Rich Unger's Blog

My wonderful new toy

I would have just commented on Tim's blog entry, but he seems to have commenting turned off.

I, too, am marveling at a nice, shiny, fast ultra 20. (And I, too, didn't pay for it.) I have mine set up in my office, partly to enjoy my coworkers' drooling, and partly because my roommate wouldn't much care for it being on the dining room table :)

I agree with Tim's review. The green LED doesn't bother me so much (that's what electrical tape is for, right?)

I definitely agree with the Solaris comment. I'm a linux user at home, and I had the hardest time with the Solaries userland. Hell, I couldn't even properly create a non-root user! There's no apparent GUI tool for user management, and the adduser command adds a user, but doesn't do the little things, like add a home directory for that user, or do group management, or anything else.

I would *love* a GNU/Solaris. Hell, I would love to see a solaris-kernel package for debian or redhat. That's what it comes down to, right? Now that they're both OSS, there's really nothing to stop competitive distribution and packaging, is there?

In the meantime, I put Fedora on there. I don't actually have a requirement for the solaris kernel (hell, I don't actually have a requirement for the machine at all, it's really just a beautiful toy).

My first order of business is to get project looking glass up on the thing. I'm stalled at the moment, because some of the java library requirements are not available for an amd64 jvm, and not realizing this, I neglected to install the 32-bit jvm instead.

Hey, Sun, how about getting some ultra 20's to the folks developing looking glass? That'd get better amd64 support in a hurry :)

Comments

• There is a system management gui that allows you, among other things, to create new users. Run /usr/sbin/smc.

  Otherwise though, I agree with you, there is a learning curve to for Linux users like me.

  Posted by: 1avi on October 24, 2005 at 02:09 PM

• Useradd has everything you need, '-m' will create the user directory.
  useradd -u 1002 -g mygroup -d /export/rich -m rich

  Posted by: delabassee on October 25, 2005 at 05:19 AM

• Aren't there license restrictions on Open Solaris that would prevent a "GNU/Solaris" from becoming real? Or is jhis just FUD?

  Posted by: flozano on November 23, 2005 at 12:12 PM

• I've never heard anyone say such a thing. If they did, then, yes, it is FUD. Certainly these guys don't have a problem: http://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2005-November/012745.html

  Posted by: richunger on November 23, 2005 at 01:09 PM

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