Mathematica, which is a rather expensive bit of maths software from Wolfram Research, is supported on Sun's Solaris x86 operating system, but only on AMD 64-bit CPUs, not any Intel CPUs.
http://www.wolfram.com/products/mathematica/platforms/ says: Sun x86 Solaris 10 64-bit Requires AMD 64-bit machine. Here are some instructions which allow Mathematica 6.0 and 6.0.1 to run on Solaris Express Developer Edition 9/07 snv_70b X86. I posted these on alt.solaris.x86, but thought I'd stick it here too. (I've not tested under other Solaris 10 x86 varients, but I assume it will work. You would need to obtain the correct libraries from Sun Studio 12 though). Attempting to run the text-based Mathematica kernel on an Intel Duo Core 2 CPU causes it to crash immediately. ld.so.1: MathKernel: fatal: /usr/local/Wolfram/Mathematica/6.0/SystemFiles/Libraries/Solaris-x86-64/libsunperf.so.1: hardware capability unsupported: 0x100 [ AMD_3DNow ] Apparently modern Intel chips support *most* of the AMD instructions, but appears (for my Intel CPU at least) not the AMD_3Dnow instructions, which one of the libraries supplied with Mathematica needs. However, following the suggestion of Marc (marc.glisse ||at|| gmail.com) on the comp.unix.solaris newsgroup, and posts from several others in quick succession (which would never have been possible on comp.soft-sys.math.mathematica with the delays the moderation causes on there), I had a solution. I replaced the library libsunperf.so.1 supplied with Mathematica 6.0 with a later one supplied by Sun on their Solaris Express Developer Edition. (The actual file is part of the Sun's Studio 12 development system, so one only needs that, which is free. As is Solaris of course too). That allowed Mathematica to go a bit further, but then it failed with the message ld.so.1: MathKernel: fatal: libfsu.so.1: version `SUNWprivate_1.1' not found (required by file /usr/local/Wolfram/Mathematica/6.0/SystemFiles/Libraries/Solaris-x86-64/libsunperf.so.1) ld.so.1: MathKernel: fatal: libfsu.so.1: open failed: No such file or directory Killed The file libfsu.so.1 is also part of the Sun Studio 12 development kit, but Mathematica does not look for it. But one can copy that into the directory where Mathematica looks for libraries (or, as I did, make a symbolic link). Finally when all that is done, the kernel (math) works, but the front end (mathematica) crashed almost immediately. But that issue for Solaris is in the support FAQ for Mathematica, http://support.wolfram.com/mathematica/systems/unix/solaris/notruetypefontsolaris.html which says the -noTrueTypeFont option can fix problems with Mathematica crashing on Solaris. (Who is at fault here, Sun or Wolfram?) That did not help immediately, but I then realised the previous crashes probably resulted in corrupted cache data, so I started Mathematica with the -cleanStart option too. Then, it works!!! Mathematica is now running on a computer running Solaris x86 with an Intel CPU, not the supported AMD CPU. Obviously this hack will not be supported by Wolfram, but it appears to work. (Perhaps they would add support for Intel chips, as it seems possible with little effort). I would add it runs the Mathematica 6 benchmark quite slowly, scoring 1.37 or so on a machine which scores 2.00 on Vista. Both 6.0 and 6.0.1 have been tried, with similar performance. Use at your own risk, but the steps are below. Assuming Mathematica is in the default installation, you will need to be root. 1) Change to the Directory Mathematica uses for libraries: # cd /usr/local/Wolfram/Mathematica/6.0/SystemFiles/Libraries/Solaris-x86-64 2) Rename the original library to something else # mv libsunperf.so.1 libsunperf.so.1.orig 3) Create a link from the later version of the library in the Sun Studio 12 development system # ln -s /opt/SUNWspro/prod/lib/amd64/libsunperf.so.2 libsunperf.so.1 4) Create a link from the file /opt/SUNWspro/prod/lib/amd64/libfsu.so.1 to the directory used for the Mathematica libraries. # ln -s /opt/SUNWspro/prod/lib/amd64/libfsu.so.1 libfsu.so.1 5) Launch Mathematica with the options -cleanStart and -noTrueTypeFont $ /usr/local/bin/mathematica -cleanStart -noTrueTypeFont 6) Next time, it should work without the -cleanStart option, but the -noTrueTypeFont one is still needed. $ /usr/local/bin/mathematica -noTrueTypeFont It now works!! 7) If you want to, you can edit the script /usr/local/Wolfram/Mathematica/6.0/Executables/mathematica and add -noTrueTypeFont on the very last line exec "${MathematicaFE}" -topDirectory "${TopDirectory}" "$@" -noTrueTypeFont It would be so nice if comp.soft-sys.math.mathematica newsgroup was not moderated, so allowed a fast exchange of views between people. It allows problems that need contributions from many to be solved quickly, something that seems impossible on comp.soft-sys.math.mathematica, but was on the unmoderated Sun newsgroup. Obviously the above will not be supported by Wolfram Research, so use at your own risk, but it does appear to work for me at least. Solaris x86 has been known as a very good operating system for Mathematica, with various records having been set on that platform http://www.sun.com/third-party/srsc/resources/wolfram/Wolfram_ss.pdf My initial benchmark results suggest it does not work as well on the Intel CPUs as it does AMD, as the benchmark results are quite sluggish given the hardware. Overall, for best performance it seems hard to beat Solaris x86 on an AMD CPU, but this is quite usable. I'm not sure why Solaris x86 should run the benchmark so much slower than Windows Vista does on exactly the same hardware. A difference in score from 1.37 to 2.00 is quite significant. 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