I'm thinking of trying Sun Solaris and would like to get some input on its pluses and minus. I used CDE at work and didn't like it, so I want to run Gnome as my window manger.

Right now I'm running Mandrake 8.1. I'm happy with Mandrake but its performance as for speed is not so good.

I was thinking that Solaris would be very stable and since it's a Sun product and Gnome and many other applications are either written my Sun or Sun is closely involved with the application then maybe there would be better stability and performance. A couple of things I was looking for are how is it's performance, are there enough applications, how well developed is Gnome on Solaris, does CDE have to be installed. All input helpful.

I've heard that unless you have sun hardware, solaris runs like poo. It wasnt ever really designed for i386 hardware. Why not try freebsd?

FreeBSD is very stable!

actually the new Solaris 8 runs not to bad on i386 as long as ya got at least a gig processor and alot of ram, also as long as you dont try to run it giving up services (like running as a work Email server). If you want to use it and paly with it ,it should do just fine.

really?I want get one.where can I get it --solaris 8 for intel

From Sun of course.

think about how rediculous what you're saying is. unless you have a GIG processor. just to run a OS?????!?!?

that is rediculous. you can run freebsd on next to nothing, and run it well. so why not run it. plus its got less restrictive licensing.

I've tried running GNOME on Solaris and it worked quite nicely. I haven't seen Solaris on Intel - so I can't really shed an opinion about that. According to news I saw today, they are not going to put out an i386 version of Solaris 9.

you can always try Slackware which is very close to Solaris as well.. and it runs great on about any intel machine.. with gnome too..

I agree, Solaris if your gonna run it seriuos as in a server run it only on a Sparc. but if you dont have a Sparc and only want to be able to run the OS to get a feel for it, and since most i386 boxes have a gig go for it.PS. I like FreeBSD much better as well!

from Sun for non-commercial use. It is available for numerous chip sets and runs just fine on older hardware. The Sparc station that I use sometimes is 33 Mz.

<insert pointless plug for the distribution of your choice here>

I just took a Solaris course and someone gave me a copy of Solaris 8 (for INTEL) I am running it in a P II 233 at home with 128 MB mem and 4 gb HD and is running ok, of course I am just playing with it so I am not running it as a production server, I just one to get familiar with it.
If U really want it you can go to the SUN site and download it for $20 just look for the Intel version.

I remember getting Slowlaris installed on my PC back in 96. What a bitch! If you want to run a real unix you should try one of the BSD variants. I heard they're pretty easy to setup and have decent driver support.

hmmmm I thought Solaris was built on a microkernel and Slack on a monolytical kernel?

What I meant by my statement was that Slackware is the most Unix like, and Solaris is Unix.