The vast majority of operating system reviews are the result of a user spending a few days or weeks using a particular operating system and writing about their observations. This review is the result of my continued use of Solaris 10 (previously Solaris Express) from August 2003 to February 2005. Another JumpStart installation improvement is the ability to add non-Solaris packages during the installation of Solaris. In many cases additional software is installed on a system and this takes time, especially if you have to build multiple machines. Using the package keyword in a profile and specifying a path to the package (must be in a SVR4 package format) allows the administrator to install additional software without having to handle CD’s or tapes and controlling what gets installed on each machine. Security Enhancements
Webmin
System Administrator
Part of this was my work as an External Beta Tester for Sun Microsystems. This provided the opportunity for a number of people to test Solaris 10 on a large amount of hardware and software. A number of Sun engineers monitored news groups to gather information about issues with Solaris 10, this helped in fixing bugs that might not have been seen by other testers. Solaris 10 is probably the most tested operating system in recent history.
One advantage of such a relationship is that you can see the how the OS evolves from its early builds to the FCS release. I was also fortunate to be able to test Solaris 10 on both SPARC and Intel machines. An abbreviated list of the equipment I used to evaluate Solaris 10 is as follows:
2 Sun Blade 100’s with a 500 Mhz UltraSPARC II CPU, 1024 and 1152 MB of memory respectively and 20 GB disks
Sun Ultra 10 Creator with a 333 MHz UltraSPARC II CPU, 640 MB of memory and a 120 GB disk
Sun Ultra 30 with a 250 MHz UltraSPARC CPU, 1 GB of memory and an 18 GB disk
Sun Ultra 2 with 2 300 Mhz CPU’s, 1536 MB of memory and 8 9 GB disks in 2 Sun MultiPacks
Dual CPU Pentium III system with 768 MB of memory and 2 160 GB disks
Pentium IV system with 512 MB of memory and 2 40 GB disks
There have been a number of features that Sun has been touting such as DTrace, Solaris Containers (Solaris Zones), Process Rights Management, and Predictive Self-Healing. While these features are important, there are many other features that don’t get as much of the spotlight and are just as important and useful. In a discussion I had with Chris Ratcliffe, Marketing Director at Sun, he pointed out that since there are 600 new features added to Solaris 10 and that there are customers who have no idea that some things can be done with Solaris because the features are unknown to them. I have experienced this myself several times where in discussion with other administrators about a specific problem I would mention a tool and get “huh” as a response. This article will mention some of the “gold” in Solaris 10 that might be passed over for the more highly mentioned features. Understanding that many places might not be able to upgrade to Solaris 10, I will specify features that have been put into Solaris 9 by using (9 12/03), in this case a particular feature can be found in Solaris 9 12/03 release.
Installation Improvements
In the past you used the Software 1 of 2 CD and booted off of the CD to stat the installation, and you never touched Installation CD. With Solaris 10 you receive 4 CD’s (or 1 DVD) and all four have to be used to install the product (unless you choose a custom installation that does not require all of the CD’s. One of the things you might love (or hate) is the WebStart installer that is used for the Software 1 CD. For people not familiar with the WebStart Installer, if you use the Installation CD for Solaris 8 or 9 you would use the Installer. I never cared for it but you do have other installation choices (including text based), so pick the method that you are most comfortable with.
One of the biggest improvements in Solaris 10 (9 4/04) is the ability to create disk mirrors during the installation! Of course this requires a JumpStart server and a custom profile for the machines in question. This feature alone is worth “the price of admission”. For example I built robert2 (an Ultra 2 I use with Oracle) and mirrored the root disk and the four disks needed for Oracle during the installation, as opposed to creating the mirrors separately. Your mileage may vary, in my case it worked because I was using MultiPacks, this might or might not work with D1000’s or T3 arrays. An example profile is below showing the use of the filesys and metadb keywords to set up mirrored disks:
filesys mirror:d10 c1t2d0s0 c2t2d0s0 1024 /
filesys mirror:d20 c1t2d0s1 c2t2d0s1 2048 swap
filesys mirror:d30 c1t2d0s3 c2t2d0s3 2048 /var
filesys mirror:d40 c1t2d0s4 c2t2d0s4 2048 /usr
filesys mirror:d50 c1t2d0s5 c2t2d0s5 1024 /export/home
filesys mirror:d60 c1t3d0s0 c2t3d0s0 8192 /u01
filesys mirror:d70 c1t4d0s0 c2t4d0s0 8192 /u02
metadb c1t2d0s7 size 8192 count 3
metadb c2t2d0s7 size 8192 count 3
metadb c1t3d0s7 size 8192 count 3
metadb c2t3d0s7 size 8192 count 3
metadb c1t4d0s7 size 8192 count 3
metadb c2t4d0s7 size 8192 count 3
An installation method new to Solaris is WAN Boot (9 4/04), where a Solaris machine can be booted and have Solaris installed over a remote network without having Boot Servers installed on every subnet like what is required for JumpStart. WAN Boot requires a client machine that supports WAN Booting or by booting off the Software 1 of 4 CD and loading the wanboot program then proceeding with the installation. A WAN Boot server uses a web server to deliver the OS to clients, this can be done via http or https using certificates.
Most people end up turning on UFS logging to improve performance and help prevent disk related issues when machines are shut down dirty. Now UFS logging is turned on by default, and can be turned off by editing /etc/vfstab, making the appropriate changes, and rebooting.
The Desktop Experience
A lot of noise has been made about Sun’s choice of Gnome as the alternative Graphical User Interface, replacing OpenWindows. Then with Build 69, Sun introduces the Java Desktop System (JDS) to Solaris 10 bringing a new look and functionality. As I tested the OS, I started to really like JDS, it is clean, simple and easy to navigate. Many would say that it has a “Windows” look and feel, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Sun is trying to capture the Enterprise desktop with JDS, as opposed to the typical Unix user. Most Windows users would easily be able to use JDS without much training, and Sun has provided the tools necessary to further customize JDS to meet specific requirements.
For integration with Windows I was able to map a shared directory from my Windows XP laptop to my Ultra 10 in Network Places and create a shortcut to that location without any configuration! The inclusion of Evolution as an e-mail client along with StarOffice makes JDS really sweet. Another thing I liked was the being able to set up a non-PostScript printer without “pulling teeth” to get it done. Using Print Manager I was able to set up my LaserJet 6L connected to a Netgear PS-110 Print Server in under a minute! Anyone familiar with trying to configure a printer on a SVR4 Unix machine will appreciate this.
Service Management Facility
One of the biggest changes to Solaris 10 is the Service Management Facility (SMF), introduced in Build 69 SMF controls the starting and stopping of system and other services. For example previous to Solaris 10 to start the NFS server you would type:
/etc/init.d/nfs.server start
Under SMF you would type:
svcadm enable /network/nfs/server/default
The real benefit of SMF is the ability to automatically restart services based on the configuration of the system. This allows the system administrator to control what can or cannot be restarted by SMF, while you might want syslog to automatically restart, you might not want your Oracle database to be restarted after a dirty shutdown. SMF gives the administrator fine grained control over the starting, stopping, and restarting of services, and can make a system administrator’s life a little easier.
Solaris 10 brings a number of significant changes to improve overall security of the system, Solaris Containers and Security Rights Management have received much of the press. There are other features that contribute greatly to improved security of a Solaris system. Password security has been improved considerably by the inclusion of the following features:
1.A choice of encryption methods for passwords from the default crypt function, to an MD5 encryption that is compatible with BSD and Linux systems, Blowfish, Sun MD5, or a custom written module (9 4/04).
2.A password history can be enabled and hold up to 26 previously used passwords.
3.Solaris 10 allows you to create or use an existing password dictionary to check your passwords against for complexity requirements.
4.Passwords are now checked for complexity requirements that you specify.
About a year ago there was a link to a password dictionary that had 227,000,000 passwords being sent around the BugTrak mailing list. I downloaded the file, extracted it and had a 1 GB dictionary file. Modifying /etc/default/passwd to specify the path to the dictionary, I attempted to use the dictionary on my Ultra 30 and promptly locked the box up for 10 minutes while the password being used was being checked. This is not a fault of Solaris, but a dictionary of that size I would not recommended.
Another cool feature is TCP Wrapped rpcbind, any RPC request can be logged and RPC traffic can be limited to specifc hosts.
To check the integrity of a Solaris system, most administrators use Automated Security Enhancement Tool (ASET) which works, but is not protected from tampering in any way. Sun has addressed that issue with the Basic Audit Reporting Tool (BART) which can be used instead of ASET. BART allows any user to create a manifest of files on a particular machine (only root can create a manifest of the system). ASET requires root or Primary Administrator role level access to work which limits the functionality. BART also uses MD5 checksums for each entry in the manifest, and ASET does not meaning that malicious users would also have to generate an MD5 checksum that matches the manifest for each file they intended to modify, not an easy task.
The firewall software bundled with previous releases of Solaris, Sun Screen has been replaced with IPFilter. It is started by default but is in an unconfigured state, which means remote connections with telnet and SSH will work with no problems.
Bundled Software
Unlike previous releases of Solaris where Sun provided a Companion CD with various tools, Solaris 10 (if a Full Distribution installation is done) comes with 185 packages, 30 of them directly supported by Sun:
Apache http server versions 1.3.33 and 2.0.52
BIND version 9.2
flex version 2.5.4
GNU GCC version 3.4.3
GNU make version 3.80
Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) support and modules for Apache
MySQL database version 4.0.15
Samba version 3.0.4
In the past to get some of this software, you either had to download it from www.sunfreeware.com, www.blastwave.org, use the Software Companion CD, or build it yourself. Of course if you don’t care for Sun’s choices you can always download and install the software of your choice. I see it as a welcome addition to Solaris to include these tools. All you have to do is add /usr/sfw/bin and /usr/sfw/sbin to your PATH and “off you go”. What is interesting about the inclusion of Open Source software with Solaris 10 is what Sun will support. SSH and Samba are fully supported, they might not be the latest version, but this means patches will be provided. Will Sun provide updates for software included in Solaris 10 that is not supported, I don’t know. But I do like the inclusion of the tools, if nothing else it saves the time in trying to find, download, and installing them.
Performance
Solaris 10 GA has not been on the streets for a month and people are already clamoring for benchmarks. I did some testing with iozone (www.iozone.org) on both my SPARC and x86 machines, but chose not to include them, the reasons why are simple:
1.Insufficient time to properly test both platforms correctly before publication using th GA Release.
2.Since there have been issues raised as to whether there would be a difference in how a benchmark would respond based on which compiler was used. Again I did not have sufficient time to test that theory to see if there was a significant difference between GCC and Sun Studio.
3.The performance of 7+ year old SPARC hardware is hardly a fair test for Solaris 10 considering that Solaris 10 is optimized for the UltraSPARC III or better CPU. Many of the SCSI systems ship with internal Fibre Channel disks that in my experience (SunFire V480) are really fast, especially after tuning maxphys.
Conclusion
I think that Sun has put some really nice touches on Solaris 10 that make it a better operating system for both administrators and users. The security enhancements are a long time coming, but are worth the wait. Is Solaris 10 perfect, in a word no it is not. But for most uses, including a a desktop OS I think Solaris 10 is a huge improvement over previous releases.
If you would like to see your thoughts or experiences with technology published, please consider writing an article for OSNews.
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 http://www.sunfreeware.com, http://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?