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Can anyone tell me the benefits of Solaris? I am seriously considering changing my OS from XP to Solaris, and I want ot know if it is worth it. Thanks ;D

Benefits of Solaris eh?

Solaris on Spark or Solaris on x86? The first is claimed to be reliable, though I personally find it ugly. The latter is a joke.

Well, Solaris is a POSIX system (like Linux or BSD). As such, you will be able to access the vast array of GNU-ish tools that readily compile on any such system, without having to look for a compatibility layer like Cygwin.

I won't get into the "more secure" / "free software" debate, as I have lived happily and securely with proprietary systems for a long time. But among the POSIXish systems, Solaris is considered a "professional" choice, and often used in production server environments. It scales very well on multi-CPU systems, and is considered very "solid".

On the downside, it's a second-grade POSIX citizen, with less complete driver support (compared to BSD, let alone Linux), and you might get into problems with some of the more obscure software packages as many package maintainers test on Linux and perhaps BSD, but seldom Solaris.

It has been working fine for me, with a very cool Java GUI, but it won't let me access a drop down menu to change the screen resolution? whats up with that? ???

Welcome to the world of X Window.

I don't know much about Solaris administration, but you'll probably have to delve into /etc/X11/xorg.conf or somesuch... try to find some fellow Solaris users to help you out. (I doubt there are many around on this forum...)

'eh? X Window?? well I did get 1 month of tech support with SOlaris that I just learnt about, so I used it, and I did have to get into that area... It wasnt too hard, copied some things into the Terminal (command line thing), restarted, ran kdmconfig and all was well! The screen is jsut a little grainy but its a small price to pay, Cheers

X Windows is a graphics server for UNIX, all UNIXs (as far as I am aware) are natively all console based without a GUI. X Windows is the most popular GUI server for UNIX systems.