Taylor Oliphant wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I am interested in investing in Sun, and I see Solaris as one of it's
> greatest assets. The problem that I see (And am in no way asserting that I'm
> smart enough to be right.) is that Solaris only works well on a tiny, tiny,
> tiny, tiny portion of the hardware that's out there.
>
> Is Sun planning on expanding it's Solaris install-base to older and cheaper
> hardware as well? I would like to see Solaris on the march to attract, to be
> blunt, low income students and developers who have no plans to own nice
> hardware. (Plus, with the economy the way it is, more and more people will be
> hanging on to legacy hardware.)
>
Sun has little business case to expand to ancient hardware. The cost of
development and support, weighed against the need to continue developing
for new and current products (especially mobile products) means that Sun
doesn't have as much to put there as you might like.
That said, a number of projects have come along that help here. For
example, I know of several NIC drivers (my own afe and mxfe, Murayama's
sfe and bfe drivers, and Joost Mulder's vr driver, as well as work being
done by Steve Stallion to improve dnet and to provide an rtl8029 driver)
which help out here enormously.
So, the community can offer to do more here, if there is desire. I'm
not sure what specific "legacy" hardware you're looking for.
But at the same time, some legacy hardware has become so old as to be
worse than useless -- where that hardware holds back further
advancements. (An example of this is the ancient ISA based SoundBlaster
cards, which finally got EOF'd. Supporting them would have been a lot
more work for the new audio kernel framework I'm working on.) In those
cases, removal of the hardware support may be worth more than keeping it
around indefinitely.
(If you want to work with a project that works on truly ancient
hardware, you should check into the NetBSD project. They still keep
running ports on the sun2 68k based systems, for example.)
But again, if there is particular hardware you'd like to see supported
that isn't -- well you should ask about it. You never know, you might
be surprised. :-)
> The other major thing that would really boost the install base (As I see it)
> is to attract developers like Adobe. I've talked to a few Adobe programmers
> who say that Solaris/Linux development is a long ways away, if at all, but I
> mean, they are developing photoshop for the iphone - How hard could it be to
> open source an old version of photoshop and allow users to port it to
> linux/solaris at the very least? (That's not really my main question, I'm
> just hoping the right person reads it.) =) Does it seem awkward to anyone
> else that one of the best workstation OS's on the planet isn't capable of
> very much audio/visual work at all?
>
The audio story for Solaris will be greatly improving soon (should have
more in the next OpenSolaris release after November.). Stay tuned. :-)
And of course, I believe that the visual situation is vastly improved
recently, and work still continues there. (But you'll need "modern"
hardware to take advantage of those developments. :-)
-- Garrett
> Thanks in advance,
> -Taylor
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