[sclug] [OT] Solaris vs. Linux

[Will Dickson]

In case anyone's interested:

I recently acquired an old SPARC (thanks, Alan P :-) and 
after some teething troubles (it turned out the CDROM was 
broken, which was a problem since it was SCSI; bowever, by a 
wierd coincidence my company had one of those lurking in a 
junk pile, which worked). After a looooong install process 
I've got Solaris 9 on it.

Now, it's not an entirely fair test (the SPARC is hugely 
less powerful than my x86 box, and Sol 9 has very recently 
been replaced by Sol 10) but if the Solaris desktop guys 
aren't scared of penguins, they ought to be. (Solaris may 
well still be better on big iron OTOH.)

Oh yeah, and Sun? Giving me Solaris on the grounds that I'm 
a developer is a cool thing to do, and displays an 
insightful enlightened self-interest. But then trying to 
sting me for $995 (!!?!) for the C compiler so that I can 
actually *do* some development... isn't. And doesn't. And 
since there's this little thing called GCC, I'm afraid your 
scam isn't going to work, either. Nice try.

Will.