about Solaris Operating System

[selden]

Solaris is a proprietary Unix operating system from Sun Microsystems. It runs on their proprietary SPARC hardware. A freeware version is available that runs on Intel hardware.

Solaris is used heavily in technical computing environments.
Sun's hardware tends to be more expensive than Intel or Apple hardware, but also tends to be much more rugged.

Maya is available for Solaris.
3DS Max is not.

[lots]

Personally I dispise our sun machines at work. We have a lab and several faculty running on Sun UltraSparcs (5 and 10). We also have 2 or 3 servers from Sun. All of it running solaris. They're really old and clunky though... And when it comes to modern Sun systems, well, they're all based on Opterons anyway (well aside from niagra..). So really you're just using a normal every day Workstation class PC, with a big price tag, expencive yearly service, and Solaris, which you can get for free...

The OS itself is fairly straight forward. Its just a unix flavor, and a fairly known one. But if you've already got Linux running on a dual Opteron rig, then there's not much point in investing in a Sun workstation. Unless you like burning money :)

Our department is moving away from Sun, as it is too costly to run. Thier service contracts are a bit silly :P Insted we've been buying up cheap dells and fitting them with better hardware and stufing linux on them.

The service is MUCH cheaper, the hardware its self is too. And linux is a fairly robust system in its own right. Enough for all of the department's computational needs (Stat and Math).

[selden]

One thing we've found is that Solaris servers tend to be more reliable under heavy load than Linux systems. Too often the Linux variants of NFS have intermittant problems that just aren't seen in Sun's version. But then, Sun originated it.

[lots]

Alot of that may have to do with the distribution and version of NFS, etc. etc... But I can see your point. Afterall, Solaris was developed by people who were paid :) When it comes to linux, its rather different :)

[thomaspecht]

maya on sun? i think you're mistaken there. afaik there is no commercial graphics software on solaris/sparc except for alias studiotools and some old adobe stuff from the stone age.
you're probably mixing it up with IRIX, another flavour of unix. lot's of graphics packages available for that one, including maya, but hardly anything in active development anymore.

and to the original poster: solaris was probably mentioned in that book as relevant to the entertainment industry because at some point large renderfarms running renderman were stuffed with sun boxes, since these were a bit faster and cheaper than the state-of-the-art SGI's of that time. i think sun has been replaced by linux for the most part for this application.
your book is probably rather outdated. commercial unices running on the big iron are afaik only used for server tasks and certain compositing apps these days. and some leftovers for special tasks, of course.

[j@cky]

Thanks a lot for your answers..so Maya is available or not in Solaris?...GI JOE said that there is no graphic softwares available on solaris, except Alias Studio Tools and old Adobe packages..Thanks

[qwatkins]

Thanks a lot for your answers..so Maya is available or not in Solaris?...GI JOE said that there is no graphic softwares available on solaris, except Alias Studio Tools and old Adobe packages..Thanks

According to Alias/Autodesk they do support Solaris (whether or not it is Maya I'm not sure) take a look:

http://www.alias.com/eng/partners/hardware_partners/index.shtml

[thomaspecht]

easy to find out, really: http://www.alias.com/glb/eng/support/maya/qualified_hardware/index.jsp vs.
http://www.alias.com/glb/eng/support/studiotools/qualified_hardware/index.jsp

[ya3]

...IRIX, another flavour of unix. lot's of graphics packages available for that one, including maya, but hardly anything in active development anymore.
Discreet Smoke, Fire, Flint, Flame and Inferno. I think those titles are big enough to hold up IRIX's reputation for a while now :P And they've only just stopped Maya for IRIX at v6.5

[beaker]

Discreet Smoke, Fire, Flint, Flame and Inferno. I think those titles are big enough to hold up IRIX's reputation for a while now :P And they've only just stopped Maya for IRIX at v6.5Not for long. Autodesk is already shipping most those packages on Linux(except Fire).

[ya3]

Not for long. Autodesk is already shipping most those packages on Linux(except Fire).
Bleh. Killjoy :P

[beaker]

For the entertainment industry, Electric Image, Nendo, Lightwave used to be on Solaris but were discontinued a few years ago. Houdini, Prman, Mental Ray all run on Solaris and are still being updated. Also there are plenty of CAD/3d surfacing apps for the product/auto design market that still run. Previously mentioned is Alias Studio line of tools. Also ProE, Solidedge, Catia, etc...(there are a bunch of them).

Stick with windows, linux or osx. Solaris is good for a server, but for 3d your paying a premium for pretty normal hardware that would cost you a lot less if were a pc.

[thomaspecht]

hm, i think inferno is also IRIX exclusive at the moment. the "real" one anyway, not the linux-based SD-only version they announced a few weeks ago for the japanese market.

[beaker]

hm, i think inferno is also IRIX exclusive at the moment. the "real" one anyway, not the linux-based SD-only version they announced a few weeks ago for the japanese market.It is a shipping product in Japan since November but yes, it is not available anywhere else yet. Not a big issue since there is very little difference between Flame and Inferno except the hardware.

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