Now It Can Be Told

Well, after much wailing and gnashing of teeth (why does useradd(1) try to create home directories under /home if Solaris reserves that for mount points?), I now have my shiny new Ultra 20 up and running. I got a user account added so I don't have to run as root, and I've at least looked at the included software (Java Studio Enterprise and Java Studio Creator). Haven't actually had enough time to create a project yet, but I think I've got everything else squared away enough so I can focus on Java develoment. The box comes pre-loaded with JDK 1.5.0, which is nice. I'm not sure if it's the 64-bit or 32-bit version, though.

Interestingly, the box seems to get faster as I use it. When I first started playing with it, it seemed to take forever for a new terminal window to pop up. Now it's (subjectively) quicker. The CDE seemed definitely quicker than GNOME, but that's not too surprising given that it's been out longer (I remember using it HP workstations back in the mid-90s). The GNOME environment is no slouch, though. I first used GNOME back with it first came out, when I was running RH5.2 with (I think) the 2.0.36 kernel. It was usable, but I eventually switched to Enlightenment. Then I dropped Linux for good and went over to NetBSD and never looked back. I hope Solaris works out.

I got Apache started, but I think I'm going to see what the Sun application server has to offer before I go much farther down the infrastructure setup route. I'll probably wind up installing all kinds of stuff (Tomcat, JBoss, Resin, Jetty) before I'm done, but I'm going to start out with the Sun suite and see what the creators of Java have managed to do. I have a feeling I'm going to be downloading Eclipse sooner rather than later, though. It's like vi -- my fingers know it too well to leave it behind for long.