[rescue] Which is better?

[Brian Hechinger]

> Which is better, Solaris 7 or Solaris 8?

IMHO, 8. i noticed a very large speed increase on my sparc5 with 128MB ram when
i went from 7 to 8.

> I was looking and saw there's newer features on Solaris 8, but it seems more
> bloated, by way of software to install.  Any suggestions?

you don't need a lot, so if hard drive space is at a premium, spend the time
to do a custom install and leave out the stuff you don't need.  _OR_ so a bare
minimum install and add what you need/want.  on my firewall, doing a minimum
install:

wonko at goku$ df -k
Filesystem            kbytes    used   avail capacity  Mounted on
/dev/md/dsk/d0         47975   26300   16878    61%    /
/dev/md/dsk/d2        588894  184147  345858    35%    /usr
/dev/md/dsk/d3         96455    3849   82961     5%    /var
swap                  210356       4  210352     1%    /var/run
swap                  210360       8  210352     1%    /tmp
/dev/md/dsk/d4         96455    1614   85196     2%    /opt
--------------------------------------------
quick totals:        1040135  215922  741245

so, less than 250MB in use, and that includes swap usage.  now, i'll be honest
with you, this machine is painful to use, since it lacks a lot of the utilities
that you are probably used to, but then this is a firewall, not a shell box,
but the point is, you can install Solaris 8 and have a usable system on a 500MB
drive if you wanted to.  and 1G is not unreasonable.

on the other hand, my two sparc20s are almost full, but that's not just OS,
that's 10GB of crap i have laying about. :)

> Target machine is an SS5 with 64MB of RAM, and 2GB HD for the root and swap.

2GB? more than plenty.  i'd do one of the mod-range installs, and add stuff as
you need it.  you'll be fine.

-brian