Chris Saul's Blog

Solaris still not ready on the laptop Still haven't got around to getting Solaris 10 fully functional on my laptop. This isn't because it can't be made to do so, it's just due to not having time. Anyway, when I'm in the office I use a Sun Ray and when I'm travelling I usually use wireless networks and the wireless card only has an experimental driver, so it's Windows only when out of town for now. Things I still need to do to get things working properly -

Get xorg.conf file for My Toshiba S1

Work out how to get DHCP to time out more quickly when booting offline

Follow Darren's advice to get GDM to be the default login handler

Get hold of experiemental wireless drivers and get them working

Use of Solaris 10 is definitely accelerating with the tech guys I work with. There seem to be two camps - Linux users who want to roll their own for fun or functional reasons, or people who want Solaris underneath for their own reasons. A lot of sales guys are fully JDS/Linux now, which is impressive. Those who travel a lot tend to use Windows still due to wireless card drivers and the like. Internal Sun Rays now run what ITOps are calling a 'JDS preview'. It's basically a nice JDS lookalike to be used until Sun Ray 3.0 is supported and deployed on Solaris 10 - currently all Sun Ray servers are Solaris 9 and there's no official JDS layer for Solaris 9. What's impressive about this is that they essentially upgraded the look and feel for 30,000 desktops in about a day. That really shows the power of Sun Ray. I've started using the 'preview' and I like it. I've used CDE for 6 years now and had got throughly used to it though, so at first I missed CDE's feeling of being quite nippy, but now I inifinitely prefer such 'modern' feature as a toolbar to which and from which I can minimise and maxinmise apps. I remember the guys who used to complain about CDE at Sun and claim OpenWindows was much faster though. There were still a few of those around in 1998 when I joined and one of them set up a Sun Ray based 'web cafe' at a place we sponsored at the time, using OpenWindows as the windowing manager. It made it look like we were installing some ancient dumb terminals, although CDE was only a little better. ( Mar 22 2005, 06:17:42 PM GST ) Permalink Comments [3]