On Tuesday 11 October 2005 10:52 am, David Schanen wrote: > Well, it wasn't my decision to go with Linux in general or Redhat in > particular, but I wouldn't have necessarily lobbied against it had I > been a part of the process at the time.
I've been faced with similar decisions, and I can certainly say that there are many reasons to select an OS, not always most efficient, what we as engineers want to implement, there is some politics and other reasons for selecting. Sometimes it's software that is available, sometimes it's for a homogenous environment, etc...and Solaris is a choice by many for these same reasons (has been for me in the past). > My interest in OpenSolaris began as a result for the search for OS > that actually worked on my previous Athlon64 system. NetBSD 2.0 and > Solaris 10 were the only two things that worked reliably for me--this > is no b.s., I tried just about every Linux distro and BSD out there. I had a similar situation while trying to help my porsche mechanic, who is also a good friend of mine. He bought a 2-way Opteron system (actually put it together himeself), and had installed a 64-bit version of Linux. He wanted to run Debian, and Debian didn't have all the 64-bit packages he wanted, most notably KDE. So he installed the 32-bit KDE, creating 32-bit system running with a 64-bit kernel. Come to realize that you can't compile a 64-bit kernel while having the 32-bit compiler/environment installed, and would need to install a cross compiler to handle that. He shy'd away as it wasn't very straight forward. It was a good time for me to explain how the compatibility works in Solaris, and how you can compile a 32-bit or 64-bit kernel with either the 32-bit or 64-bit compiler, all the libraries are in place. > to make a long explanation short, for a number of reasons (licensing, > the many people already experienced with SunOS, the free compilers) I > think OpenSolaris has lots of potential in scientific computing at > universities, which is my particular area of interest. Good to hear. I think the engineers have done a top notch job on Solaris 10, and are putting some incredible features to it in updates. This is the best release of Solaris to date, and packs such a punch, it's hard not to at least look at. Thanks for the honest reply! -- Alan DuBoff - Sun Microsystems Solaris x86 Engineering _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
