OT: Comparison of Unix systems and window managers

Seconded. If nothing else, easier to install new stuff.

All I have are flexpacks and standalone drives.... I do have a few DLT libraries that are great bookends. I'll check with the geeks to see if I can find you some carriers...

Gotta be the Sun one... I'm weird like that... I have a bunch of 21" Sun monitors and i know they are Sony's they just keep the desk branded the same....Weird I say...

it's the Enterprise 10000 Yup, the big dog... Traded it for a Hemi block.

SW13 died with Sbus. I just wanted a matching bitchen' monitor

DONE and DONE!!!!!

Perrtty aren't they!

Ya, that's the one. Died you say? You haven't seen my shop, an odd assortment of lathes, bandsaws, mills, grinders, and old Sun and SGI hardware. Don't ask, it's not pretty.

Grumble and grumble-mother-farker-i-hate-you-the-end-grumble, yeah. Made a shitload on rhat, divested to a bunch of, well, you can guess.

Oh, hell yes. You should see my, er, our, perfstat graphs. /me loves extra capacity. So, is it wrong that I consider all 1600+ of our boxes as "mine"? Because, the way I see it, if my pager goes off when it breaks and I have to wake up to fix it, it's MINE. Money doesn't enter into it, it's about responsibility. And, Crom help you if you deploy something to MY servers without proper change control, dammit. Ahem. You know who you are, and no, don't ask me to be a reference because neither of us would like that.

(nevermind, the one guy who knows WTF I'm talking about is astonishingly unlikely to read this)

George,

I am typing into Thunderbird on top of Ubuntu. I have to second (Iggy's???) observation that Gnome=CPU load, but have not had enough trouble to jump ship yet.

I have not had MS Office installed at home for 4-5 years. A couple of times each year, I dust off a copy a work; Open Office generally does what I need. Just don't start tomorrow morning's career-critical whatever on it if not initiated. That's not to say anything bad about the software; it is quite good. I cannot speak too much to the word processor, as I do most heavy lifting via LaTeX. I have used MySQL almost exclusively for years now, and long ago converted the web pages (that I do not serve from my own code) to Apache. There is one more tie to Redmond, and it's a gem, but that is a long story and not yet resolved.

Over the summer, I was re-installing win2k on a machine to be used for controlling some experimental equipment, and before lining up for installing the OS, re-installing to get the required service packs, and then hunting for hardware drivers, for kicks I dropped an Ubuntu live CD in the machine, and the damn thing just worked. Absent drastic changes, they can keep Vista, Windows Genuine Annoyance (or whatever they call it), etc.

Bill

Thanks very much for all the thoughtful responses.

First perhaps I should describe my machine in a bit more detail. It's a Sun Ultra 2 with 2 x 400 MHz processors, 1280 MB RAM and 2 x 36 GB hard drives. It's fast enough for almost everything I want to do. The only thing it won't do satisfactorily is play full-screen video, and I rarely want to do that. I've thought about adding more RAM, but as I rarely use all of the 1280 MB, there doesn't seem much point. The first digit of the serial number is 8, so according to what Dave says, it's a 1998 machine. The system board date given by "eeprom" is 36029598, but I can't make much sense of that. But whatever the date, it's one of the highest specification Ultra 2s out there.

Rob, thanks very much for the offer of an Ultra 5 or 10. But I think even the fastest Ultra 5s and 10s are slower for most tasks than a high specification Ultra 2. Plus I'm guessing you're in the US, so the shipping to me in England would probably be exorbitant.

Besides, my Ultra 2 seems fast enough for my needs. I don't really feel I need a faster machine. Even running Gimp under Gnome, it seems fast enough to me. The machine was also plenty fast enough to run Solaris 10 when I tried it. But I really disliked the Java Desktop System, so I went back to Solaris 9.

Choice of window manager is obviously a very personal thing. Don likes window managers which are really simple. Some people like an extreme amount of eye candy. I like a compromise between the two. I really think Microsoft did a great job of designing the windowing system which was used from Windows 95 until Windows 2000 Professional. That's why I like Gnome 2.0.2 with the "Crux" theme.

I guess I could try compiling Gnome 2.0.2 for Solaris 10. And if I was to do that, I'd probably add one or two more features such as "next" and "previous" buttons when using Nautilus as an image viewer (the version of Nautilus which comes with Solaris 10 includes these buttons, but it dumps core when you try to use them, which was another reason why I abandoned Solaris 10). But I've not compiled anything for Solaris before. I've compiled things for HP-UX, but that was a long time ago, and my skills are undoubtedly rusty. Besides, at the moment I'd rather use reliable pre-compiled packages if I can, and spend the time using the packages instead. But the problem is that I'm finding it hard to locate reliable versions of the packages I want for Solaris 9 now. The big problem with the packages from

is that they use shared libraries, which forces you to upgrade everything, even if you'd prefer to have the latest versions of some packages, but older versions of others.

Does anyone know of a Gimp 1.2 package for Solaris 9 which doesn't use shared libraries? The only one I can find is on Sun's freeware CD-Rom, but this seems to be an early version which won't save GIF or PNG files.

Don, you mentioned a Gimp 2.0 package which was released by Sun. Do you know if they released a version of this for Solaris 9, and if so where it's available from? I wouldn't object to Gimp 2.0 so much if I could find a version which was reliable and didn't dump core almost every time I used it.

Igor, thanks for suggesting FVWM2. I used to use FVWM on a HP-UX system (not mine) a long time ago and disliked it. It was just too basic for my liking. I didn't realise there was a big difference between FVWM and FVWM2, but having looked at some FVWM2 screenshots, it looks alright. FVWM2 is installing now as I type this. I'll try it out and see what I think. Does FVWM2 support "themes" or "skins" or whatever it chooses to call them? I don't see this as a requirement if the window manager looks sensible to start with, but many don't.

Now I think about it, I seem to remember there being a few other window managers around which duplicated the appearance and functionality of Microsoft Windows. FVWM95 and QVWM I think. Some went a bit too far, even copying the "Start" button. Are any of these still around? I'm happy with the compromise offered by Gnome 2.0.2, but I can't find a package of it for Solaris 10, and I'm not sure how long I'm going to be able to keep using Solaris 9.

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with Linux. I'm just familiar with Unix, and familiarity is good when you don't want to spend time learning something new.

If I was to buy another machine, it would likely be a PC rather than a SPARC machine. Much as I like SPARCs, availability of spares can be a problem, and PC hardware gives more possibilities when experimenting with operating systems. Plus, there are a few things for which I'd find a PC useful, such as Photoshop, QuarkXPress and AutoCAD.

Thanks for the advice.

Best wishes,

Chris

It was not my observation. I run Gnome stuff, but not Gnome window manager, I use fvwm2 as a window manager now.

same here

Never lost anything to OpenOffice.

I use mysql to run algebra.com. During peak hours MySQl happily handles 30-40 queries per second (15 web objects per second).

They can keep viruses too.

My colocation center guy told me that they have a lot more priblems with MS servers than with Linux servers. Downtime, viruses etc. i

Join the club on that regard. Not sure that means anything at all.

Yup, for that architecture, you've pretty much topped it out. Says a lot, actually, that 10 year old hardware of this class is still usable.

Yes, I'd stick with the Ultra-2 over a desktop-class Ultra-5, 10, or 60. Although the 60 is pretty much a toss-up.

I'm SURE you can run gnome on Sol10. I haven't found anything yet that couldn't be migrated, no reason gnome should be unique.

If you have a solaris package for it, just install it on 10 and you'll most likely be fine. And if you're not, I'd love to know. pkginfo |grep -i gnome might list them for you.

sunfreeware.com. Really.

Nothing wrong with working in your comfort zone.

Feel free to email me directly if you want; if time permits I'll be happy to try to help.

Dave

I wish I could say that. Unfortunately, I find myself having to read documents sent to me by users of the latest-and-greatest version of Word, which Openoffice doesn't even *try* to decode (and openoffice is pretty hit-or-miss on older formats. Generally good enough to be readable).

And TurboTax is Windows-only.

And the service manual for my 2007 is in HTML on a CDROM, with javascript that has bugs that cause it to fail on every browser I've tried except Explorer (my normal browser is Firefox).

Also, I'm webmaster for

so I have to see what that page looks like under Explorer as well.

Other than those unfortunate exceptions, it's all Linux. FWIW, I've been using Debian since some time around Y2K. I used RedHat before that (switched because I'd gotten into Update Hell with RedHat), but got my actual start in 1996 with Slackware.

I hear very good things about many other distributions, especially Ubuntu. For that matter, Mac OSX seems to be very, very good. But until I have a compelling reason to change, I'll be Staying With What Works.

My wife and I have, let's see... my main workstation, my router (an old Dell), a machine that is the VPN interface to the outside world, a machine that runs backups, three laptops (they all dual-boot for those nasty Windows-only situations), and a TS5500 embedded 486 board mounted on an iRobot Create robot platform. Oh, and an FIC NEO1973 phone, which runs Linux after a fashion, but not well enough to be useful as a phone yet. But getting achingly close.

A server farm is just like running a cattle farm... You just get SNMP & Raised floors to plow!

I dig ya Sir!!

Rob

For values of "windows-only" which include "and Mac OS X", I guess?

Sounds like whoever wrote said HTML needs a severe beating with the clue-stick. These days, it takes special effort to make a page that doesn't render in all popular browsers.

Or perhaps they could realise that you don't need JavaScript for a manual?

Chris

Ayup. See previous re: cluestick.

Igor, you might know something useful here. Several years ago I wrote a message board application using PHP. Just PHP. Every time someone posted a message, it would save the data as PHP variables in a separate file. The message dates were part of the file names.

Now I'm working on a big site. Something relevant to r.c.m, but not something that I want to reveal just yet. I'm wondering about re-writing the message board application to use a MySQL database to store the messages. I'm wondering if MySQL might be a more efficient means of storage for a large number of messages (assuming I want to leave the messages online in perpetuity). Any idea?

Best wishes,

Chris

You could use

for that, although I think the free service is a bit more restricted than it used to be.

Chris

I have no doubt that MySQL is the way to go for a multitude of reasons. Files suck. There is really no question.

My algebra.com is like that also, with students asking math questions and tutors answering them, it is all in MySQL (questions, answers, lessons and solvers) and it is all publicly available. Their URLs look like html files, but it is an optical illusion maintained by mod_rewrite.

Example:

This is not an HTML file.

This is a MySQL query

select ... from solutions, questions where questions.id = 106918

i

I just tried FVWM2 from

Version 2.4.19. It took me an hour or so to set the window manager up and make it appear on the "dtlogin" screen, but now it works.

It's actually very much like the FVWM that I remember on HP-UX. A bit too simplistic for my liking. I much prefer the Windows method of minimising and maximising windows which Gnome offers. I also miss the Gnome "Applications" menu at the top of the screen, and FVWM2 doesn't seem to like Firefox, which I use as my main browser (it keeps hanging).

Looks like I'm going to be sticking with Solaris 9. I might buy a PC for experimentation, though. I've seen some nice rackmount machines for sale. I like those rackmount cases because they don't go yellow with age.

Thanks for the advice.

Best wishes,

Chris

Thanks for the opinion. My message board application does seem to slow down a lot when there are a lot of messages saved as individual files. I'm thinking that using MySQL might avoid that. My only reluctance is that I don't have much experience of MySQL, but I have plenty of experience of PHP.

Is the main content of your site (the lessons etc.) stored in the MySQL database too? I was thinking of only using the database for the message board, and keeping the main content as simple HTML files, using PHP to print the header menu.

Best wishes,

Chris

You can do that with fvwm2 and more.

See

You can have all that run along with fvwm2. See the above screenshot.

Used PCs cost next to nothing around here.

i