I've spent the past 2-3 days fiddling with the new server. First I installed Solaris but since x86/x64 support is so new, things like my network card were not supported. I did find the source code for a driver that will work, but before I got that far I had a couple of other issues. The first was on boot, it would say something like "could not load character set" a bunch of times and left me stuck in a POSIX character set. Many of my keys did not work (such as backspace, alt, etc). I formatted it 3 or 4 times trying things differently each time. The last few times, on the last step, it would say it wanted to reboot. I clicked the button and nothing happened. Reset with the power switch, and Solaris had errors booting.

For now I've given up on Solaris on my server. I think I will still give it a try one day, possibly using real Sun hardware with a SPARC processor and the whole 9 yards. From what I've read, it's a great OS. But for now, it is a bit too much. A lot of the commands are different than in linux so I'd be learning the OS almost from scratch.

I decided to give Ubuntu Server a try. I installed the server edition and when it finished it gave me a shell. No applications installed, no GUI, or anything. I guess it's meant to be bare bones like Gentoo is after you install it. This was a little too bare for me. The days of wanting to be hard core are over for me, so I wiped it and installed Ubuntu Desktop. It installed quickly, all hardware supported and working, and without a ton of bloat. I had to remove a few things things such as Open Office, Gimp and Evolution but not much else.

Words to describe Ubuntu? You can quote me on this one.... "OMFG!!!!!!!!!!!!". I've heard all the hype before. Ubuntu is easy to install, easy to use, installs from a single cd, etc... that never sold me because every distro says that. I have SuSE on my laptop and it was easy to install, everything worked, and I'm happy with it. I'm finding it difficult to find the words to describe my feelings when trying Ubuntu though. Maybe I'll quote someone else: Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz "Ubuntu is gaining a ton of momentum. It is arguably one of the most important, if not the most important Linux distro out there."

So what is it that I like about Ubuntu? I can't say exactly. It has this feel that I've been waiting a long time for. In 1998 I started with Red Hat 5.1, and have since used Slackware, LFS, Gentoo, DSL and SuSE. I've used KDE and Gnome. Things have gotten better over the years but no distro gives me the feeling Ubuntu does. (Is that a banana in your pocket? heh jk). For the first time ever I was able to browse my windows network with the click of a button, seeing workgroups, computers, shares, etc.. on other distros I could only use my windows shares by specifically typing in the name of the computer or IP address. Click a button, now I can use VNC to access the desktop. Click an other button, now it synchronizes the time with servers on the net. Add/Remove programs is just like Windows, etc etc..

Next I burned the Java Enterprise System CD for x86/x64 and popped it in the drive. It's all RPM based. Ubuntu uses Debian packages, not RPMs. Earlier I had thought I could just use alien to convert the RPMs to Debian packages but when you look at the number of RPMs, and how the custom installer probably won't work anymore without RPM files, I realized that I'm screwed. I did some reading and Sun says their software can be installed on RedHat or SuSE.

This angered me initially. I wondered why they would be so controlling. I think I can understand now. Sun offers commercial support for all of their products, if you want it. They can't support their products if you are using one of many dozens of distros out there, configured whichver way you wanted. Plus, the target market for the JES (previously commercial only) is enterprises who won't use software without support. Most enterprises use RedHat or SuSE because they are so well supported.

So... I'm a bit dissapointed. RedHat Enterprise and SuSE enterprise are both expensive, and have annual fees if you want the software updates. The enterprise editions are what Sun says JES runs on. I put the JES cd in my SuSE 10 laptop (not enterprise edition) and was able to get the installer to run without complaining. It looks like I'll be formatting AGAIN, putting SuSE 10 on, then installing this software. It's 7:15 PM now. Hopefully I can get SuSE installed and the components of JES I want on that server installed before bed. I wish I had time to relax a bit :/ I can't though, there is so much to read and do to get where I want to be.

** Update: I managed to get both SuSE and Directory Server installed tonight. SuSE's installation was mostly simple. Once logged into Gnome I see it installed a lot more programs, and many choices for the same thing (4 web browsers, etc). Auto-update gives me an error no matter what I do. The network browser finds my windows workgroup but no computers. Plus, I just find the default layout/settings not as nice as Ubuntu. I did notice YaST (SuSE configuration tool) has tons of graphical configuration tools for every kind of server (dhcp server, dns server, NIS server etc) and all kinds of other stuff. I don't remember seeing all of that in Ubuntu but maybe I just missed it? I think I prefer Ubuntu except for things that don't come packaged for it already. For example, before I formatted I got Sun JDK 1.5 installed and Netbeans 5.5 to see how much trouble it would be. I had to download the RPM for JDK 1.5, and use alien to convert it to a DEB file. There is no Debian package for Java. Also, there is no debian package for Netbeans. I think Netbeans had a binary installer. I got both working. Back to SuSE.. getting Directory Server installed wasn't too bad, though it's not configured right at the moment. It wants real DNS names, though the server is behind a firewall. fs01.rycotech.com is not real. My other new server will have a DNS server installed for my internal computers to use. Hopefully I can set up a fake fs01.rycotech.com in there so the local machines don't complain. In Windows, Active Directory also seems to be a DNS server? When my computer joins the domain, anyone can resolve it's name. With my setup at home, without a DNS server you can't resolve their names. I wonder if the directory server will become my DNS server or what? More reading.