That x64 in the advert....

[Stephen Philbin]

I don't get it. That advert on this site for that x64 box, the new "industry standard" as it puts it. It says it's so spankingly fast and wonderful, but it runs Solaris. Am I missing something about Solaris here or what. The only time I ever hear about Solaris is when someone is complaining about it. I mean it's not like I've gone looking for opinion on it or anything, it's just I've never seen Solaris get a complimentary mention anywhere. I've seen it complained about in readme's, articles and various documentation (usually for compiling something you want to install), but never anything good.

Is it just a massive coincedence? Or is there some sort of speed/reliability trade off going on here? I just can't seem to make sense of them advertising how wonderful their new box is, whilst at the same time advertising the fact that it uses an OS that people seem to like to complain about.

[NogDog]

I've worked on projects in the past that were fielded on DEC, HP, and Sun servers using DEC's UNIX, HP-UX, and Solaris respectively. I don't recall any particular Solaris problems (at least no more than the other two); but then we had some top-notch sys-admins who probably knew all the necessary tweaks and kludges already.

[Stephen Philbin]

I think most of the problems I've seen mentioned were things just refusing to compile with no apparent reason and infrequent, yet seemingly random crashes of applications. I know there's an application I've installed on my computer that basically says in the compile notes to not even bother to try to build it on Solaris, but I can't think what it was. I think it might have been Kopete (hardly the kind of software you'd want to be installing on the box in the advert I know), but I could easily be wrong. I actually got to know the name "Solaris" from all these warnings and stuff in README's and INSTALL's before I even saw it "out in the wild" as it were.

I used to worry; "What is this Solaris thing and am I using it?" for a while before I saw it advertised like that and mentioned in other articles etc

[NogDog]

It does have some slight syntax differences on some OS commands, making it depart from "standard" UNIX (if there is such a thing). Same thing for HP-UX. I know a lot of our software had conditional compile statements or even separate source versions to account for such differences, though I don't know the details. So I suppose if someone creates an application on HP-UX and either doesn't have access to Solaris for devlopment or doesn't know about--and how to deal with--the differences, then there is a likelihood of incompatibility. I don't think it's so much that Solaris is "wrong" or "bad" as it is that it is different, just as HP-UX or DEC UNIX is different.

[MstrBob]

I don't think you can judge an OS based on the fact that there is software that works for other systems and not on it. It's not really the Operating Systems fault. I don't expect to be able compile any decent size Windows application for Apple. (Okay, if you want to take the "But Solaris is supposed to be Unix" argument, I can't very well compile a decent sized Apple app on Linux.) Barring excepts of cross-platform languages (Like Java) of course.

[PeOfEo]

Solaris is definatly not something I would use for a webserver though. It is does have definate uses though, CSX back in jville has a whole array of SPARC boxes controlling their rails. MIPS is not something I would use for a webserver either, but if I were working at pixar I would prefer to have an SGI MIPS work station. Industry standard is vague... standard in what industry, it is certainly not standard for http servers.

Nogdog, when you worked with hp boxers, were those running Itanium2? I have heard a ton of gryping about that architecture.

[Stephen Philbin]

I don't think you can judge an OS based on the fact that there is software that works for other systems and not on it. It's not really the Operating Systems fault. I don't expect to be able compile any decent size Windows application for Apple. (Okay, if you want to take the "But Solaris is supposed to be Unix" argument, I can't very well compile a decent sized Apple app on Linux.) Barring excepts of cross-platform languages (Like Java) of course.

Yeah I know what you mean. It just seemed odd. I would have thought that if they were going for their bestestestestest ever yet! kind of kit, then they'd have gone for an OS that was really geared towards that kind of thing and was as compatible as possible.

[NogDog]

Nogdog, when you worked with hp boxers, were those running Itanium2? I have heard a ton of gryping about that architecture.

Don't think so, it was for a military contract, which in our case usually meant hardware that was a few years old (only the really sexy projects get the latest and greatest toys). Of the three (DEC, HP, and Sun) the DEC's usually gave us the least amount of trouble, but that was at least in part due to them being the most prevalent in the field, so we developed for them first then modified as necessary for the others.