OT: Need some Solaris advice again

Actually, I got an email from Sun last week that you can get sol10 media kits for free, for yourself. If you can't find the link on sun's site let me know and I'll dig up the URL.

Media kits are about =A320 each. I know I can download Solaris 10, but there are a few reasons why I'm not going to. Our internet connection has been very slow and unreliable recently due to a fault on our phone line. It would likely take me about a day to download Solaris 10, and I'd be suspicious of the files I got. I probably could install the download manager and get it to compare checksums etc., but all in all it doesn't seem a good plan. Especially as I need this machine badly to do stuff. So I don't mind paying a little to get it fixed.

I'm getting them used from a local firm which upgrades/recycles servers etc. =A325 each, guaranteed free from grown defects and in perfect working order for three months.

Best wishes,

Chris

I found it:

Crap. Pity I didn't find it last night before I ordered the media kit. However, it seems to be DVD only, and I don't have a DVD drive on my Ultra 2, so it's not ideal. Anyway, I can't feel too sore about it. This is the first time I've given Sun any money and I've got hundreds if not thousands of hours use out of their products!

Best wishes,

Chris

Hi Chris,

I don't want to beat the horse to death, but the later versions were more customizable than Ver 7. I wouldn't call it ancient though. Version 7.54 is just old, maybe came out around mid 2003. Version 3.62 is more like ancient. It really blazes though on the newer machines :) Every once in awhile I still run it to view documentation or mess with a troublesome website. It was the last version built for Win3.x, which I still run from time-to-time too.

Trust us on this one Chris, get Opera 9 and then customize the interface/look to your liking.

If I dislike Sun's version of Mozilla which comes with Solaris 10, I definitely will. I probably will anyway to be honest. It can be useful to have two browsers. Do you know where a pre-compiled package is available?

Best wishes,

Chris

[ ... ]

Well ... since I already have the latest version (Sol-10-U3) burned, I'll save them the cost of mailing.

Thanks, DoN.

O.K. It *does* take a *long* time, even with a T1. I think that Sun's site throttles bandwidth to each client system, so nobody hogs the bandwidth. But it does make it a bit more problematical with a slow and flakey connection. The download manager does re-start downloads and skip what is already downloaded, so it is better than trying to do it by hand. And there are md5 checksums for each of the files. (There are five files to make a DVD-ROM .iso file for Solaris

10, plus another to make the CD-ROM for the software companion collection of pre-compiled open source stuff.

O.K. That is not too much more than eBay prices, and usually the shipping makes up the difference with most eBay vendors. :-)

Good Luck, DoN.

From Opera's own site:

I'm presented with a big green button reading:

Download Opera v9.10 for Solaris

presumably because it detected that I was connecting from Solaris already. If you have to download it via another system, you may have to go to the home page first. Even clicking on the "download" button takes me to:

which still says nothing about Solaris in the URL, but is certainly specific in the page. Here are the choices offered:

====================================================================== Select language: pkg.gz shared 17.1 MB static 23.1 MB pkg.z shared 9.1 MB static 12.6 MB tar.gz shared 6.5 MB static 8.9 MB tar.z shared 9.2 MB static 12.5 MB ======================================================================

I went for the tar.gz static version, since that proably gives a bit more flexibility in install location than the "pkg" format does.

I installed in /opt/opera-9.10, with the invocation script in /usr/local/bin -- but you can customize all of that when running the install script.

And -- the site allows you to select download locations, including two in the UK -- one FTP and the other HTTP.

Enjoy, DoN.

I don't know. I was absolutely stunned to find I was getting

700KB/Second (not a typo) downloading the latest updates from Sun a couple weeks ago. To the desktop. I am quite pleased to be back at GE, for a bunch of reasons.

Hi all,

Just installed Solaris 10 today. Using two 36 GB disks, I split one into three partitions (18 GB for /, 4 GB for swap and the rest for / opt), and the other I turned into a single large partition for /home. My first impressions are mixed. Solaris 10 seems noticeably faster than Solaris 9, which I'm a little surprised about, but there are a couple of things which really bug me about it. Firstly, why do I have to have anti-aliased true type fonts? They look blurry. Why can't I still have bitmap fonts? Seoondly, I've already found a bug in Nautilus. Open a directory of pictures, set the display mode to "View as Image Collection", then type a new directory name in the address bar and it crashes. Almost every time.

I know I could use CDE. I just don't like it much. It isn't user friendly enough for my taste. Has anyone here tried KDE for Solaris?

Right now I'm thinking about going back to Solaris 9.

Best wishes,

Chris

Hm. That'll bite you. Lately I'm just doing slash, swap, and /var. overpartitioning will bite you at some point, one way or the other. Not a huge deal, just keep an eye out for it so when it happens you can say "ah, yes..."

Agreed. We've got older equipment (well, at our site, a 280 is "older") that we've upgraded from time to time, the performance improvement is noticable. Unix systems are like that though; each upgrade of MacOSX I've put on my iMac has made it measureably faster.

Dunno, I don't use gnome on Solaris, but it should be google-able. You could always, um...

Nope but if you know how to drive KDE better than you know how to drive Gnome, I'd suggest it's worth a shot.

Disks are cheap - try 'em all!

Dave

According to Christopher Tidy :

As far as I know, I still *do* have bitmap fonts -- using CDE. It may be that your choice of gnome has forced you to the trutype fonts.

I've never used Nautilus. It appears to require Gnome, so I would not have had the opportunity. Is it a 64-bit application or a

32-bit one? Does it come from the "Software Companion" CD-ROM, or did you download it as a pre-compiled package? (I think that Gnome and all its toys (like Nautilus) are included in the Software Companion -- and install into /opt/sfw. You will need to tweak the paths to get to those

-- and probably set LOAD_LIBRARY_PATH to include those libs, too.)

KDE is supposed to be a free clone of CDE as far as I know. Why choose it over CDE when CDE is native to Solaris? What are the differences?

Even though Solaris 10 is faster? I thought that you were worried about it being slower and you *wanted* faster.

Enjoy, DoN.