[advocacy-discuss] Changes out there?

[W. Wayne Liauh]

> Fiona Duan wrote:
> > Yes, most of them are students. The web site is
> located at South China 
> > University of Technology and belongs to the  China
> Education and 
> > Research Network (CERNET), with connection to the
> public network in China.
> >
> > I contacted with Vincent Ding who maintains this
> portal and asked for 
> > the numbers, he clarified that it should be "90
> thousand" click, the 
> > real download number is lower than this. However,
> it is still nice work.
> >   
> 
> Yah, getting perfect numbers is difficult. The point
> is that our stuff 
> is now making it into the hands of a very large
> number of young people 
> in a rapidly expanding market. That's so cool. I
> guess it was worth it 
> to ship OpenSolaris 2008.05 with dozens and dozens of
> languages, eh? :) 
> I have to check with the Sun engineers here in Japan
> because I had heard 
> that some guys were interested in putting up some
> community mirrors here 
> in Tokyo. Good stuff  ...
> 
> Jim
> 
> -- 
> http://blogs.sun.com/jimgris/
> 

One reason IMHO that is causing such changes is the increasing popularity of Intel's C2D processors.

AMD does not have its own chipset, and notebook makers typically pair AMD CPUs with Broadcom wifi chipset, which does not provide drivers except for Windows.  Although we can use the NDiswrapper program (in conjunction with the firm ware downloaded from the manufacturer) to make Broadcom wifi work in Solaris, doing so involves a lot of work and the results are not very unreliable.

With the Core 2 Duo processors, in contrast, Intel also makes available the associated chipsets for wifi, NIC, video, etc.  As we all know, Sun is working very closely with Intel to develop "and optimize" Solaris drivers for Intel's hardware (something no one would have never thought possible just a short while ago).

When the hardware is cooperating (as, for example, in the case of Intel's C2D), OpenSolaris can be the best operating system dwarfing everything else--almost like a Mac on steroid but without its pricy price tag.  :-)
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