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Sun Microsystems Linux Business

Sun Java Desktop 2 Review 304

Posted by timothy from the then-say-it-to-me dept.
Anon. writes "Linux.com is carrying a pretty damning review of Sun Java Desktop System version 2. JDS seemed to have issues with almost each and every machine the author tested it on, support was quite bad - and to top it all, the software comes with a seven page license document. Something seems to be terribly wrong somewhere - otherwise why would Sun decide to ship JDS with kernel 2.4.19 at this stage?" (Slashdot and Linux.com are both part of OSDN.)
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Sun Java Desktop 2 Review More

Sun Java Desktop 2 Review

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  • Kernel versions are very often "behind" (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 22, 2004 @04:48PM (#9226319)
    Something seems to be terribly wrong somewhere - otherwise why would Sun decide to ship JDS with kernel 2.4.19 at this stage ?"

    I dunno. Why are you not asking a similar question of Debian???

    • Re:Kernel versions are very often "behind" (Score:5, Informative)

      by gorre ( 519164 ) on Saturday May 22, 2004 @04:52PM (#9226335) Homepage
      I dunno. Why are you not asking a similar question of Debian???

      Because Debian has pre-built images and source packages for up to and including 2.6.5 and 2.4.26?
    • Because 2.6.6 is in unstable :)
    • Why are you not asking a similar question of Debian???

      Haha, thats hillarious. Mmmmmmm, Sun is baaad.. Mmmmkay?

  • Seven page license document? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 22, 2004 @04:49PM (#9226323)
    Wow, they really shortened it.
  • meh..i would have thought that they are one of the few people who stand to lose out from linux becoming more usable

  • here is why they'd use 2.4.19 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jbellis ( 142590 ) * <jonathan@carnage ... m minus math_god> on Saturday May 22, 2004 @04:50PM (#9226330) Homepage
    Corporate clients are far more interested in stability than in the latest & greatest. Look how long RH goes between updates of their workstation and advanced server lines.

    Java Desktop R2 seems to be more of an upgrade to the bundled apps. Nothing really major here.

  • Disclosure (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 22, 2004 @04:51PM (#9226334)
    Paper documentation would be nice. How are you supposed to read PDF files on a CD if you can't even get the system working?
    Maybe they have to say in the box to use any Windows PC to read the manual before install.

  • The problem here seems to be hardware support... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by TexasDex ( 709519 ) on Saturday May 22, 2004 @04:52PM (#9226341) Homepage
    but for once this doesn't appear to be the manufacturers' fault.

    Trouble with hard disks, especially SATA but also regular ATA, seems to be a common problem this guy is having. That should not be a problem with any modern Linux distro, and why Java Desktop manages to screw it up I suppose we'll see.

    I'm waiting for the next version.

  • Media Bias (Score:5, Insightful)

    by turgid ( 580780 ) on Saturday May 22, 2004 @04:53PM (#9226347) Journal
    Sun isn't flavour of the month in the media just now, and especially in the "Linux" media, where Sun is considered to be in league with Microsoft and SCO. To expect a fair and balanced review from linux.com is therefore misguided.

    • Re:Media Bias (Score:5, Insightful)

      by KimiDalamori ( 579444 ) on Saturday May 22, 2004 @05:02PM (#9226387)
      It's one thing to assume that us "Linux bigots" are going to tell you that Sun's product is harder to use than Linux, or that their desktop is uglier than GNOME or KDE. But if the product does not install correctly, that's probably a bit more serious than just "media bias".

  • A bit irresponsible (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mariox19 ( 632969 ) on Saturday May 22, 2004 @04:54PM (#9226353)

    I guess Sun deserves what it gets, but I think the reviewer was a bit irresponsible. Perhaps he had a deadline and couldn't wait around for replacement media (assuming that you still couldn't rule out defective media) or for Sun support to resolve the issue. I think however that it would have been a much more useful review if the reader found out exactly why the reviewer couldn't get it installed on all but one machine and couldn't get it to run on the machine on which it did install.

    I'm left wondering if it wasn't in fact defective media, and just how bad Sun's support is: meaning, what does it take to get a problem resolved.

    • Regardless of defective media, the fact that you can get better support on IRC, for almost any other distro makes the situation laughable. I'd be seriously pissed if I had forked out cash for this shyte.

    • Re:A bit irresponsible (Score:5, Insightful)

      by slamb ( 119285 ) * on Saturday May 22, 2004 @05:57PM (#9226641) Homepage
      I guess Sun deserves what it gets, but I think the reviewer was a bit irresponsible. Perhaps he had a deadline and couldn't wait around for replacement media (assuming that you still couldn't rule out defective media) or for Sun support to resolve the issue.

      He did everything right.

      First, he made a reasonable attempt to install it. He tried several computers; he tried both the graphical interface and the text one. If there had been a "check media" option (like RedHat's installer has), I'll assume he would have used it, given the other steps he took. Defective media is understandable. But we don't know that's the problem, because they didn't provide a way to check. Why not?

      Then he called support. He didn't use any special reviewers-only support channel. He called the normal number like everyone else has to. He got the same horrible support experience. And he criticized them for it. Why do we just let large companies off for having horrible support? Why don't we yell and scream until they do better?

    • Re:A bit irresponsible (Score:5, Insightful)

      by LuxFX ( 220822 ) on Saturday May 22, 2004 @08:25PM (#9227206) Homepage Journal
      I guess Sun deserves what it gets, but I think the reviewer was a bit irresponsible. Perhaps he had a deadline and couldn't wait around for replacement media (assuming that you still couldn't rule out defective media) or for Sun support to resolve the issue

      Whether or not you think the reviewer could have done more -- the reviewer definately did more than Joe User would. If a reviewer 'only' tried installation on three or four computers, that's still three or four more than most people have access to.

  • pretty sluggish on a relatively powerful machine (Score:5, Informative)

    by very ( 241808 ) on Saturday May 22, 2004 @04:55PM (#9226355) Journal
    Used it on P4 2.4GHz, Geforce4 Ti 4200, 1GB RAM

    It's so sluggish on this particular machine.
    SUSE 9.1 Live CD works better on this particular machine.

    That's what I've experienced.

    asdf

  • Dead company walking... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by hagbard5235 ( 152810 ) on Saturday May 22, 2004 @04:56PM (#9226357)
    Sun's pretty much a dead company walking.

    Their hardware is more expensive, and slower.

    Their OS is less feature rich, but has more bugs, and doesn't perform as well in most cases as Linux.

    Look around, everyone who possibly can is getting off of Suns and onto Linux x86. The major things holding most of Suns customers back in this regard are proprietary software support, and that's improving all the time.

    And as to Java... I'm not sure exactly how they intend to make money there... IBM does the Java services market SOOOO much better than Sun does.

    • Re:Dead company walking... (Score:5, Informative)

      by mrm677 ( 456727 ) on Saturday May 22, 2004 @05:13PM (#9226448)
      Their hardware is more expensive, and slower.

      Slower for single-threaded cache-bound apps, absolutely. But Sun hardware has superior multiprocessor performance, scalability, and memory bandwidth. It is also far more reliable. I point you to this anecdotal story [photo.net]about what happened when photo.net moved from Sun to Dell hardware.

      Their OS is less feature rich, but has more bugs, and doesn't perform as well in most cases as Linux.

      Oh man, Solaris has far more enterprise features than Linux. Intimate shared memory, a performance counter interface, hot-swappable CPU support, a solid device driver interface, the list goes on and on. And the future is multiprocessors...Sun has a huge advantage with Solaris as it readily scales beyond 100 processors out-of-the-box. The Linux stock kernel scales to what, 8 processors maybe, until falling flat on its face due to lock contention.
      • even linux 2.4 could handle more than 8, and now you can google people running 2.6 on 64. So it's getting there, but you're right, Solaris still scales better at the high end.
      • The Linux stock kernel scales to what, 8 processors maybe, until falling flat on its face due to lock contention.

        I don't think that's true, I think 2.6 scales to 16 processors.

        2.6 supports the Intel MP 1.1 spec, which defines 16-way SMP.

        Not that I have ever tried it, but I suspect you need to check your "what, ... maybe" facts.
      • Intimate shared memory
        We call this hugetlb, or did. The name keeps changeing. All this really means is that you support shared memory locked into RAM, hopefully with some sort of large-page notion.

        a performance counter interface
        We call this oprofile. We also have the user-space kcachegrind and the perfmon patch, so you get some choice on Linux.

        hot-swappable CPU support
        We have this too. It works great on IBM's zSeries mainframe. Oh, PC hardware? Solaris can't do that either because the hardware wil

        • Re:Linux has those features too (Score:4, Informative)

          by Decaff ( 42676 ) on Saturday May 22, 2004 @06:29PM (#9226757)
          And the future is multiprocessors...
          Your "beyond 100" is nothing to a 512-way SGI Altix running Linux. There are 1024-way systems under development. Sun can't touch this.

          Even the Altix doesn't touch this - its a supercluster system. The suggested configuration for individual nodes is pretty small - a max of 12 or 16 processors. You can specify up to 256 processors, but its unlikely to scale well unless you are using specialised application code.

      • Re:Dead company walking... (Score:4, Informative)

        by hagbard5235 ( 152810 ) on Saturday May 22, 2004 @06:35PM (#9226773)
        Since another poster was kind enough to address most of your software points, I'll address the hardware:

        Chip for chip the UltraSparc is slower:

        1.28Ghz Ultra IIIi (the newest Sun chip for which
        I can get spec benchmarks):

        Specint: 704
        http://www.specbench.org/cpu2000/results/res2 004q1 /cpu2000-20040112-02710.html

        Specfp: 1063
        http://www.specbench.org/cpu2000/results/res 2004q1 /cpu2000-20040112-02709.html

        Opteron 146:
        Specint: 1354
        http://www.specbench.org/cpu2000/results/res 2004q1 /cpu2000-20040209-02854.html
        Specfp: 1394
        http://www.specbench.org/cpu2000/results/res 2004q1 /cpu2000-20040112-02709.html

        So the Opteron is about twice as fast at int and 30% faster at float. So while you can get more processors from Sun than an x86 base, you may not get more performance.
        • Sparcs have more HW contexts (registers) than x86, so process switching is zero-overhead for more concurrent processors. While x86 must copy CPU registers to RAM and back again for each switch. That really eats up performance.

    • Re:Dead company walking... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The parent is a typical Sun-bashing troll in slashdot, and I wouldn't normally be bothered to respond but for some clueless folks on /. I'll put up some response here...

      > Sun's pretty much a dead company walking.

      The supposedly dead company has 7 billion dollars in the bank with practically negligible amount of debt,
      and is still making $10+ billion revenue a year.

      > Their OS is less feature rich, but has more bugs, and doesn't perform as well in most cases as Linux.

      There's absolutely no proof or ev
    • Sun's pretty much a dead company walking.

      Yes, now all they need to do is spend the 6 billion in cash they have and stop grossing 1+ bill in revenue per quarter.

      Their hardware is more expensive, and slower.

      Do 400,000+ transactions per hour 24/7 on your home built pc and get back to me.

      Their OS is less feature rich, but has more bugs, and doesn't perform as well in most cases as Linux.

      I guess if you want your corporate IT department to rival that of a medium sized College, you could squeeze extra perf

      • Re:Dead company walking... (Score:4, Informative)

        by hagbard5235 ( 152810 ) on Sunday May 23, 2004 @01:53AM (#9228198)
        Yes, now all they need to do is spend the 6 billion in cash they have and stop grossing 1+ bill in revenue per quarter.

        Umm... if you check their financials you'll see they only have about 2.7 billion in cash:

        http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=SUNW

        And they are carrying about 1.47 Billion in debt. Given that they ran a negative cashflow of -20 million dollars last year, they could keep this up for some time. You revenue is irrelavent, it's your earnings and cash flow that count.

        Do 400,000+ transactions per hour 24/7 on your home built pc and get back to me.

        That must be why there are no Sun boxes in the TPC-C top ten.

        http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_perf_results. asp

        I guess if you want your corporate IT department to rival that of a medium sized College, you could squeeze extra performance out of Linux.

        Or you could field twice that many people managing your relationships with the proprietary providers of the software you need. In most cases it's the proprietary code that is the bottleneck (in my experience in industry). Or you could also field extra sysadmins to work on compiling and integrating all the FOSS programs that your users actually need that Solaris doesn't ship with.

        Oh... and working around the issues and problems with Solaris, like the fact that they screwed up their version of BPF so badly that the libpcap folks found it was faster to filter in user space. Or the fact that their packet sniffing interface doesn't hand over the whole frame received, but trunkates it for you to the size indicated by the ethernet header making them useless for certain kinds of tasks. Or the million and one other little things that are broken in Solaris that will NEVER be fixed.

  • Available distros suck ATM (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ultrabot ( 200914 ) on Saturday May 22, 2004 @04:59PM (#9226370)
    The Linux distro scene is in a rather bad state ATM:

    1) Debian sarge release was pushed further on - and you have to go via knoppix to install Debian on a modern SATA machine, leaving the system in a messy state. Obviously the Debian (non-)release is a standing joke, but Sarge will be so late, it's not even funny anymore

    2) FC2 was released, and it has several showstopper bugs (it keeps on crashing for me, it eats partition tables for dinner, keyboard layouts don't work, etc, etc). I'm sticking with FC1. FC1, OTOH, seriously rocks, once you beef it up with KDE 3.2 and kernel 2.6. FC1 is the best Linux I've ever used, and I was hoping it wouldn't stay that way after FC2 :-(.

    3) Suse is still non-free-beer. Come on Novell, letting hobbyists dabble with it at home isn't going to hurt anyone.

    So what's left, then? Mandrake, Gentoo? Warez version of RHEL? WBEL?

    And on the topic of JDS: they are always thrashed in reviews, but the media keeps hyping how "integrated" the system is, and finally Linux is of commercial quality. Go figure.

    • Re:Available distros suck ATM (Score:5, Informative)

      by (H)elix1 ( 231155 ) <slashdot.helix@nOSPaM.gmail.com> on Saturday May 22, 2004 @05:03PM (#9226394) Homepage Journal
      3) Suse is still non-free-beer. Come on Novell, letting hobbyists dabble with it at home isn't going to hurt anyone.

      SuSE is free-as-in-beer, but you don't get an ISO install. Got to use the FTP installer, which is a pain but works. Novell also opened up YAST, the only bit of special sauce that had another license recently.
      • SuSE is free-as-in-beer, but you don't get an ISO install. Got to use the FTP installer, which is a pain but works.

        For 9.1?

        Novell also opened up YAST, the only bit of special sauce that had another license recently.

        The graphics & stuff still have a different license, right? I suspect the ISOs still aren't fair game for copying...

        • You can copy SUSE CDs! (Score:5, Informative)

          by SoTuA ( 683507 ) on Saturday May 22, 2004 @05:16PM (#9226467)
          You can copy the CDs freely and install it on n+1 machines, but you can't _sell_ those copies or sell machines with SUSE preinstalled unless you sell them the license (and the CDs, and the manuals, and...)

          An email was sent to SUSE to settle an ongoing discussion on the legality of copying the CDs in the local unix/linux newsgroup chile.comp.unix :)

          This is from the response email from Frank Schmachel of the SUSE sales team:

          Many thanks for your inquiry to our SUSE PreSales Service and your interest in SUSE LINUX.

          Most applications that come with the SUSE LINUX distribution are licensed with GPL or LGPL, some have their own licenses.

          Each of these licenses applies to the single package it comes with and allows you to make as many copies of the software as you want and give them to whoever you want, provided you do not _sell_ the software. You may sell support for the software, but not the software itself. Also, you have to make the source code available for free.

          SUSE LINUX as a Linux distribution is a work with its own rights. Our license can be found on CD1 as /COPYRIGHT.yast. This license too allows you to make as many copies and installations as you want from one set of discs, provided you do not long for or get any kind of reward for it. Reward implies value in money, benefit in kind and supply >of services.

          This also implies that it is _not_ allowed to install SUSE LINUX on machines that you will sell except that you will sell a full license (boxed CD set and books) with the machine to the customer.

          So you can copy the SUSE cds. Why don't they offer the ISOs directly is beyond me. More user familiarization with the product would lead to more recommendations when it comes to buying enterprise-supported linux.

          • Re:You can copy SUSE CDs! (Score:2, Informative)

            by kfg ( 145172 )
            Each of these licenses applies to the single package it comes with and allows you to make as many copies of the software as you want and give them to whoever you want, provided you do not _sell_ the software.

            I would only take exception to this one line. Certainly you are free to sell GPLed and LGPLed software to your little heart's content. Nor is there a requirement to make the source code available for free. You may charge a reasonable fee to cover the costs of distribution. CDs cost money and the labor
            • Perhaps he meant that line only to apply to the licenses of packages that were not released under the GPL, such as the artistic license, but he did not make that clear.

              I think he meant the whole SUSE CD package. True, you can take apache sources, compile it and sell it for a million bucks (and maybe even find a sucker who would buy it :) but they would frown if you take their compilation (SUSE) and sell it for more than "the cost of distribution" (I think there's a further email that I can't find that tou

        • For 9.1?
          Novell also opened up YAST, the only bit of special sauce that had another license recently.

          9.1 will be made open for free download in June. They usually wait a few weeks between putting the retail iso's out there for sale and allowing the free ftp install. All the directories are already there for private/authenticated users.

          If you must have a free bootable CD media, you can make one. Take a look at http://www.linuxiso.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=13 5 67 (mind the gap) for notes on doing it wi

      • Go ahead and try to use the FTP installer when you have a NIC that is technically supported but requires a 1-line hack [linuxquestions.org] to the Tulip driver to make it work.

        The Microsoft MN-130 adapter came out a year ago, and the fix was discovered on November 6, 2003. [redhat.com] Why is it that six months and a major kernel release later, this fix still isn't included in a stock kernel?

        Nathan

    • no complaints. why do you seem to think it's not a viable option?
      • no complaints. why do you seem to think it's not a viable option?

        I used an old 7.x version back in the day, and it left me with the feeling that many things were broken in various ways. Mandrake remains very cutting edge, so I have been kinda assuming that the brokenness persists.

        I might be wrong, am going to read a few reviews and if they deem it stable enough I'm giving it a go. In principle I like Mandrake-the-company, and their attitude. We'll see how the distro fares.
        • is they recently moved to a dual-release model.

          A few months ago Mandrake 10 "community edition" was released. Then when the bugs were shaken out they released "official" which is what I'm running. So you get the cutting-edge software (I really, really wanted a 2.6 kernel) but it's not as half-baked as some of their old releases infamously were.
      • that this server serves over 500k database-backed pages (not hits) per day. So it's no yahoo, but it's a bit more than the average falls-over-when-it-smells-slashdot-coming hobby site can brag about. :)
    • Not sure I understand your point. I agree with you on Debian and partly with you on FC2, but what's wrong with the rest ?

      SuSE is "free"... while you cannot download an ISO, you can install it for free using the FTP installation method. Not ideal, but it works and once installed, you have a true-to-life SuSE installation.

      And, what about Mandrake ? Or Gentoo ? What's wrong with them ? Gentoo 2004.1 is great, works really nicelly and has all the latest packages you'd want in a distro.

      Mandrake 10 is also qui
    • My answer? Slackware 9.1 with a 2.6 kernel and Dropline Gnome 2.6. Todd at Dropline does a superb job keeping packages up to date, and Slack has just worked on pretty much any machine I've tried to put it on. It lacks some of the GUI admin tools of FC, SuSe, or MDK, but I like it and have found it to be solid for desktop use.

    • Re:Available distros suck ATM (Score:4, Informative)

      by Netsnipe ( 112692 ) <netsnipe AT gmail DOT com> on Sunday May 23, 2004 @12:48AM (#9228065) Homepage
      1) Debian sarge release was pushed further on - and you have to go via knoppix to install Debian on a modern SATA machine, leaving the system in a messy state. Obviously the Debian (non-)release is a standing joke, but Sarge will be so late, it's not even funny anymore
      Not true; get your facts straight. The Debian Installer [debian.org] Beta 4 is working fine for 10 architectures at the moment and can be used to install a clean testing ("Sarge") or unstable ("Sid") system. You can also generate new Sarge CDs using Jigdo [debian.org] that will use the new installer. It's also using the 2.4.25 kernel right now and handles the popular SATA chipsets fine.

  • I tried the OS and... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by pyrotic ( 169450 ) on Saturday May 22, 2004 @05:00PM (#9226378) Homepage
    All these distro reviews are so superficial. This one was worse than most. Rather than complain about how his fave window manager isn't included, he complains about how he couldn't intall it on his hot-rodded PC. So having not installed it, he doesn't have too much to bitch about.

    I'm probably the only one around here who wants to know how a distro functions for the purposes of doing usefull work. Reviews of the install process are pretty pointless, unless your interest is in cloning large numbers of X clients or servers. Next!

    • Re:I tried the OS and... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by clk23 ( 759435 ) on Saturday May 22, 2004 @05:14PM (#9226455)
      I would generally agree that many distribution reviews are lacking in actual content. However, I don't believe this review is pointless.

      The guy tried four different systems, two of which were 'hot-rodded,' one of which was a pretty standard budget PC config, and the last of which as an older laptop. I think it's a valid point to illustrate that he couldn't get the thing to successfully install on any of those systems.

      And, further, I think it's a valid point to describe the support structure and quality of support he received when trying to resolve the problem.

      The install process is important. I've personally grown tired of encountering install processes which require pseudo-arcane knowledge, loads of custom configuration, and hours of hand-holding. Show me something that offers an install that is functional, intuitive, while still offering options for customization, and I'll be impressed.
    • The point is that almost all distro's have got the installers down to a fine art, and this one refuses point blank to install on 3 out of 4 machines, and botches the job on the last one. Come on, if this was Windows we were talking about, they'd be no end of critisme(sp?). I'd be interested too to find out how JDS2 performers once it's up and running, since we're talking about a corporate distro here, so installing is the Hell Desk geeks job, but still, this is the worst hardware support I've ever run acr
    • "he complains about how he couldn't intall it on his hot-rodded PC"
      or his normal PC
      or his bare-bones PC
      or his laptop...

  • Solaris...? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by psi42 ( 747491 ) on Saturday May 22, 2004 @05:00PM (#9226381)
    With all this abysmal hardware support and horrid tech support, I often recall that Sun has made many a conficting statement in the past, and also that Solaris, Sun's glowing flagship, is still Top Dog as far as this 7-page-license company is concerned.

    I would believe that running JDS on linux is just a prototype, to generate hype especially among the linux crowd.
    Sun seems to be going out of its way to implement this on Solaris...perhaps the final incarnation of JDS will be on Solaris itself, without any Linux or GNU code at all, and completely proprietary. It seems that they will say "Linux just isn't up to par, but if you upgrade to the $599 Solaris JDS, all your hardware will work."

    Or so it seems.
    • I've been pretty surprised that JDS isn't already on SunRays. That's what Sun's been pushing for years, and technically if not necessarily commercially it's their killer offering.

      I dunno, maybe you're right that this is just a test-bed. Pretty weird way to go about it. But then again we're talking about Sun here.
      • When I spoke with Sun for the review, they said that a Solaris x86 JDS will be out this summer, and Sun Ray support will follow sometime later this year.

        -Jem

    • Re:Solaris...? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Usagi_yo ( 648836 )
      Solaris is available for basicaly free. $75 last I checked. This is for up to 8 processors. That and above they license separately.

  • No Problems Here (Score:5, Informative)

    by cbowland ( 205263 ) on Saturday May 22, 2004 @05:09PM (#9226425)
    I installed JDS version 2 on Friday on a generic pc at work without any problems. Don't have the exact specs, but nothing should be older than a year. From what I could tell, the only difference between JDS Release1 and Release 2 is the addition of the client piece for the Sun Control Station. I will be installing that on Monday. BTW, the requirements for SCS are a little goofy [sun.com], as least to me.
    Software
    • Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS/ES 2.1
    • J2SE Version 1.4.1_03 or higher.
    • Tomcat 4.0.3 or higher
    • Desktops running Sun Java Desktop System, Release 2

    Hardware
    • 600 Mhz Intel Compatible processor or better
    • 512 MB of RAM
    • 160 GB hard drive, at least 400 MB of free disk space in the directory /var
    • 10/100 Base-T Ethernet network interface
    Kinda steep on the HD size. Plus, what the deal with requiring Red Hat? Doesn't Sun have its own linux or Solaris for x86? For what's it worth, Sun has a great opportunity in the corporate desktop market. I hope the can get some traction with this effeort.

  • Not that big of deal... (Score:3, Informative)

    by (H)elix1 ( 231155 ) <slashdot.helix@nOSPaM.gmail.com> on Saturday May 22, 2004 @05:27PM (#9226501) Homepage Journal
    Something seems to be terribly wrong somewhere - otherwise why would Sun decide to ship JDS with kernel 2.4.19 at this stage ?

    Keep in mind JDS was a rebranded SuSE distro. SuSE Server 8 ships with the same kernel, so no real surprises there. I'd chalk it up to Sun wanting to invest the minimum amount of skin to get something up and running that also had a fair amount of application support.

    As for why they did not just fold in the latest-greatest 2.6 kernel, I have an idea. I recently rebuilt my workstation and decided to go the Gentoo route with the 2.6 kernel. Got a new laptop and installed the new SuSE Server 9 beta with the same. All was good, until I tried shoveling on the first of the commercial software. DB2 v8.1 just had a fit with the GUI installer. With a wee bit of elbow grease I got it going, but I don't even know if my code is going to work yet, much less the app server and ldap. It should, but...

    (Stir Crazy voice)The 2.4.19 kernel - safe, not sexy.

  • what sort of user is Sun targetting? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by dankelley ( 573611 ) on Saturday May 22, 2004 @05:32PM (#9226529)
    According to my tests, the answer is...
    1. Not science folks like me, given the lack of (f2c or g77) fortran, which means no Octave for my analysis and no R for statistics.
    2. Not home users, given the non-inclusion of e.g. a working movie viewer. (Their java media player was completely busted -- it showed a few frames and then died.)
    3. Not cutting-edge linuxers, given the use of the 2.4 kernel.
    4. Not the home market, given the use of soffice (aka openoffice) which still won't handle complex msoffice documents well, and given the use of a stumbling movie viewer.
    5. Not future java-app users, since the java apps included (movie viewer, text editor) are ugly and slow.
    Having noted the above in my own tests, I switched back to Fedora for my home box [my work boxes are osx and solaris]. Using fedora [core 2] gives me (a) a newer kernel, (b) newer versions of software such as openoffice and mozilla and (c) easier updates.

    The real advantage may be in work-groups that have loads of existing Suns as well as linux boxes; there is benefit in having a similar GUI and similar software on each. This reveals the answer to the question of my subjectline, I argue.

  • We had a SUN demo (Score:4, Informative)

    by novakane007 ( 154885 ) on Saturday May 22, 2004 @05:35PM (#9226541) Homepage Journal
    We had a rep into our office to demo JD from SUN. I haven't tooled around with the live CD that we were given, but to be honest I wasn't very impressed. We asked about why everything is so old on it and they said it was designed that way for stability. The market focus in their mind was for large numbers of very simple desktops, like call centers. The strength of the system is that it can be completely remotely managed on the fly. Application and OS properties can be manipulated on a central server which are then replicated to the desktops. This was demonstrated by changing the desktop colors on the central repository. After a few minutes the background magically changed on the desktop machine. The modifications can be made to a set of standard apps like mozilla, evolution and staroffice. For example you could push out a new proxy server setting to every client. The limitation is that you can't add to the managed apps. For example if you wanted to use KDE instead of the default Gnome you could no longer remotely manage it. Or if you wanted to use opera instead of mozilla, etc. Keep in mind this is still a very young product and they were frank in telling us that a lot of work is still being done. That being said I just don't see this desktop catching on. Suse 9.1 on the other hand is a terrific product that Novell is spending a pile of development dollars on. SUN shouldn't be wasting it's time fragmenting the desktop competition. Let RedHat and Suse duke that one out.

  • GNOME (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    That's quite an facile editorial but you can't expect better from normal users. My screenshot looks better than yours. Evolution is better than KMail, GNOME looks more polished than KDE and so on. I do use XChat, Abiword, Rhythmbox.... ...usually you get stuff like these from normal users. And this is ok since you can't blame them for stuff they simply don't know about or don't have a slighest knowledge about.

    Such editorials are hard to take serious since they are build up on basicly NO deeper knowledge of
  • Rolling your own desktop distro is a subtle thing. Sun has always been a hardware company, and so they have always had control over the hardware their OS runs on. They have never yet had to deal with the tangled mess that is PC hardware, with conflicts, obscure devices, and all the rest of it. And the one thing missing most from the Sun Java desktop is Java. Where are all the Java apps? Sun should be all over this: "The Sun Java Desktop is a collection of apps, protocols and file formats which let you run your desktop environment anywhere that runs Java. We have partnered with Suse and Redhat to provide an environment which we certify is Sun Java Desktop compatible, but any Java 1.4 environment will work." What about doing that? But Sun is not doing that. Is anyone? Yes [evermoresw.com]. But if you look at their website, you see that they are backed by American investors, but not Sun! What's going on? Sun should buy them and make that the cornerstone of the Java desktop.

    In future, if Sun really wants something it can call the Sun Java Desktop, it would have all the applications in Java, and a Java runtime which is perfectly integrated into the OS, like OS X's Java environment.

    -----------
    WAP Apache [chiralsoftware.net] software

  • SATA (Score:2, Interesting)

    by drewz ( 592542 )
    yeah...

    I have not tried the JDE, but i wasn't able to get Suse 8.1 and even Suse 9.0 installed as delivered on my machine due to SATA issues. Pretty much same error - installer couldn't find a place where to drop the OS.

    My suspicion is that it may be the same issue.
    SATA only got seriously addressed at the end of 2.5 kernel tree, as i recall Redhat had its own version of kernel 2.4 that incidentally supported serial ATA, but Suse was behind on this front. Of course, for Sun not to include such support i

  • I can understand the problems but... (Score:5, Informative)

    by the melon ( 89066 ) on Saturday May 22, 2004 @06:14PM (#9226708)
    I think the reviewer needs to take into account the target audience of JDS. The reviewer certainly dose not fall into this category.

    I have installed JDS 2 on a Emachines 6805 Athlon 64 notebook with almost no trouble. The only issues were ACPI, built in wireless and Video. The video was an ATI Radeon 9600 that was not supported by the version of the XF86 driver in JDS. Simply download the ATI FGL drivers from ATI and install/configure. Worked great. As far as ACPI is concerned your just going to have to disable it. Most mainboard implementations of ACPI are horribly buggy anyways and Linux kernels have not until 2.6.3(read the change logs, almost everything was from Intel and ACPI related) had very good/complete support of it anyways. The built in wireless was something that had windows only drivers and I did not have the time to try the NDIS wrappers tool.

    I have people in my office that have JDS2 running with little effort on IBM T40's, Toshiba Tecra M1/S1, Toshiba M100, various desktops including Dell PW650, Tyan K8W based Dual Opterons, HP XW4100 workstations, plus all kinds of misc homebrew machines.

    As I believe someone else has pointed out, JDS is not intended to run on the latest hardware, it is designed to run very well on slightly older but much stabler hardware. It is intended to be a corp desktop, easy to deploy from a reference image to tens or thousands of similar machines and then work consistently. How many people need a 3.2Ghz P4 Prescott to run StarCalc? Mozilla? Your certainly not going to game under it.

    This really brings up one of my favorite aspects of Linux, its adaptability to different tasks. The Sun JDS "envronment" servers a different purpose than Fedora or Gentoo. It dose several things much better than either of those two do with minimal work on the users part. Sure you can probibily get Gentoo or Fedora to do the same thing that JDS dose but it would take a great deal of work and even more so to make it easily reproduceable.

    On a slightly differeny note I do really get tired of all the Sun bashing that goes on. Just as I have grown tired of all the Microsoft bashing the used to go on at the top of Sun. Sun is just a company with a great deal of excellent people working there that generally are working towards a common goal: building better software and hardware that makes peoples lives easier and more enjoyable and have a good time in the process. Sun is not dying. Far from it. They are only becomming stronger.

    I must insert this disclaimer: I work for Sun in Solaris OS Engineering. I have for the last 8 monthes and been enjoying every day of it.

    • Re:I can understand the problems but... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Decaff ( 42676 ) on Saturday May 22, 2004 @07:00PM (#9226888)
      On a slightly differeny note I do really get tired of all the Sun bashing that goes on.

      Oh come on. Being nothing more than a pioneering and innovative open systems company with decades of experience, if Sun refuses to listen to the wise suggestions of thousands of open source zealots, many of whom have at least a year or two of software experience, what can it expect?

  • The author's bio is worth a look.... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Tetravus ( 79831 ) on Saturday May 22, 2004 @06:26PM (#9226742) Homepage
    Using subtle clues and hints in his first-person narrative to imply emotion and intention, Jem Matzan's critically acclaimed writing style is truly unique among fiction authors. Jem's extraordinary characters and distinct dialogue decorate his fantasy universe while coaxing readers' imaginations into providing the specifics.

    Also a professional actor and model, Jem spends much of his time performing in such productions as television commercials, stage plays, and interactive variety shows.

    Biography provided by the author, October 2002
    from here : http://www.scifan.com/writers/mm/MatzanJem.asp

  • 2.4.19 (Score:2, Funny)

    by SQLz ( 564901 )
    otherwise why would Sun decide to ship JDS with kernel 2.4.19 at this stage?

    Thats simple. Thats the version of Linux kernel they have licensed from SCO.

  • Maybe it's me; I don't see the point of JDS. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by crazyphilman ( 609923 ) on Saturday May 22, 2004 @07:45PM (#9227057) Journal
    Before you all think I'm a doofus, hear me out:

    1. There are a bunch of already-existing and very high quality Linux distributions, all of which make a huge number of very useful packages available. So, Sun weighs in with a Beta distribution which includes almost no packages other than their custom Sun stuff?

    2. With all the aforementioned very high quality Linux distros out there which are more or less unencumbered by license issues (besides GPL, which we all like), Sun encumbers its new O/S with a seven page license agreement?

    3. With all the downloadable distros which can be had for no more than bandwidth costs, Sun goes with a subscription model? And then provides shaky support to boot?

    4. With all the other distros offering a league of choices, KDE, Gnome, Blackbox, etc, configurable on a user-by-user basis, Sun forces you into using only one specific window manager across the board?

    5. And, sun releases this system without (apparently) adequately testing their installer against popular types of hardware?

    Like I said, maybe it's me, but this is kind of a "WTF" moment for me. Why is Sun trying to reinvent the wheel like this? Why are they doing so much to make their distro much weaker than existing ones? What's going on?

    I thought their rotating windows trick was kinda cool, but I think I'm going to stick with Slackware and OS/X on my machines. I've got the JDK installed on both, and Eclipse, too. It seems to be working a lot better than their new setup...

    • See the post from someone else a little ways up the list. The whole point of JDS is stability and centralized management of extremely large numbers of workstations. Distros like Fedora and Mandrake would be an absolute nightmare if you were supporting thousands of users.

      Corporations spend *a lot* of time with internal end user support. So much so, that it is just nutty. I did that type of work when I was in college and it was just ridiculous. You've got users who aren't much above using their CD ROM
  • He really should have described his partitioning setup. Partitioning was the only complication I had with my first FreeBSD install, because it has a different philosophy than RH Linux. Took me hours to create a setup that both worked and seemed feasible in the long-term, since the long-term implications with an old limited size HD are always a concern for those elements you don't necessarily put in the /usr partition, such as /var.

    You'd think this following statement he made would have been a clue that there was probably something wrong with the way he partitioned the 80 GB drive he claimed should have been able to handle the install:

    I had the opportunity to try it on my laptop system and it seemed to work at first (JDS was recognized as a viable distribution to upgrade to SUSE 9.1 from) but I didn't have enough space to install all of the packages that I needed with the existing partition setup, so I had to repartition and thus lost the ability to test the upgrade further.

    The guy says the partition configuration he used for the JDS didn't work for SUSE 9.1 either, and had to repartition it to have enough space to complete the install! It appears to me that the only difference between this and the problem he had with JDS was that it sounded like JDS gave the warning a bit earlier in the install.

    I believe that a JDS install should alleviate the user as much as possible complications from partitioning. Yet, we don't know if he had used "advanced" options that permitted him to create the limitted partition sizes, or a default install. In fact, we know nothing about the options he was given and the options he chose for partitioning.

  • No choice (Score:4, Informative)

    by grahamlee ( 522375 ) <graham@iamlUUUeeg.com minus threevowels> on Saturday May 22, 2004 @08:42PM (#9227275) Homepage Journal
    why would Sun decide to ship JDS with kernel 2.4.19 at this stage?

    Because the feature freeze was six months ago. That's how commercial UNIX works, and SUNW are traditionally a commercial UNIX company. If you want to be an über-l33t Linux h4>

  • Sun installations suck for technical workers (Score:4, Insightful)

    by The OPTiCIAN ( 8190 ) on Saturday May 22, 2004 @10:15PM (#9227626)
    <i>If you want the system management utilities and development tools they must be installed afterward.</i>

    I wonder when Sun are going to get their act together and start fixing the basic toolchains available on their environments. We work on Sun slices at work, and we're prevented from having access to all sorts of basic tools we need.

    Now I can understand wanting to restrict access to compilers, scripting languages, etc.

    But perl *is* available on the environment, yet the halfwits who set policy in our server sections prevent us from having access to tools like less (yes, we have to use more, tail and head forall of our gigabyte-log-scanning needs because the version of vi on these environments won't read long lines or too-long files); vim (sigh) or (perhaps less controversally) lsof.

    And the reason?

    These are disallowed for 'security reasons'.

    This is the second place I've worked at where my team has been limited like this. When are Sun going to get a clue and learn to install the basic tools geeks need to be happy?

    Until they do - avoid Sun.

  • digging their own grave (Score:4, Informative)

    by discogravy ( 455376 ) on Saturday May 22, 2004 @11:09PM (#9227793) Homepage
    If they really wanted to get this out, they'd do a better job of it. There's a livecd version of the JDS -- suppoed to be based on morphix, I heard. They gave them out at some trade show (or maybe it was some Sun meeting thing) and supposedly sent you a copy if you signed up for (and attended) an online presentation that they gave. I was interested enough in it that I did this, and still didn't receive a livecd in a month's time. I called and emailed them about it and still haven't heard about it. Of course, there's no public .ISO for you to make your own: you have to buy the JDS for 100$ (or 50$ for now -- some early adopter promo I think.)

    That's not the way to get users to pick up your product. SuSE is the only linux distro that's wholly "pay for product" -- and even they have a liveCD and an ftp-installer ISO available. I understand Sun wants to get the product out...but does Sun understand that?

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