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.