Other *nixes

[Frank 'Crash' Edwards]

On Mon, 19 Jul 1999, James Hawtin wrote:
> I have tried solaris 2.6 and 7 on my think pad 770X, I have no joy with 7 
> installling at all, 2.6 pm kicked in twice during install causing lock ups 
> eventually got it installed. Have to stick Xfree86 on it as the X server does 
> not like the graphics card.

Figures.  I haven't tried 7, but an associate has 2.6.1 (?) installed on
his 770X and it seems to be doing okay (haven't heard about any major
problems lately).

> PCMCIA did not work serial did not work, so pretty difficult to network in any
> way at all.

Huh?  I haven't heard that from Scott; I'll have to ask him about it.  His
office is heavily networked and I can't imagine that it'd be useful to him
in that condition.  Then again, he wiped his disk a few weeks ago and
installed Linux with multiple VMware sessions running NT for some training
material development he was doing...

> Had better luck with a compaq 266 PII, pcmcia did not work serial
> worked and I had a docking station which the net card worked in!  So
> I had to slip things at home
> 
> Unless there is a really good reason for wanting solaris 2, I
> suggest you forget it SUN, if you read there web site are not
> interested in support the "low end" market, so drivers I don't
> expect will be improving much.  At home I have two solaris 2.6 intel
> machines, I choice linux for my laptop as solaris 2 had so many
> failings (my first linux box) I will be converting the others in
> time.  Because it is the future in my view for the intel platform.

I believe you may be correct in the low-end market.  Star Bridge Systems
announced a programmable microinstruction set cpu which is -- get this --
"3 orders of magnitude faster than a 500MHz pIII".  Since the price is
expected to be around $1000US early next summer for a complete machine(!),
you'll be getting 1,000 times the performance of a pIII for the same
price.  Pretty cool. :-)  And since the instruction set is programmable,
it can emulate (or actually _be_) a PowerPC, a SPARC, an Alpha, or
whatever.

They already have a system capable of beating out the Cray family.  I saw
the article on CNet, I think.

> Solaris has nice multitreaded kernel though, which is nice for my dual PII
> main machine, linux is not nearly as good on that score ..... YET!

Yeah, Linux is lagging here.

> James

One response to the original post was that AIX v2 isn't supported anymore.
But I've heard rumors from inside IBM that AIX v5 (code named "Monterey")
may be available for the Intel family of processors.  Boy, I'd love that!
And it's been too long in coming.  But I think internal politics within
IBM has been holding back the Intel port, because it might eat into the
rs6k product sales (damn straight it would!  The Intel hardware is soooo
much less expensive).  I think driver support is slowing them down right
now.  That may have been partly alleviated by their large investment into
RedHat, though.  Time will tell.

That's all rumors, of course.  I don't even work for IBM. :-)

Ciao.
--
Frank J. Edwards         Edwards & Edwards Consulting
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