a place in the sun
about Sun, Solaris 10 and Java Workstation w2100z -- Posts with "sunshine" in titles will praise SUNW, Solaris 10 or w2100z. Posts with "sunspot" will complain. Other posts will fall somewhere in-between.
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2005-05-30
sunspot - NVIDIA driver
Suppose you have a pair of 20" DVI monitors. With Solaris 10 on w2110z your second DVI monitor is idle and the first one shows 1280x1024 on 20". As it stands now Solaris 10 on w2100z can display only one DVI monitor at suboptimal resolution without hardware acceleration despite having NVIDIA Quadro line of high-end graphics cards. These cards are impressive (dual DVI, fast 3D, etc) and expensive (current street price is over $1300). What Sun does not tell you when you buy w2100z is that they don't yet have native driver for these awesome graphics cards. Funny that. If you install either linux or windows, you will get NVIDIA's drivers. If you install Solaris 10, you get soley limited generic nv driver.
Sun has committed two sins:
- It has been misleading customer wishing to use Solaris 10 on w2100z.
- A Sun exec recently said a real driver is shipping in a month or so. Considering Sun made a huge deal about NVIDIA more than 6 months ago when it launched w2100z, and Solaris 10 in the beginning of this year, we can this is way, way, late.
To my friends who are interested in w2100z, I advise to be aware of this problem and the noise problem (see below). Both are fixable to be sure but it's been bitterly disappointing to see Sun handle them so poorly.
update 2005-06-03 Finally NVIDIA driver is out. There are long threads at solarisx86 list about it. I'll wait another week and try it out.
At 10:10 by Jay 
NVIDIA may be close to releasing a driver soon: NVIDIA Solaris Forum
This is my personal blog. The views expressed on these pages are mine alone and not those of my employer.
Jay Han