solarix 10 x86?

[ncage]

Anyone tried it? How was the hardware compatibility for general hardware? How did you like it compared to linux? Looking for opinions here.

 

[drag]

Solaris hardware compatability is much less then Linux. Probably also slower.

See http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/ For details. Depending on what you want you may have to buy drivers for it to work.

OpenSolaris project, if it's attracted lots of developers, may have hardware that is supported that isn't supported in Solaris 10 proper. But many things that Solaris 10 proper will support may or may not nessicarially make it into OpenSolaris due to licensing issues. I can't comment on the details since I don't use Solaris for anything.

(once it supports Xen then I'll definately give a try, then hardware issues are a non-issue (for myself I just don't have a spare machine) due to hardware abstractions and Linux.)

 

[sourceninja]

I found it annoying to setup and to use. And that is comming from someone who has lots of exp on sun boxes here at work. x86 solaris just sucks.

 

[thesix]

Anyone tried it?

I run both Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris at home.

How was the hardware compatibility for general hardware?

Worse than Linux. Better than Solaris 9.
What matters is whether it supports the hardwares _you_ want to try it on.
Among the PC lists in your sig, "ASRock 939Dual-Sata2 MB" might not work in Solaris. I don't even know what it is. Solaris 10 has native Nvidia video driver just like in Linux.

How did you like it compared to linux?

Depending on what you do.

For a desktop user, Linux will be more pleasant, because major distributions usually have the lastest/greatest GNOME/KDE versions integrated.
(Open)Solaris by default comes with JDS, which is based on an older version of GNOME, and I don't like the overall look and feel, but then I use Windows as my desktop and work mostly on CLI in *nix.

That's not to say you can't run the lastest released GNOME/KDE version.
Check out this: KDE 3.4.3 IA32/AMD32 and UltraSPARC-II Released .
Also the Nexenta OS brings Debian pkg tool and most current GNU tools to Solaris kernel. Check these screenshots.

On the other hard, if you do Unix/Java programming, or, have strong interest in operating system theories and implementations, or, need a high performance and reliable platform to run your business, Solaris is an excellent platform you dont' wanna miss. Of course, Linux/BSD are all good too.

The community (users + developers) is much smaller than Linux, but you get access to a group of lead developers/architects for various parts of the OS on a single site: OpenSolaris.org