Re: Is Sun sincere about encouraging new Solaris users?

On 28 Jan 2007 16:18:53 -0800, Shannon Jacobs
<Shannon.Jacobs.nospam@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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?

Context: Microsoft has always annoyed me, and my annoyance has been
reaching crisis proportions. It would be much too tedious to go down

Me too.

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.

www.sun.com, click on the Solaris icon just below Dowloads. Then the
rather visible ORANGE Download Solaris 10 button. Then either Register
or enter your login details. After that just follow the instructions.

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?

Perhaps for the same reason that Fedora Core and FreeBSD (to name but
two) are also on multiple CDs.

Solaris also has a DVD download.

Just a hint, but you might find it worth investing in a few rewritable
disks.

Major observation: There is no reason for me to burn a set of CDs for
an installation.

So why do Red Hat and FreeBSD offer iso downloads then?So why do Red Hat
and FreeBSD offer iso downloads then?

Most of the files will soon become obsolete anyway
(assuming that Sun is actually doing any updates).

This may be true for Linsux, where almost everything is either broken,
or will be broken when the next incompatible change to glibc etc. comes
along. OK, I'm exaggerating a bit, the serious distros don't go
switching glibc versions. This certainly isn't the case for Solaris.

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.

See other posts for details of network installs (and liveupgrade, can't
remember if anyone mentioned it).

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.

My experience is that Solaris is more stable than RedHat or SuSE (have
hardly used any other Linuxes) though there has been a drop in quality of late.

There are other alternatives as well, such as FreeBSD and Mac OS X.

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.

You would really choose an OS based on things that you read in an
advocacy group ?????????

A bientot
Paul

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