New Tadpole SPARCbook RSN 457
Jon Masters wrote to us in regards to the SPARCBook 6500 from Tadpole. Solaris 9, 4 gigs of RAM and all that - but with the TiBooks and Linux working on laptops, how much do people need Solaris laptops?
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New Tadpole SPARCbook RSN
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It is now pitch dark. If you proceed, you will likely fall into a pit.
Who would need it (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Who would need it (Score:2, Funny)
bad enough when people take their work home with them, even worse when they take the server home with them!
I'll take yours if you don't want it! (Score:5, Insightful)
Where else can you get a 64-bit laptop?
Re:Solaris runs on Intel (Score:2)
Re:Define 64-bit (Score:3, Funny)
Are you simple? It's one thing to say "What do I need this for." It's another thing to try and claim that your 32 bit computer is 64 bit.
Re:More bits != better (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, 64-bit is usually worse in practice than 32-bit, all other things being equal. Many processors let you compile code for 32-bit pointers or 64-bit pointers; the MIPS R10000 family is the one I'm familiar with. The same code compiled for the 32-bit ABI will either run at the same speed as the 64-bit version, or it will be faster. The difference is caused by cache performance. If your pointer is twice as big, you can only squeeze half of 'em into the same caches. Thus, more cache misses, and decreased performance of the application overall.
Unless you need more than 2 GB of virtual memory for your program, you should compile it with 32-bit pointers.
Re:More bits != better (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Define 64-bit (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Define 64-bit (Score:2)
Re:Define 64-bit (Score:5, Funny)
printf("My computer is %d bits\n", sizeof( int) * 8);
}
Re:LEARN TO WRITE C! (Score:2)
$ cat source.c
> main(){
> printf("My computer is %d bits\n", sizeof(int)\
* 8);
> }
> !
$ gcc source.c
$
My computer is 32 bits
Matt
Re:Define 64-bit (Score:2)
Re:I'll take yours if you don't want it! (Score:3, Informative)
First things first. If they lead you to think something without saying it, they imply. If you think something without their saying it, you infer.
Now, where exactly did Apple imply that their PowerBooks are 64-bit systems? The only marketing or tech material I've seen that even mentions 64-bit computing is a little blurb on the vector units, saying that they handle "information in 128-bit chunks, compared to the 32- or 64-bit chunks in traditional chips."
Elementary (Score:3, Troll)
Solaris notebooks will satisfy their own market niche - users who need a stable, secure Unix with good development tools. Linux notebooks will be available for the rest of the Unix market.
Re:Elementary (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Elementary (Score:2)
It's what I have always wanted! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:It's what I have always wanted! (Score:3, Interesting)
Jumpstart really is the bomb, especially now that it does archives.
Re:It's what I have always wanted! (Score:4, Insightful)
And how long did it take you to get JumpStart up and running in the first place? And how long will it take to add a package to your JumpStart configuration?
I was paid to be a Solaris Admin and so I have the utmost respect for the power of JumpStart. However constrasting the joys of such Sun innovations as NIS+ and pkgadd with the insanely beautiful Debian apt-get led to only one conclusion:
Well, let's see... (Score:5, Insightful)
maybe not for moblie use at all (Score:2, Funny)
and think of the cash saved on kvms and monitors and stuff!
and they would also have 3 hour (or how ever many hours they git out of the batteries) back up power supplies.
cuz honestly who needs 4 Gb of ram on the road?
You make a good point (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe laptops are the low space servers of the future? The only major drawbacks are the lower hardware limitations and the cost.
Re:maybe not for moblie use at all (Score:4, Informative)
Well, maybe..... (Score:2)
For development / network administration / sysadmin stuff, my Dell C600 running RedHat 8.0 runs like a dream at a fraction of the price.
Has anybody had experience with Solaris on a laptop? What's it like?
Re:Well, maybe..... (Score:2)
Pros: really, _really_ stable. 200+ day uptime. runs normal solaris binaries, normal kernel (+ a few patches). Has better power management and removeable device support than other unix laptops.. extremely well built, and its a REAL unix workstation.. scsi, ethernet, isdn, dual serial, etc etc. How many laptops have scsi ?
Cons: weight - its heavy, and here's the big one.. the battery life is TERRIBLE. i got 45 minutes out of a fully chargeed battery, and i had the 85mhz model. the 110mhz was even less..
This was my first laptop. I eventually decided that no laptop will be powerful enough to run everything the way i do on a desktop. Also, I realized, on a laptop, the only thing that matters is battery life.
Repeat after me: the only thing that matters is battery life.
So because battery life is paramount, and no laptop will run everything you need it to anyway, the best thing to do is get
the least powerful laptop, with the best battery life.
So, i got an IBM Z50 off of Ebay. It's an old windows CE device in a laptop form factor. It has no moving parts, instant on/off, and heres the best part - 8+ hours of battery life, and at least 5 running WiFi. It has all the power i need - it has an RDP client that i use to connect to a windows 2k server box.
Who else has something that lets them run IE6 wirelessly for 5+ hours of interactive use ? (oh, and weighs about 2 pounds)
Demos, trade shows, etc (Score:4, Insightful)
Not a Solaris notebook. (Score:5, Insightful)
You're Right (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, at this point the advantages of a Solaris laptop are a pittance compared with what else is out there.
Most user applications that demand laptop portability are met with x86 hardware or a Mac running Powerpoint.
Even if Sun had had the benefit of Intel's economies of scale so that we'd be using UltraSPARC V's by now, they still would have difficulty selling the laptop to any market except perhaps Solaris field engineers.
64 bit addressing and Solaris 9 is a great boon for folks running databases on big iron, but I just can't see what it buys you on a laptop.
Re:You're Right (Score:2)
Sounds like it'd be helpful for 3D rendering apps. In that case, I could see Hollywood buying a few of these.
Re:You're Right (Score:2)
Fail-over, demonstration, ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Plus if your trying to sell something that runs on Solaris wouldn't it be good to demo it on solaris? For example, if the customer cannot come to you.
Also as far as server fail-over you could use one of these temporarily to host a webserver, db, hell anything you want. If the battery works like most laptops it would last at least 1 hour with a heavy load and 2+ with a moderate load. Try that with a UPS for around $8000 (SPARCs are damn expensive).
Re:Fail-over, demonstration, ... (Score:2)
I guess these Sparcs can be used for the same thing. They sound a lot cheaper than those RS/6000 laptops though, i think the machine that guy showed me cost $30000+ at the time.
Oh, come on (Score:5, Insightful)
- An administrator of a fully SPARC-based network
- Someone in scientific or industrial applications who need more than the 1 GB RAM that the TiBook supplies; with these specs (4 GB RAM, 160 GB max harddisk) it could even work quite well as a demonstration or temporary replacement server
- Someone with legacy Solaris programs that they need to make transportable
- A person who develops for Solaris
- Someone who just plain prefers Solaris to Linux (believe it or not, they exist)
Just because you personally do not have a use for this device does not mean that no one has a use for it.Re: portable vs. portable (Score:4, Funny)
So you can make the program portable even when it isn't portable? ;-)
Re:Oh, come on (Score:2)
Re:Oh, come on (Score:2)
I blame my parents.
If you can't imagine thousands of engineers lining up to submit purchase orders for this new laptop...
Thousands... Nope. A few, yes.
heck, why don't we just replace all the servers in the world with Dell 1U units running XP? Heck, it works, doesn't it?
'Cause it doesn't do what I want. Dell 1U's running FreeBSD, on the other hand, would do me fine. I'd even go with linux if I needed to. But I think I'll buy OSX for my next server box because it's so easy to use and maintain (I've got freebsd now, and the last openssl patch was a royal pain).
Which brings me to my point: I suspect these laptops will be REALLY EXPENSIVE. Solaris is notorious for being an unfriendly OS for users. I'm thinking that most engineers will:
. Buy a big server/desktop and remote display when they need to crunch numbers with a GUI, as is done around here most of the time.
. Go with a friendlier OS for their notebook.
What's more, I don't think there are a whole lot of applications out there right now that I'd want to run on a 650Mhz notebook that need 4G RAM. Are there folks who need to run big DBs on their notebook? Yeah, a few. Thousands? Naw.
Finally, I note that Dell will sell me a notebook with 1G RAM and a 2.2GHz CPU for about $5200. I wonder if a similar config from SUN (with the same RAM and CPU at 1/3 speed) will cost less than 3x.
Re:Oh, come on (Score:2)
I can't help but ask...how many Real Engineers have you actually been in contact with in your entire life? The market for this laptop is out there, have no worries. Your parochial, limited view of the world prevents you from seeing this.
Re:Oh, come on (Score:2)
Humor us all, and think just for a minute, and fill in the blank: a laptop's purpose is largely to be ______ (circle your answer: portable, stationary). If you guessed portable, you're right! And when you're in a place where you've taken your portable laptop, you oftentimes don't have access to the network. So. It is time like those when you can't just ssh -X in to run an app running on a Sun server somewhere.
Re:Oh, come on (Score:2)
Actually, I almost always do have access to the network. Maybe I'm just spoiled.
Demo systems (Score:5, Insightful)
That is nothing (Score:5, Funny)
Now for something with real bizarre appeal you need to go for...S/390 [ibm.com] on a laptop. Yes folks thats right, the great big clunking mainframe in the backroom running on your own Thinkpad.
Solaris is for wimps, I wouldn't go anywhere without my portable mainframe system.
Re:That is nothing (Score:2)
Makes for quite a demo.
Duh, yes it's necessary. (Score:5, Insightful)
In using a close match for the target platform I discovered a bug in their libraries that I would not have otherwise caught, and was familiar enough with the debugging utilities of the box to use them remotely on the servers on which this app. lived. Since I had written the app. at exactly the same OS level as the target system, I new it wasn't a porting bug and that it wasn't a version bug. This saved me time far more valuble than the cost of my HP workstation. People who look down their noses at this laptop either code at very high levels or don't code at all.
The CmdrTypo that almost corrects itself (Score:3, Funny)
*lol*
Re:The CmdrTypo that almost corrects itself (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Duh, yes it's necessary. (Score:3, Insightful)
43 minutes to compile a 50000 line program, OUCH. Compile time isn't much of an issue. I guess it's not if you're not making a lot of changes or having to go through debug sessions where you have to tweak things to help figure out what's going on.
As to the rest of your comments, it's the same thing people have been saying for the last 10 years, pc's more cost effective than brand x unix, yadda, brand x is going away, yadda, yadda. The most amusing thing is this comment:
I would never consider spending more on Sun hardware because if Im doing graphics I use a Mac (or Irix)
Irix!?! SGI!?! Lord knows, their stuff is never overpriced and their price performance ratio is on par with WinTel/Apple. Oh wait, maybe not. What's that, SGI/Irix has certain features that warrant the higher price for your needs, hey, just maybe Sun/Solaris does the exact same thing in the server market.
Solaris laptops? (Score:5, Insightful)
Believe it or not, there are still people that haven't ported their software to linux. They need Solaris laptops (or worse yet, they lug around a workstation) to show off their wares to potential customers.
Personally, I think it's silly. Porting to linux is a great idea for a number of reasons, the ability to run on a plethora of cheap laptops not being the least.
a good reason. (Score:4, Funny)
Because you need that kind of firepower to adequately run StarOffice(TM).
Why Solaris? (Score:3, Interesting)
Anti-Hemos/Linux R0XX0R$ post! (Score:5, Interesting)
Every single time an article about Sun/Solaris comes out, someone (often the original poster) will say, "but Linux does xxx, so we don't need this!"
Everybody chant the following mantra: Solaris is not Linux. Linux is not Solaris. There is room for both.
Do we need this laptop? Well hell, do we need laptops at all? Is there some reason we NEED a Linux laptop over one running Win2k? Of course not!
That said, some things are easier under Linux that Windows. (and vice versa!) Some things are more mature under Solaris than Linux (or maybe all things?). Some people prefer Solaris, some prefer Linux, some prefer Windows, and some preferred OS/2. WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY do we have to say "but Linux..." EVERY SINGLE FUCKING TIME ANYTHING ABOUT ANY OTHER PLATFORM IS MENTIONED?????
OK, rant off. Just had to get that off my chest.
Amen, brother! (Score:3, Insightful)
J.
Re:Amen, brother! (Score:4, Informative)
Same reason we need pumpkin computer articles (Score:3, Insightful)
If *you* want to carry a pizza-box Sun on Caltrain and use one of the few cars that still have electric outlets, go ahead...
Re:Anti-Hemos/Linux R0XX0R$ post! (Score:3, Insightful)
I can think of two reasons:
1) It never was.
2) Because Gnome 2.0 hasn't hit final release yet. That's where Sun is going from CDE, and good riddance!
"Linux a good all-around choice for those who do a little work on Unix"
Oh, absolutely it is! No argument from me on that aspect--three of my machines at home run Linux! What I object to is the assumption (or occasionally flat out claim) that Linux is (a) a better solution always and forever; and (b) therefore the only one that should be talked about. It amounts to the same sort of egotistical empire-building and chest-beating attitude that Microsoft is always accused of.
horror, horror, look at the keyboard! (Score:4, Funny)
http://hw.tadpole.com/pdf/products/mobile/
at zoom level of 800% or so.
What is that key between tab and shift? This has to be a mistake. Do they really expect any self-respecting Unix user will by this???
Prejudice aside, I think I want this toy even more than Zaurus. I wonder if FreeBSD 5.0 will work on it
And yes, there are people who really do need it.
Re:horror, horror, look at the keyboard! (Score:5, Funny)
Umm, it's a caps-lock? Just as every Sun keyboard has had since the introduction of the Sparc?
Don't get me wrong, I liked the Sun3 keyboard just fine too (with a CONTROL there, as God intended!) but you're fighting a battle that was lost 12 years ago, man. Move on!
--
Re:horror, horror, look at the keyboard! (Score:4, Funny)
There has been a UNIX layout and a PC layout keyboard in type4, type5, type5c, and presumably type6.
All my sparc keyboards are UNIX layout - the way god intended.
and my w2k / xp machines at work ? They run ctrl2cap - from sysinternals.com
The battle hasn't been lost. The weak have given up.
Re:horror, horror, look at the keyboard! (Score:2)
Or how about the key between Fn and Alt? Yes, that's the infamous "diamond key". Look very closely, and you can see they "painted" over the Windows key.
Hah.
Solaris x86 running on Toshiba laptop (Score:2, Interesting)
And with the battery, it's has a builtin UPS!
Sure, I could have used Linux. But I mostly use Solaris for work, so I chose to work with an operating system I'm more familiar with.
Re:Solaris x86 running on Toshiba laptop (Score:2)
Interesting... (Score:3, Interesting)
--RIP DMC, here's some 40 for me, and some for my homies.
Re:Interesting... (Score:2, Insightful)
I was sitting here laughing about Sun's "Death Throes," and then thought about their stock price for a minute, and decided that the business world needs to be blown up in its entirety.
Sun is a healthy, prosperous company. They have a BIG market share in server rooms (especially in the geophysics/oil&gas world), they're producing excellent hardware, they've got a top-notch OS, and...
their stock price is floating around $3, making them ripe for a takeover by quite a few companies.
It's stupid. Their stock price, like that of many other companies, has no bearing on their health as a company anymore. There's simply no connection between stock price and performance, either good OR bad.
Bah. No real point. Just disgusted with big business.
Re:Interesting... (Score:2)
i think its pretty clear that the entire tech sector was _Extremely_ over valued. SUNW lost a lot of ground not because of their bad products, but because of the bad investors that inflated the price so damn high.
Realistically, anyone that had any sort of experience with the markets would have started selling sun short about a year ago. And they'd be filthy rich right now. With double and triple digit P/E ratios, the entire tech sector is a joke.
Look at MSFT - no debt, $40b in cash, record revenues all through an economic downturn (and the tech sector crash). Still, the price has been floating around the same level for about 2 years. Granted, after 1:30PST today there may be a big change in MSFT, but even so, the financials at MS by all indications show that it is one of the strongest companies there is.
Yet its share price has stagnated.
Right now, so much price has dropped out of the tech sector, that all that remains is for the _value_ of those stocks to catch up. Then the stock prices will rise again, and do so at a normal rate (backed by people that know what the fuck they're doing, not idiot day-traders)
Incidentally, SUNW's product offerings are a mixed bag. They cant decide wether they're a hardware or a software company publicly (What is SunONE ? Has anyone seen it ? Why were they telling MSFT that Software didn't matter 1 year ago ?) Also, as nice as the ultrasparc III is, its only nice compared to other sparcs. x86 chips are doing quite a bit better, and itanium crushes it for FP work. SGI systems scale better than Suns, pretty much everyone makes a workstation that outperforms them at the bottom end. IBM's entire line of products is in roughly all ways superior to the equivalent (where they exist) offerings from Sun.
Sun's biggest asset right now is its installed base, and as we've seen, linux/x86 is eroding that because for many things, the port is almost free, and because the hardware is soooo much cheaper (absolute and price/perf)
Sun was the poster child of the
Sun is not a healthy or a prosperous company. They're laying people off, forcing vacations, etc etc. This isn't because of their stock price. Its because people aren't buying as much sun gear, because it costs too damn much money, and because everyone that bought any in the last 2 years has auctioned it off as they went under, so the market is flooded.
Non-Sun OEM use SPARCcs? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Non-Sun OEM use SPARCcs? (Score:2)
Re:Non-Sun OEM use SPARCcs? (Score:3, Informative)
You might be able to build your own [sun.com], but these days finding a 250 or 450 on ebay may be cheaper...
Re:Non-Sun OEM use SPARCcs? (Score:4, Informative)
Heck yeah , Fujitsu , Tatung , Toshiba just to name a few.
Check out www.sparc.com for lists of members of the Sparc consortium.
Remembering Axil (was Re:Non-Sun OEM use SPARCcs?) (Score:2)
I wound up at one point doing some contracting for Axil. I still remember those days fondly. Among other products, Axil made a board called the Axilerate which was a drop-in replacement for the Sparcstation 1, 1+ or 2 motherboard which featured a Microsparc 2 CPU. In essence, you could upgrade your machine to the equivalent of a Sparcstation 5. I thought it was a great product (obviously modern machines are on a whole different level). Axil didn't have any sort of employee/contractor purchase program. I actually had to go to a reseller to buy my Axilerate board.
It was a shame when the asian flu hit Hyundai, which was Axil's parent company. In a cost-cutting measure, Hyundai shuttered Axil, which at the time was the #2 manufacturer of Sparc based computers (#3 was almost as far behind Axil as Axil was from Sun).
Military and certain agencies (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, I can tell you that there are certainly a number of users in the military as well as applications that certain government and quasi government agencies use running on Solaris. A few years ago at the Whitehouse, I noticed a number of Solaris workstations and the first laptop running Solaris I had ever seen. I don't know about things currently, but I expect there to be more Windows machines there now than there used to be. Although our Veep Dick Cheney appears to use a TiBook.....
Additionally, the TiBook is limited to 1GB of RAM (hardware limited NOT the OS which can address much more) and there are number of users in the sciences and video editing markets who would like portable 2GB workstations, but given Apple's focus on video editing, I would expect the next TiBook revision (not the one next week) will address more RAM.
Re:Military and certain agencies (Score:3, Funny)
Although our Veep Dick Cheney appears to use a TiBook.....
I would love to see that "switch" ad.
Why do people need it? (Score:2)
Choice. Sure we balk at Microsoft people asking why anyone needs to run Linux, then we turn around and balk at someone for creating a Solaris laptop.
I think its cool, I'd like to get one for work, we use a number of Solaris only apps.
Out of Wintel, tired of being lied to. (Score:2)
CPU Comparison, Anyone? (Score:2)
Re:CPU Comparison, Anyone? (Score:2)
the reasons you want this are because
1) you need sparc/solaris machine(s)
2) you need one thats portable
Fun With Sparc Hardware (Score:2)
Sarcasm aside, Tadpole makes some great products. They've been building laptops that put most others to shame for years
My other favorite style of Sparc system was the Ross SPARCplug. It was a full server, packed into a two (or three?) 5.25 inch drive bays. Stick it in your PC, plug in a network cable, and pow -- stealth server! Dual hypersparc CPUs, 256MB of RAM, SCSI, 100Base/T ethernet
Hmm. You can also find raftloads of old IPXes and stuff, for dirt cheap (usually under $100). Tons of fun. Beats the pants off of a low end PDA for cheap thrills.
Just think
But it *has* to be Intel or Mac..... (Score:5, Interesting)
Evidently no one else knew enough to buy it either, and so when they caught the guy a year later, that was the only thing of ours they had not managed to offload. When I went to the police to reclaim it, I was fully prepared to go to lengths to show I knew the password, but they said 'just take it'. Then an officer asked me if that was a good brand of laptop and would I recommend it for their college aged kid....
Oh the nostalgia working on that brings me... SunOS 4.1.1... As an aside, anyone know where I could get a replacement battery, software updates, and/or the little scsi plug adapter for this sucker?
Also have a new iBook (for when I need battery or don't want to take forever to do anything), and bought my Fiancee a PC laptop (linux/WinXP dual boot).
Re:But it *has* to be Intel or Mac..... (Score:3, Informative)
I don't know about the rest, but the best course of action with the battery is to get it re-celled. Inside the battery casing is usually just standard sized NiCad or NiMH or LiIon cells (depending on the age). Search around, there are companies that specialize in exactly this.
Look at the xrays of a TiBook [slashdot.org], for example. You can see the cells inside the battery in the lower left corner.
Parts (Score:3, Interesting)
found some good stuff there
this used to be a good site.
that's a good place for solaris software
The uses of a Solaris notebook (Score:2, Interesting)
1 - Jump start. This is a beautiful box to ethernet over to your new server to install Solaris via jumpstart, especially if you need to do the install while off the net, e.g. a tripwired hardened server like a firewall running Checkpoint Firewall/1.
2 - CDE. So many of the admin tools for SunOne software are buggy in any version of X other than standard CDE. Examples are the directory/web server java based console.
3 - Portable development. Let's say that you are debugging Sparc assembly for a new device driver, or just testing your C code on a particular patch level of Solaris XYZ to find issues with the shared libraries, and you would rather sit in the coffee shop than in your dusty cube.
4 - Portable 64 bit processing. Particularly useful for math or physics types who want to crank out some data on the way to a conference or in the hotel room. (Yes, 1GB of RAM, but no limit on Swap. Not to mention REALLY big Ints.)
5 - Full solaris application testing environment. A wonderful thing to have to take to datacenters in other parts of the country which are not part of the corporate backbone yet to help you figure out why those new Websphere application servers cannot talk SSL LDAP over 636 to the new SunOne Directory Servers.
6 - I could keep going, but I have to get back to work.
jfs
Obligatory Movie Reference. (Score:2)
UltraSPARC 2i (Score:2)
The website seems to say that the laptop simultaneously has 4GB and 2GB. *THAT* is the power of Sun hardware.
Tadpole (Score:5, Interesting)
Then I got one of these (for hrumptyhrumptens of thousands of dollars). It paid for itself in a month. I could do builds on-site, leading to turaround times of less than an hour. I no longer had to get a hotel for most support visits! I sure had a need for a non-Linux notebook.
Of course, it radiated so much heat out the keyboard that my hands would just drench the thing in sweat. That got a little gross. But it worked like a champ.
This is neat and all, but... (Score:2, Interesting)
I mean, I'd really like a solaris laptop. It would beat the hell out of my portable rack rig. But damn it, I don't want to have to fend off sales reptiles just to find out how much it is.
All I can think is that they want to "personalize" the price based on how much money they think they can get out of you.
Re:Specifications (Score:2)
Re:Specifications (Score:3, Informative)
The page says that the version with Solaris 9 and 4GB RAM is due in winter 2002.
Conflicting information. (Score:2)
At the bottom, it says 2GB of DRAM, Solaris 8.
The Specification page says 2GB ECC SDRAM, Solaris 8.
The PDF Datasheet says "2GB ECC SDRAM, 4 slots PC 133 SODIMMs (unbuffered, ECC)" and "Solaris 8"
My guess is it's a last minute update.
Re:Specifications (Score:3, Funny)
Re:did you notice this (Score:2)
Re:did you notice this (Score:2)
Except at Sun.
Re:LOOT AT THIS! (Score:2)
Re:Didn't List a Price... (Score:2)
2) or more likely, if you need to ask its too much. I.E. I would have to morage my house to pay for it.
1) I don't care
2) I would mortgage my house to pay for it...
Re:Didn't List a Price... (Score:2, Informative)
I'd guess the 6500 pushes $20K depending on the options.
Re:Mod +Funny (Score:2)
"Broken, stupid compilers". You think GCC is broken? If you don't like the compiler you're given to use, find a diferent one.
"braindead default configs". No such thing as a default config on oslaris, talk to the people who installed it.
"a useless, trash desktop". I use Gnome and KDE for my Sun box. Once again, if you dont like the tools you are given, use somthing else. Soalris 9 ships with Gnome now, KDE can be downloaded pre compiled. So what's the problem?
It sounds like you have some poorly configured Solaris systems. However that in no way means that Solaris is the problem. As they say PEBCAK (Problem Exists Between Chair And Keyboard).
Re:Mod +Funny (Score:2)
Any OS is gonna run like crap if it's not configured right, so I won't go into that.
If you don't like the defaults that come with Solaris, you can get quite a bit of GNU and other stuff from Sunfreeware [sunfreeware.com]
FYI (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I could use a Solaris laptop (Score:2)
Assignment: put yourself in a situation in which you have to deal with the Teamsters. I bet you hate it.
Re:Linux Laptops? (Score:2)
http://xtremenotebooks.com/index.html
Laptops without an OS pre-installed are possible through them and they at least appear to be reasonably priced per included laptop features. I once purchased an IBM laptop with linux pre-installed but I think they have since discontinued that option...
I emailed them and got their brochures (via mail) (Score:5, Informative)
Actually prices aren't that bad when comparing to average Sun prices.
Here you go, I found an email with prices & na (Score:4, Informative)
Tadpole has discounted our 500MHz IIe laptop with the 14.1" LCD
1024x768, with 20-60GB HDD and up to 2GB RAM. Let me know if you have any
interest.
500MHz IIe, 14.1"LCD, 20GB HDD, 256MB RAM $5,489.50
500MHz IIe, 14.1"LCD, 20GB HDD, 512MB RAM $5,939.25
500MHz IIe, 14.1"LCD, 20GB HDD, 1GB RAM $6,750.00
500MHz IIe, 14.1"LCD, 20GB HDD, 2GB RAM $8,730.50
can expand to 60GB HDD
Tadpole also announced a 650MHz IIe, up to 160GB HDD, 4GB RAM coming in
Dec., 2002
Dennis Vines
Sr. Account Manager
Tadpole
2300 Faraday Ave
Carlsbad, CA 92008
PH: 800-770-9003 x 216
FX: 760-931-1063
Email: dennisv@ca.tadpole.com
Portable Solaris Workstations and High Density Servers providing
solutions from the Rack to the Road
Re:Three excellent reasons to love it... (Score:2)
Thinkpads, for example have three buttons. Some HPs do as well. Some others I'm sure, but I haven't dealt with them...
I, on the other hand, have a one-button touchpad.... My optical 5-button,2 wheel mouse compensates though (not bad for 12 bucks...)