Solaris 9

[bandwidth_pig]

I must admit, I was most pleasantly suprised with Solaris 9. If any of you out there are considering switching from 8 (I did recently) I feel it really offers a performance enhancement. I have a low end Ultra Sparc I. It's only 167 mhz with 256 megs of RAM. But it runs 9 like a champ. Using primarliy the CDE, I find it to be much faster than it's predecessor. When I switch to Gnome though, it bogs way down. But hey...what can one expect for a 167 mhz CPU? Have any of you switched from 8 to 9 and noticed a nice little increase in performance?

As a side note, if any of you are running a Ultra I, I am curious what size of drive you have if it is not stock. According to Sun, it does not appear the Ultra I supports anything over 4 gigs (perhaps slightly over). Which seems like a terrible waste to me. If it has the same number of pins for the SCSI drive, I don't understand why the limitation outside of perhaps the kernel. I'm still somewhat new to Solaris, and trying to figure this one out.

[DaHitman]

I moved to running Solaris 9 on my Thinkpad T30 at work since my fortune 50 is on the warpath about "rogue" linux boxes.. (long story).

I gotta admit Solaris 9 is damn skippy.

If SUN wooulda had this available a few years ago, it would be pretty popular.

With the addition of XF86 and all the capabilites and drivers that work, along with offering all the popular GNU tools (gcc, apache/php/mysql, etc), plus KDE and GNOME... its actually almost just like working on a Linux box.

I have been able to pretty much do everything on my Solaris 9 laptop I did when I ran Linux on it, and I have a nice KDE 3.1.1 desktop even.

In fact the only thing not supported on this laptop by Solaris now, is the winmodem, which is not supported under Linux either...sound works great for mp3's, and I even have 3D Video with the onboard Radeon Mobile using the ATI XFree86 driver.


>Using primarily the CDE

Sorry... I got tired of that interface back when it was only on HPUX.

>When I switch to Gnome though, it bogs way down.

I bet its your video. Get the XFree86 stuff going and your performance will be 10000x better since you will be using a driver optimized for your card and not the generic and SLooooow VGA driver. I even see a performance boost using the XF86 driver on my Ultra5 with an ATI card it it.

>Have any of you switched from 8 to 9 and noticed a nice little increase in performance?

Yep... very much so. Also if you turn on ufs logging in the vfstab its much more of a performance boost now it seems.

Solaris 9 seems down right peppy compared to 8 on my Laptop and my Ultra 5. We also feel it runs faster on our servers. We are still mostly a mix of 2.6 and 8 at work, but we have 9 running on some now, and it seems faster on the netras and even the v880's etc.

>According to Sun, it does not appear the Ultra I supports anything over 4 gigs (perhaps slightly over).

My guess is thats all they "sold" or offered for it at the time.... I bet you anything it will work with larger drives.

[bandwidth_pig]

Thanks for the tips! I'll give that a try! So how do you feel about that Ultra 5? I have been watching them on Ebay and you can pick up either the Ultra 5 or Ultra 10 for a real resonable price anymore. Does the Ultra 5 have the propreitary plug for the monitor? I know what you mean about the CDE, but since I already run KDE on my Debian and FreeBSD boxes, the CDE is a nice change.