Migration to AMD and OpenSolaris

Hi Folks

I managed to escape the family for a couple of hours on Saturday afternoon
and after visiting some book shops I had a look in a second hand computer
shop here in Brussels. Poking around I found a Java Workstation W1100z
with two really nice matching Sun screens, it's rare to find anything
other than run of the mill PCs here so I was hard pressed to contain my
excitement. The shop didn't appear to know what they had, the guy told me
they'd installed XP but "when compared to other PCs we have it's not up to
much". Music to my ears of course and I couldn't resist and bought it.

I struggled home with the screens on the tram. I went back on Monday at
lunch time to collect the computer itself with the car. It was less than
half the price of the same model on eBay and I think got a real bargain.
2Gb of RAM, 2Ghz AMD64 processor and an 80Gb hard disk. Not much cop as a
PC these days but great for a UNIX box.

I've spent the last couple of nights installing OpenSolaris and I have to
admit that I am smitten. I was sick as the proverbial parrot when Apple
moved to Intel and I always thought I'd be a die-hard Sparc fan but this
machine is faster, quieter, and will be cheaper to upgrade than the sparc
based gear.

The only trouble is that it makes my tricked out SunBlade 1000 a little
obsolete. Such a shame as I'd spent quite a bit upgrading it.

First impressions of OpenSolaris are "wow look at all the eye candy!
*drool*" but I'm having some difficulties with Oracle and Asterisk so I'm
not consigning the Sunblade to the recycling center just yet. The nvidia
card was not supported by the latest release of OpenSolaris as nvidia had
dropped the card from the list supported by their driver. I had to install
via vnc and then install an earlier graphics driver. After lots of playing
around with Xorg.conf it worked and gnome is doing dual screen with all
the fancy stuff.

Has anyone else made the leap? Thoughts on sparc and the future? I notice
OpenSolaris is numbered "5.11" which seems to make it plain that it's the
future according to Sun.

From what I see OpenSolaris has put some kick back into the OS and
re-ignited the community spirit which (at least from my perspective) had
been flagging a little lately.

Best regards

Ben