of offers for academic environments, like 2 for 1 deals which make these machines a real killer (a $500 brand new sun workstation is far more attractive than any dell feecee, plus most of our cad pakages run on solaris)
Also these workstations are geared towards entry level tasks, like development, some cad stuff (EDA), and of course for academic use. Since it is easier to deploy a bunch of blades to replace your existing suns in most university labs, than try to roll down a bunch of linux boxen.
<p>
I use to work for Sun. I use to own a SunBlade 100. And I still own SUNW stock.
</p>
<p>
What the hell is Sun doing???! A 650 Mhz machine for $3000+ ?? Please!! For that price, I could get a dual 1.25 GHz G4. Plenty of Linux zealots would still think I over spent.
</p>
<p>
Just who are these expensive, low-end machines targetted at? They are too low performance for any CAD work. There’s nothing it can do that a much cheaper Linux cannot. The only thing would be to develope Solaris specific software. But if that is the target market, Sun should be selling these machines at cost if not at a lost. And a couple of grands for C/C++ compilers in this day and age is just plain fucking ridiculous!
</p>
<p>
Wake up, Scott!
</p>
Javi, you can have your opinion and I have mine: The Blade 100/150 are slow and expensive for almost anything.
I don’t see the point (other than running Solaris 9 on a SPARC CPU) of having those instead of getting a much cheaper x86 box with either Red Hat 8 or FreeBSD.
“Can someone tell me how a $3000+ Blade 150 is better than than a $1000 with linux?”
It probably isn’t for most things.
Of course, there are companies who simply want to deal with a big corporation and the support that they can provide. Sun Microsystems fits that bill, regardless of the technical merits of Solaris in comparison to things like GNU/Linux and the BSDs.
It’s funny, in a way. There are so many people out there who see GNU/Linux (and to a lesser degree, BSD) as a way to down Microsoft but in the end, it will be Unix vendors like Sun and SGI who will probably feel the biggest pinch.
Hi Eugenia,
mind to share your sources on how to change the resolution and color depth? Is it possible to do that from a non root account?
thanks in advance,
florian lutz
Simple, but good review.
I actually used what used to be RedHat SPARC Linux, I don’t believe they make it anymore, and it felt faster than Solaris 8 on an older SPARCStation. If I remember correctly, it ran Gnome, and it felt okay usage-wise.
Still, Sun is spending R&D money in I don’t know what. Believe me, if they had good, cost effective products, I would be all over there. But in reality, they don’t. Yes, I do like and use Java. But if Java only worked on Solaris, I wouldn’t even look at it. Sun needs to make major changes with regards to what they are saying to the public and what they are really doing. I was expecting Solaris 9 to be something new. A major change worth my attention. Now they are saying that version 10 will be the one.
I started to use Solaris before Linux in the mid-90s. But I found it very incomplete, hard to configure, and very expensive. I remember a new SPARC workstation that the division where I was working at bought for $20k. What a rip off! It ran version 2.5.1. And in all truth I can say that in overall what you get from them years later is the same thing. How many tools have I found that are unusable by any sane person.
Sun needs to focus on usability, if they want to survive. They should forget about everything else and make what the already have easier to use.
>mind to share your sources on how to change the resolution and color depth?
It’s been a while when I did that (about 3 weeks ago). So, the Blade 100s and small 150s can change the res on the command line with the fbconfig utility. For my model, because it had a real gfx card (not onboard) I had to use another utility, called XXXconfig (can’tremember the 3 characters in the begining of the word sorry, and I don’t have the SPARC machine anymore to check it out).
So, you can say something like XXXconfig 1600x1200x85 or something and for the color, there is another switch (but the wording they use for it in the help is not obvious at all that it is for # of colors!!)
> Is it possible to do that from a non root account?
No idea. I only did it twice, as root (it is not something you do everyday
.
Sun is focusing on Servers, they don’t really care about norml users, people who use SUN computers are meant to be used in mission critical enviroments like banks, hospitals, planes,s ervers, etc. They are usually run by very experienced system administrators.
These machines can have hundreds of CPUS also, something no other OS can do, and they take up little space if tehy are put as racks. YOu can even replace hardware like a graphics card without ever shutting it down.
They also have some of the est support available.
Yes, but the Blade 100/150 IS NOT one of these machines you describe here. The Blades are essentially PCs. With a SPARC CPU.
To change the resolution on a SPARC, it depends on the graphics card, but the syntax is usually the same:
<Graphics Card Type>config -res <resolution>. The resolution includes a refresh rate, for instance:
ffbconfig -res 1280x1024x76
(1280×1024 @ 76Hz)
To change the color depth, you have to edit the /etc/dt/config/Xservers, if it doesn’t exist, look at /usr/dt/config/Xservers. You add an entry to the command on the last line that looks like ‘defdepth ##’.
And yes, unless your SysAdmin has changed things, you have to have root access to change resolution / colordepth.
As for the purpose of these systems, they are made for people who need them. We run 95% Solaris for our production systems, and its nice to have a somewhat inexpensive system to use for admin/testing/development. Why not use X86/Linux? I can’t compile my SPARC programs on Linux, and Linux on X86 can not handle some of the things we do to SPARC in production (large multi-threaded apps manipulating multiple 2GB+ images).
And that price is list price, so, if you talk to ANY reseller, look to get 20% or so off the list price, depending on the reseller and how much they need your money. Yes, that is still more than a beige-box clone with Linux, but again, there are times where you need it. I’ve got an Ultra 10 and a SunBlade 100 sitting right next to my Dell Optiplex GX240 running Crux linux. Use the right tool for the job at hand.
As for the performance, I agree with Eugenia. Graphics wise, its pretty slow, always has been for most things. But there are still times where you just need a Sun system. Command-line apps (and some graphical ones) run more than fast enough.
(And yes, for our crunching needs, we are looking at linux clusters, but we’ve not progressed beyond the thinking stage, but even the linux cluster might have some problems, mainly because of the x86 architecture.)
SMF
Hi Eugenia,
Tell me one more time: why couldn’t you use linux/*BSD on this blade ? There are some ports of some distributions for tis architecture.(they might be, in some degree, ‘devel’ distro’s)
I think there is no sense in comparing linux and solaris.
Let’s try to compare Linux on sparc64 and Linux on x86.
best regards
Michal
Granted my (and Javi’s, apparently) opinions are only backed up by the environments we work in professionally… and get paid for.
Hey… no one will argue that an Intel architecture will give you more bang for the buck. Its all about being easy to deploy your code out there on an E450 or what have you.
Running Linux blades might be cost effective for a development team… but of course the goal is to create SPARC executables not Intel.
🙂
I also worked for a while (professionally) where the development team each had an RS/6000 AIX box. I suppose you would recommend our team use Linux, too?
The the drivers for equipment purchases are somewhat different for a business than for a consumer or hobbiest.
Ahhhh, I’m rambling and don’t know what I’m talking about…
(apologies)
Quack! Quack! Quack!
I used to use Sun HW to design ASICs for many years. Sun is still in that biz & others because
1) the HW has been 64bits for some time, and many CAD EDA SW absolutely need to bang multi Gigabyte databases around not doable on x86 yet.
2) the CAD SW often costs 6 fig just for annual licenses dwarfs the HW costs (even as expensive as Sun is) and most importantly
3) it handles heavy loads with out falling over. The jobs often run for days or even weeks, 6-12 month design schedules simply don’t leave space for restarting the jobs.
Now when 64bit x86 is released and can be made into rock solid reliable workstations & servers at the Sun/HP quality levels, that strikes 1).
When the high end CAD SW has been ported to RH 64bit ed, that strikes 2). So far only the lite lower cost EDA SW runs on 32bit RH.
When RH can run the kind of loads Solaris handles, that strikes 3).
So Sun has a few more years, Hammers will take a little while to prove themselves, then RH and the CAD/EDA vendors have to follow.
If you look at the supercomputing needs of say the Bioinformatics world, Suns will be more and more relegated to hosting FPGA accelerators that do the real heavy lifting but that is also still a very immature field.
The writing is on the wall IMHO atleast for Sparc though, its holding back performance computing. Of course there are other markets like the .com world.
All the comments people have said so far are relevant both pro and con. Sun really needs to move off of the Ultrasparc II chip for anything but embedded and true blade environments where things like power consumption have more weight than raw CPU power. However one thing to consider with these entry level workstations is that they are true 64 bit environments. While this doesn’t affect most everyday folks is does have a play in various apps that need the 64 bit capabilites – not so much for server like tasks but for simulations, mathematical calculations, etc. You can’t even boot into 32 bit mode on Sun Blades now. Also don’t under estimate the power of binary compatibilty as one poster mentioned – no where else in the industry can you develop an app and have it run on 1 to 106 CPUs without a recompile. That compatibility up and down Sun’s line has always been a great strength. Many people are willing to trade raw power for that type of flexibility. That said Sun can’t move fast enough to come out with UltraSparc IIIi chip to better compete at the entry level for workstations.
I really think this machine is pretty much a stopgap to try to keep already existing Sun customers with Sun. It’s pretty obvious that even their traditional market has been starting to look at Linux.
My question is: what is Sun doing to try to expand their market share? With systems like this it seems like they’ve really given up, unless they’re going to release something more preemptive before the x86-64 platform stabilizes.
jay said:
> What the hell is Sun doing???! A 650 Mhz machine for $3000+
> ?? Please!! For that price, I could get a dual 1.25 GHz G4.
> Plenty of Linux zealots would still think I over spent.
keep in mind that you cannot compare the clock speed of one sort of processor to another, i.e. a 650 mhz sparc does not equal a 650 mhz intel, motorola, or anything else. only the benchmark tests can be used to make these kind of comparisions.
There is no such concept has bios in a sun blade (BIOS: Basic Input Output S (?)).
Sun machine, like macs come with OpenFirmware. OpenFirmware is far from being baisc, it’s a Forth interpreter, meaning that without having an OS you’re able to play pong (see machack 3 years ago), meaning you’re not tied up with one processor achitecture for you expension cards.
—
http://islande.hirlimann.net
i don’t know their definition much, but i know they’re different.
i’ve one Sun U10 at work (ultrasparc II 233MHz),
and i like to run SETI@Home by night when i wasn’t there.
it can gerenate more work units per same period of time than PC 600MHz besides.
but well, surfing web with FLASH graphic / watching movie on PC is a LOT faster!!
I just wanted to make a silly comment about the Solaris UI. The screenshots provided are very plain and boring, and, don’t really make it look like Solaris has much of a look and feel. CDE looks like CDE on any other UNIX, and Solaris Gnome looks like Gnome on Linux. The only recognizably Sun looking widgets are the Java metal ones (see the audio control window in the first screenshot). Is Sun planning on integrating the metal look into their Gnome desktop, or are they going to keep it like it is in the screenshot (vanilla gnome)? It seems to me that it would be a waste to not include the metal look when they have worked so hard to integrate it into Java and Swing. Another bonus is that it would give the Sun a unique and identifiably Sun look as well as making all apps (native and Java ones) all look consitant.
Oh well, just making a comment.
Skipp
Sun hardware is just too darn expensive to buy new. But with lots of old but still great systems going for a few hundred dollars on Ebay, it’s worth looking into. I recently picked up a dual 300mhz Ultra 2 Creator, and with Linux on it, it is really a pretty nice machine. Gnome under Solaris ran pretty slowly, but Windowmaker under Suse 7.3 is snappy, and it is a great system for experimenting with SMP and 64 bit computing.
So maybe the Blade isn’t something you’d want to sink your cash into for geek den at home or even for your small business office, but maybe look into one of the older systems on Ebay. They really do make pretty good servers for miscellaneous development or intranet stuff.
but all Sun WS suck (given the price/performance ratio).
At my last job I had a Sun Blade 2000 in the ‘large variety’… That’s quite something different from that lil pesky blade150. To make it clear: Dual Sparc CPU, tons of RAM, 72G Fibrechannel disk.
guess what, an intel p4 running at 1500MHz, cranking around in Win2k while having only 128M ram, and the harddiskt wasn’t even in UDMA mode due to a broken cable, ‘felt’ much faster, and in fact was faster (twice as fast at setiathome, no other benchmarks done).
’nuff said.
bye,
[L]
There are two key things to remember when considering the SunBlade150 performance.
1) It is running Solaris
2) It is true 64bit
Solaris is designed to perform best in a multi processor environment performing massive numbers of threads without hitting bottlenecks, as such it does not perfrom well in a single processor limited thread environment. As stated by Eugena, Linux can only dream of having the same capability. The reality is that you can’t really focus on both. Either you have 1 processor running fast and the others running incrementally slower or you have 1 processor running slow with overhead task and the next 99 flying.
It is a true 64 bit machine and for those who work with applications the benefit from a 64bit environment understand the value in have the 1-100 cpu scalability capability.
If you want to see Gnome on Solaris fly then get a SunRay thin client with a Enterprise server on the backend with 1000 users on it and then try and do the same with Linux or NT, sorry but there is only one solution that can currently handle that.
I have an sun workstation for home use, and also found gnome2 pretty much unuseable. CDE is annoying, but Solaris9 also includes native support for using WindowMaker, which is absolutely the way to go. It’s nearly as beautiful and
hardly suffers at all from excessive bloat, unlike gnome2 on
solaris at the moment. Sun workstations are generally
awesome though, and for software development and network services solaris-on-sparc is a joy. Almost all the favorite open-source/gnu apps are present as well.
I have a sun blade 100, and I think it performs well, I outfitted it with memory from crucial.com so I wasn’t raped by Sun…. That was really the only upgrade I felt needed to be done.
Gnome2 performance just plain sucks, but once I compiled KDE3 on it, it seems to perform as well as CDE… Nautilus is slow on linux / x86 if you ask me…
As for packages, gcc, gimp, etc. can be downloaded from sunfreeware.com and installed using pkgadd no problem, much easier than rpm in my opinion. Also, these packages are on the supplimental software CD that comes with the Solaris Distribution, and are also downloadable from sun’s site… ..no need to apt-get anything…
-Josh
At my previous job we had 13 Blade 100’s (standard configuration, 128 MB RAM, 20 GB disk). Performance even after applying Solaris 8 4/01 through JumpStart was poor. We could not stop the systems from paging until we inserted another 128 MB DIMM (on one machine).
Another thing I thought was odd was that when we added a 60 GB 5400 RPM hard disk (yeah I know “what”) to each Blade as secondary master, the performance improved even on the “standard configuration” Blades!
To get good performance out of a Blade 100 or 150 I would probably remove the existing Seagate drive and replace it with a pair of Western Digital Special Edition drives and max out the RAM. There is also a fair amount of tweaking you have to do to get Solaris to run nicely, and I am sure that was not done on the review machine. That is why I prefer my Ultra 2 and 30 at home, less effort, better results.
As far as Gnome goes, I downloaded the Beta 3 and the Media Libraries that is supposed to make Gnome faster, performance on my Ultra 1 Creator was a joke! Hopefully Sun will “get it together” before they actually release Gnome (especially for Solaris 10).
but my post is modded down. You can read it if you go to the world below, by clicking on the “moderated down” link…..
How well does this thing run java apps?
This “review” of the Sun Blade 150 is really much more of a review of Solaris 9 than the actual machine (witch can run Solaris, OpenBSD, Linux… whatever). I would be more concerned with I/O through put numbers, file transfer times and other such specs in a hardware review. Your $3K+ is buying the machine not the OS, as it is a free download for single CPU systems.
/KRM
FreeBSD now works on the ultrasparc platform, allthough I think they are a little ways away from having all of the ports collection working.
You can get all kinds of Solaris software at http://www.sunfreeware.com including all of the GNU utilities. All of them in easy to install package format.
I am a Unix System Administrator and I have a SunBlade100 at my desk. I flip between CDE, Gnome 2.0, and remotely XDMing into a Linux box (for KDE) and the performance is about the same for all (but I don’t do a lot of gfx-intensive stuff). I
t is very nice to be able to work on scripts and programs on my small box that I can be sure would work on any Sun at my site. That’s the beauty of Solaris… I can scale programs from a 8 year old Sparc10 up to a SunFire all on Solaris 8 and they will work. There are many reasons companies with $$ use Solaris for servers over Linux.
Phelk: on GNOME performance on SunRay
my office runs SunRay, i agreed that GNOME on SunRay (backed with enterprise server) is a little bit faster than on my U10. Anyway, it still a bit slower than CDE .. of course, expected behavior IMHO.
Josh: on apt-get
(as you may already known) actually, Solaris has something quite similar to apt-get, it is pkg-get .. i never tried it, but instruction about it is on your mentioned web — http://www.sunfreeware.com
Ludovic Hirlimann: on Firmware/BIOS
you’re right! we can do many useful things at ‘ok’ prompt
You might want to download the sun mlib package which is suggested in the install documentation for beta 3. This enables gnome to use the UltraSPARC’s vis instruction set for GUI rendering and you would be surprised at the perfromance gain. I can clearlty see the gain on my 440mhz ultra 10 i am sure the 650 mhz blade 150 will be better. If only reviewers read documentation,Sigh.
I have been running gnome on solaris 9 since 1.4 beta. With 2 beta 2 my workstation was logged in for 62 days and all I would do is unlock and lock my screen everyday from 9-5. This is on a dual head Ultra10 by the way and not one crash with heavy use.
cheers
jon said:
“keep in mind that you cannot compare the clock speed of one sort of processor to another, i.e. a 650 mhz sparc does not equal a 650 mhz intel, motorola, or anything else. only the benchmark tests can be used to make these kind of comparisions.”
Oh, please! Everyone has heard of the so called “megahertz myth” by now. Not to mention I had a formal CS education.
But come on, tell me you don’t seriously believe a 650 MHz UltraSPARC can perform anywhere near a 3.6 GHz Intel. Apple has been trying to educate the public about the megahertz myth, but even the G4 I was comparing the SunBlade to has a clock speed of 1.25 Ghz. That’s almost twice that of the 650 MHz SunBlade, and there are TWO processors! Ok, fine, you picky asshole, SMP don’t scale linearly, but still!
Should have sold my SUNW when I had the chance.
Eugenia, how was the Fuel ? Any reviews of that, or did I miss that ?
What were the specs ?
I got the Fuel for a month, for an SGI article that will come out on Monday. This was the middle range Fuel, not the “cheap” one. 😉
SGI guys came in today and got it back just 2 hours ago.
Very slick machine and fast (600 Mhz), 4DWM is really fast on it. Gnome 1.4.1 is very slow on redrawings though (I didn’t have Gnome2 on it, but the faster Gnome 1.4.1. While Gnome 1.4.1 is responsive much better than the Gnome2 on the Blade, its redraws are terrible)!
Thanks for the info. Can’t wait to read the review.
You get to play around with some really cool hardware. Shame you have to give it back.
I found the review interesting, but I wasn’t quite sure what the point of it was. Yes, Solaris can be a PITA to install packages on, but Solaris/Unix admins have no problems doing so.
As for Gnome2 – come on, when isn’t gnome (or KDE for that matter) slow? A lot of people don’t ever want to buy the best and biggest hardware just to be able to run a ‘better’ desktop management package. Much as I periodically use both, I usually end up resorting to window managers such as IceWM in most circumstances – my general thoughts being that the CPU is _mine_, not the desktop manager’s. In that sense gnome/kde can be useful for Windows users switching because they’re used to all sorts of weird pauses and slow-downs when they launch an app.
I’d be interested if someone at OsNews with a Solaris background who’s not particularly interested in Gnome2 could offer a counter-review to balance things somewhat…
What planet are you from?
There are about 12,000 applications available for SPARC/Solaris, and about 7,000 of these are certified on Solaris 8.
Virtually every open source application out there is available for SPARC/Solaris. Someone mentioned sunfreeware.com. Sun also includes a disk full of freeware with Solaris.
And I just don’t get your evaluation. Changing the resolution? Changing the color depth? UNIX workstations are not toys to play with. Generally the resolution and color depth on the frame buffer is set to the optimum for the card. The monitor is designed to work with the card. Changing the resolution is difficult because there is little need to change it. Of course you may need to change the resolution if you have a specilized monitor, but in most cases the defaults work fine.
As for installing software, if it is in a Solaris package format, you can either use the pkgadd command line, or the Solaris Management Console.
The Sun Blade 150 may not be a speed demon, but with 256 MB RAM it will run circles around the old Ultra 10. And there are few desktops that you could load up Oracle 8i and Netscape Application Server to test a web application. I have done this on an Ultra 5, so I know it can be done.
i use a Sun Blade 100. Originally shipped with 128mb RAM and 20GB, we purchased upgrades of an addition 128mb and another hard drive.
gnome beta 3 from Sun runs ok, but as Eugenia mentions cpu use can go up dragging stuff around.
i’d also recommend getting the mlib referred to in a previous post.
adding packages is easy if you have root access. pkgadd -d ./packagename so whoever has that problem might be trying without being root.
i’d recommend upgrading the RAM to 512mb and if you are going to use an IDE such as NetBeans to do some java development then i’d recommend a minimum of 750mb.
See if you can source it elsewhere without voiding your warranty because it ain’t cheap from Sun.
But it all depends what you use your Blade for. I administer other servers and compile on other better spec’d servers unless i am compiling something for my own Blade.
But……BeOS on a dual 466 Celeron is still quicker at doing what i want to do most of the time.
cheers
peter
You mentioned that the Java apps didn’t look much like the motif underneath. I’d expect if they were using motif l&f instead of metal things wouldn’t be too dissimilar. After all, the motif AWT and Swing motif l&f were written for Sun machines so that they could leverage Windows Java coders to stealthily write native-looking apps for Solaris.
It would be in Sun’s interest for Gnome AWT peers to appear soon. For one, it would modernise Solaris by freeing them from Motif. More importantly, it would galvanise their troups in the NetBeans/Eclipse war. After all, if the AWT also used gtk underneath, why bother with SWT?
Sorry, but I do not think you are qualified to review this hardware. People buy Sun workstations for serious work – mechanical and electronic engineering, scientific visualization, software development, financial modelling. No-one cares how easy it is to change the screen resolution, or how well a beta copy of a window manager performs. Not only that, but I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve installed from sunfreeware.com and it’s literally as simple as gunzip and pkgadd.
The only way to review a system is to use it for its purpose, and to do that, you have to know how to do that. Tell us how well it runs Mathematica or Pro/E (if you’ve even heard of those). Until then, stick to PC toys.
It was really just comments on the machine. A review of a workstation should include some real performance benchmarks, not just “it felt slow” or “it was okay”. Some performance comparisons would also have been nice.
For everyday use there is no reason to get a Sun workstation, although you can surely pick them up cheaper than $3000. Just get the small version and buy your own PC133 RAM. The real reason to buy a Sun is if you are running Cadence or CAD packages that only run on Sparc. If you are just going to browse the web and send/receive email get a Linux box.
If you are looking to run a nice Gnome desktop on a Sparc, you should check out Ximian Gnome. It is still using Gnome 1.4 but it looks good and performs well on the Sun Blade. I would not recommend it so much on the slower Sparc II’s, Nautilus and gdm are dogs on them.
>Tell us how well it runs Mathematica or Pro/E
Tell ME where to download demos or samples of these apps then. I know there are demos for Windows and Mac for CAD and 3D apps and other such stuff.
TELL *ME* where to download such stuff FOR Solaris!! AND THEN come back to me and tell me that I didn’t test it rihgt.
I posted a while ago about the MLIB package and how it improves performance of Gnome 2 beta 3 on Available from suns website. Can you rerun you gnome after installing the package.
It is available for free download. It is clearly mentioned in the Installation guide for beta 3. Applications not using available hardware features might not perform optimally on the platform. You can’t blame the platform for that.
From the installation guide that should be in the install directory:
MediaLib Library
You can boost the performance and overall responsiveness of the GNOME 2.0 Beta 3 desktop by installing the mediaLib[tm] graphics acceleration library. The mediaLib library, if present, is used in GTK+ functions to speed up common graphics functions. The mediaLib library is available for the Solaris 8 Operating Environment or the Solaris 9 Operating Environment. The mediaLib library takes advantage of the VIS[tm] Instruction Set on UltraSparc[tm] machines for further speed improvement.
You can download the mediaLib library from the following location:
http://www.sun.com/processors/vis/mlibfiles.html
You can find information about mediaLib at the following location:
http://www.sun.com/processors/vis/mlib.html
You can find information about VIS in the following location:
http://www.sun.com/processors/vis/
You can use the following mediaLib libraries with the GNOME 2.0 Beta 3 desktop:
SUNWmlibl
Full install: all mediaLib functions
SUNWmlibi
Partial install: mediaLib imaging functions only
I work for sun and my comments are my own and not indicative of the stance and are *not OFFICIAL” responses of Sun Microsystems Inc.
Eugenia, the demo programs are usually sent out on a CD. Sun Solutions is one such CD that normally comes with the computers from Sun and is available for free. You can subscribe to it too. If the system you got was new then the Sun Solutions CD with the demo programs was probably tossed to the side forgotten. I do that too 🙂 Demos are available for almost everything.
I like seeing info on Sun hardware being used by folks in the outside world but I have to agree that you didn’t really cover the Blade for its intended use. Most of the article was just Gnome stuff, you didn’t really use the system. It was kind of like when Anand reviewed an Oxygen video card 🙂 You can bet most of his readers thought it was grossly overpriced and slow but few of them really knew what it was used for.
Ximian Gnome does run better on Solaris if you’re actually interested in that stuff. I use CDE myself but many younger or newer users like Gnome. I don’t but that’s a personal preference. I use Windowmaker in Linux.
You didn’t mention Solaris plug and play capabilities. Pop in new hardware, do a boot -r and the hardware is ready for use when the system comes up. Just minor configuration is needed like if it’s a new quad ethernet card it’ll need network information. You could have spoken a bit on what can be done on the box when there is no OS available or before the OS loads (at the ok prompt). You could have also mentioned the extensive documentation available online from Sun including the hardware and all the patches, updates etc at sunsolve.sun.com too.
Oh well, at least you got to fool with a low end box for a bit. I agree that the Sparc boxes don’t “feel” fast but that’s not what they’re used for.
PCs are like Ferrari’s, fast and always breaking down.
Sun computers are like Mack trucks, it might not be fast but it’ll carry a big load and run forever.
>Can you rerun you gnome after installing the package
No, I CAN’T. The machine was returned to Sun last Monday!
>You didn’t mention Solaris plug and play capabilities
You GOT to be kidding me! I actually forgot to write about this in the article, thank you for reminding me!
My husband put in another USB mouse (which supposedly the whole point of USB is to be hot pluggable) and the cursor froze!!! I had to completely reboot the machine for the new mouse to work. Duh! This is year 2002 people.
Do you seriously believe this comment has any technical merit? Do you not know that such a thing can happen for a million reasons, and has nothing to do with Bill Viand’s comment at all. Now put your finger on your forehead and think.
It’s good you forgot to write that comment in the article, it would have detracted from the quality, not added.
And about my post that you modded down: I understand that it was too long, but in hindsight you might regret it (since apparently people don’t read the stuff in the “moderated down” link), because it and your answer to it clarified a few important points, namely:
a) that you needed apt-get just because of one application which didn’t have a Solaris package done, yet. Packaging for Solaris is something that all the Solaris port maintainers do, soonr or later.
b) that you knew of the CD containing the Solaris ports of opensource stuff
Now, while this would reveal that you were exaggerating when you said that there are no or very few Solaris ports of freeware, and that you didn’t really have to install apt-get (as 99.999% of Solaris users never had to install apt-get), it would also reveal that you were not completely lost and hapless, and would have given to your review and yourself a more serious tone overall.
Can you please send me solaris wallpaper you used in GNOME? Or put it on FTP please.
[email protected]
> Tell ME where to download demos or samples of these apps then.
These are not applications that you can just “play with”. If you don’t know how to use them, you’ll start them up and then stare at them in confusion. What you should have done is got the equipment, then found a professional workstation user to really give it a workout with the sort of applications that people buy Suns for in the first place. A workstation is not a PC and cannot be reviewed like one.
If you really want to see hotplug and Dynamic Reconfiguration that Solaris can do. Try pulling out an entire processor board out of a enterprise class Sun machine and watch in amazement as the system keeps on going with out reboots. I would love to see windows or linux do that.
Or may be even handle a load of 2500 processes on a dual CPU machine. We have a sun ray server serving 60 users running EE CMOS apps, netscape, staroffice and what not with atleat 2500 processes and 4000 threads running at once and it doesn’t even break a sweat with loads like 3.5 max. Do some real comparison rather than saying a app developed for one platform and an incomplete port of another platform don’t compare well.
Solaris is the only platform after linux where linux apps compile and run with out a hitch. Try ogle or xine or any of them I have compiled them myself. Solaris x86 even comes with lxrun which can run linux apps unmodified from an ext2 filesystem. From the review it doesn’t seem like you even tried to compile a program.
Your review was not a linux comparison review FYI. It was a workstation review. You should put in effort to try and compile a few apps on solaris and point out the problems if any.
As per the review Eugenia only had the Blade 150 for a week! Do you really think she had enough time for an indepth review. Time constraints would have made anything more than a brief overview of the system impossible. As for Pro/E and other other professional apps: it should be obvious the Blade 150 isn’t intended for these programs, that’s to domain of >$10,000 UltraSPARC III workstations.
The Blade 150 seems best suited for Solaris server admins and developers running their development environment locally, while compiling on a server. It could also make a good low end server (for example, ace’s hardware use a Blade 100 as their web server, http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=45000240)
I also found the forum posts relating actual experiences using Blade 100/150’s quite interesting too. If it came with an AGP 4x/8x slot and GeForce/Radeon drivers for decent graphics at a reasonable price, the Blade 150 would make a nice novelty desktop.
–Raging Dragon