[SunRescue] Solaris on older Sparc boxes

[Lyndon Griffin]

On Mon, 17 Jan 2000, you wrote:

> It had a 2 gig drive and a cg3 when I got it, so I did a full install.  CDE,
> everything.  I even put Netscape 4.6 on it.  It's "slow" but useable.  The
> only problem comes up is when 2 or 3 Netscape windows are open and all
> loading something.  The CPU meter stays pegged a 100% and the mouse stops
> responding.  When Netscape is done, everything is fine.  I use this quite a
> lot to browse the web.  It's no slower than my 28.8 modem was.

Netscape is a frightfully bad browser, at least in it's 4.x form.  I was
responsible for a series of tests, a year or so ago - MSIE vs Netscape, and MSIE
kicked Netscape's ass in page rendering speed tests on ALL platforms, including
Solaris 2.6/SPARC.  This was mostly a 4.x vs. 4.x test, but towards the end I
got really curious, so I compared Netscape 3.x vs Netscape 4.x on identical
machines, and 3.x's rendering speed was nearly twice that of the 4.x browser. 
I can probably even dig up the results of these tests, but to really believe
this, you'll have to try it for yourself.  Netscape sucks in a number of other
ways, too - but I don't want to flare up a holy war, here.  For
this reason, I always keep a Solaris install at home so that I can use *groan*
MSIE from my other X boxen.  I would rather not use any MS product, but when it
comes to browsing...  well, I'm too impatient for Netscrape.

> 
> I tried installing StarOffice.  Don't do it.  It will load up, but the
> response time is too slow to do any work.  It will occasionally seem to
> freeze the machine, but it's probably doing the same thing as Netscape.
> After an hour I just power cycled it. StarOffice seems stable from a remote
> X terminal, but still too slow.

I love and hate StarOffice at the same time.  I find it works best if you're
running FreeBSD or Linux on a newer Intel box.  I would say that you get the
pain you deserve if you try running it on anything less than 300mhz(Intel).

> CDE and Openwin run about the same speed.  Take your pick, I like Openwin.

CDE has just about as many CERT advisories out about it as the entire Windows
family of operating systems (well, not really, but there are quite a few).  I
don't recommend it for use in any sort of hostile environment, but home s/b OK.
 I Love KDE on my Solaris box, however, and if you are really accustomed to the
CDE interface, KDE is close enough in many respects to serve as a decent
replacement.  My impression of CDE on slower boxes is that I would rather scrap
Sun's X server and simply run TWM on a generic build of X.  CDE on my
Apollo 710 running HPUX 10.x seems way faster than on my SS10 running Solaris
7.  Come to think of it, CDE on HPUX seems faster than on AIX, as well.  Makes
you wonder to what extent the code is the same across those platforms, but now
I'm just rambling.

<:)  Lyndon