Solaris zones

Sounds like Plan 9.

Not really. Plan 9 is much more flexible. A zone is about the same as booting another instance of solaris in an emulator, only much faster than an emulator, and without the need to manage ALL software updates separately for each instance.

I am currently using solaris on my sparc, gonna put open on it though asap. Im not sure if i like it, but have to learn it a bit first

In daily use, when configurated properly, there is nothing not to like about Solaris. The default GUI (CDE) is horrible, though.

I hope that in the far future when I will have my own multiple room house, Sun will still make SunRays. Those things are brilliant: you can take your session from one to another simply by removing a creditcard sized card from the one and inserting it in the other.

EDIT: holy cow, look at the price of the server software needed for SunRays if you want more than a single-seat license! (what's the point of a single seat SunRay anyways?) I think I'd rather hack up something myself with the same functionality then, using, among other things, FreeNX and separate card readers.

Anyhoo, back to topic.

Yeah, those sunrays are amazing, on eBay you can get them for around £100 .

Anyways, the only thing I am not liking about solaris atm is the fact it isnt FOSS and the drivers for my onboard graphics arent there.. I'll find 'em

Hey! I happen to *like* CDE; seriously. For a lightweight WM/DE it's not too bad at all really.

Hmm... Maybe it was just my pain when OpenLook was not installed anymore on the university solaris system, and I was forced to use CDE.

But you have to admit CDE does look uglier than anything else.

I never used Solaris or CDE on anything else but I've seen some screenshots of CDE and I agree it's not very nice and modern looking. KDE, GNOME, Xfce4 and others are way more advanced in that sense. CDE looks like past.

As for the solaris zones I probably don't need that anyway, but still if I try OpenSolaris it may be to just see how it feels like.

I downloaded Nexenta. I think I'll install it on qemu...

I think zones might be quite useful for:
- trying stuff without messing up the whole system or having to manage a separate testing system.
- keeping untrusted software in a sandbox
- developing your own distribution?

I would try full blown solaris

At least it is free as in beer, better than SOME operating systems and it is nearly open source now, i mean, the reason that some of it isnt is because they need to keep their enterprise customers biting

I really need to learn how to use zones though, and dtrace, they are really really really good.

I suppose so; it reminded me of the old Irix interface as well though. Maybe I'm just a poor judge of looks

CDE is by far a lot better than the JDS (Java Desktop System, which has pretty much nothing to do with java if the people in the soalris channel are right). The JDS sucks up even 1gbRAM, and makes a computer thatshould be fast, slow.

I guess we can conclude that after OpenLook Sun's GUIs got worse and worse

Wow! I thought JDS was a Gnome desktop based on SuSE? Or am I thinking of something else?

It is. Apparently they added some desktop toys written in Java that noone really likes. It's been ages since I last read anything about JDS, though, so don't quote me on that.

Yeah, JDS is awful, really is, a lot heavier than gnome, and I had a discussion lasting over 300 lines in the #solaris irc channel about how rubbish it was. Seriously. It doesnt even recognize .bin files off of the sun website, for the OS, that the company did itself!!

Whereas CDE does.