So, who's running Solaris 10 on their desktop?

[HannibalX]

I've never fiddled with Solaris much but I may be inheriting some Solaris related IT duties so I need to become familiar. I have an old desktop (Opteron 185, 4GB, 10k Raptor) to play with. Any specific install procedures I need to be concerned with? Any ideas on how it will run on this hardware? I'll find out soon enough I suppose.

TIA

 

[Arkaign]

It will run like dynamite on that hardware. Solaris is a very "dry" OS though.

 

[lxskllr]

This page might be of use to you...

http://wikis.sun.com/display/SolarisDeveloper/Migrating+from+Linux+to+Solaris+or+OpenSolaris

I don't know anything about OpenSolaris, but wanted to see some screenshots. I haven't found those yet, but I'm still looking.

Edit:
Found screenies. It looks like Ubuntu :^D I guess you could expect that with the Gnome desktop, eh? I'll have to read a bit on it, and see how it differs from Linux.

 

[HannibalX]

Thanks for the link. I've been all over Sun's site but missed that somehow.

I'm installing now. So far everything is very straight forward, almost MS like, dare I say.

 

[Modelworks]

When SGI died in the hardware market I walked away from Solaris and never ever plan to return.

 

[Tristicus]

Hm, I would be interested in trying OpenSolaris out.

 

[HannibalX]

I've been switching between OpenSolaris 2009.06 and Solaris 10. So far so good, everything seems to be "working" in both. The GNOME desktop is familiar in OpenSolaris. I managed to get my NIC working after some time but it was relentlessly complicated.

 

[Nothinman]

So, who's running Solaris 10 on their desktop?

Good god, no. I can't even think of a reason that would make me consider that.

 

[Chiropteran]

When SGI died in the hardware market I walked away from Solaris and never ever plan to return.

I thought SGI machines ran Irix?

 

[HannibalX]

Looks like I need an nVidia card as there are no drivers for ATI cards for OpenSolaris. 2D is supported for almost all chipsets but no 3D or hardware acceleration. Shucks.

 

[Arkaign]

Nvidia has owned *nix for a looooooong time.

 

[Schadenfroh]

Stay away from OpenSolaris' dev version, it is a buggy nightmare.

 

[HannibalX]

Nvidia has owned *nix for a looooooong time.

There are plenty of ATI drivers for Linux... none of which work with OpenSolaris though...

 

[VinDSL]

Looks like I need an nVidia card as there are no drivers for ATI cards for OpenSolaris. 2D is supported for almost all chipsets but no 3D or hardware acceleration. Shucks.

I'm running OpenSolaris 2009.06 on a multi-booted Toshiba lappy -- with an ATI graphic chip -- and it works fine...

OpenSolaris 2009.06 is pretty nice, but the GRUB they use is incompatible with GRUB in Linux. Every time I boot into OpenSolaris, it wipes my Linux GRUB, and I have to rebuild it before booting into Mint 7 and Vista.

Anyway, I just wanted to tell you that OpenSolaris 2009.06 supports ATI on my lappy, so you might want to keep trying... ^_^

 

[HannibalX]

I'm running OpenSolaris 2009.06 on a multi-booted Toshiba lappy -- with an ATI graphic chip -- and it works fine...

OpenSolaris 2009.06 is pretty nice, but the GRUB they use is incompatible with GRUB in Linux. Every time I boot into OpenSolaris, it wipes my Linux GRUB, and I have to rebuild it before booting into Mint 7 and Vista.

Anyway, I just wanted to tell you that OpenSolaris 2009.06 supports ATI on my lappy, so you might want to keep trying... ^_^

2D is supported. 3D is not, for my GPU (X1950 Pro). The hardware compatibility sheet references that 2D is supported, so, the normal GNOME desktop environment does work. However, if you want to run the 3D desktop or run applications with hardware acceleration you can't. I discovered this on the opensolaris forum. If you have other information contrary to this lets have it.

 

[VinDSL]

I think you're right! I didn't see the X1950 Pro listed on the HCL page.

I digress...

While I was looking around the Sun web site, I discovered that Toshiba sells (certain) laptops with OpenSolaris 2009.06 pre-installed from the factory. One model was dual-booted with XP.

Hrm...