I've just started at a new company that uses Solaris heavily, I know little of Solaris though what I have seen of it seems to lack the "nice little apps" that Linux has as standard.

So heres the question, I have a sparc box to play with, should I load a sparc port of Linux, or just jump into Solaris 9.

Is there much difference in installing those "nice little apps" on Solaris or is it just a straight forward "make"?

jfp

I think the general advise has to be "look and see where your employer is going - is his use of Solaris strong / stable / growing, or is it fading.  Similar question for Linux".

I used to present Solaris courses, but I stopped at around Solaris 7 when the Perl and Java business got so much that it was eating up all my time; in those days the graphics tools were rudimentary, and had undocumented features that rendered them less useful than they should have been.   Ah, but that's probably been fixed by now.

Linux is a damn good operating system.  I note that some of the Unix vendors (such as SGI, I believe) now use it in preference to maintaining their own Irix and I do wonder if that's the way for the future.   And the good news is that Unix and LInux are sufficiently alike for what you learn about under the bonnet for one applies pretty closely to the other.

To give you a further flavour ... over the last weekend, we've been rearranging the network and a number of other minor things like furniture.  We're down to just a token Solaris box on the network - basically because Linux suits us so well .  We've been busy sorting out a dual boot system (Xp and Linux) on one of those swish Sony Vaio notepads, playing around with "dd" commands and boot sectors to give us the full flexibility we need. The "skill" used to do this comes from old Solaris training days



Ok, again I'm way late, but FYI

Lots of those nice apps are available as Sparc binaries from
http://www.sunfreeware.com/

Putting Linux on Sparc may be more hassle than installing gcc, gmake, gtar, gzip etc.
A lot of things compile & work fine, but some still give me grief.
For instance, I have problems getting DBFile for perl to install. Maybe you wont, but I did.

Also, a friend of mine said to me the other day that he thought Linux had too many 'silly' superfluous features that may be scaring the purchasing management types. I refer to KDE, Gnome etc. (he called them toys)
I know that they can be good things, but server side people just don't need 'toys'.  I have long been a Linux protagonist, but I'm starting to see  what he means. Every time I use a linux box with KDE or whatever I get lost in Konsoles etc..

(I'm going to have to stop posting on here, but it's so compelling.)
B

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