> 1. What are the resource requirements for all this > wonderful > Solaris 10 software to work and perform reasonably > well? > Is it all available for x86 systems? Does it require > a > 64-bit dual or quad processor system, 4 GB of RAM and > a 200 > GB HDD? Or would it all work on a 1.8 GHz Intel > Celeron > single processor system with 512 MB of RAM? E.g. is > the > power of the zones technology fully available on such > a > low-powered desktop system?
I would say Solaris x86 would run reasonably fast on an obsolete Pentium II or Pentium III. I run my instances of Solaris x86 mostly on AMD Athlon Thunderbirds, which are 1.2 and 1.4GHz, respectively. The 1.2 GHz is a desktop and runs pretty damn fast. The other machine is a server -- it only has 192MB (16 of which is reserved for the onboard video, I had no choice there) and 2 x 40GB ATA hard disks, and is even faster! Actually the server itself maybe uses 64MB or less -- I know I always have about 100+ MB physical RAM free, plus the load average almost never goes to 0.5, even under heavy loads (this machine is a primary and secondary DNS server for multiple domains across the world). Anyways, I'd say Athlon Thunderbird is pretty obsolete hardware. And Solaris flies on it. > 2. And what about documentation? Are good tutorials > available for Solaris newbies covering the unique > aspects > of Solaris 10, or do you have to be a long time, > seasoned > Solaris sys admin to catch on to these Solaris > esoterica? > I found the Sun Solaris 10 User's Guides and Sys > Admin > Guides to be pretty dense on these subjects. Boy are you in luck! Sun has about as comprehensive and as detailed documentation as you're going to get, and it's all free! See http://docs.sun.com/ on any imaginable subject concerning Solaris! > 3. So far the discussion has only been about Solaris > 10 or > OpenSolaris. What about new distros such as Nexenta > and > BeleniX that retain only the Solaris kernel and core > libraries? Pure Solaris is renowned for its > stability; Nexenta might be interesting to the Linux crowd who are scared to really dive into real UNIX -- it might ease the transition. BeleniX and ShilliX are still to early in development to be usable for production. None of these distributions are usable for anything other than trying out Solaris for the first time in my opinion. It is unlikely that a Fortune 500 company would be putting any of these in any of their production environments. In addition, Nexenta will always lag behind Solaris Express / OpenSolaris because it has a different management paradigm and therefore will have to do porting of SUNW packages every time. While this may be acceptable for casual / desktop use, I believe it will be completely unacceptable for a production / enterprise environment. > part of the reason presumably is the fact that Sun > Q/A > applies to every single aspect of the entire OS. > Does this > quality and stability necessarily carry over into a > hybrid > OS with Solaris kernel and GNU utilities, > applications, > etc.? Potentially such an OS could be incredibly > buggy and > unstable, completely negating the advantages of a > very > stable Solaris kernel, couldn't it? Can such a > hybrid > indeed be made as stable as Solaris itself? It cases like Nexenta the stability value proposition would only apply to the kernel and SUNW userland tools. Everything else would be at the same level that Debian or Ubuntu are. This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
