Solaris Support ...

[marten]

What I would like to know - all those VA users - deploying or even developing under Solaris (Sparc) - what do they do after the Oracle/Sun merger. What about new hardware ? What is the situation for a SPARC oriented develper right now.

I reinstalled my old small SunBlade 100 with Solaris 10 and VA8.03 is working, though I get lots of error windows, when clicking too fast on the GUI.

[koschate]

I get lots of error windows, when clicking too fast on the GUI.

I get those on AIX and Linux too. It's a "feature" of VA Smalltalk under X-Windows . Disabling the tabbed browsers helps the situation somewhat, but it's getting to the point where it's almost impossible to do significant development working in UNIX.

[marten]

I get lots of error windows, when clicking too fast on the GUI.

I get those on AIX and Linux too. It's a "feature" of VA Smalltalk under X-Windows . Disabling the tabbed browsers helps the situation somewhat, but it's getting to the point where it's almost impossible to do significant development working in UNIX.

I tested my ResourceManger under Solaris and was deeply suprised, that not only the size of the input fields were wrong (that's expected behaviour), but I also noticed, that the widgets did not resize at all the way they do under Windows. I mostly defined them under Windows using the VAAssist shortcuts.

Now I manually set/corrected them and the resizing worked as expected.

Actually I would be more interested in answering my first question. Where do people get their Sparc hardware now ... ?

[koschate]

Actually I would be more interested in answering my first question. Where do people get their Sparc hardware now ... ?

Sun equipment is being sold by Oracle now, in many cases by the same folks you were talking to previously. A friend of mine transitioned from being a Sun SE to an Oracle SE. Contact me offline, and I'd be happy to pass on your information to him, and I'm sure he can dig up the right person in the Oracle organization to help you.

[marten]

But they only sell server stuff, no workstations any more !? That means, one must buy an old Sun Blade 2500 or stuff like this ?

Sun equipment is being sold by Oracle now, in many cases by the same folks you were talking to previously

[koschate]

But they only sell server stuff, no workstations any more !?

It does look like they're pretty much out of the workstation market. They definitely seem to have given up on Sparc-based workstations, which means you're looking at a server machine to run VA Smalltalk. GemStone does support x86-based Solaris - perhaps it's time to lobby Instantiations for support as well?

[marten]

I thought in the same direction, but after your posts I read postings in other Solaris oriented forums and I got the feeling, that Oracle did a positive statement for Solaris (Sparc-based), but not for x86-based Solaris and I heard - even here in Germany - lots of complaints from customers against Oracle and their license/support agreements.

On the other hand I'm not that interested at all in Solaris ... I wish to have a very, nice feeling Linux based VASmalltalk - doing serious development even in the client area.

GemStone does support x86-based Solaris - perhaps it's time to lobby Instantiations for support as well?

[koschate]

On the other hand I'm not that interested at all in Solaris ... I wish to have a very, nice feeling Linux based VASmalltalk - doing serious development even in the client area.

I'd be very happy with that myself. Mind you, Solaris has one big advantage going for it: ZFS. If it weren't for some compatibility issues, I'd be running Solaris on my home servers just for that.