Re: First commercial deployment of aurora?

On Fri, Aug 22, 2003 at 08:08:56AM -0500, Paul Gienger wrote:
> Well if you want a modern OS and want to be legal about it, linux is the 
> cheaper way to go... Sun wants you to pay for your Sol9 licenses on 
> boxes that have capability for multiple cpus, so if you're cheap that's 
> out.

:-) I know that, that's why my U10 only has Solaris 9 - 'cause the
licence is even worse than what you say: You also have to pay for a
single CPU licence, unless you buy your Sparc fomr Sun directly or
from an authorized dealer. That leaves most home users like me with
either an old Solaris 8 licence (from the time it still was free), an
unlicensed system or any of the free OSes.
However, as we're talking about business use, I figured that this
argument would be pretty moot - if Solaris *is* better, the licence
will (should...) be paid in that case.


> The other thought is that most of the OSS products out there are 
> developed on linux, which would make a guy think that they would run 
> better on it than on solaris. 

Which causes frequent complains from the Solaris crowd about
non-portable programming - and rightly so. I had my share of fights
with OS on Solaris...


> As a personal point of view, backed up by absolutely nothing, I would 
> guess that linux in general would be snappier than Solaris of any 
> flavor.  I don't have a really good test mechanism to find out if it is, 
> but I do have the hardware to test it out on ;)

I personally cannot confirm that - my Aurora U5/400 and my Solaris 8
U10/440 are *very* comparable (and Solaris 9 is supposed to be even
better - unfortunately, neither Linux nor Solaris 9 can cater for my
SunPCi card... :-( ).
However, the biggest argument against Linux coming from the Solaris
crowd e.g. on comp.os.solaris or comp.sys.sun.* is targeted at multi-CPU
machines and server duty. If I'm to believe them, Linux is not able to
scale on those Sparc machines. I certainly don't have the hardware to
test that... :-}


> <special note> I'm leaving out any sco-ified costs of running linux 
> since I don't think that's going to be an issue, ymmv </note>

Pffffff.... ;-)

Cheerio,

Thomas
-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
                Thomas Ribbrock    http://www.ribbrock.org 
  "You have to live on the edge of reality - to make your dreams come true!"
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