Why Someone (me) Would Want to Use Solaris- Mephisto
If it were put in a box, if Sun would make it easy to use, if I could buy it at a retail store, carry it home, and plug it into the wall, I would buy it.
Why Someone (me) Would Want to Use Solaris. *Mr. Mephisto*
1. Solaris (UNIX) is very stable. I ran Solaris 7 on an Intel machine for nine months without turning it off and it never crashed. Windows 95 (my previous OS) crashed, on average, once a day. A Mac I had prior to that (OS 7) was even worse.
2. Solaris (and other UNIXes, like Linux) is free.
3. Solaris supports 64-bit CPUs. The Sun Ultra 5 (and all other Sun machines, I think) comes with a 64-bit CPU. It is fast and efficient. Also, 128 megs. of RAM is standard. The graphics card is a good one. It's fast and will support true color without straining. Open GL libraries are supplied so the system supports a variety of graphics software packages through this standard format..
4. The Sun Window Manager (CDE) is enormously configurable and allows all applications, if you want, to be launched by point and click from icons in a variety of menu and desktop configurations. The CDE allows you to switch among a number of virtual screens, extending the screen's "real estate" considerably. (There are programs that allow you to do this with Windows, but I never found a completely trustworthy one.) Of course, you can always use UNIX commands at the command line prompt, but you don't have to. Also, important for me, Solaris comes with a PDA synchronization utility (Palm Pilot in my case) that ties in seamlessly with the Solaris calendar, address book, etc., which I find better than the Palm desktop software.
5. Solaris 8 (unlike Solaris 7) comes with important FREE software:
Star Office 5.1, which offers more applications than MS Office and is better integrated with the browser.
GIMP (Gnu Image Manipulation Program) which can do everything I used to do in Photoshop.
The Gnu c c++ (gcc) compiler and "make". (This does not have a GUI. Sun will sell you one. But for compiling simple programs, the commands are not difficult to learn.) gcc is a standard ANSI c compiler. This means that anything that will compile on your machine will compile on any other kind of machine with only minimal "tweaking", if any. Borland, Microsoft and even CodeWarrior have added their own extensions to standard c, which means that porting code to another platform can be difficult.
A complete Java package (of course!).
Emacs, the standard UNIX editor.
XFTP - and X windows point-and-click file-transfer tool.
Netscape.
XV, a popular image-viewing utility.
Players for MIDI and digitized audio files (.wav, .au etc.).
… and a whole lot of other stuff I haven't installed.
Note that some of these programs come as Sun "packages" (like Linux rpm's) on a separate CD and must be installed. (Star Office is pre-installed.) The "package-adding" utility is very easy to use, though, and installation is pretty automatic. Also, all of these programs are available for free download from sunfreeware.com as Sun packages, so even if you download them, installation is a snap. Unfortunately, secure remote login software is not provided free (e.g. ssh), so you'll have to download and compile the source code if security is a problem for you.
6. On the downside, unless your organization has a technical support contract with Sun, it's hard to get help from them. However, there are many listservs and newsgroups that serve novice UNIX users, and I have found that this informal network can often be as helpful as phone-in or email tech. support.
7. Finally, Sun partitions the hard drive (at least mine) in a rather odd way. Everything preinstalled was put on a relatively small partition (2 gig.) leaving a 6 gig. partition with nothing on it. This means that, unless you move some of the pre-installed directories to the large partition, you will only be using 25% of your hard drive and will have very little room to install additional software. I guess the reason they do this is to allow you the greatest freedom to set up your hard drive the way you want. But to do it this way shows that Sun still thinks of its users as being "UNIX-savvy".
WHY SOMONE WOULD BUY SUNW IN A BOX AT A RETAIL STORE
8.If Sun goes one extra step, and assumes that some its users are not even remotely familiar with UNIX, makes it unnecessary to move directories around, pre-installs all (or at least more) of the free software they provide, makes installation of new software completely idiot-proof (there is a Java-based install "wizard", but I haven't used it yet) and provides tech. support, then they could go head-to-head with any of the common intel/mac systems you see in computer stores and wipe the floor with them. The Ultra 5 is certainly competitively priced.- MR. MEPHISTO |
