Re: Thinking about upgrading to Solaris 10

From: Richard B. Gilbert (rgilbert88_at_comcast.net)
Date: 01/24/05 

Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2005 21:29:43 -0500

Greg Menke wrote:

>"Richard B. Gilbert" <rgilbert88@comcast.net> writes:
>
>
>>I'm sure the trivial input filter would have solved the problem if I
>>had been able to find one or known how to write one. I found
>>virtually nothing in Sun's documentation to guide me! What I did
>>find didn't help or didn't work. HP laser printers are everywhere.
>>If Solaris supplies anything in the way of support for them, it's
>>practically invisible. I suspect that any printer that required both
>>a carriage return and a linefeed for each line (I think that's most
>>printers) would have presented similar problems.
>>
>>The solutions are probably obvious to the experienced sysadmin. To
>>the newbie, it not obvious how to do it nor is it obvioius how to find
>>out, other than to find someone who knows and ask him! I tried asking
>>and was told about a filter called something like "unix-to-dos".
>>Someone else promptly denounced that recommendation as an abomination!
>>The docmentation tells you to install a filter but nothing about which
>>filters are available, if any, and nothing about writing a filter.
>>
>> Installing and configuring printers is one of the areas where Windoze
>>is clearly superior!
>>
>>
>
>The only trouble I've had with getting jetdirect or lpt port HP
>printers going with Solaris has been me setting things up wrong.
>That, and I had to slow down the Ultra 60's parallel port so the
>printer could keep up. For me, the total cost in time of working out
>printer connectivity issues in Solaris has been about the same as
>Windows.
>
>Windows tries and sometimes suceeds in being inexperienced-friendly at
>the cost of making harder things extremely difficult and
>inflexibility. Solaris is not inexperienced-friendly, it tries to get
>out of the way to let you do the harder things the way you need to. I
>imagine many of the other unixes have the same philosophy- OS X
>excepted.
>
>One could apply your same argument to saying horses are superior to
>cars because they don't need batteries. Clearly, its not possible to
>make an informed judgement between the 2 operating systems without
>reasonably equivalent experience with both.
>
>It really amazes me that people install an OS and expect everything to
>just fall into their lap. Installing an OS is sort of like installing
>a new engine in a car- theres lots of little fiddly details you have
>to know to make it work- the new engine doesn't come with a detailed
>installation manual, the customer is SUPPOSED to come to the task with
>enough experience and knowledge to do the job or a checkbook to pay
>for the people who do. Lacking both, the customer has to figure it
>out him/herself with as much help as they can get from others. And
>that means the customer needs to ask specific questions about specific
>problems and be prepared to do a good deal of often frustrating
>homework to understand both.
>
>Gregm
>
>
Is it so unreasonable to expect the vendor to provide documentation?
The specific problem and its solution were not covered in the SA238
course materials. The "Solaris System Administration Guide, Volume 2"
(805-7229-10) does not discuss the problem that I can find. Creating
print filters, filter definitions, etc. is discussed only in the most
general of terms. Is every sysadmin expected to re-invent the wheel?
Is it really so wrong to expect the stuff most people will need will
exist, be documented in such a way that it can be found, and will just
work? The necessary stuff is there for the Sparc architecture because
HP provided it but, for whatever reason, neither HP nor Sun provided any
such support for the X86 platform

I am new to Solaris but I wrote my first computer program, in assembly
language, for an SDS 930 ca. 1966 which, if memory serves me, was a year
or two before there was such a thing as Unix. My subsequent background
was IBM OS 360/370, IBM System/7, HP RTE-III and RTE-IV, VAX/VMS, two
years of IRIX, with brief exposures to Digital Unix/True-64, and
HP-UX. Except for IRIX the bulk of my experience has been VAX/Alpha
VMS for the last twenty years with some Solaris (X86 and Sparc) in the
last three years. I think I've paid my dues!

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