Re: OT: Comparison of Unix systems and window managers

According to Christopher Tidy <christopher.tidy@xxxxxxxxx>:
Hi folks,

Sorry for the OT post, but I think people here might be able to offer
me some worthwhile advice.

I currently run Solaris 9 on a Sun Ultra 2 as my main workstation. I
like Unix and need it for many of the things I do. But no operating
system is perfect, and sometimes I have to do a re-install. Recently,
I've been finding it difficult to find the software packages I want
for Solaris 9. Mostly I get my packages from http://www.blastwave.org/.

O.K. I've been using Solaris 10, and am currently running U3.
I've got U4, but have not yet installed it.

Gimp is a good example. The last release of Gimp 1.2 was great. It did
almost everything a basic image editor needed to do, and was also fast
and reliable. Gimp 2.2, by comparison, is a pig. It's slow and bug-
ridden. Sometimes I can't even get it to save an image without dumping
core.

Hmm ... I don't find gimp 2.0.2 (which comes with Solaris 10) to
be buggy -- I've never had it dump core on me, and I've never
encountered bugs which I've noticed. This is the gimp which comes with
Solaris 10 (and it happens to be compiled as 32-bit code, even though
Solaris 10 won't run on a 32-bit machine -- it wants the ultras, which
are all 64-bit as you know.)

It *could* be that the bugs you are encountering are from your
choice of window manager -- and almost certainly the slowness is. To my
mind, *any* version of Gnome has too much eye candy, which costs CPU
cycles.

I'm doing most things on an Ultra-60 (very similar to the
Ultra-2, except 450 MHz maximum CPU speed, instead of the 400 MHz
maximum for the Ultra-2. Both run dual CPUs, but the Ultra-60 uses PCI
bus instead of SBus, so you can get more modern interfaces (such as LVD
SCSI) which are not available for the Ultra-2. Also, there are slots
for *two* Creator-3D framebuffers, so you can run double headed if you
so desire.

Note that there *are* much faster machines around. I have one
Sun Fire 280R (a rack-mount server) which happens to have dual 900 MHz
"Ultra-III Cu" CPUs, and can be pushed to dual 1200 MHZ Ultra-3 CPUs
should you so desire. While I do most things on the Ultra-60, the Sun
Fire 280R gets used for things where I need the speed. It appears to be
much faster than the 2X speed increase you would expect from a jump from
450 MHz to 900 MHz. I understand that this was a result of some
significant optimizing of the Ultra-III CPUs and of Solaris 10 to work
with that.

And while not everybody would want a rack-mount server with a
noisy set of fans, the same CPUs and system board run in the Sun Blade
2000 -- and that one has fans which speed up or slow down according to
the cooling needs. At the moment, the room temperature (by my chair) is
78F, the temperature inside the computer is 93F (at the remote
system control card), and the two CPUs are running at 131F and 127F
respectively. (The high-temperature warning starts at 199f for the
CPUs, and the "Failure" zone starts at 203f.

The Sun Fire 280R and the Sun Blade 2000 both boot (by default)
from Fibre channel drives. I have a pair of 146 MB drives in mine, but
larger are available. There is an internal SCSI bus which is used only
for the DVD ROM drive (and optionally for an internal tape drive as
well), and a separate external 68-pin SCSI bus which has all fifteen IDs
free for drives.

Note that I went to the Ultra-60 because I needed a LVD SCSI
card -- which is not available in the SBus cards, but is in the PCI
cards. That card has now moved to the Sun Fire 280R.

Now I would upgrade to Solaris 10, but I don't like it much.
This is mainly because I use Gnome as my main window manager. I know
this isn't a popular choice, but to me Gnome 2.0.2 (which came with
Solaris 9) was a good compromise between speed and user friendliness.
Then Sun ruined it with the Java Desktop System in Solaris 10.

I've never gotten to like Gnome -- it slows things down too
much, even in Solaris 9. And it has too much in the way of fancy
images which I don't need.

This seems to have happened to almost every operating system. All of
them seem to have reached a peak in the early 2000s. Windows 2000
Professional was, in my opinion, the best ever Microsoft OS. Mac OS 9
was the best Apple OS. Solaris 9 was the best Sun OS. Since then, all
of these operating systems have been spoilt in pursuit of eye candy. I
just don't understand it. Who wants the Fisher Price look of brightly-
coloured buttons and stupid animations? Obviously people don't see the
world the way I do.

Quite the way I feel about Gnome, FWIW.

But I don't really like the very basic Unix window managers either. I
rarely use CDE, and I always hated FVWM.

I used OpenWindows until forced by its disappearance to move to
CDE, which I am currently still using. If CDE vanishes, I will probably
move to FWIM. I used TVWM before going to OpenWindows.

Each move loses something, and gains something else.

I want a nice compromise,
without the eye candy or bloat. Gnome 2.0.2 with the "Crux" theme was
great (yes, I like the way Windows looked in pre-XP days, it was
good).

So -- why don't you compile Gnome 2.0.2 yourself?

BTW -- not only is Sun allowing download of Solaris 10 for free
(other than the need to register), but they are also now making their
fancy development system and cc/c++/FORTRAN compiler available for free
as well. If you hit them at the right time, they will even ship you
DVD-ROMs with the OS (for both SPARC and X86) and the development system
for free.

There are things which compile better with gcc, and other things
which compile better with Sun's cc. And one of the problems with gcc
and gnu-based packages is that there are now incompatible versions of
some of the libraries. You need to compile package X and have to
first compile the latest version (or at least a later version) of
libraries Y, Z, and W. Then, when those are installed, you discover
that older programs have stopped working, because they *required* the
older versions of one or more of those libraries. So there is something
to be said for sticking with Sun's cc and c++.

Your problems with the GIMP may well be that of library
versions, especially if they are third-party compiled and downloaded to
your system. You should either use the version of the GIMP which Sun
supplies (in /usr/swf/bin, if you are trying to find it), or compile it
on your system so the libraries match what you have.

So I'm wondering if I might find a more satisfactory compromise with
another kind of Unix. I'd rather stick with Unix as opposed to Linux.
I was thinking about FreeBSD, probably on PC hardware. Anyone here use
it?

I don't use that -- but I use OpenBSD. Not as a desktop, but as
a firewall (with PF), and for servers which I have to leave exposed to
the outside world, like web servers.

I seldom even install a window manager, because I normally
connect to these systems via SSH -- or if I do need to log on directly,
I will be doing something simple enough so the raw console suffices.
Note that I have OpenBSD both on UltraSPARC systems and Intel CPUs.

And I think that you will discover the problems with GNU's
libraries with just about any unix version.

Basically I need a reliable Unix OS with good third party software
support. Reliable software without major bugs is much more important
to me than having the latest version of everything. And I want a
window manager which is intuitive and user friendly (preferably
resembling the traditional Windows look) but without eye candy or
stupid animations. It seems so hard to find a window manager which
occupies the middle ground between CDE and the latest versions of
Gnome and KDE.

And what I have seen of Gnome has *always* struck me as having
too much eye candy.

So should I stick with Solaris 9 or try something else? Any
suggestions would be appreciated.

Try getting a slightly more modern box (The Sun Blade 2000 would
be really nice -- especially if you get it with a pair of 1200 MHz
CPUs.) I run CDE on the Ultra-60, with my Sun Fire 280R as a file
server (using the ZFS version of RAID which comes with Solaris 10), and
backups with an Exabyte 430 tape library using Mammoth-2 drives.

Oh yes -- the Sun Fire 280R and the Sun Blade 2000 can accept up
to 8GB of RAM, while the Ultra-2 (and my current Ultra 60) are limited
to 2GB of RAM. For things which need a lot of RAM (such as the GIMP),
the more RAM you have the better. And the faster (and more) swap space
you have, the better, too. I presume that your Ultra-2 is fully loaded
with 2GB of RAM.

Just my points of view.

Good luck,
DoN.
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