Solaris Advantages

[d2kx]

Hi everyone,

especially after todays installation article about Solaris (Express Community Edition) I got interested in trying out Solaris. But I've got some questions:

What is the main difference between the Linux and Solaris kernel? I mean there must be a reason that people are choosing Solaris over Linux. Why for example did you, Michael, try out Solaris?

What packages has SXCE, how current are they and how to update them?

What about playing media, especially non-free videos/mp3s?

Do ATI X1K users can test it at all? Because I didn't see any drivers from ATI.

...

I only wished I could make the swap to Linux completely, I like it so much, but I'm a hardcore gamer...

- d2kx

[Michael]

Originally Posted by d2kx

What is the main difference between the Linux and Solaris kernel? I mean there must be a reason that people are choosing Solaris over Linux. Why for example did you, Michael, try out Solaris?

What packages has SXCE, how current are they and how to update them?

What about playing media, especially non-free videos/mp3s?

Do ATI X1K users can test it at all? Because I didn't see any drivers from ATI.

...

I only wished I could make the swap to Linux completely, I like it so much, but I'm a hardcore gamer...

- d2kx

Solaris was derived from UNIX, as you probably know. Some of the major advantages that Solaris has over Linux includes DTrace, Solaris Containers, ZFS filesystem, and a few other abilities. Solaris is extremely reliable for mission critical servers, which is partly why it's often chose over Linux in such cases.

Right now SXCE doesn't have a proper package manager like yum or apt, but that's one of the items being addressed with Project Indiana. New Solaris Express Community Editions are pushed out every two weeks or so, which makes them very updated with the latest code for "Nevada" (Solaris 11).

Never tried playing media in Solaris...

ATI currently doesn't produce a driver for Solaris. There is the open-source R200/300 one in X11R72, but X1000 users are currently out of luck for any sort of 3D acceleration.

[d2kx]

This sounds like Solaris (yet) isn't the right choice for Desktop users. Maybe I just think so, because I've got a X1900XT

...

But all that doesn't change the first sentence of my earlier post. I am currently downloading the 3GB big DVD.

[d2kx]

The installation was like it is shown in the article, but I "only" had 4GB of free space in my VirtualBox and only could install the 1400mb big package selection (I knew that's not correct), so I hadn't an usable installation at the end. I didn't want to start the installation again because it was slow. I had a Xserver running installer after some questions in the installation but I still had to press F2 etc. and had no graphical assistant like in the article. All in all, I didn't like the installation and see no point in using Solaris over Linux. But I learned something about Solaris today so I'm happy

[krisia2006]

Originally Posted by d2kx

The installation was like it is shown in the article, but I "only" had 4GB of free space in my VirtualBox and only could install the 1400mb big package selection (I knew that's not correct), so I hadn't an usable installation at the end. I didn't want to start the installation again because it was slow. I had a Xserver running installer after some questions in the installation but I still had to press F2 etc. and had no graphical assistant like in the article. All in all, I didn't like the installation and see no point in using Solaris over Linux. But I learned something about Solaris today so I'm happy

I work with Solaris in datacenters and have a file server at home running Solaris 10 mainly for zfs manageability, performance and reliability.
There is a huge learning curve with Solaris. Solaris has a strong process scheduler, resource manager, Live Upgrade, etc.
Plenty more to learn about in Solaris if you have the time.