Just don’t expect that peace to last if you provide it with a big complicated processing job, those fans can kick in with a jolt that wakes you up.

Operating system support

As with any Intel/AMD based PC the range of operating systems supported is suitably large, including Sun’s own Solaris 10 or OpenSolaris, GNU/Linux, BSD and many others. Sun officially provide drivers for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server/Desktop and Microsoft Windows. I tried Solaris, Red Hat, SUSE and Windows on this machine.

It should be fairly self-evident that Sun’s own Solaris is the preferred solution for the machine. The unit came installed with everything working, but I’ve had to wait for a few revisions of the driver CD to replicate this situation on later installations. Version 1.5 of the CD seems to work fine.

I’m a big fan of Solaris, and have been since I started using it 15 years ago. The latest incarnation, Solaris 10, includes some significant improvements, including improved network performance (a feature I’ve been able to take advantage of during testing), support for Solaris Containers (virtualized operating system units), and a host of improvements in the desktop environment for those people using Solaris as their main computer.

Using Solaris also enables you to take advantage of the bundled software, which includes Sun Java Studio Creator 2, Sun Java Studio Enterprise, the NetBeans IDE and Sun Studio 11. This is a rich combination, ideal for those users developing Java applications, and, with Sun Studio 11, C/C++ and Fortran applications. I’ve been using Sun Studio 11 for a while now and have found it a excellent alternative to GNU gcc.

Of course, since Solaris is one of the oldest Unix variants, you can download and install a host of other applications, including all the GNU tools, Firefox, Thunderbird, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and many others. Some of these are provided as standard, and others are available on a CD provided with the machine. I haven’t had any trouble manually building any of the typical free software solutions for use on Solaris either, and there are many sites, such as SunFreeware and Blastwave that will provide these solutions for you if you want them.

Beyond Solaris, I was impressed with the level of support when using both the Red Hat and SUSE Linux variants. The drivers that Sun supplied provide enhanced video driver support that make X fly. I have to admit to not being a regular user of either distribution—I use Gentoo or Kubuntu by choice—but I ran both distributions for over a month while doing a variety of tasks, from software development, through web site developing (including testing a deployment that uses the LAMP stack) and more general web browsing and writing duties.

Beyond Solaris, I was impressed by both the Red Hat and SUSE Linux variants

The only issue I came across was a small problem with Red Hat not always shutting down properly. SUSE didn’t seem to exhibit the same problem, so I don’t take this as an indication of a fault with the box.

Running Microsoft Windows was also impressive, especially when taking full advantage of the fast graphics card and trying out some 3D software and the occasional game. The ability to run Windows, especially as a dual- or multi-boot system with your other OS of choice is a big advantage.

Performance

Measuring performance is an art of course, and I decided to look at the performance in two different ways. The first is by using a standardized performance measuring tool (GeekBench), and the second is just to look at the machine in terms of how it feels and runs in use.

Geekbench results

The Geekbench performance measuring tool has a key advantage over many of the other tools available in that it is designed to test a range of functionality and is able to do this in a standardized method across many different operating systems. This can be useful, not only to compare different machines, but also to compare different operating systems on the same machine.

I decided to try the Ultra 20 M2 with Windows XP, Solaris and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. I also compared this to a 24” iMac (with the T7600, 2.33GHz CPU) running Mac OS X.

I ran the tests 10 times and then took an average of the results. The overall scores were as follows:

GeekBench results