In article <Pine.SOL.3.96.1000718143741.12892A-100000 at thale>, Jamie
Kincaid <jamie at thale.nott.ac.uk> wrote:
> Hello,
> Can anyone on this newsgroup share their experiences of running Solaris
> on intel boxes?
> This recently popped up as an option in a Linux v UNIX for bioinformatics
> debate started by my colleague Keith Bradnam.
>> I am considering solaris x86 as an option having used Solaris happily on a
> sun machine for some time now but was wondering what differences or
> problems (if any) people have encountered.
I'm running Sol x86 7 and Linux on my home PC and am most familiar with
the latter. One thing I should comment on is that Solaris is much more
of a resource hog than Linux. I can happily run Linux in 16 Mb RAM
on my old 486 (mainly in text mode, of course) but on my PII/350
Solaris devours RAM. I have the Solaris x86 8 CD awaiting installation
but I'm delaying this as I've heard that this version is even more
hungry. On the plus side I notice that hardware manufacturers are
now starting to supply Solaris x86 drivers (even if just on their web
sites) (eg. Adaptec's drivers for their latest [23]9160 SCSI cards).
Any problems I've had with Solaris are mainly due to my Linux-centricity.
Bernard
--
Bernard P. Murray, PhD
bpmurray at cgl . ucsf . edu
Department of Cellular & Molecular Pharmacology, UCSF
