Re: Is Sun sincere about encouraging new Solaris users?
- From: "Canuck57" <dave-no_spam@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 29 Jan 2007 14:56:39 GMT
"Shannon Jacobs" <Shannon.Jacobs.nospam@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1170029933.754010.232600@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
At this point, I think not. Or is Solaris really such a piece of
bloatware that Sun is unable to condense it to a single installation
CD?
Solaris has more in it's distribution than does distros like Ubuntu.
Why not download the DVD version of Solaris? It is one burn.
Me, I installed at least 20 systems this weekend and didn't burn a single
DVD nor a CD. I just powered up VMWare on my portable, pointed it to a
Solaris DVD ISO image, installed it. Then setup DHCP and install server and
booted other systems from it. Once I had one each of Intel and Sparc
installed, I tailored the images and made flash archives. The rest of it
was easy... Can't do that with Microsoft or Ubuntu's native distribution
without buying something else like ghost.
Yes, I run Unbuntu too. It is very good as an entry level stand alone Linux
workstation. Solaris targets a different breed.
Context: Microsoft has always annoyed me, and my annoyance has been
reaching crisis proportions. It would be much too tedious to go down
the list of straws, but the Windows Mobile straw rates special mention
as one of the biggest and ugliest straws I've seen in 30+ years of
working with computers. Mostly I've been experimenting with Ubuntu and
Fedora Core, but I'd heard enough about Solaris over the years, and
even used Sun hardware a few times in the past, so I was receptive to
trying it out, planning to replace one of the Ubuntu partitions on
this multi-boot machine. Early research suggested that there was an
installation CD image that could be obtained from Sun, but visiting
their website led through LOTS of tedious and useless places, into
tedious and useless registrations, and finally led to a large and
complicated mess of files that probably could be used to install
Solaris--but they'd already passed my nuisance threshold, so I put the
idea on hold for now.
Minor observation: Why should the installation be broken into a bunch
of fragmentary CDs? If Sun insists on a multiple-CD installation, then
at least they should be full CDs. Is that another limitation of their
competence? Or just that Sun doesn't care about wasting my resources
as long as I'm paying for the blank CDs?
Major observation: There is no reason for me to burn a set of CDs for
an installation. Most of the files will soon become obsolete anyway
(assuming that Sun is actually doing any updates). The only plausible
reason for Sun to insist that I have a set of CDs is because they hope
that I'll install Solaris on several machines and they want to save
bandwidth by downloading the images only one time to a (non-paying)
customer--but first they have to get me to install it once. An initial
bootable CD should be able to bootstrap enough of an OS to download
the rest from the network. If they're seriously concerned about saving
bandwidth, then perhaps they could investigate BitTorrent or some
other esoteric and obscure technology to conserve resources.
My past experiences with Sun were not impressive. Actually, they were
sometimes rather annoying or even painful, but I'm hoping that maybe
Sun has improved things since then. Ubuntu is actually doing most of
what I want with only moderate adaptation pains. However, Ubuntu has
enough limitations that I'm still sort of receptive to alternatives--
and I'm increasingly desperate to evade the deadly grasp of Vista.
I actually thought the best place to seek 'strong' advice would have
been on a Solaris advocacy newsgroup, but it appears that no one is
interested enough in Solaris to have bothered to create such... If
there are some Solaris 'partisans' around here, I'm interested in your
reactions or constructive suggestions.
.
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