How I tested

Testing took place in the InfoWorld Test Center lab in San Francisco. Although I had a little video-related difficulty installing Sun JDS on an obsolescent Gateway desktop in my lab (am I the only one who finds it scary that a 1GHZ CPU with 384MB of RAM is "obsolescent"?), a brand-new IBM ThinkPad T40 proved a little more challenging. The ThinkPad's diagnostic partition apparently occupied some real estate on the disk that JDS wanted and installations repeatedly failed, but putting a raw disk into the laptop solved the problem. I suspected that tweaking the GRUB loader configuration would have also done the trick, but I didn't find any documentation on this until my testing was almost over.

Getting the ThinkPad networked was a small headache as well. First of all, since Intel is still dithering about Linux drivers for Centrino, I was going to be tethered by my network cable for the duration of testing. Second, the YaST2 9 (Yet Another Setup Tool) installer had grabbed a bad driver for the built-in 10/100-Base-T hardware. This was as easy to fix as the video driver had been, though harder to diagnose.

Once those issues were out of the way, I was able to use Sun JDS for most of what I do in the course of my day -- except for e-mail, since IBM's behavior indicates that Linux isn't important enough on the desktop to warrant a port of the Lotus Notes client software. I found that applications behaved well, even on the low-end desktop. In short, JDS is a perfect desktop. I'd use it myself, if I weren't carrying on a passionate affair with my new PowerBook.

Although the initial setup experience was less than ideal, most shops deploying Sun JDS will do so from a centrally managed image to large installed bases of identical hardware. Therefore, I'm discounting the actual amount of difficulty that configuration and driver issues will cause.