18 January, 2007

The Sun finally shines again in the Flying Brick System.

The latest offering from Sun.


Well. After all my bashing about Solaris not working on brick (the K6-II@533MHz, Apollo MVP4 chipset, 512MB) I actually tried it on fatty (a Celeron Coppermine@766MHz, 256MB) and got the surprise of my life. It WORKS on here! And it works like I expect! So now I'm writing this from Mozilla under CDE, on Solaris 6/06. It seems to behave rather nicely, though I've yet to do some more customising. One other thing I've found though, is the lack of hard drive space. I only installed on to a 3.2Gb drive, so I'm missing some things I wanted to experiment with, like the Sun Java Application Server Platform.

The real deal.


Now to the reason I installed Solaris to begin with: I wanted to see how programs behaved on a real UNIX™, and not on a clone like Linux, nor on a BSD variant. Not that I don't like Linux or FreeBSD, merely that I wanted to try the closest thing I was ever going to get to what has always considered to be real UNIX™. Anyhow, I'll leave this as just a real short note so far. No point in boring people with the few small struggles I've had learning how to "mount" a cdrom, or how to even get X to show a picture. Suffice it to say I've dealt with those. Only things left are sound, automounting CDs, and SunFreeware. and even that's not desperately important. I seem to remember there was a driver for my sound chipset out there somewhere, so I might hunt through my IRC logs to see what's around. Sun's Freeware (of course) is available freely, so all I have to do is scare up enough room... hmm, how about a new hard drive, people? Say, oooo... about 20GB?

SunSet.


Cheers for now...time I went and played with CDE and all those wonderful things that make Solaris so unique. Now where did I put that DVD-ROM?