From david.kirkby at onetel.net  Thu Jun 17 13:53:52 2010
From: david.kirkby at onetel.net (Dr. David Kirkby)
Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2010 12:53:52 +0100
Subject: [Rd] Corrections for the R manual on Solaris
Message-ID: <4C1A0CD0.8010905@onetel.net>

There are a few errors in the R manual about Solaris.

1) Firstly you may know that Sun is now owned by Oracle.

2) "(Recent Sun machines are Opterons (?amd64?) rather than ?x86?, but 32-bit 
?x86? executables are the default.) "

It's not true to say that recent machines are Opterons rather than x86.

Many new Sun machines are based on 64-bit Intel CPUs (often called x64). The 
machine I'm using, a Sun Ultra 27

http://www.sun.com/desktop/workstation/ultra27/index.xml

is less than 6 months old and has a quad core 3.33 GHz Intel Xeon in it.

It is certainly true that some recent machine are Opterons.

Note, 64-bit libraries for 64-bit systems, even those based on Intel CPUs, go in 
/usr/lib/amd64. Likewise many open-source software will install the 64-bit 
libraries in /usr/local/lib/amd64. There's no "intel64" or anything like that.

3) "Modern Solaris systems allow a large selection of Open Source software to be 
installed from http://www.opencsw.org (formerly http://www.blastwave.org) via 
pkg-get, "

It should be noted that OpenCSW and Blastwave are both still in existence. 
There's a lot of animosity between the two camps, but both do exist. So one is 
not formally the other.

Unfortunately, they both install software in /opt/csw, so I would be very weary 
of using both sites, as there is no coordination between them.


Dave



[Rd] Corrections for the R manual on Solaris
Dr. David Kirkby