Flutterby™! : Solaris on Intel: gone 2002-01-09 18:35:59+00

Solaris on Intel: gone

2002-01-09 18:35:59+00 by Dan Lyke 5 comments

Some of you will remember my previous whining about Solaris versus Linux.The saga has continued, currently my slower development Linux box is outperforming the faster Solaris production box (my guess is because of network performance), and all the alleged problems that were supposed to materialize on the Linux machine haven't; it deals with large file systems fine, yeah, threading clutters the process list a bit, but whatever.Now Linux World claims Sun will drop Intel from Solaris 9. No great surprise here.

Solaris is just plain slow. Ask Meuon about who well his SparcStation runs Linux! Even on their own hardware, Sun doesn't keep up. If you look at the issues with the Linux kernel that advocates of other forms of *nix point out, you'll find very well thought out arguments from Linus on why the Linux kernel won't support those features. My experience, so far, has been that Linus is almost always right. Sometimes I wonder what the kernel would be like if Linus hadn't added SMP support, like he intened but Digital paid him to do.

Wow.. I've been referenced on Flutterby! But yes.. Even Sparc's run Linux better than Slowlaris. It's not it's fault, Linux says FOO to backwards compatibility and Slowlaris has been around a long time. Whats sad is that nice Sparc 20 barely makes a decent web browser, even under Linux. Intel hardware is cheap and plentiful... and getting VERY fast.

I'm running some development on an Enterprise 420. When I got the box from the IS guy, I got the Solaris8 disks with every intention of installing it permanently. However, after the Solaris8 install and some runs with the gcc compiler my download of the RedHat 6.2 Sparc .iso was finished.

Temptation got the best of me, and it's been running RH ever since. fast, fast, fast.. I sure wish gcc had sparc64 optimizations...

Of course, I am an inherent contradiction. I am running Irix on my Indy and doubt I'll run anything else. After using KDE full time for a year and Gnome for almost as long (of course the WinX GUI has been in my pallette of UIs as long as it has existed), I find the Irix/Motif UI to be incredibly good. Fortunately, SGI has just enough chutzpah to release their GUI into OpenSource before they gasp their dying breath... For now, I dream of a dual-500Mhz R12K Octance, but my Indy keeps chugging along.

I realized why I like this box so much. It's the same reason I am drawn to the late 60's/early 70's Porsche 911s. All of the fantastic, hi-tech built into the machine has since been integrated into commodity hardware. It's just the novelty of running the harware that defined the technology. And both SGI and Porsche did it with a certain pannache. The cars are as much fun to drive as the computers are to operate!

Oh no.. Eric has become Sid from UserFriendly. He'll be touting the virtuses of punch cards next.

Flushy, the Debian and SUSE Sparc distributions are much more current than the RH 6.2 for Sparc. SUSE was just a little weird for me, but very complete. Debian reminds me of the old Slackware days: Minimalist and very good.