Scared of Solaris 10

General Forums Off-topic Chat
#1

I keep getting cold feet about changing to Linux. I was looking at :shock: ReactOS. Then I fell for the “Bananna in the tail pipe” when I watched a Solaris 10 presentation. The features they boast about are numerous. One thing that is not numerous with any of those OSes are … Software. I can see it now:
-dukytyme starts Solaris 10 install process
-installation is almost complete, duky smiles…but then…
-remembers that he DON’T remember where he put those XP Home Edition disks…but oh well, Solaris boasted enough
-ta da, everything looks all cool, clean, fresh, fast and new…yay
-then, duky realizes that his computer is “abnormally” fast because…
He Aint got no software[insert cricket sounds here] :shock:

I have a GNX4 processor that comes with software for…PC and Mac, but not Solaris, or Linux. ReactOS gives me the feeling that they are only going to support 1 or 2 MS applications a year(kidding, kinda).

Is anyone here actually using Solaris and having success with running Blender on it. I think Blender runs on anything. I dunno, just having Blender, OOo, NVU, and the other Open Source lot would be cool enough almost, but Audacity is cool except the latency makes me want to…well, if I wasn’t already bald, I’d pull my hair out again. I am not using an ASIO, I am using USB-midi. If I was going to use ASIO, I have access to a Delta 10 10 and a Behringer I/O. Those seem to support PC/Linux, but…[more crickets here] no Solaris.

I think once I finally wipe Windows off my hard drive, I will start checking out the next OS. I think it will be Solaris if when I call Digitech and ask them if they have a Solaris version of the GNX4 and ProTracks/X-Edit suite. Then it’s all she wrote… Blender and my Guitar is all I need…Well, Water, Blender and my Guitar…Uh, well, bread, water, Blender, guitar…yeah, that’s it.

#2

So - you’re now running on solar power?

#3

Just my 2 cents:

Nvu is terrible – it rewrites your HTML, even when you specifically tell it not to do so. It boasts the Gecko rendering engine, but considering how long they’ve known about that bug (which shouldn’t be that hard to fix), I’m pretty sure that it’s being coded by a couple of chimpanzees.

Matt

#4

[withdraws fangs…unfurrows brows… smiles]

No. Just electricity like most people. Maybe it’s when I try to put more than two sentances together is where I stop making sense. Anyways, I was just babbling about my current attraction to Solaris 10 and a little fear that I won’t have “enough” cool software to play with.

#5

Your signature rocks, dude. :slight_smile:

Anyway, it seems that that’s the major price you pay when switching to Linux right now. I simply split my hard drive into two partitions (one for SuSE and another for XP) so that I can use either one at any time. Don’t throw away all your Windows software just because you want to try another OS. Use both!

#6

I use Solaris 9 at the university and it works very well. I don’t see any reason you wouldn’t be able to install the software you want on it (I think there’s even a Solaris-specific installer for Blender).

Just avoid CDE and get a real WM, like sawfish or KDE.

Hope this helps.

#7

Yeah,
Mon or Tues I’m gonna call DigiTech and propose a software exchange(PC for Solaris). I’d like to have a whole hard drive dedicated to one OS. I have an extra hard drive, but when ever I hook it up, the other becomes inaccessable. I been the tech support route but no change, so I unhooked it. tech support had me pulling out the little stints in the back of my drive and now I don’t remember what slot it even goes in.lol. I could find out, but Solaris just sounds almost too cool to be true.
Oh yeah, there is a Solaris version of Blender, I wonder if it’s working cool, I have not heard anyone complaining about Solaris ever, for anything. The whole “Self Healing” thing is above my head but souned brilliant on thier presentation. It’s like “[exhale]Ahhhhhhh, self healing”…“Solaris, get me a cup of coffee”. lol.

#8

I should add that Solaris is not designed to be a one-user, desktop OS. It can of course be used that way, but it is aimed at business and networked computing (workstations). I don’t think that should worry you though…

#9

yeah, i highly recomend putting gnome or kde on it, not sure if the newest version has them stock, Solaris is nice, its one of the old Unices, cool stuff, if my presumtions are correct, if you dont find a solaris package, you can always compile the source yourself, the only problem you’d run into is linux/bsd only stuff, which, i cant think of, Its a solid OS, personally, i would go for Ubuntu,Fedora or Suse for a desktop *nix, they’re all good though, and if you’re wiling to put in the work, you can do whatever you want with them. literally. I read an article on a fedora powered pinball machine, actually there is a commercial arcade company that makes a bowling game that runs red hat, its sweet. But i digress, just try it out, hey, if its self healing, it wont mind if you rm -R /

#10

Yeah, I am only a sigle user and probably wont ever hook another computer to this one. I just want max power with what I have, I free’d 4 gb by deleting wavs in my project folders(most were 90 mb each) and my computer still chokes when I record acting like I don’t have enough memory. I just think that it was my poor d’loading habits from the past that screw’d my computer…I sometimes feel paranoid like someone eles is copywritting my music right after I record it…lol. because I hear all this grinding from my hard drive. So I am LONG over-due to wipe this drive. And Solaris is looking good to me. The only concern I have, like I said earlier, is the software with my guitarworkstation.
Thanks for all the insight

#11

I’ve installed Solaris 10 thrice now and never did get networking going…I gave up.

#12

All that disk thrashing is just XP doing it’s normal stuff…

Drives me nuts because I can hear it (which is why I have a very quiet drive to begin with…)

You can turn off the file indexing service to reduce it a bit.

Solaris is not designed to be administrator friendly like other unices (Fedora, Urbuntu, etc.) so you have to know something about it to make it work.

You can find system documentation at http://www.sun.com/
This is a cool site also http://www.sunfreeware.com/

Good luck!

#13

Thank you guys for the insight. Turned of file indexing, and disabled the Background Intellegent service, increased the virtual memory paging file(a little); even though it stopped “Summa-tha” grinding, I noticed that my apps are snappier and faster. Woo hoo, I guess I’m ready to try busting out some big-ol- gilligan island waves in the fluid sim, huh? lol.

The Solaris sites from the links are cool. I’m trying to be brave, but I know I have a bit of reading(and understanding) before I rip XP out by the roots. :slight_smile:

Thanks

#14

If you’ve got slocate or locate installed and cron is setup to do this once a day, you’re going to here the same thing in UNIX.

#15

yeah, my computer woke me up one night when it was running updatedb, if you keep it updated it doesnt actually thrash that much though. At least it seems to go really fast unless you’ve made a lot of changes to your drives.

#16

Unix based systems do alot of stuff in thier idle states.

Like defraging and updating. So you will hear the drive taking a spazm.

I use ubuntu, and when I leave my pc for about 30minutes you see the harddrive light going crazy, sorting out my drive space.

#17

Yeah, I just went to Tweak XP a couple days ago and learnd some cool tips. Most the grinding stopped on my drive now. I don’t need File Indexing either. I have 4 gig free, but Now I am trying to stop my PC from taking a Chenney when ever I open somthing. This all started fairly reciently and I assume that I am being exploited. I never hear of Linux users complining about being bogged with spyware. I just need to be brave and just switch. I should load what I want on my other drive and just wipe one just to learn other OSes.
Basicly, I need to stop being a wuss.

#18

Like defraging

hehe, never thought ext2, or ext3 needed defragging that often, and reiser doesnt even have a defrag utility.

On a note about dual booting, personally, i think that the only way to go as far as dual booting goes is keeping the OS’s on separate drives. Either that if you have a bunch of old computers like me, you can always rDesktop into other computers that have windows installed from your old systems to your nice ones to play games/do work that requires windows. I just dont reccomend putting any OS on the same drive as another, It rarely works the way it should, and its always a pain. Personally i literally switch drives if i want to switch to windows. Who wants all that crap anyway, It seems if you want to install anything to make windows actually usable it slows your computer down to a crawl, I’ve got a billion things installed on linux and it runs the same as the day i installed it. Sure you can break linux just as easy as windows, but instead of reinstalling, I just create a new user account, and voiala, its back up to speed.