Thursday, January 06, 2005

Solaris 10 Gets Ready to Roll

So ServerWatch have noticed: Solaris 10 Gets Ready to Roll.

They get some things spot on:

To its credit, Solaris 10 has features no other operating system on the market can claim. That's right, Sun Microsystems is innovating in the operating system realm again, and it is doing it well.

and

Amazing performance and support for x86 and AMD64 platforms; Innovative features in both performance and usability categories.

Some things I'm not so sure about:

An abundance of innovative new features, mostly aimed at administrators rather than users

The abundance of new features is fine; but the Java Desktop System - Gnome, Mozilla, Evolution, StarOffice and the like - seems aimed squarely at end users. Or:

Solaris 10 is a viable option for all servers

It's close - hadware support is improving, and most (but not all) servers are well covered. Or even:

Solaris 10 comes with true 64-bit AMD support, which results in a three-fold speed improvement out of the box

Now, I know it's fast, but that factor 3 is a bit arbitrary. Some things in Solaris 10 - especially on Opteron - are spectacularly quick. Others are just OK.

And some things are just plain wrong:

Version 10 is different, however, because it uses only one code base.

Nope, sorry. It's been that way since Solaris 2.4. Or:

Cannot coexist on the same physical drive as another operating system.

Which is simply untrue. See http://multiboot.solaris-x86.org/.

1 comment:

Jim Grisanzio said...

Thanks for these corrections, Peter. And for that multi-boot link. -- Jim G.