True, the build quality is quite nice. I have an Ultra-20 M2, but at the price I paid for it, there's a lot to be wanted. It's essentially the same price as a Mac Pro, which is also a quite nice machine, and much more powerful, and for my own use probably would had been better. But... I like (Open)Solaris a lot, and Sun's engineers have not fixed the ~B77 EFI problem in fdisk. I also think Sun would cover more hardware problems directly, ie: not making me send in the machine to replace parts like Apple, but I'd like to hear from others what has happened when something has failed, what is required and such. Sun doesn't sell in retail buildings, so this is probably why they just send parts directly, but for personal/small-business use I'm unsure.
OpenSolaris is newer than FreeBSD. FreeBSD 6 might be comparable to OpenSolaris in terms of age, those guys definitely have a lot of overhead. FreeBSD is at 7 now with new Linux 2.6 compatibility, which I think for personal workstation use is a lot easier and better than having to forward X11 and run a full instance of Linux in a zone, ULE is now stable in -STABLE of 7, and there's improved threading, wireless, crypto, and volume management. If NVIDIA and VirtualBox fixed their litle issues I'd dump OpenSolaris, I mean there's experimental ZFS which my friend runs and is quite stable, and 8 will have DTrace. OpenJDK builds and runs on FreeBSD too. I certainly think their community is still larger in the active sense, but they do have different direction than OpenSolaris. I'd like to blame Sun's marketing team for expecting really ridiculous things out of such a new system. (I mean, look at OS X it's from 1999 based on BSD but still the GUI and such is only 9 years) I really don't care if Sun is behind OpenSolaris or not, I think they got some great people working on it, but their direction is not exactly right. James On Wed, May 28, 2008 at 11:29 PM, Kaiwai Gardiner <kaiwai.gardiner at gmail.com> wrote: > On Wed, 2008-05-28 at 23:12 -0500, Bob Friesenhahn wrote: > > On Wed, 28 May 2008, James Cornell wrote: > > > > > Ultra workstations are too priey for most, they're up there with > > Macs. Apple > > > doesn't offer anything in full desktop form for sub-$2000, and Sun's > > desktops > > > at the specifications they should be are sold at $1800. Most > > organizations > > > buy from Dell because they can get them for $1100 a piece with > > hardware > > > support. I doubt availability of Codeweavers CrossOver would help > > Sun's > > > > It is good that your email account is about to expire since you have > > certainly burned it up. > > > > I have a Sun Ultra 40M2 here and found to be very well priced, > > especially once I opened it up and looked inside. I took photos of > > the insides and sent them to all my friends. I have never seen such > > remarkable build quality. I have priced out systems from other > > vendors and found the prices for similar hardware to be similar. > > Most of the Dell PC hardware is low-price junk and you have to go to > > the top of the Dell "Precision" workstation class to match Sun's > > Ultra > > 40. > > That, and the fact if you run a business you can depreciate it over a > period of (according to NZ tax IIRC, 3 years) - effectively making it > 'free'. > > > > Sun has a real PR problem and if they know it or not wouldn't make a > > > > Sun has always had a PR problem, yet they continue to succeed. From > > my perspective they are doing most things right at the moment. Four > > years ago they seemed to be taken over by Microsoft's marketing > > department but now the marketing is done by engineer's blogs and the > > vaccum cleaner salesmen have mostly moved on. > > Agreed; I'd sooner see Sun keep on the path; thats not to say their > marketing is perfect, some of the stuff they do is cringe worthy - and > at times ignoring how a few free pieces of hardware and support to a > community project might garner some brownie points with the unwashed > masses. > > > > market it's a good bet we'll see it but then again I find FreeBSD to > > be a > > > better platform than most, it lacks VirtualBox (Which may or may not > > be > > > > FreeBSD is quite nice. Better organized and operated than Linux. > > True, and it is wonderfully simple :) I'd run it if I could, but it > doesn't support my wireless card :( > > > > desktop. There's too much nutty behavior in OpenSolaris. I > > certainly find > > > 2008.5 to be a regression even though it means well, just too many > > strange > > > problems. > > > > OpenSolaris is a lot newer than FreeBSD. Maybe you should cut it > > some > > slack. > > True, but too bad Sun allocates money based on what the product brings > in now rather than what the product could bring in, or worse, taking > eons to merge things; how long is OpenSound going to hang around before > it finally gets merged? > > Matthew > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/desktop-discuss/attachments/20080529/46ca645f/attachment.html>
