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Thoughts, comments, feelings? I'm considering using it as a way to increase my Solaris experience in the absence of a Sparc box.

Bruce

I've used Solaris Intel on and off over the years. What can I say about it? It's Solaris--no more, no less. Version for version it looks and feels pretty much like the SPARC version, but without the OpenBoot console or the kewl Stop button. You get your standard Solaris desktops, of which CDE is the only one that's tolerable. Rumor has it that Solaris 9 will sport GNOME, but by then the Intel edition will be gone. The command set is the typical crufty and archaic BSD legacy stuff, although recent versions come augmented with some GNU stuff. At least that's true on SPARC; you may have to install them from a separate CD on Intel.

If you've become accustomed to a more feature-rich environment, you might feel a bit let-down by Solaris, especially the sparse CDE environment. Solaris is more for work than play, and the bells and whistles are at a minimum. Nonetheless it's a good, solid environment.

Solaris Intel is fine for teaching yourself most Solaris aspects. If you're studying for a cert, you will need to beg, borrow or steal a real SPARC machine for at least part of your training, as the tests do test your knowledge of the firmware. If your company uses Solaris Intel for an application, then getting the free version is a way to familiarize yourself with installation and maintenance of the product in an offline environment. But since the binaries for Intel and SPARC are different, there is a good deal of division between the platforms. Just for fun it's a worthwhile endeavor.

Since Sun's new product strategy has changed to make Solaris the SPARC platform OS, and Linux the Intel OS, they have pulled the ISO images off their website. You can still order the media kit, which is what I did when I found out that 10/01 would be the last Intel version.

Solaris on x86 has... issues. Sun just released it to give PC type guys exposure to Solaris. I imagine you would be hard pressed to find anybody actually using Solaris x86 for production work. Personally, I view it as sort of a novelty. It's neat, and if you've got an old PC around to throw it onto (and don't we all?) it can be a fine way to get your feet wet with Solaris. However, as Speed said, there are things one should know about Sparc architecture before he can consider himself well grounded in Solaris. Do yourself a favor and check on ebay or similar for old Sun hardware. If I recall correctly, you can get a really decent Ultra for less than $600. Or you can do what I did a few months ago and get an old SparcStation 10 for less than $100.

Oh just come out and say it:

Real men don't run UNIX on Intel.

There.

eh, I can think of at least a few good unix-like operating systems that run fine (or even best) on intel architectures. Solaris isn't one of them though.

Real men run branded UNIX® systems!

j/k

IMHO the hardware support in Solaris x86 is non existent. If you want to install it, check the supported hardware list. If something you've got isn't explicitly listed, don't expect it to work. The real problem is that that includes network cards as well. And, Solaris isn't much uses without a network card.

As another note, I highly recommend the used Sun route. I picked up a 250Mhz Ultra30 w/ 256MB of RAM and a pair of 4.5GB drives for $450. Even included a Creator3D card. The only thing I had to add was a CDROM.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: SecretSquirrel on 2002-03-13 23:42 ]</font>

Thanks folks - sounds like it may be suitable to get familiar with the current Solaris environment. My last SunOS experience was ~v4.1 I think.