[rescue] Solaris firewire

[Lionel Peterson]

> From: Nadine Miller <vraptor at promessage.com>
> Date: 2004/03/01 Mon PM 08:08:01 GMT
> To: The Rescue List <rescue at sunhelp.org>
> Subject: Re: [rescue] Solaris firewire

> Alan Duboff is local to me in SJ--he goes to BayLISA mtgs.
> He was the one recruiting device driver programmers for Sun
> that I mentioned a few months back.
> 
> From what he has said, Sun is very interested in getting x86 up
> to speed, so if you have opinions, I'd suggest putting in your
> 2 cents on the list as well.
> 
> (I won't try and guess at what this means for the Sparc hardware
> line.)

I think "not much." I take the view that Solaris x86 is one of Sun's two viable options for portable & desktop Solaris. While UltraSPARC laptops and desktops are certainly available, they tend to cost far more than otherwise similar x86 options. (you can get one heck of a G4 or x86-based laptop for $2.5K when compared with the "low end" UltraSPARC laptops... And UltraSPARC desktop machines cost far more than commodity x86 desktops. Low-end portables and desktops are a very big market, and Sun wants a piece of that action, I suspect.

Solaris x86 on a PII/266 is quite usable, more so than, say, an Ultra 1-200e - in lots of ways the Ulta 1 is superior, but for general "feel" for "desktop" activities, the PII feels faster (probably due to framebuffer/video card differences).

By maintaining/supporting Solaris on x86, you can ride the wave of affordable hardware and keep clients tied to the Solaris OE.