I went and upgraded my machine to Solaris 9 today. Here's the report so far:
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CDE - Mostly the same, but now every window has an input language box at the bottom, so you can type in Hebrew, Arabic, etc. Nice, but I can't figure out how to remove it, so now it's just annoying. The interface seems a bit zippier.
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I was happy to see that Sun has their own version of ssh. At first it worked great as connections seemed exceptionally fast. I was quickly deluded when I began to see scp stalling and bizarre ssh errors such as "dispatch protocol error: type 20 plen 144". Time to install OpenSSH I guess.
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Netscape 6.2.1 Beta doesn't work. I'm guessing it's a proxy issue. 4.x works, though. Time to install IE or Mozilla.
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There are some common GNU utilities installed by default, which is nice.
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There are some new apps, such as scm (Sun Console Manager) that are nice, but aren't included in the workspace menu so you have to dig into the docs to find out what the command is to start them.
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Speaking of scm, it's nice but, like every other Java GUI app, very slow.
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Perl 5.6.1 installed. Hooray!
That's it for now. I'll be back after a day or two of visiting sunfreeware.