>>>>The problem that I see (And I 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. [...] >>>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. [...] > > 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 > > spinning ? > > come on over to my place and I'll show you Solaris > 2.5.1 x86 still running > on a Pentium P90 as well as OpenSolaris snv_98 > running on a mother board > that is nailed to the wall here. As well as my HP > Kayak from 2000 that has > been running with four SCSI controllers since 2002, > and yes, one very > small old IBM Thinkpad .. that too. > > there is no spin here ... why would there be? > > quite frankly .. get the CDROM and boot it. Most > likely it will work well > enough.
Given the use of the appropriate version for the hardware (i.e. that support for _really_ old hardware that was once present may have been removed, and some support for relatively new hardware has only become available quite recently, in part perhaps due to licensing or other such issues), you are perhaps closer to the truth than the OP. But if "tiny, tiny, tiny" == 5% or less, and "large large large" == 95% or more, then I wonder if both of you aren't a bit off base. Back around build 50ish or earlier, I'd run it on a Ferrari 4000, and not been very thrilled. It worked, but at the time, the available graphics support fell far short of taking advantage of resolution, let alone acceleration; the advanced features of the touch pad didn't work, forget about the BlueTooth mouse (which still wouldn't work AFAIK although that is on the way), the SD card reader didn't work. More of that (the graphics, and one or both of the SD card reader and the advanced touch pad support) might work now, although perhaps with some scrounging rather than _all_ out of the box. I don't know - the Ferrari died, and I haven't found a cheap local option for getting it fixed yet. I do have a Mac Mini now, and if its internal disk were a little larger, I might try x86 on there for kicks. I wonder if x86 could boot off of a USB drive (AFAIK MacOS can, but without some unsupported hacky stuff, XP can't; don't know about any others). I don't really want to run MacOS off the USB drive for performance reasons, and I doubt I'd be running x86 on it all that often; if I want to run Solaris, I've got an IPC, a SPARC 10, a Voyager, a Sun Blade 100, and a Sun Blade 2000 (the latter two running 24/7) around the house. (as you might gather, I've used Solaris since 2.0, but 99.9% on SPARC; before that, SunOS 4.x on SPARC and mc68k, and even some SunOS 3.x on mc68k I think...not to mention Domain/OS on Apollos, SVR2 and 3 on 3B15's, version 7 on PDP-11's, ...) I may play with running x86 under VirtualBox on the Mac; I expect that should work ok, subject to the limitations of VirtualBox as to USB support and such (and some rumors that Leopard's USB support is a little flaky - BitPim doesn't much like it for instance). Although I don't usually use Linux, I had tried Ubuntu Studio under VirtualBox on the Mac so I could run Rosegarden, but the performance made it less that useful for a more or less real-time app like that; I ended up paying for Harmony Assistant running native on Mac OS. (I'd love to see something like Rosegarden running on Solaris; alas, it's tied to jack+ALSA, and while OSS4 may solve a lot of audio problems, it doesn't necessarily help getting apps that use something else ported. OTOH, one of the Rosegarden developers reportedly wants to work on a Mac OS port, having found the whole audio-on-Linux situation to be just too darn frustrating. Since OSS4 _does_ run on a lot of OSs _other_than_ just Linux, I _hope_ it's not too late for it to catch on enough to get a decent level of app support.) It frustrates me when folks like the OP, from one bad experience, imply that Solaris doesn't do a lot of things that it does. OTOH, when other folks generalize their range of happier experiences in a way that suggests it _already_ works as many places as (for example) Linux does, I'm sorry, but that sort of implied (or readily infer-able, if you didn't intend to imply it) exaggeration doesn't seem to me to be helpful either. The situation has gotten much better over time (just the one example of the Ferrari that I mentioned shows that). And there's every reason to believe it will continue to improve. Will Solaris on x86 ever support as wide a variety of hardware as Linux does? I don't know, although unless individuals doing unpaid work help with writing and porting drivers, I tend to doubt it, since in all probability businesses will invest mainly in work that results in hardware or support contract sales, and sometimes further for the sake of mindshare that might get future sales. All of which will tend to favor newer hardware, some perhaps modestly priced, but not the sort of freebie hand-me-downs that broke students and such might want to try out. Then too, some of the difference may be a matter of semantics or expectations. Does it constitute "working" if a system boots and is more or less usable, or do you expect most or all functionality of all the peripherals to be supported? Look at all the complaints about RAID cards, various Ethernet and WiFi NICs, etc. Some of these just take some tweaking, but even that most people probably expect to just work without that. Others, sorry, no driver. (never mind that there were some really crap RAID cards sold, not to mention flaky BIOS support, and such. No, I don't work with peecees much, but sometimes I sit near some folks that do, and the horror stories I've heard, even with Windows or Linux theoretically having driver support...) So what I'd welcome is people saying "it's a lot better than it's been, and continues to improve; here's some of the recent improvements, and here's some that have been mentioned as forthcoming". That, along with a pointer to the HCL, seems to me to be a balanced response, sufficiently free of blatant advocacy that if it turns out that whatever the complainer wanted to do still doesn't work, at least they might realize they could try again later, rather than feeling mislead and going away for good. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
