Euan Thoms wrote:
> How well supported is multimedia (mpeg, avi, wmv etc) going to be in
> project Indiana? I ask this because it sucks in Solaris 10 and even
> Nevada / OpenSolaris builds that i have trialled to date.
>
Its going to suck for awhile as adoption is still low and Solaris 10 is
basically not on the radar. Im sure Sun and team will work with
communities to get the support needed for the more popular codecs but if
you are expecting Indiana to be a right-off-the-bat drop in for Windows,
Mac, Linux it wont be. I do think Indiana adoption to be huge in
business because A) Sun is a very trusted source and the Sun brand is
widely respected and B) Most enterprise customers don't care if their
employees can watch videos and YouTube at work.
> I am a big fan of Sun products and for the last 6 months I've been
> doing my best to move away from Windows, not just
> becaushttp://www.cnn.com/e I find Windows frustrating (fragmentation,
> viruses, pests, bad administrator friendlyness, being forced to
> upgrade to buggy replacements with little backward compatability
> etc...). But also because I believe they are a bad thing for the IT
> industry, impeding the growth of standards and protocols and open
> formats that allow fair play.
>
I am also a big fan of Sun Microsystems (not so much Java) but I do like
Suns quality, their commitment to standards and their rock solid
hardware, I have 9 year old Sun hardware that I still use and keeps
chugging along. I'm also a fan of Microsoft and I think their quality
is pretty good. I love Server 2003/2008, Visual Studios and .NET are n
excellent DE. Its extended through the Mono Project and one of the
things I have been doing of late is targeting my software written in
.NET to leverage the Mono framework so my software will run on .NET as
well as Mono.
> At the moment I have Ubuntu on my desktop PCs because I got fed up
> trying to get simple things like mpeg video clips to play and my Canon
> PIXMA printer doesn't have a driver for Solaris etc. I'm really happy
> to see that this latest OpenSolaris is committed to making a user
> friendly desktop environment to match the worlds most advanced OS.
> "Synaptic package manager" style deployment makes a world of
> difference for the newbie like me. After all, why should Solaris be
> reserved for the server / enterprise market, why not make a desktop
> environment or similar quality to their server products.
>
I rolled my own distribution based on Ubuntu so thats my main desktop,
I'm waiting for Indiana but my review of it will more than likely be
focused on how far its come, Indiana is very young in terms of software
projects, and the usability by the professional. I'm not expecting a
home user ready version of Indiana for at least 2 years.
> How extensive will the automated package management be compared to
> aptitude and yum? Will linux apps work on indiana? There's not a lot
> of software available for Solaris yet.
>
Containers will be a way for you to run your apps. I'm thinking since
Linux is based on UNIX or has a very similar design that porting will be
fairly straightforward. What we need to do as users is contact the
project admins, show them a port is desired, offer guidance and
assistance if we can. If you aren't a developer attempt a compilation
and go back with any failures or problems and seek assistance.
> How about driver support? Currently I don't know whether I can buy a
> modern photo printer and be sure it will work. I'm prepared to bin my
> Canon, don't think it will ever have solaris kernal driver ;-(
>
Printer support isn't bad right now. I have had success setting up
several home printers in OpenSolaris and Solaris, if you are multimedia
company or a print company you may have issues with the big hundreds of
dollars printers as I don't have them to test. We will most definitely
need something similar to ndiswrapper and ndisgtk for Wireless
interfaces and project evil is a pretty much hit or miss at this point.
Off the shelf hardware will be hit or miss but in reality, its a hit and
miss on most OS's
> Last but not least, will 3D graphics support be available for Solaris
> in the future, is it on the agenda or will it remain to be deamed
> unnecessary?
>
>
3D Graphics have been supported on Solaris for a long time. Thats not
an issue.
> I look forward to switching to Indiana in the future, hopefully it
> will be up the standard of modern linux distros soon. Respect to the
> guys working on OpenSolaris, I would help if I had the time and was
> clever enough!
>
I am too but as I stated don't be expecting a complete desktop drop in
replacement out of the gate. Its going to take awhile. I'm expecting
the first release of Indiana to be on Par with Linux about 1999 era or
2000.
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