Date: Sun, 23 Jun 2002 14:11:57 -0400 From: Andrew J Caines <A.J.Caines@halplant.com> To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: [OFF] FreeBSD vs Solaris - Opinions? Message-ID: <20020623181157.GG15958@hal9000.halplant.com> In-Reply-To: <B93AD854.3078%ukla@attbi.com> References: <B93AD854.3078%ukla@attbi.com>
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Steve, Since other people have pointed out that your question was meaningless and unanswerable since you didn't even hint at what you wanted to do with this system, I'll just add a couple of notes. FreeBSD is much easier to admin than Solaris for someone who is experienced in both. The same goes for most free software. The community support channels which exist for FreeBSD are substantially better than the vendor and community support in general, although there are some good Sun/Solaris community resources. If you go to a single vendor like Sun, you buy a "solution" - hardware, software, support, etc. You pay the money to get a known set of expectations. As for hardware, the two cases you gave are substantially different. > Which, in your opinion would make a better server. Sun UltrSparc 5 / 333mhz > running Solaris (I got a great deal on a couple of machines) or a generic > Athlon 1.2mhz running FreeBSD. [both machines have ATA drives & 256meg] The U5 is a low-end desktop box with a slow IDE drive. You can put half a gigabyte of RAM in and it can be useful, but it's not a real server class box and isn't a great desktop if you make the mistake of running things like CDE. My U5 with US-IIi/333MHz/512MB is roughly comparable to my PC with PII/266MHz/384MB, though I'd prefer the PC for desktop performance running the same software[1]. The Athlon is a real generation [as opposed to Intel style snake oil] ahead of the US-II. For a fair comparison from Sun, look at a new Blade with a US-III. [1] http://halplant.com:88/systems.html#Software -Andrew- -- _______________________________________________________________________ | -Andrew J. Caines- Unix Systems Engineer A.J.Caines@halplant.com | | "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary | | safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" - Benjamin Franklin, 1759 | To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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