Compiz coming to solaris

M

Want to have all that eye candy (desktop coolness) that we have on Linux on your Solaris box. It is still little rough on edges, but it is coming there slowly. Guess soon Solrais will have as stable packages available as there are for Linux distributions.

Erwann has posted Compiz 0.5.0 packages for Solaris Nevada/Express on x86 - this is the latest step of several months of work to make this happen.

“We’ve been working on this for several reasons. Our accessibility architect became very enthused after seeing Beryl’s screen magnification support and talking to the Beryl developers at last fall’s Ubuntu Developer’s Summit. Our (now-former) director of Solaris Open Source (including OpenSolaris and the Solaris Desktop & X teams) became a fan after seeing the demos at the X.Org Developer’s Conference Sun hosted in February. Even the Solaris CTO has jumped on the bandwagon for making the Solaris Express Developer’s Edition look more modern.

We were dreading the tough choice of having to pick Beryl or Compiz - at first glance, compiz looked more stable, but beryl had more plugins/effects and the accessibility support we were interested in. Fortunately, the compiz and beryl communities solved this problem by re-uniting their efforts.

*linux.wordpress.com/2007/04/28/compiz-on-solaris-x86-eye-candy-for-solariss-desktop/

first que:
1.Who has a solaris Box @ home?

Cool !
@rakesh , I do..

Solaris too is competing with Linux,BSD's,it went Open Source.

My ThinkPad runs Solaris snv_56.
And it's great to see Solaris developers working hard to bring it to desktop users also. Still, they need to focus more on drivers than on eye candy.

cant they port drivers from Linux as does bsd?

@yamaraj do u hav solaris on ur desktop too???

M

Yamaraj said:
My ThinkPad runs Solaris snv_56.
And it's great to see Solaris developers working hard to bring it to desktop users also. Still, they need to focus more on drivers than on eye candy.

Wouldn't eye candy bring in more users, thus better development, indirectly? This new challenge might entice a few more good developers to come in.

pathiks said:
@yamaraj do u hav solaris on ur desktop too???

I do.

tech_your_future said:
Wouldn't eye candy bring in more users, thus better development, indirectly? This new challenge might entice a few more good developers to come in.

Eye candy matters, but so does the need to resolve drivers and compatibility issues. While compiz may sound exciting to Linux users, they'll be disappointed to see the lack of DRI enabled 3D drivers. Even Intel DRI is still in works and was slated to be integrated into Nevada a couple of months back. nVIDIA, on the other hand, is a completely different story. Solaris Express comes with nVIDIA 3D drivers and one can also download them off NV's official site.

So, things are improving and the new CEO, Jonathan, is actually serious about the x86 platform and bringing Solaris to the desktop. I wish him success.

M

thankfully I have nvidia. I did read that only nvidia cards are supported. Will those solaris DVD's shipped by sun work or do I need to download other?

Solaris 10 doesn't come with nVIDIA drivers, but you can download and install them. If you downloaded/ordered a recent Solaris Express [Developer edition], then your card should work out of the box.

A

Yamaraj said:
My ThinkPad runs Solaris snv_56.
And it's great to see Solaris developers working hard to bring it to desktop users also. Still, they need to focus more on drivers than on eye candy.

right said, as of now 915 boards have become very old to say precisely they have become history still solaris does not support on board audio or lan and vedio is also not supported.

@yamaraj do u mean that solaris wont work on my onboard intel 845gv gfx??

^It will work fine, but without hardware 3D acceleration.

Wht with Via Unichrome Pro cards?No Hopes.I think
OR Does openchrome.org drivers for X.org-7.x works as with Linux on Solaris too?

Tech_Your_Future , I used solaris 10 on my old box that had nvidia.. It uses the nv driver.If only need to get your audio working by downloading a driver and installing a driver.I downloded an intel audio driver and it worked..