Jim wrote in to tell us about Sun posting the latest update of their Solaris/SPARC OS. The update, dated 12/02, is downloadable from the sun website here.
Solaris 9 for SPARC Update Available
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Its not just an update, its the entire OS. You just have to register and you can download 3 newly released ISOs, plus a international ISO and CD labels if you like that stuff.
Well, technically, it is not a brand new OS release, mearly a maintainance and feature update.
Its not real obvious on the web site what has changed in this release?
Here you are:
http://docs.sun.com/db/coll/753.8
Supposed to include a speed increase for such apps as Star/Open Office. Kewlness. Maybe this will make using a Blade desktop more bearable?
~Christopher
Make a *Blade* more bearable? I was thinkning about firing this thing up on some Sun4m’s with 8-bit framebuffers. Gulp.
Well, from what I’ve heard from Eugina(sp?) and others as a desktop running Gnome or KDE its somewhat sluggish though apparently under CDE its just dandy. I think this has more to do with their X-Windows system then the system simply being too slow. I have a laptop that only has a Pentium II 266 mhz that can run Gnome 2 and KDE just fine – somewhat unresponsive under load, but usually quite responsive and quite usable. A 650 mhz UltraSparc IIe must be faster then a PII 266. Perhaps now with XRender support things will be faster and we can expect anti-aliased fonts?
I’ve run Solaris 8 on a sun4m machine before. It actually had a 24-bit framebuffer, but it was too slow to run in 24-bit mode comfortably. Solaris 9 will probably be just fine on a Sun4m machine in 8-bit mode, as long as you have a CPU with some external cache. Just don’t expect netscape to start up very quickly.
I installed KDE from the CD that came with Solaris 8. It’s full of GNU apps compiled and packaged for Solaris.
However, I think Eugenia did not install KDE from there. She downloaded some packages from the ‘net. Maybe the bleeding edge KDE stuff is sluggish on the Blade, maybe because Sun wasn’t involvd in creating the build (unlike the stuff on the extras CD).