* Ray Clark (webclark at rochester.rr.com) wrote: > To be honest I am very confused by the many versions of solaris, and > what they are. Since I have your ear, can I veryify the following > understanding, as well as tweek up my names, and add any "aliases"? > > [1] Solaris 10 0807 or U4 would be the most stable, but the > oldest/clunkiest/least-featured.
I wouldn't call it old, clunky or least-featured. I'd call it production ready, time tested, featureful (compared to other OS offerings). > [2] Solaris Express Developer Edition (current) is well tested and > while it may have its quirks, I should not be in danger of loosing > data. Keep in mind, Solaris Express (any edition, Developer or Community) is a 'snapshot' of the next release of Solaris. It's under active development and change. The Developer edition releases are put together using a stabilized set of bits from the ongoing development train as it were. > [3] Solaris Express Community Edition (AKA Nevada), since it comes out > every other Friday, assume that while it might be great to play with, > it probably has its moments, and depending on any given release > without being on top of what is going on in the community would be > pretty risky. That depends on what your needs are. For instance, developers inside the Solaris organization use SXCE as part of their day jobs. There's a mantra 'FCS quality all the time' when devleoping Solaris. Sure, issues pop up but in general it's quite usable. In fact some companies (Joyent to name one off the top of my head) run their business on SXCE. Quite successfully from everything I've seen and read. They're pretty knowledgable people with regards to Solaris. > [4] Indiana is very early, and should not be used other than by people > who want to play with a work in progress. It will use the gnu > userland, and in general have capabilities more like a Linux > distribution. It does not appear to show up anywhere yet. I wouldn't say this is spot on either. It's intended for people who want a look at some of the features that might appear in the next release of Solaris. Furthermore, it's a showpiece for OpenSolaris being more than just a collection of bits and something that people can actually run. I myself have been using Developer Preview 2 as my day-to-day work environment and it's been no different than using SXCE in my experience. In some cases, it's been better. But I haven't had any productivity slow downs because of it. But yes, it's very early stages for this. > Frank mentioned "Opensolaris". I don't know what to relate these > comments to on the 'download page'. The thread might imply that since > I installed SXDE that was not the live CD, that I did not install > ZFS.... any might indicate the SXDE was NOT OpenSolaris. I don't know > what the LiveCD is... BeleniX appears to be the only one listed as a > "LiveCD", is this what you mean? I appologize if I am being thick, > but to me this is not at all clear. SXDE is not a liveCD, nor does it have support for using ZFS as your root filesystem. It is available in CD/DVD form and you have to install it before it's even usable. Indiana provides a liveCD and does have support for using ZFS as your root filesystem. You can boot the liveCD and you'll have a working instance of Indiana (just like other liveCD's like Ubuntu/Knoppix) where you can surf the web, check email what have you and then even install. > Thanks for any help you can give me understanding! Hope that was helpful. Cheers, Glenn
