Solaris and GRASS

[Chris W Skelly]

We have just gone through the following upgrade:

> We are running GRASS 4.0 under Sun OS 4.1.X and OpenWindows 3.  Some of our
> Systems people are asking when we are upgrading our OS to Solaris 2.X.
> I would appreciate if anyone who has upgraded to Solaris 2.x would let me 
> know how this affects the use of GRASS.  I am interested in both the pros and 
> cons of such an upgrade.

or should I say that we are still going through this upgrade! There
are lots of bugs/patches and we are not impressed with Sun at all.
Grass does work, but the promised inclusion of Motif in this release
of Solaris never materialised...next time they tell us! So you have
to mess around with X11 libraries to getting it working right.
Also, MAJOR PROBLEM, and Sun didn't bother to tell us this --- NeWs
Print doesn't work, you have to buy an upgrade. Is it just 
Australia or is Sun falling apart all over the place? Also beware
that extra RAM you purchaced for your SPARC2 doesn't work in the
Sparc10. Our new Xterm also comes with a book listing the things 
that don't quite work under solaris yet, sighhhhhhhhh.

Good news is: 1. Solaris is binary compatible with old system and
our copy of ARC/Info does run (we did however have to send off to
ESRI for some new file/library or something) and 2. we use starnet
xterm emulators on our PCs and the speed has _dramatically_ improved
with Solaris (way da-go sun...).

oh, did I mention that sys admin has changed radically? or that
filemanger won't work without a patch either?

If you don't have to change yet. Wait till the next upgrade of 
solaris is available --- it has to have fewer bugs, right?

chris skelly