[ILUG] Solaris X.86 dies.

[Liam Bedford]

On Thu, 2002-01-10 at 22:50, Niall O Broin wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 10, 2002 at 02:20:57PM -0000, Matthew French wrote:
> 
> > I really doubt Linux had much to do with the demise of Solaris x86. The real
> > problem would be the difficulty of developing device drivers for Solaris.
> 
> That's the big problem of course as I know to my cost - I have Sol8 on my
> Inspiron 8000 but I can only use it via a serial console or over the net
> because it has a problem with the keyboard controller chip. However, Sun
> wanted to be there to compete with M$ where Intel hardware was going to be
> used, at a time when the choice on Intel hardware was M$, SCO or Novell.
> Then along came the Finnish Swede upstart and took a lot of that mindset and
> Sun is left carrying the can for Solaris 8 updates for a much smaller slice
> of the pie. AND there's no doubt that Linux was what caused Solaris to
> become free (as in beer) for machines with 8 or less processors which is
> most of the Intel installed base so Sun's revenue from Solaris IA sales,
> never huge, dwindled further.
surely that's the whole of the Intel base, as 8 way is as much as Xeon's
go (with a hack to allow two by 4 processor groups to coexist)

I always found Solaris on Intel to be slower, and more memory hungry
than Linux. I also hated the fact that you either had to set
LD_LIBRARY_PATH
or compile with -R because there's no /etc/ld.so.conf

(and there's no point telling me how to do it, I don't have a machine to
run solaris x86 on now (unless that P75 would feel like it.. nope, I
think that would be insane))


L.