A few weeks ago I ordered a Sun Ultra 24 workstation to use as my primary workstation for work. One of the reasons I bought it is because I need to gain experience using Solaris for one of my future ventures. It came with Solaris 10 pre-installed which is great for servers, but is too dated for desktop use. A lot of the software is from 2003-2004 such as NetBeans IDE 5.0, Star Office 7, etc. I downloaded Solaris Express Developer Edition to install but aborted once I found out that a new version will be released next week. Solaris Express is where the development of Solaris 11 happens. Twice a year many of the innovations are backported to Solaris 10 in an update release. Solaris Express has the latest versions of all desktop software which is perfect for me.

In the spring of 2008 Solaris Express will be replaced by the first official OpenSolaris distribution from Sun, code named Indiana. Indiana is to Solaris what Fedora is to Red Hat. It is a frequently updated distribution that will become the next version of Solaris every three years. The new Image Packaging System (IPS) will debut in Indiana replacing the old System V packaging system. The old packaging system doesn't know how to resolve dependencies and doesn't use network based package repositories. I think this was one of the last major hurdles in Solaris adoption.

There are a couple of things that I don't like about the Sun Ultra 24. The keyboard is missing the right Ctrl key which is replaced by a "Compose" key. There are a bunch of UNIXy keys on here, such as a black diamond? I use the right Ctrl key + arrow keys to quickly move around text skipping entire words with each key press. Now I have to use the left Ctrl key which requires re-training my "finger memory". The other slight annoyance is that the hard drive makes noticeable sounds every time it reads or writes. Other than that I really like this computer. I'm sure I'll get a good 6-7 years out of it like my last computer.

I also purchased a Cisco 871 router with built-in VPN client, VPN server and QoS features. Our network admin configured it so that my home network is permanently attached to the IJW network allowing me to work from home once I'm in Toronto. I hope to use the QoS features for prioritizing VoIP packets if IJW replaces our old PBX phone system with an Asterisk based PBX.

Last week I finished reading my book on Solaris 10. My next step was to create a Solaris Zone to get some experience with it. Zones allow mulitple applications to run in isolation from eachother on the same physical hardware. It's a lot like a virtual machine, except it's not a hardware emulator where you can install any OS on it. I don't really know how it works, but know it involves sharing the kernel, is stable and secure enough for the US DoD, and is faster than other types of virtualizations. Usually all zones you create are Solaris zones but there is something new called Branded Zones (BrandZ) where you can create Linux zones. You can install Red Hat Enterprise Linux or CentOS into it. It's still not quite the same as other virtualization technologies. The Linux kernel calls are passed through to the Solaris kernel for execution. There's no GUI, no device drivers, etc... It does let you run most Linux applications though.

My big plan has been to install the Scalix communication suite in a Linux zone. Scalix only runs on RHEL and CentOS. I learned that BrandZ won't be part of Solaris 10 until Update 4 which isn't out yet. To use it, I had to download Solaris Express Community Edition which is the bleeding edge development build of Solaris 11. I installed it and easily got a Linux zone built and booted. There is one problem though.... BrandZ only supports Linux 2.4 kernels, so I am stuck with CentOS 3.x and can't upgrade to 4.x or 5.x. The Scalix installer tells me that I need to install Postgres 7.4 or newer before it can continue. The only RHEL/CentOS 3.x compatible RPMs I can find are 7.3 and earlier!!! Actually there are newer versions of Postgres for RHEL/CentOS 3.x if you are using x64, but BrandZ doesn't do x64.

What I think really sucks is that with every major version of Linux that is released they change any and every API. This causes many programs to break. There has to be multiple builds of an application for different versions of a Linux. What's worse is that some applications force you to use a distro such as Red Hat because they depend on the versions of libraries installed on that distro. Solaris doesn't have this problem. Solaris is a real Enterprise OS because backwards compatibility is one of Sun's top priorities. A program build on Solaris 2 will run on Solaris 10 without recompiling.

So now what? I can't use Scalix because I can't find a Postgres 7.4 or newer RPM for it? I'll have to see if I can run a binary installer instead of an RPM.

Something else I read was that Sun is no longer paying for development to bring newer versions of CentOS into BrandZ, or to make other Linux distributions work with it. They are working on Xen support using Solaris as a host. BrandZ hasn't been released yet and they seem to be adbandoning development on it! One nice thing about Xen support will be that you can make use of Solaris' fault management monitoring tools with it. Xen seems to be quite popluar in the Linux world; it must be good. Also, it will be one more skill Linux administrators can bring with them when they switch to Solaris :)

I have a few more things to moan about. Solaris' installer lets me customize which packages will be installed, but does not automatically handle dependencies! It tells me what dependencies need to be installed and makes me fix them by hand. Also, I read a PDF where Sun recommends you use the "Everything" software group for production servers so that you get all of the administration tools etc... You also happen to get Star Office 8, games, video and audio players, IM, etc... Those don't belong on a server! I think Red Hat and CentOS also tells people to install everything for production servers.

I'll end this entry with something positive. When I booted into Gnome on Solaris 11 (Nevada), I really liked what they did in this version. There's a new theme that looks very sharp. They are using the latest version of Gnome (2.16!), latest Thunderbird and Firefox, and everything is layed out cleanly. There are some Solaris specific tools for managing SMF services, etc... As long as it works with all of my hardware, I would probably be just as happy using it as a desktop as I am with Ubuntu with the exception of package management. I did see a nice updates manager but since I have the bleeding edge version there were no updates for me to try.

One day I hope to use a Solaris workstation for my work and that would mean I'd probably be using OpenOffice for my word documents. The documents from work that I've opened in the past looked almost right but some things would end up on the next page because the fonts weren't the same. Today I learned how to copy true type fonts from Windows (such as Arial and Times New Roman) to Linux. After installing the fonts I opened my document and it was nearly perfect! The only problems were missing Windings font (for some special characters I used), and I noticed some missing lines around "note boxes" I created. Someone told me that it is illegal to copy Windows fonts onto Linux. I found out that StarOffice, the commercial version of OpenOffice ($35 or $69?), comes with a bunch of standard Windows fonts, plus some extra features. Solaris comes with StarOffice so that's perfect. Their website says they are currently working on supporting Word 2007 documents. That's good because we just upgraded to it at work recently.

Another neat program I was reading about is Cross Over Server. This is a commercial version of Wine, the program that simulates Windows and lets you run programs like MS Office 2003 on Linux, Solaris and Mac. The server edition supports thin clients such as Sun Ray. It would be so neat to have a network of Sun Ray clients logging into a Solaris server running Star Office, Firefox, Thunderbird, and some Windows apps through Cross Over. Cross Over is quite affordable ($69 per user for the professional edition).

The other day I found an absolutely perfect terminal program for calling telnet BBS's (SyncTERM), which also runs on Solaris. A bunch of my other favorite programs run on both Linux and Solaris such as NetBeans IDE, Sun JDK 6, Sun Application Server 9, PostgreSQL, tsclient/rdesktop, OpenOffice/Star Office, Wine/Cross Over, etc... Even the BBS software I run has been ported to Linux, though it does not support running DOS door games under dosemu. However, I am considering switching to Synchronet and tweaking it to look and feel just like my Maximus board. I think the time is here, I am fully capable of switching to a Linux or Solaris environment for work and home, workstation and servers.

I'm nearing completion of my Solaris 10 book. It will soon be time to put it all into practice. My revised plan for my two servers:

Server #1 - BIND, Sun Directory Server, Collab.Net Enterprise Edition, NFS server, print server, Bacula server, Sun Ray server and Cross Over server.

Server #2 - Scalix, Centric CRM, JRoller, Synchronet BBS software & door games (switching from Maximus so it can run in a Linux container with support for DOS doors).

My present desktop computer might become a BBS computer if I decide not to switch to Synchronet. Otherwise I'm not sure what I'll do with it since I don't have a use for multiple workstations.

My laptop has two hard drives. I will upgrade Ubuntu on the first drive to the latest version (7.04) and install my copy of Windows Vista on the second drive. Hopefully I will be able to find Vista drivers for everything. The laptop will be my "desktop replacement", as it has been for the last year or so.

Later in the year I will buy a real Sun workstation with Solaris 10. I plan to live in Toronto this time next year and I want this to be my workstation for work. I'll keep my IBM laptop from work with Windows XP on it just in case I ever need Windows for something (like MS Office, IE or VB), and when I travel for work.

After realizing that the J2ME book I was reading covered only MIDP/CLDC (cell phone development) and not CDC for PDAs, I decided to put the book down and start reading one of my other books that will have an immediate impact on things I'm doing with my servers.

As I started reading the first sentence of my Solaris book, the power went out! The power was out for 3 hours, so there was really nothing to do in the dark other than read a book. Solaris and I got acquainted under romantic candle light, and by the end of the first chapter I realized that this is a match made in Heaven. I will become a Solaris guru.

I need to get a life... :)

Today Sun and Intel announced a new partnership. Intel is now endorsing Solaris as the mission critical UNIX platform for Intel/Xeon. Sun is going to sell a whole new line of servers and workstations using Xeon processors. They are working together to highly integrate features of the Xeon processor such as hardware virtualization and multi cores, with Solaris. They talked about running 6 and 8 Xeon processors in a single server, with up to 4 cores each!! Also, Intel's team is going to work with Sun to fully optimize the Java platform and NetBeans IDE for Intel Xeon processors.

When asked what is going to happen to the Sparc and AMD line of servers, Sun says that it is up to the customer to make the decision what to buy. Sun has a market for Sparc servers. There is a market for AMD servers. There is also a large market for Intel servers that Sun will now be able to reach.