In article ,
John Stumbles writes:
On Sat, 17 Mar 2007 11:10:00 +0000, Andrew Gabriel wrote:

Take a look at Solaris x86/x64

But not AMD64 by the look of it.

This AMD64 system has been running Solaris x86/x64 in 64 bit mode
since I bought it in October 2004.

-- I run a mixture of 32 and 64 bit
apps without knowing or caring which is which, and certainly without
having to build different environments to run them in.

But do you have a Realplayer, acroread, or flash 8 or 9?

I don't keep up to date with these things as I don't use them.
Realplayer -- don't know
Acroread -- I use an old version, but I think there's a newer one,
but probably not the latest. There are several non-adobe ones.
Flashplayer 9 is available for Solaris in beta from adobe.

If you want a GNU look-and-feel

No thanks ptui! - I'm a KDE weenie ;-) But it looks like they've got
kde in the repository, so that's OK.

I don't know how they handle mixed 32/64 bit applications, and given
it sounds like the problem you mention above is a user-land problem, not
a kernel one, it might be same problem as on Linux.

The problem AIUI is that the shrink-wrapped stuff expects certain
libraries and if Shrink-wrap Inc doesn't do a version of their app for
AMD64 the workaround is to install the IA32 version along with IA32 libs
in a chrooted environment. I wouldn't expect to get that problem with the
solaris distro because you probably can't get even the 32-bit versions for
it :-)

Solaris x86 kernel runs in 64 bit mode if you have a 64 bit
capable CPU, or 32 bit mode otherwise. The 64 bit kernel runs
32 and 64 bit applications completely transparently (and without
any form of emulation). All applications must come in 32 bit mode
(or they won't run on 32 bit only CPUs), but they can also come
in 64 bit mode if they can benefit from it. All libraries come in
both 32 and 64 bit mode.

Looks like Nexenta's equivalent workaround is BrandZ "Allows to
run Linux userland".

BrandZ is a Zone (a Solaris containment mechanism a bit like BSD
jails, but much more fully featured) into which is installed a
Linux system minus kernel, rather than another Solaris system as
is the case with normal Zones. A BrandZ Zone then also provides
an alternate syscall layer into the Solaris kernel which provides
the same interface as a Linux kernel, rather than the standard
Solaris syscall layer.

However, Nexenta is a Solaris distribution in which the userland
is all Debian rather than Solaris anyway, so you probably won't
need to use BrandZ for anything except binaries which are supplied
only for Linux.

I have done lots of work on Linux servers, but I'm not a serious
Linux desktop user, so I can't give you first-hand experience of
Nexenta verses Linux. However, I was in a meeting with a number
of Linux die-hards recently. One of them asked if anyone had
tried Nexenta, and about 5 of them had, and they were extremely
complimentary about it. None had a single negative comment, and
those that had measured performance found it significantly better
than a full Linux distro, and it was much more responsive and
stable under heavy load than Linux is. A couple of them had
noticed it also includes Dtrace, and been totally converted to
using it for identifying system problems (something Linux has
always been particularly bad at doing), and could not imagine
using any OS in the future which didn't have Dtrace. (It is
being ported to several other OS's at the moment, including
Linux.) As these were not the kind of comments I normally hear
from Linux die-hards, it looks like Nexenta may have something
particularly compelling to offer them.

--
Andrew Gabriel
[email address is not usable -- followup in the newsgroup]