I have not used Solaris or Linux very much and wondered how Solaris matched up against Linux ??
Is it harder or easier to master ? has it got any particular advantages over a Linux distro ?

thanks

From my experience its just solid. Its great for server platform use but I would use Slackware or most other Linux distro's over Solaris for a Workstation or desktop use anyday.
And Sun hardware just rocks if you can afford it. But if your looking for a great server OS give it a try, if your looking for just a Workstation/Desktop type OS I would just stick with Linux.

My wife and I just had a kid, so I started working from home a lot
more than before (running actual code and processing data
instead of just adminstering from home). I have an Athlon XP
1700+ at home, and was pleasantly surprised at how much faster
my home system runs than the Sun boxes at work. There are a
couple Sun blade 100s, some older machines, and a Sun E3500.
The code running on the E3500 is about twice as slow as the
same code running on my XP 1700+.
It's not the OS, it's the hardware, and a $10-15K machine running
slower than a $500 machine amazes me. . .
HOWEVER, the Sun hardware will continue to run when my XP
has been recycled a dozen times.
I have not found that using Solaris is any more difficult (or easy)
than using Linux. By using, I mean using/adminstering (I'm only
a little involved with administration on the Solaris boxes at work).

I use solaris at uni and it is pretty darn quick on a four processor sprc machine (dunno exact specs but its pretty new)

anyway, im doing some maths research at uni (its holidays down in australia) so i have the whole servers processing power to myself.

having said that, i agree with previous posts, solaris is great...as a server, but for a home desktop/workstation, linux is better.

Yeah, it's definitely not the OS. The internals in an E3500 are relatively old compared to a XP 1700+ system. The bus speed on those systems was only 84 or 100 MHz depending on the processor speed. If it's an older E3500, the processor speed is probably only a 300 or 366 MHz. I'm surprised that the Athlon system only runs twice as fast. The E3500 is probably handling a larger userbase. I really have to love the stability of a Sun system, especially under heavy load. At one place I worked, a heat sink fell off of a chip in a E4500. The chip caught fire and burned a hole right through the processor board above it. The system kept running! The only thing that we couldn't figure out was how the office staff didn't notice the awful smell of burning plastic. We didn't find out about this until we went out to the site to make some hardware changes.

For me, this is the end of intel X86. I'm buying Ultra Sparc hardware next time. I would be just as happy with Linux running on Sparc than I would be with Solaris, so long as Java 1.5 (comming out next year) runs on either one. On the other hand I heard that SUN is comming out with a home users PC in 2003, but if it is Intel based than I don't want it!

This E3500 has two 400 MHz processors, and isn't really that slow
of a machine, but compared with the Athlon, it crawls. However,
if I could get the Sun hardware for about the same price as the
x86, I'd take it. I, too, value stability over speed (but am too cheap
to pay for that stability ;).
About the OS: I like the linux philosophy better than the Solaris
philosophy (free/open vs closed), so I'm happier with running linux
on whatever machine I have, but can not honestly say one is better
than the other.

A dual 400 MHz system is a pretty snappy system especially once you tune it up.

Yeah, it's not a bad system, and even though it's the server, I use
it to run code on weekends because it's not one of the workstations,
and is just running a few non-intensive services at that time.
However, it still doesn't compare with my machine at home, or even
the single 800 MHz Athlon on my desk at work when you consider
raw CPU processing speed. Once memory management comes
into play, Solaris still has a leg up on Linux, though that's
changing, I think.

Thanks for the reply's.

Another question.........is Solaris running on Intel more stable than Windows running on the same machine, we have NT and Win 2000 and they both seem quiet reliable.

Just wondering as some time in the future I will be wanting to set up a little web server at home and wondered which O/S to use.

Cheers

Use Linux on Intel or Intel clones. Solaris uses the same webserver that Linux does, Apache 2.0. For that matter you can use Microsoft Windows IIS, it comes with Windows 2000.

In the future, Microsoft is also going to ship their SQL database server, free with their operating system. I find Linux to be more stable than WinXP or Windows 2000, however you need to become familiar with the shell.

Solaris 8 SPARC workstation (not a server, but a typical system
used everyday for image processing, large code runs, etc.)
uptime: 108 days. (since OS/Hardware upgrade)

Slackware Linux (AMD Athlon) server uptime: 190 days (since
install)

Windoze 98 workstation uptime: 3 days (since last reboot due to
losing contact with NFS server)