> > > 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. > > man, I have run it on all manner of wird stuff. Old > and low powered like > you wouldn't believe. I am writing this email right > now on a seven ( or > eight? ) year old HP Kayak PC machine with a 400MHz > processor. Works fine. > > I have weird low powered low cost VIA CoolStream > based hardware and it > works solid as a rock. > > I have, are you ready for this, an IBM Thinkpad model > 390X with maybe > 384MB of memory and I installed Solaris 10 GA in it. > > I have been running Solaris on x86 for about as long > as it existed and it > wasn't always easy to work with, but you really have > a large large large > portion of the hardware that's out there to pick > from. > > Dennis
I wonder if both the OP and you aren't spinning a bit. x86 does indeed run on quite a few platforms including older ones. But there are doubtless also plenty it doesn't run on, and plenty it runs on but doesn't have the drivers to take full advantage of. Probably good to check the HCL before spending time or money; next best is if you find something that works but isn't in the HCL, submit the info so that the next person will know. Driver situation has improved a lot. Most effort probably goes to current hardware, although independently developed drivers and ports from *BSD might have helped out some with older stuff too. Some hardware vendors help out, but the base is so much smaller than Windows that it's only a few by comparison that bother. Porting from Linux is usually impossible due to license differences, and often might not be much help anyway due to architectural differences. So IMO it won't get any better than what Sun plus peripheral vendors plus others want to pay for creating drivers for (which usually means what they see some profit in doing that for), plus what can be readily ported from the *BSDs \ or someone with the time and ability wants to write themselves. So...doesn't suck, but there are bound to be other OSs that can run on lots more odd or old hardware. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
