Thanks will try the livecd maybe of some help. "You'd rather it *didn't* run on new hardware, or that people should spend time supporting hardware that's about to be EOLed?"
Your latter statement is what I was suggesting. Why? The hardware that's going to be EOL is EOL at the manufacturer, because real world that EOL is very prevalent and will be in use for some time come. So I believe that EOL and obsolescence can not be equated to the being the same thing. As I mentioned in my previous post I still have some EOL's running myself. From what I have ascertained so far this system I am writting this e-mail on must also be considered EOL by the developers, yet I would venture to say it has a very large current user base. So maybe the real problem is in definition, is it EOL when the factory stops making it or is it EOL when the users stop using it. In engineering, functionally speaking, an item or system is only obsolete when it becomes incapable of performing it's designed function. My "EOL'd" computer system in this case still carries out it's designed function perfectly, even thou there is new hardware out there, that in itself did not make it obsolete. As I stated *nix distros have done an excellent job in this regard, they continue to support the older hardware yet keep pushing forward with the new hardware. I have noticed that the new is a little slower coming than some would like but that is typically a small minority rather than the normative and it does eventually come. They do both! I would think that if it can be successfully done in the *nix world to their great benefit that it could also work in Solaris and also be a huge benefit to Solaris. Again as an example I have several (over 100) different choices to run on my "OEL'd" hardware, not including XP, or WIN2K. They don't make my system obsolete they (the other 100) make it functionally better rather than obsolete. Given the choice of buying new hardware over keeping my current desktop systems so I can run Vista or Solaris I will choose one of hundred other OS's. I even run Windows, which I must still have for certain apps, which runs in an emulator not in it's own environment on my "OEL'd" system and it still works great. In conclusion the best summary is both need to be addressed, that's from my point of view which means very little. I am just a user and can only answer for myself. But in my business model right now Solaris is not an option, I can not run it (yet) on any of my systems and I am not going to shell out the money for five newer systems, because the ones I have function just fine. This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
