[Penguin4x4]

SANTA CLARA, Calif. - September 24, 2003 - Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: SUNW) today announced support of the Java Desktop System on the AMD Athlon 64 processor, leveraging the momentum of Sun's Java Desktop System and fulfilling customer demand for an alternative desktop. Sun will provide both 32- and 64-bit Java Desktop System support for the AMD Athlon 64 processor recently announced in San Francisco. Customers in areas such as manufacturing, call centers and governments will benefit from the system's increased processing and memory power, and enhanced ability to process mixed and digital media as well as graphics-intensive computing

Official Press Release
JDS Main Page
JDS's Features

[Arkaine23]

Sun has also mentioned development of a 64 bit version of Solaris that can be run on the A64 architecture. They've had 64 bit Solaris for 64 bit Sparcs for a long time now.

[Is_907]

so it's like a Sun-made Linux distro with a custom desktop, right?
and they expect us to pay for that? (j/k, i understand it's target audience is not the bums like me who don't want to pay for anything Linux-related)

sounds pretty nice, though.... isn't Sun also making an X replacement desktop system? or was I dreaming...?

[Arkaine23]

Solaris is more Unix than Linux, though like Linux, it is techincally a Unix-like OS. Sun has had 64-bit CPU's and 64-bit Solaris for quite awhile, they just don't really measure up to Athlons or P4's.

Solaris is very stable, and there's a 32-bit version that can run on x86 systems. I don't really like it as much as Linux. I've used Solaris 8. It's desktop is useable, but not as nice as KDE. But I don't have enough experience with it to really say much else about it.

I wound up trying to install the Sparc port of Gentoo onto one of the Sun boxes I managed- so users could have KDE and OpenOffice and things like that. It didn't work out so well. I got the base system on fine, but I couldn't get KDE to complie.

[Cúchulainn]

Sun has never been able to do desktops right imo. Just thinking of a Java-centric desktop makes me want to run. Their target markets are pretty telling.

[ookabooka]

Originally posted by Arkaine23

I wound up trying to install the Sparc port of Gentoo onto one of the Sun boxes I managed- so users could have KDE and OpenOffice and things like that. It didn't work out so well. I got the base system on fine, but I couldn't get KDE to complie.

I have an ultra 10 workstation that I got KDE installed and working on gentoo linux. What version were u trying to compile? I only had problems trying to distcc it (333 mhz is pokey, even for a sparc) because I had to make a cross compiler on my other computers. You could try stage 3 for sparc64, that should have kde already compiled.

[Arkaine23]

This was about 8 months ago. perhaps they have updated it since then. Think I was trying for KDE 3.0 something... I was doing this on Ultra 80's. And I have a feeling it was the XF86 that was misconfigured.