Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Unix Operating Systems Software

New Tadpole SPARCbook RSN 457

Posted by Hemos from the sparc-at-the-world dept.
Jon Masters wrote to us in regards to the SPARCBook 6500 from Tadpole. Solaris 9, 4 gigs of RAM and all that - but with the TiBooks and Linux working on laptops, how much do people need Solaris laptops?
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

New Tadpole SPARCbook RSN More

New Tadpole SPARCbook RSN

Comments Filter:

  • Who would need it (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 01, 2002 @01:43PM (#4579044)
    There are some apps that people need to run on Solaris on a mobile workstation -- government comes to mind.

  • I'll take yours if you don't want it! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 01, 2002 @01:44PM (#4579048)
    with the TiBooks and Linux working on laptops, how much do people need Solaris laptops?

    Where else can you get a 64-bit laptop?

  • Elementary (Score:3, Troll)

    by drhairston ( 611491 ) on Friday November 01, 2002 @01:44PM (#4579053) Homepage
    but with the TiBooks and Linux working on laptops, how much do people need Solaris laptops?

    Solaris notebooks will satisfy their own market niche - users who need a stable, secure Unix with good development tools. Linux notebooks will be available for the rest of the Unix market.

  • It's what I have always wanted! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Rantastic ( 583764 ) on Friday November 01, 2002 @01:45PM (#4579066) Journal
    It's much to easy to use OS X or linux on a laptop. I prefer mine running an OS that takes a week to get set for production. Ah, Solaris, the car that ships without a steering wheel, how I love thee!
    • Ya know, that's funny, because I can turn any sparc machine from bare metal into a running server in 8 minutes flat. Yup, 8 minutes. Not quite a week, and I'll be damn surprised if Linux or OS X can touch that.

      Jumpstart really is the bomb, especially now that it does archives.

      • Re:It's what I have always wanted! (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Vagary ( 21383 ) <jawarren@gmail.cAUDENom minus poet> on Friday November 01, 2002 @04:59PM (#4580562) Journal

        And how long did it take you to get JumpStart up and running in the first place? And how long will it take to add a package to your JumpStart configuration?

        I was paid to be a Solaris Admin and so I have the utmost respect for the power of JumpStart. However constrasting the joys of such Sun innovations as NIS+ and pkgadd with the insanely beautiful Debian apt-get led to only one conclusion:

        Either Sun Engineers don't get out much, or Solaris is designed to be
        Administrator Hostile.

  • Well, let's see... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 01, 2002 @01:46PM (#4579072)
    Maybe there are people who WORK with Solaris: developers, admins, consultants, even hobbiests. Believe it or not, there are other OS's besides Linux.
  • maybe these should/could be used to save on rack space at colos. think about it, its less than 1u tick, and could stak them in a number of configurations.

    and think of the cash saved on kvms and monitors and stuff!

    and they would also have 3 hour (or how ever many hours they git out of the batteries) back up power supplies.

    cuz honestly who needs 4 Gb of ram on the road?
    • You do make a good point there. Also consider that to rack mount these things the only thing you'd need is a tray, roll out preferably, and a place to plug them in. The rack probably wouldn't require as much cooling as well.

      Maybe laptops are the low space servers of the future? The only major drawbacks are the lower hardware limitations and the cost.

    • Re:maybe not for moblie use at all (Score:4, Informative)

      by robertchin ( 66419 ) on Friday November 01, 2002 @02:46PM (#4579569) Homepage
      Just a sidenote, but IIRC their previous models got about 1/2 an hour. They're using a chip that wasn't designed for mobile use and thus sucks energy like crazy.
  • This has a bit of "Gee Whiz" appeal, but on the practical side, I'm not sure who the target audience is.

    For development / network administration / sysadmin stuff, my Dell C600 running RedHat 8.0 runs like a dream at a fraction of the price.

    Has anybody had experience with Solaris on a laptop? What's it like?

    • i did. i owned a tadpole 3gs and liked it a fair bit.

      Pros: really, _really_ stable. 200+ day uptime. runs normal solaris binaries, normal kernel (+ a few patches). Has better power management and removeable device support than other unix laptops.. extremely well built, and its a REAL unix workstation.. scsi, ethernet, isdn, dual serial, etc etc. How many laptops have scsi ?

      Cons: weight - its heavy, and here's the big one.. the battery life is TERRIBLE. i got 45 minutes out of a fully chargeed battery, and i had the 85mhz model. the 110mhz was even less..

      This was my first laptop. I eventually decided that no laptop will be powerful enough to run everything the way i do on a desktop. Also, I realized, on a laptop, the only thing that matters is battery life.

      Repeat after me: the only thing that matters is battery life.

      So because battery life is paramount, and no laptop will run everything you need it to anyway, the best thing to do is get

      the least powerful laptop, with the best battery life.

      So, i got an IBM Z50 off of Ebay. It's an old windows CE device in a laptop form factor. It has no moving parts, instant on/off, and heres the best part - 8+ hours of battery life, and at least 5 running WiFi. It has all the power i need - it has an RDP client that i use to connect to a windows 2k server box.

      Who else has something that lets them run IE6 wirelessly for 5+ hours of interactive use ? (oh, and weighs about 2 pounds)

  • Demos, trade shows, etc (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 01, 2002 @01:48PM (#4579092)
    Tadpoles are great if your product runs on, or interacts with, a Solaris machine. For example, you set up a tradeshow booth with a Tadpole playing the part of the Solaris server. Or you go to a customer site and set up a demo.

  • Not a Solaris notebook. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Kenja ( 541830 ) on Friday November 01, 2002 @01:48PM (#4579096)
    Its not a Solaris notebook, its a SparcBook. This means that the app you work on while on a train is the same app that runs on the 128 CPU monster in your data center.

  • You're Right (Score:3, Interesting)

    by 4of12 ( 97621 ) on Friday November 01, 2002 @01:49PM (#4579105) Homepage Journal

    Yes, at this point the advantages of a Solaris laptop are a pittance compared with what else is out there.

    Most user applications that demand laptop portability are met with x86 hardware or a Mac running Powerpoint.

    Even if Sun had had the benefit of Intel's economies of scale so that we'd be using UltraSPARC V's by now, they still would have difficulty selling the laptop to any market except perhaps Solaris field engineers.

    64 bit addressing and Solaris 9 is a great boon for folks running databases on big iron, but I just can't see what it buys you on a laptop.

    • "64 bit addressing and Solaris 9 is a great boon for folks running databases on big iron, but I just can't see what it buys you on a laptop."

      Sounds like it'd be helpful for 3D rendering apps. In that case, I could see Hollywood buying a few of these.
    • 4GB of memory, might be that its big iron in a travel size.

    • Fail-over, demonstration, ... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by BoomerSooner ( 308737 ) on Friday November 01, 2002 @01:55PM (#4579162) Homepage Journal
      and the ability to run your applications without rebuilding.

      Plus if your trying to sell something that runs on Solaris wouldn't it be good to demo it on solaris? For example, if the customer cannot come to you.

      Also as far as server fail-over you could use one of these temporarily to host a webserver, db, hell anything you want. If the battery works like most laptops it would last at least 1 hour with a heavy load and 2+ with a moderate load. Try that with a UPS for around $8000 (SPARCs are damn expensive).
      • I remember talking to some engineer from a db company (think it was Progress, not sure) a while back, he had an RS/6000 laptop on which he could create a temporary server while he repaired whatever went wrong on the original server. Don't know how they'd cope with the load (the client this was at had a pretty large RS/6000, don't think the laptop came anywhere near it performancewise). I think they had some plan to keep everybody but a few key employees out of the db in cases like this.

        I guess these Sparcs can be used for the same thing. They sound a lot cheaper than those RS/6000 laptops though, i think the machine that guy showed me cost $30000+ at the time.

  • Oh, come on (Score:5, Insightful)

    by BlueGecko ( 109058 ) <(moc.liamg) (ta) (kcallop.nimajneb)> on Friday November 01, 2002 @01:50PM (#4579111) Homepage
    but with the TiBooks and Linux working on laptops, how much do people need Solaris laptops?
    I don't even need one and I can answer that question.
    • An administrator of a fully SPARC-based network
    • Someone in scientific or industrial applications who need more than the 1 GB RAM that the TiBook supplies; with these specs (4 GB RAM, 160 GB max harddisk) it could even work quite well as a demonstration or temporary replacement server
    • Someone with legacy Solaris programs that they need to make transportable
    • A person who develops for Solaris
    • Someone who just plain prefers Solaris to Linux (believe it or not, they exist)
    Just because you personally do not have a use for this device does not mean that no one has a use for it.

    • Re: portable vs. portable (Score:4, Funny)

      by distributed.karma ( 566687 ) on Friday November 01, 2002 @02:28PM (#4579416)
      > Someone with legacy Solaris programs that they need to make transportable

      So you can make the program portable even when it isn't portable? ;-)

  • Demo systems (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Telastyn ( 206146 ) on Friday November 01, 2002 @01:50PM (#4579115)
    These sort of things are great to use as portable demo systems for software that runs on solaris. I've seen some older x86 laptops running solaris for this purpose (don't ask me, I didn't install them)

  • That is nothing (Score:5, Funny)

    by MosesJones ( 55544 ) on Friday November 01, 2002 @01:51PM (#4579129) Homepage

    Now for something with real bizarre appeal you need to go for...S/390 [ibm.com] on a laptop. Yes folks thats right, the great big clunking mainframe in the backroom running on your own Thinkpad.

    Solaris is for wimps, I wouldn't go anywhere without my portable mainframe system.

  • Duh, yes it's necessary. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Art Popp ( 29075 ) on Friday November 01, 2002 @01:51PM (#4579131)
    If you're developing software with six layers of abstraction between you and the box, buy all means by a PowerBook (they're ever cute), and develop it there. I'm sitting here next to an HP workstation for which I had to write 5000 lines of C for a particularly stressed application. Writing it using my (more powerful) Linux box and porting it over would have been a huge mistake.

    In using a close match for the target platform I discovered a bug in their libraries that I would not have otherwise caught, and was familiar enough with the debugging utilities of the box to use them remotely on the servers on which this app. lived. Since I had written the app. at exactly the same OS level as the target system, I new it wasn't a porting bug and that it wasn't a version bug. This saved me time far more valuble than the cost of my HP workstation. People who look down their noses at this laptop either code at very high levels or don't code at all.
    • "buy all means by a PowerBook"

      *lol*

  • Solaris laptops? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by wandernotlost ( 444769 ) <{moc.cigamliart} {ta} {todhsals}> on Friday November 01, 2002 @01:53PM (#4579143)
    ...but with the TiBooks and Linux working on laptops, how much do people need Solaris laptops?

    Believe it or not, there are still people that haven't ported their software to linux. They need Solaris laptops (or worse yet, they lug around a workstation) to show off their wares to potential customers.

    Personally, I think it's silly. Porting to linux is a great idea for a number of reasons, the ability to run on a plethora of cheap laptops not being the least.

  • a good reason. (Score:4, Funny)

    by programic ( 139404 ) on Friday November 01, 2002 @01:57PM (#4579183)
    but with the TiBooks and Linux working on laptops, how much do people need Solaris laptops?

    Because you need that kind of firepower to adequately run StarOffice(TM).

  • Why Solaris? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Derkec ( 463377 ) on Friday November 01, 2002 @01:58PM (#4579193)
    You may have Solaris apps or need to test against a sparc. That or you just can't find a TiBook with ->4gigs- of RAM.

  • Anti-Hemos/Linux R0XX0R$ post! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by swordgeek ( 112599 ) on Friday November 01, 2002 @02:00PM (#4579210) Journal
    I honestly worry about the number of brain cells that Hemos and others like him are firing on, at times.

    Every single time an article about Sun/Solaris comes out, someone (often the original poster) will say, "but Linux does xxx, so we don't need this!"

    Everybody chant the following mantra: Solaris is not Linux. Linux is not Solaris. There is room for both.

    Do we need this laptop? Well hell, do we need laptops at all? Is there some reason we NEED a Linux laptop over one running Win2k? Of course not!

    That said, some things are easier under Linux that Windows. (and vice versa!) Some things are more mature under Solaris than Linux (or maybe all things?). Some people prefer Solaris, some prefer Linux, some prefer Windows, and some preferred OS/2. WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY do we have to say "but Linux..." EVERY SINGLE FUCKING TIME ANYTHING ABOUT ANY OTHER PLATFORM IS MENTIONED?????

    OK, rant off. Just had to get that off my chest.

    • Amen, brother! (Score:3, Insightful)

      by jonr ( 1130 )
      The Slashdot crowd are the Beavis & Butthead of the IT industry. Well, maybe not all of you. :)
      J.
    • As with the recent pumpkin-based computer case, it's nice to have articles about Sparcbooks because they're cool. However, it's even nicer to have Sparcbook articles, because the things are in fact useful if you're a developer or user in the Sun Sparc world, which many people still are (alas, not me any more :-) (It's also surprising to hear that these guys are not dead yet [geocities.com] - I haven't seen one of their machines in a long time.)


      If *you* want to carry a pizza-box Sun on Caltrain and use one of the few cars that still have electric outlets, go ahead...

  • horror, horror, look at the keyboard! (Score:4, Funny)

    by meshko ( 413657 ) on Friday November 01, 2002 @02:02PM (#4579225) Homepage
    You can see it clearly in the datasheet here:
    http://hw.tadpole.com/pdf/products/mobile/s parcboo k/datasheet.pdf
    at zoom level of 800% or so.
    What is that key between tab and shift? This has to be a mistake. Do they really expect any self-respecting Unix user will by this???

    Prejudice aside, I think I want this toy even more than Zaurus. I wonder if FreeBSD 5.0 will work on it ;)

    And yes, there are people who really do need it.
  • I've got Solaris x86 running on Toshiba 4020CDT laptop and I use it like a server. I've got Apache, MySQL, and PHP running a copy of OpenDB [sourceforge.net] for my group at work. I'm very impressed with the performance of a machine that was lumbering along with Windows 2000.

    And with the battery, it's has a builtin UPS!

    Sure, I could have used Linux. But I mostly use Solaris for work, so I chose to work with an operating system I'm more familiar with.

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

    by airrage ( 514164 ) on Friday November 01, 2002 @02:15PM (#4579317) Homepage Journal
    I'm not a huge SUN fan, from a business standpoint, but this actually has some merit. I can see some applications for admins, engineers, etc., though still a niche-market. They say that even a mouse will fight a lion if backed into a corner. So it's interesting to see the last death throes of Sun. I just don't think this strategy is the kind of thing that makes sense.

    --RIP DMC, here's some 40 for me, and some for my homies.

    • Re:Interesting... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by swordgeek ( 112599 )
      Hmm.

      I was sitting here laughing about Sun's "Death Throes," and then thought about their stock price for a minute, and decided that the business world needs to be blown up in its entirety.

      Sun is a healthy, prosperous company. They have a BIG market share in server rooms (especially in the geophysics/oil&gas world), they're producing excellent hardware, they've got a top-notch OS, and...

      their stock price is floating around $3, making them ripe for a takeover by quite a few companies.

      It's stupid. Their stock price, like that of many other companies, has no bearing on their health as a company anymore. There's simply no connection between stock price and performance, either good OR bad.

      Bah. No real point. Just disgusted with big business.
      • while i agree that its a shame stock price doesn't necessarily affect quality of products...

        i think its pretty clear that the entire tech sector was _Extremely_ over valued. SUNW lost a lot of ground not because of their bad products, but because of the bad investors that inflated the price so damn high.

        Realistically, anyone that had any sort of experience with the markets would have started selling sun short about a year ago. And they'd be filthy rich right now. With double and triple digit P/E ratios, the entire tech sector is a joke.

        Look at MSFT - no debt, $40b in cash, record revenues all through an economic downturn (and the tech sector crash). Still, the price has been floating around the same level for about 2 years. Granted, after 1:30PST today there may be a big change in MSFT, but even so, the financials at MS by all indications show that it is one of the strongest companies there is.

        Yet its share price has stagnated.

        Right now, so much price has dropped out of the tech sector, that all that remains is for the _value_ of those stocks to catch up. Then the stock prices will rise again, and do so at a normal rate (backed by people that know what the fuck they're doing, not idiot day-traders)

        Incidentally, SUNW's product offerings are a mixed bag. They cant decide wether they're a hardware or a software company publicly (What is SunONE ? Has anyone seen it ? Why were they telling MSFT that Software didn't matter 1 year ago ?) Also, as nice as the ultrasparc III is, its only nice compared to other sparcs. x86 chips are doing quite a bit better, and itanium crushes it for FP work. SGI systems scale better than Suns, pretty much everyone makes a workstation that outperforms them at the bottom end. IBM's entire line of products is in roughly all ways superior to the equivalent (where they exist) offerings from Sun.

        Sun's biggest asset right now is its installed base, and as we've seen, linux/x86 is eroding that because for many things, the port is almost free, and because the hardware is soooo much cheaper (absolute and price/perf)

        Sun was the poster child of the .com era. And now they're paying for it.

        Sun is not a healthy or a prosperous company. They're laying people off, forcing vacations, etc etc. This isn't because of their stock price. Its because people aren't buying as much sun gear, because it costs too damn much money, and because everyone that bought any in the last 2 years has auctioned it off as they went under, so the market is flooded.
  • I didn't know other OEMs besides Sun used the SPARC processors. Are there any other OEM besides Tadpole and Sun that make SPARC based machines?

    • These days the only one I can think of would be Samsung. However there are a bunch of small companies htat buy motherboards and CPUs from Sun and built systems. In the past there where groups such as ROSS that not unly used the Sun CPU design but went beyond that to introduce their own versions (the ROSS Hypersparc). If you hunt around you can find some cool Sparc hardware made by the clones. My fav's would be the ROSS Sparcplug, a full height drive bay Hypersparc computer and the Opus Sparcard, a Sun Sparc 5 on a ISA card.
    • Sun sells OEM mobos that can run Solaris, and there are a few manufacturers out there, though I think Axil is gone.. Fujitsu builds some enterprise-class sparc systems, and I worked on a system built by a japanese or korean company (forget which) that was just an AXi base IIRC.. Also, Integrix [integrix.com] builds OEM systems, though I've only used their pizza-box RAIDs before..

      You might be able to build your own [sun.com], but these days finding a 250 or 450 on ebay may be cheaper...

    • Re:Non-Sun OEM use SPARCcs? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Lupulack ( 3988 ) on Friday November 01, 2002 @02:34PM (#4579455)

      Heck yeah , Fujitsu , Tatung , Toshiba just to name a few.


      Check out www.sparc.com for lists of members of the Sparc consortium.

    • In my youth, I actually transitioned from Apple ][ to Sun. I didn't buy my first PC until 1994 and then only to run FreeBSD on it. I was a big fan of Suns for a long time, which was tough to do given the pricing.

      I wound up at one point doing some contracting for Axil. I still remember those days fondly. Among other products, Axil made a board called the Axilerate which was a drop-in replacement for the Sparcstation 1, 1+ or 2 motherboard which featured a Microsparc 2 CPU. In essence, you could upgrade your machine to the equivalent of a Sparcstation 5. I thought it was a great product (obviously modern machines are on a whole different level). Axil didn't have any sort of employee/contractor purchase program. I actually had to go to a reseller to buy my Axilerate board.

      It was a shame when the asian flu hit Hyundai, which was Axil's parent company. In a cost-cutting measure, Hyundai shuttered Axil, which at the time was the #2 manufacturer of Sparc based computers (#3 was almost as far behind Axil as Axil was from Sun).

  • Military and certain agencies (Score:5, Interesting)

    by BWJones ( 18351 ) on Friday November 01, 2002 @02:20PM (#4579358) Homepage Journal
    but with the TiBooks and Linux working on laptops, how much do people need Solaris laptops?

    Well, I can tell you that there are certainly a number of users in the military as well as applications that certain government and quasi government agencies use running on Solaris. A few years ago at the Whitehouse, I noticed a number of Solaris workstations and the first laptop running Solaris I had ever seen. I don't know about things currently, but I expect there to be more Windows machines there now than there used to be. Although our Veep Dick Cheney appears to use a TiBook.....

    Additionally, the TiBook is limited to 1GB of RAM (hardware limited NOT the OS which can address much more) and there are number of users in the sciences and video editing markets who would like portable 2GB workstations, but given Apple's focus on video editing, I would expect the next TiBook revision (not the one next week) will address more RAM.

  • how much do people need Solaris laptops?

    Choice. Sure we balk at Microsoft people asking why anyone needs to run Linux, then we turn around and balk at someone for creating a Solaris laptop.

    I think its cool, I'd like to get one for work, we use a number of Solaris only apps.
  • What if I do not want to feed the lesser known but equally evil half of the Wintel duopoly, and the TiBooks are either not good enough for me or produced by a equally evil company I do not trust.
  • Anyone know of a rough performance comparison between linux apps running on a UltraSPARC-IIi 650MHz processor VS a new P4 or Athlon XP? This seems like a very nice laptop but I'm not at all familiar with Sparc processor performance...
  • I was hoping it would share some other great features with Sun servers, but alas, I'll have to wait for a laptop with hot swappable CPU and memory modules ..

    Sarcasm aside, Tadpole makes some great products. They've been building laptops that put most others to shame for years ... I've only played with one (mmm, trade shows), but they're solid and fast little buggers. Heavy, and the battery life isn't very good, but if you need a Solaris workstation on the road ..

    My other favorite style of Sparc system was the Ross SPARCplug. It was a full server, packed into a two (or three?) 5.25 inch drive bays. Stick it in your PC, plug in a network cable, and pow -- stealth server! Dual hypersparc CPUs, 256MB of RAM, SCSI, 100Base/T ethernet ... at the time (mid-ninties), it was a rocket! They pop up from time-to-time on eBay .. usually a few hundred bucks now, as opposed to several thousand dollars back in the day.

    Hmm. You can also find raftloads of old IPXes and stuff, for dirt cheap (usually under $100). Tons of fun. Beats the pants off of a low end PDA for cheap thrills.

    Just think .. for about $1000, you too could own a REAL beowulf cluster, running on Sun hardware! Now that's something to write home about, even if your nodes are only running at 25MHz .. but even then, you'd still be surprised at what they can do.

  • But it *has* to be Intel or Mac..... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Junta ( 36770 ) on Friday November 01, 2002 @02:46PM (#4579573)
    I got a Tadpole Sparcbook 2 from work. About a month later, my apartment was broken into and it, among other things was stolen. So my girlfriend was calling all the local pawn shops to make sure they would keep an eye out for it. I came through the door on such a call and she said 'I'm tired of dealing with this guy, he wants to talk to you'. And so I answered and he asked what type of Laptop it was, and I replied with Tadpole Sparcbook 2. He said he didn't recognize the brand and if it was Intel or a Mac, and I said neither, it is a Sparc, and he replied that all computers were either Intel or Mac, even if rebranded something else. He asked if it ran DOS or Mac, and I said "SunOS". He said he didn't want to know the application I run on it, but what comes up when I turn it on before running anything. Finally I said 'If something comes into your store that looks like a laptop but you don't know what the hell it exactly is, it's probably mine...

    Evidently no one else knew enough to buy it either, and so when they caught the guy a year later, that was the only thing of ours they had not managed to offload. When I went to the police to reclaim it, I was fully prepared to go to lengths to show I knew the password, but they said 'just take it'. Then an officer asked me if that was a good brand of laptop and would I recommend it for their college aged kid....

    Oh the nostalgia working on that brings me... SunOS 4.1.1... As an aside, anyone know where I could get a replacement battery, software updates, and/or the little scsi plug adapter for this sucker?

    Also have a new iBook (for when I need battery or don't want to take forever to do anything), and bought my Fiancee a PC laptop (linux/WinXP dual boot).
    • where I could get a replacement battery

      I don't know about the rest, but the best course of action with the battery is to get it re-celled. Inside the battery casing is usually just standard sized NiCad or NiMH or LiIon cells (depending on the age). Search around, there are companies that specialize in exactly this.

      Look at the xrays of a TiBook [slashdot.org], for example. You can see the cells inside the battery in the lower left corner.

    • Parts (Score:3, Interesting)

      by erik umenhofer ( 782 )
      I had one last year. It was really cool. It felt like a solid piece of metal. I loved holding it because it made me feel like I was carrying a real machine and not a bunch of plastic. I got parts at a couple of places.

  • 1 - Jump start. This is a beautiful box to ethernet over to your new server to install Solaris via jumpstart, especially if you need to do the install while off the net, e.g. a tripwired hardened server like a firewall running Checkpoint Firewall/1.

    2 - CDE. So many of the admin tools for SunOne software are buggy in any version of X other than standard CDE. Examples are the directory/web server java based console.

    3 - Portable development. Let's say that you are debugging Sparc assembly for a new device driver, or just testing your C code on a particular patch level of Solaris XYZ to find issues with the shared libraries, and you would rather sit in the coffee shop than in your dusty cube.

    4 - Portable 64 bit processing. Particularly useful for math or physics types who want to crank out some data on the way to a conference or in the hotel room. (Yes, 1GB of RAM, but no limit on Swap. Not to mention REALLY big Ints.)

    5 - Full solaris application testing environment. A wonderful thing to have to take to datacenters in other parts of the country which are not part of the corporate backbone yet to help you figure out why those new Websphere application servers cannot talk SSL LDAP over 636 to the new SunOne Directory Servers.

    6 - I could keep going, but I have to get back to work. :-) I want one!

    jfs

  • It may have a RISC processor, but does it have a 28 dot 8 modem in it?
  • Isn't the US2i artificially limited to 2GB of RAM?

    The website seems to say that the laptop simultaneously has 4GB and 2GB. *THAT* is the power of Sun hardware. :)

  • Tadpole (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dozer ( 30790 ) on Friday November 01, 2002 @03:13PM (#4579787)
    A few years ago, I travelled around Europe supporting my company's product on site. I'd try to fix a bug, then send the patch back to the US to be built (no source code could ever touch a client's computer). Turnaround times were over a day, due to the time change.

    Then I got one of these (for hrumptyhrumptens of thousands of dollars). It paid for itself in a month. I could do builds on-site, leading to turaround times of less than an hour. I no longer had to get a hotel for most support visits! I sure had a need for a non-Linux notebook.

    Of course, it radiated so much heat out the keyboard that my hands would just drench the thing in sweat. That got a little gross. But it worked like a champ.

  • Why isn't there a price on the freaking page? If I wanted to talk to someone on the phone, I wouldn't be using the web!

    I mean, I'd really like a solaris laptop. It would beat the hell out of my portable rack rig. But damn it, I don't want to have to fend off sales reptiles just to find out how much it is.

    All I can think is that they want to "personalize" the price based on how much money they think they can get out of you.

Slashdot Top Deals

Get hold of portable property. -- Charles Dickens, "Great Expectations"

Close