I installed Suns Java Desktop System yesterday and took it out for a spinn. Here are my reflections. Feel free to ask more questions!!
SUN Java Desktop System
Hardware: Dell Dimension 8300, 3.2GHz with 2GB RAM, Hyper threading enabled (virtual dual CPU), dual graphics card (NVidia Quadro4 dual DVI AGP and NVidia DVI PCI).
*** Installation
The installation was very smooth and extremely fast. Full installation occupied about 2.8GB disk.
* Problems
If serial ATA disk was enabled then the system (and installer) would not boot. Solution: disable SATA disk in BIOS.
Installation in graphics mode did NOT work. Just blank screen.
If Creative Soundblaster Audigy 2 sound card was in the system, then once again the system wouldn’t boot.
Could not get dual display output from Quadro4 Nvidia card. It only saw one screen.
Could not get Dell 2001FP (newest 20″ TFT from Dell) to work. No matter what frequencies I tried, all I got was flicker.
Could not get higher resolution than 1600×1200 on a Apple 23″ TFT screen (1920×1200).
The only sound card I could get working was an Griffin iMic.
I have to manually enable USB mouse support every time I boot.
*** Usage
The system is very responsive and fast and most functionality needed for a basic system is there. EMail, Web, Staroffice 7 for word, excel, powerpoint.
The system crashed once (hanged hard really) when running the default screen saver (the flag which looked rather ugly on my system by the way).
* Annoyances
StarOffice couldn’t open files that were on SMB disks (i.e. on a disk server) which I found rather strange.
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But to summarize, the system is very nice. Simple install and easy to use. Might be enough for basic users but I think most users would want something with more applications but compared to a bare Windows XP installation it was ok.