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Solaris Live Transcripts Index March 14, 2001Chat Title: Using Your PC to Develop for the Solaris OS This is a moderated forum LizA: Welcome to Solaris Live! We have with us Chris Baker, Systems Engineer with Sun for 7 years. He is the Product Manager for the Solaris OS on x86 platforms. Chris is joined by Bob Palowoda, Sun Market Development Engineer for the past 8 years. Bob helps ISVs in porting and tuning applications to Solaris. Also with us is Bill Erickson. Bill, start us off by telling us what you do at Sun. Bill Erickson: Currently in Solaris OEM Account within Software Technology Sales doing both account mgmt. and Systems Engineering. LizA: I have a question for the three of you: Can I really run Solaris on my PC? chrisb: LizA, Yes you can, subject to some constraints - you should check that your PC hardware is on the Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) at http://developers.sun.com/prodtech/solaris/. chrisb: Liza - and I want to add that we find many more systems than are listed will actually work. chrisb: LizA - By the way, I'll be putting in place features on the http://sun.com/intel/ website to help new users install their systems, request drivers etc - so the message is to keep watching that site! LizA: What about laptops? Bill Erickson: LizA, yes you can run Solaris on laptops given the appropriate drivers exist; check with the HCL as well. chrisb: Bill, LizA - in fact we're looking at a lot of new business opportunities with Laptops from many vendors including Toshiba, Panasonic, Fujitsu etc - whilst Solaris doen't always have full device support, there is excellent coverage from third parties such as Xi Graphics (http://www.xig.com), the Opensound drivers plus open source offerings like Xfree86. LizA: Does Sun deliver the same developer tools for the Solaris OS on x86 platforms as it does for the Solaris OS on SPARC platforms? bobp: LizA, Yes the Forte C, C++ and gui development tools (formerly WorkShop) are available for the Solaris OS on x86 platforms. Each major release 4.x 5.x and 6.x they have made incremental performance changes to the backend code generators improving performance. viennatao: I did install Solaris last week, several times :) First I was not really satisfied with the result I got, so I simply changed the box, and devices. I wanted to install it for testing my Java programs on a different System than Win x.... Everything runs now, except my 3Com Ethernet, which does not really bother me a lot, since my programs are running already. But is there a way to find out the right IRQ and stuff for configuring? chrisb: Viennata - Pleased to hear you're working with Java on Solaris. Regarding the 3Com card - there is a patch that might help (see http://access1.sun.com or http://sun.com/bigadmin) I also found the other day that the newest 3C905TX cards can cause installation panics - this is being worked in engineering right now! LizA: Do you support AMD and Cyrix chips? chrisb: LizA Yes, in fact I worked with AMD in their UK HQ to certify the 1GHz Athlons and Cyrix, whilst not that popular works too. bobp: LizA, Yes it runs on the latest Athlon 1.1 and 1.2 DDR supported motherboards. Be sure to use the MU3 update as a few motherboards require a patch to work with some of the VIA motherboards. The K6III and II have worked with Solaris for some time. viennatao: Thanks, I really like how Solaris deals with Java. (right click compile) That really shows that Java's made by Sun. I'm using Java Speech to connect it to IBMs Via Voice. Is there a way, program, for Speech recognition on Solaris and is there also a speech api for it? chrisb: viennata Thanks! we invest a lot in tuning Java for the Solaris platform. JVM 1.3.1 is downloadable now and will be integrated into a future update. I'm fascinated by your work on speech - I'm not terribly familiar with that area but I know that Sun is committed to "accessibility" and I believe this will include a speech component. Michael: If I'm using Forte for Java running on Windows NT to develop servlets that will be deployed to a Solaris server, are there any gotchas I have to keep an eye out for? Or am I limited to developing on Solaris to deploy to Solaris? chrisb: Michael If you wish to try out Solaris as a development environment on your PC you can download it and take advantage of the Free Binary License Program - see http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/binaries. You can also set up dual boot systems. bobp: Michael, Yes you can use servlets with Solaris on Intel. The Apache/Tomcat enviroment works on Solaris x86. No Gotcha's that I'm aware of. Kingfisher: Sun is choosing to call the x86 platform the "Intel Platform Edition." Is this because it is a defacto name for PC platforms these days? It gives the impression that Solaris doesn't run on AMD, Cyrix, etc. chrisb: Kingfish The naming decision was made many years ago when Intel totally dominated the market - I'll take this input into consideration as we'd like to ensure in future that the market understands that many CPU and PC architectures are supported. LizA: Can I use open source tools like GNU? Bill Erickson: Yes you can use Open Source tools with Solaris Intel. In fact, Solaris 8 comes with a CD that contains many of the GNU and shareware that exists in the market today. One can also go to http://www.sunfreeware.com and download many free packages. Michael: Our IT shop only supports Windows NT on our workstations. Loading Solaris isn't an option. So I can't develop for Solaris on NT? bobp: Michael, you can develop Java on NT and use the servlets on Solaris x86 but I would advise your IT department to convert one of the NT machines for testing Solaris x86. chrisb: Michael - we also offer an NT migration toolkit at http://soldc.sun.com/ntmigration/ if you want to move C apps across. LizA: We've just had a slew of Java-related questions...Where do I get Java for Solaris Intel? viennatao: What would you say is the best development environment for Java on Solaris ? TAO: Sorry (box crashed) back again. What would you say is the best development environment for Java on Solaris? I'm using IBM Visual Age on NT, is there anything comparable? Bill Erickson: Java 1.2.x SE is included with Solaris 8 and can also be download from http://java.sun.com chrisb: TAO, viennata - there are a number of Java development environments which will run on Solaris _ I'm not familiar with the third party solutions, but Sun offers the Forte (Netbeans) tools ranging from the (free) community edition to a full enterprise version. TAO:Ahh thanks. Question Linux-Solaris. What is the big difference ? What do they have in common basically? bobp: TAO, The biggest difference between Linux and Solaris would be the threading model and POSIX signals. If you are developing with Java it's not going to be a big concern. What Linux and Solaris have in common is generic user level commands. chrisb: TAO - good question. Being a UNIX derivative, Linux has many APIs which are shared with Solaris, and it is certainly very easy to port well written open source code onto Solaris. Being a more mature environment in many areas, Solaris offers a broader range of functionality - see Bob's reply above. LizA: Can I build and run Open Source software on Solaris Intel? Bill Erickson: Like I stated, Solaris Intel comes with many open source tools that can also be downloaded via http://www.sunfreeware.com chrisb: LizA - also don't forget that lxrun is bundled with Soalris (Intel) so you can run x86 linux binaries directly if you don't want to recompile (but note that the Forte 6.1 compiler has a great new backend if you want to squeeze out all the extra performance) TAO: ahh I see, do you know if the Comm API, that is supported for Solaris and Win, runs on Linux as well. I'm using it to get into a rom bus technique, which means that I use Java for opening and closing doors and lights. You might be interested in it. We are developing a program for helping challenged people, here at school in vienna chrisb: TAO - that's really interesting - I'm sure our accessibility team would be interested to hear more details of your work (they deal with making computers more friendly to challenged people). Sorry, I'm not familiar with those APIs TAO: Allright: We have a Hompage for our project: http://www.alisher.com/instabus.php3 Also with an online demo that enables an Applet to move engines and lights in our room. Feel free to contact me via email as well: Bernhard Schmid: tao@chello.at bobp: TAO, COMM, DCOM, and ADO are a product of Microsoft and supported by Micosoft which is out of the realm of the subject. I'm not aware of Linux support for COMM api's other than Chilisoft. An alternative may be RMI. chris: I have heard that Sun is going to discontinue Solaris for the Intel architecture. I assume this will dampen Software development with respect to the Intel platform. Please comment, thank you. chrisb: chris - good last minute question as we're just about to shut the chat here. I'm running Soalris 9 on my laptop and I'm anticipating over 1,000,000 licenses deployed under the Free program by May. We'll be rolling out programs to reinforce the message that Solaris on a PC makes a great development platform! chris: Yes, this type of format is great for Sun developers and outside users to chat about issues. Thank you for your time. LizA: Thank you Chris, Bob, Bill, and those of you who asked such great questions. Do you have any parting thoughts? chrisb: All - thanks for joining us today - I'm pleased to see that as Solaris on PCs grows in popularity through the Free License program we are welcoming more developers to the community. It's also great to note that we're helping to support both Java and open source projects. Bill Erickson: Thanks for all the questions. Please feel free to contact me regarding any business issues at william.erickson@eng.sun.com LizA: Thanks again, everybody, Please join us again on Thursday 19 April, 9 a.m. PST, when we will have as our guests Rory O'Donnell and Liam Grogan...the topic..."New Hardware Certification Test Suite for Solaris IA (Intel Architecture)". March 14, 2001 | ||||||||
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