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No Solaris 9 for x86
Jon writes: "Unsurprisingly, LinuxWorld is reporting that Sun is not going to support Solaris 9 on PCs. The article cites a marketing suit who claims that the prevailing economic conditions account for this."
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Sun has always been arrogant. Howver their stuff is pretty good. I recall when they were really cracking on bill and the ibm guy. Lets hope they are not showing weakness now.
Found here. But is this good, encouraging the curious to move to free OSes when exploring beyond Windows, or bad, removing a great way of finding out about an OS that is easier to convince your boss to have installed?
James F.
As this article on The Register points out, there are now no proprietary unices being actively developed on x86.
Linux and the BSDs remain the only options.
john
The market conditions are that Solaris on Intel machines is a total failure. As another poster in another argument mentioned: The only people who Solaris on Intel machines seem to be just taking it for a test run, and then they go back to their real OS (be it Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, etc.).
Just thought that was a little more honest than claiming it's the recession or Sept. 11th fallout.
well that stinks... guess i'll have to buy a sunstation now.
Why can't they just support the OS with only the market-leading/most reliable X86 hardware? That would reduce their support costs and still enable people to put together a relatively cheap Solaris box. Or do they already do this?
This hurts folks who want to learn on "cheap" h/w, but you can get a Sun Blade 64-bit workstation for $999 that runs the SPARC version of Solaris, so there are options for developers and those who want to "learn" Solaris and e-Bay is full of old SPARCs that are *very* indexpensive.
Solaris x86 was a dog on uniprocessor systems and multi-processor boxes aren't worth the cost when you can get a decent SPARC *blade* system for $999 and have 64-bit processing power.
IA-64 is still far off, and you can bet that Sun will be there when that technology is actually released and more mature since they *have* to compete with M$, IBM and HPaQ on enterprise turf where dumb suits and admins think of "plug" when they hear "spark".
As a Solaris daily user, I'd rather run Linux or QNX on PC h/w than Solaris anyway. Better updates to match h/w advances along with solid performance on single-chip boxes.
Mind the gap...
Uhm.... why do they say "chips from Intel, Corp."?
What about Athlon/XP/MP or Hammer?
K, Solaris 7 ran bad on my Athlon 500, but at least it ran there
LoCal
Now, is this just a typing error, or is Sun *that* good? ;)
Me, I must've peaked early.
-- Dan
sun used to say "we do solaris and only solaris "
they where proud of it as all the Unix vendors where selling NT
now they have linux and solaris that makes 2 in my book
(granted they are both unixy)
I wonder what the SUN sales Spin is going to be now
regards
john jones
Sun doesn't make their money on the OS, they used to but not anymore. They make it on hardware and on support both of which are pricey but worth it in my opinion. Solarisx86 has always been the redheaded stepchild of Sun anyway.
--"Karma is justice without the satisfaction"
I'd say that even Linux would be a better choice for your x86 machine than Solaris anyway.
Is your company running tools written by ma
What I gathered, especially from the register article, is that at least some of the vast numver users of x86 Solaris were not pleased at all. Appearently one had even put up a protest web site. I wonder if the other two also objected.
You have to remember that nowadays, Sun makes very little money directly from sales of Solaris/x86, and the market that Sol/x86 did have is now also occupied by many other competing *nix.
OpenBSD has provided stability on x86 comparable to Solaris/x86 for a long time and to be honest, it's probably more featureful on the same hardware, Linux has all the bleeding edge stuff that Solaris never really gets to see on /any/ platform and there are other OS' which are also in there all trying to occupy a piece of the pie from which Sun doesn't make much money anyway.
Having said all that, this doesn't really leave any customers "in the lurch". According to the Register article, support for current versions of Solaris/x86 will continue for 7 years although I imagine this will end up being more like 10... Solaris 8/x86 is going to stick around for quite a while yet and whilst 9/x86 will never see the light of day, the majority of new features in 9 are appropriate (or even supported in pre-release 9/x86 builds) for "low-end" intel hardware anyway.
It's not good. When starting to work with Solaris in my company I really enjoyed it to have a free Solaris8/x86 to install it at one of my PCs at home in parallel so I could hack it a bit and get more used to it by playing around with configuration options that I'd never dared to play around with on the systems at work.
It would be _so_ good if one could also do this with Solaris 9 at home, provided your employer started to use 9 at work. At least Solaris 8/x86 is still there.
Too bad this really fits with the news from today that Sun has removed the download links to Solaris 8. :-(((
Because Linux at home on your Average Cheap Hardware doesn't help you to get used to SunOS. IMHO it was quite a clever idea from Sun to support Solaris on cheap x86 hardware and give it away for free, so more people had a look at it. And for you at home, it is always a good chance to know how as many as possible different systems look and behave. Yes, it's Unix. But if you've never seen Solaris/SunOS before and only hacked with Linux, you'd be amazed how different the system is.
42. Easy. What is 32 + 8 + 2?
Argh! At last, Solaris 9 has a /dev/random and there's no intel version! Ah well... prngd will have to do.
I am teaching myself the basic ins and outs of Solaris 8 x86, on an old Pentium 200Mhz MMX CPU that was given to me with a mainboard and 32MB of RAM.
My cost, nil. Which is lower than $999 for a Sunblade, which I would love to have.
However, I am only beginning my IT career and really dont' have the extra money to rush out and buy a Sunblade or even a used Sparc system. Most of the used systems I have seen are either abysmally slow or above my price range.
Cheap for one person, is a whole other world for someone else. It is all relative. Most of the people learning Solaris on x86 are similiar to myself. Meaning they would love to use Sparc equipment. However, they need to eat also.
--
.sig seperator
--
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
As much as many people utterly loathe Solaris, I always enjoyed using it. Many, many government agencies still use it, and this was where I got my first exposure to it (quite a few years ago ;)
It is a shame that they are pulling Solaris 9 from x86, but as the article said, the desktop has Linux and the *BSD's now. For learning *nix, why spend $99 on a solaris media kit when you can copy/download your choice of Linux distro or BSD flavour for next to nothing?
OTOH, if you really want some nice kit (and you can afford it) - get a sun blade. And compared to the pricing for previous "new" systems, they are a bargain. Either that, or grab a £450 Ultra 5 from yahoo/ebay/qxl and then get yourself a copy of OpenBSD. Install and enjoy. Nice!
and the reason is....
/dev/random
Solaris 9 has a "Sun-ized" build of OpenSSH with it which uses
When it comes to the x86 platform, Linux is ubiquitous, and there are thousands of precompiled binaries available for it. AFAIK, unless one is willing to compile everything from source, the number of apps available for x86 Solaris is much smaller.
This is nothing more than the free market at work. Consumers choose the best product for a job based on ease of use, availability, and other factors. For most x86 users, there is not enough of a difference between running Linux and Solaris to justify the support of the latter.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
One of my colleagues suggested that perhaps Sun are testing the market, to see how people respond to a threat against future releases of S9/x86. If they wanted to get rid of Sol9/x86 then surely they could just come out and say so, but they haven't done that. Perhaps there is more to this than it initially seems.
Man, just when I was thinking about giving
p io us
Solaris 8 another go. Bad move on SUN's part.
I seriously doubt that I will locking myself
into Sun hardware anytime soon. Apple? Anyone?
Oh well, I will just have to stomach my revulsion and give Linux another try.
- Penguin Kicka.
BSDi user for >10 years. FreeBSD user for 1 year
and loving it.
---
Mac Mullah's I can deal with. Pious Linux
Mullah's are a whole different sport, heck,
their a whole differnt species.
http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?term=
So what? Solaris 8 never, ever worked right on any system I installed it on. Hardware support was less than minimal, and the ability to write drivers for the system, much less find any, was nil. Don't care, I have a slew of *BSD and Linux that I can run on this cheap, broken down hardware. Plus, amazing enough, the mention of no commercial *n?x on x86 hardware anymore keeps coming up. Why? What about QNX or hell, even Darwin?
As Sun's business is to sell UNIX servers, there is no strategic benefit from selling Solaris to run on PCs. At most, it could just bring Dell another weapon to fight against the more expensive Sun machines in the medium-sized servers market. Although it was an interesting effort to provide Solaris for Intel archs., I don't think it has never be really profitable to them. And no one is giving anything for free these days (bye-bye .com boom).
Of course this is just my opinion.
There's an ever increasing amount of hardware to support, which means pumping loads of cash into development, & they sell it for next to nothing (weren't they giving it away free a while back?).
I keep seeing people posting that if you really want to run solaris 9 that you should just buy a sunblade 100 for $995.. sure thats the base unit cost but just to add a network card on suns site you add $600
YES FOR A NETWORK CARD.. that network card better be one designed by god for that price... sun hardware is way to costly for a student that just wants to learn to use it.. not every school has sun boxes laying around for use.
The sky was the color of a television tuned to a dead channel.
First off, to be fair, the box had a K6-II@400 mghz so I didn't expect it to blaze in the first place. But I'm used to the performance of the E10k's we have layin' here at work as well as various 6500s and 4500s so I was a bit disappointed. It was cool for a while though. The box is back to running whatever linux distro I feel like messing with. (I should put a crontab entry to fdisk every Saturday
I had to go through the parts box for a video card that was old enough for Solaris to like (I don't remember Trident or Virge something). No Voood Doo or Rage goin' on here although I suspect some patch might work later after the install.
Sun did a nice thing releasing Solaris 8 for x86. I certainly helped me become more familiar with that OS as a whole. I wouldn't recommend, however, using the x86 version on a production intel machine. There are better OS's for 32 bits :).
I don't mean to be putting down Sun's efforts. The gave us Solaris 8 (for free even). I just don't think we're going to miss much without Solaris 9 x86.
We really need your help
http://www.gofundme.com/help-sherry
Hey, I resemble that remark.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
UnixWare (now OpenUnix) is still in very active development. Check out the Caldera site. :)
It's only the best environment to run Linux apps on a multiprocessor, so I see why The Register would ignore it
I used Solaris 8 on intel for a few months and I have to say it was pretty nasty. Very little hardware support, poor performance and huge difficulties getting software to work, as porting to solaris is not exactly a high priority for developers.
Since OpenSSH is the #1 reason I wanted a /dev/random, that's a darned good reason to me! :)
Either boycott their future products (knowing them, they might just screw with the Star Office and give 'Sun' users added goodies) or just kill the bastards! :-)
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.
I thought they were delaying it (with no future date announced).
Guvf vf abg n EBG zrffntr
Is a standard driver interface for x86. Preferably managed by a non-profit group who could then permit the manufacturer to display a logo on the box once the driver has been tested.
Operating systems like BeOS, Solaris, OS/2 might have stood a chance and those developing new operating systems could support a wide range from day 1.
Oh well, we can dream can't we?
[)amien
A Sun engineer told me yesterday, that Solaris 9 for x86 will be deferred some time, but _not_ eol'ed.
There is currently a beta for x86 and a release is still planned and worked on.
I believe this engineer quite trusworthy, especially more than a Linux gazette...
Another interesting piece of information from this source: they are stopping the possibility to download Solaris 8 x86 from their webserver, but you have to buy the media kit.
I must say, I love Solaris on x86. I don't know why, but it has been my favorite OS of late. It's a shame that they're not (initially) release an x86 version. It'd be nice to get Solaris with GNOME right out of the box.
Everyone is right, though. It DOES require some pretty beefy hardware. I've got a dual 1GHz PIII, 1GB RAM, and SCSI RAID throughout. It flies on this machine, but I remember what it was like trying to run it on my old Pentium 200 MHz. UGH!!!!
Of course half the software you needed didn't run on x86 and hardware support was abysmal (couldn't get v8 to talk to my 3C905, I mean c'mon here). But damn that was a lot of money you just saved.
Then Sun decided to release their Ultra 5 workstations at 6k a piece or so, IIRC. The market for Solaris x86 went **POOF** in about 4 seconds. The damn things are real live UltraSparcs and they work like a hot damn.
Sun made the usual moves to try and spark interest, gave it away free, devoted new marketing resources to it etc. But it didn't catch on, unless you really needed Solaris on your x86 for some reason most of us tried it for 2 days and ran right back to linux or *BSD as fat as we could.
I mean really, with a nicely setup Blade 100 going for $2,450 at store.sun.com who would ever bother with a half suported stepchild?
Well, you can download the Solaris 8 iso images and burn your own CDs of it as well though.
Not so fast. According to a recent Slashback, Sun has pulled the Solaris operating environment for x86 computers from its download page.
Will I retire or break 10K?
From a business perspective, I think this makes a lot of sense for Sun.
A few years back a friend tried to create a "UNIX laptop" for the purpose of having a portable roadshow platoform for a scientific code we have that was developed primarily on Solaris 2.5 and SPARC. At that time he found that Solaris/x86 was a lot of hassle to deal with and that Linux 1.2 was a better solution for him.
I think the resources spent on Solaris/x86 would have been better invested in bringing out the UltraSPARC III sooner and in further expanding utility of their big servers.
Am I missing something obvious in the following observation about the market landscape?
From my perspective, Sun would do well to find as many ways as possible to make Sun servers attractive in LANs of Linux/x86 desktops. The arena of high capacity servers is where x86 falls short and Sun shines. Make the most of it.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
THANK GOD THIS HAPPENED
Who knows I see less of this *crap* in near future ? God bless the lazy os port crew!
Im just hoping that they dont make Star Office unsupported on the x86..cuz then I might have to..have to..ahh!SPEND MONEY!!OH NO!LOL!
For those of you too cheap or too poor to spend money, I say stop bitching and get Linux Mandrake for christ's sake!
Solaris is an OS to be commended for even having support of the x86.If you want the full experience then buy a goddamn SUN Box.Don't continue to bitch them out just because they need money to run their buisness.
In order to compete with M$, they will have to use some dirty tactics.As long as I can still download Star Office for UNDER 100MEGS.Then I am happy that I dont have to use M$ Office or some other crappy alternative.
Over and out.
~Phat_Rat
"Fight The Power"
There's no substitute for 64 bit arch
Define "64 bit architecture." You mean like the "64-bit" Atari Jaguar or Nintendo 64?
Will I retire or break 10K?
knowing them, they might just screw with StarOffice and give 'Sun' users added goodies
Not likely. OpenOffice.org software is available under the GNU Lesser GPL, and Sun can't take away the freedoms that the LGPL grants.
Will I retire or break 10K?
It's a complete fscking joke! God forbid you want to install a decent raid controller (say 64bit 66MHz for example), even if you find one that is "supported" by Sun and the vendor, I bet money you'll be on the phone with the vendor for three days trying to find a working set of drivers. It's dead slow on Intel. Install DOS, it's faster and has better support.
;)
I get stuck dealing with it because the poor fools we support absolutely MUST have "development" boxes that mirror the production boxes. All the production (Oracle 8i DB) is Solaris on Sun hardware. We can't afford Sun boxes for testing, but the platform has to be the same, hence the need for Solaris on Intel: cheap Sun development boxes. Putting Oracle 8i and Solaris 2.7/2.8 on Intel is like trying to install OS/2 Warp on a Commodore 64. Managers get pissed when you bill them a shitload of time (2+ days on some occasions) just for a working OS install. Especially when you write "Use Linux next time" in the comments field.
Every chance I get I hammer management relentlessly, without pity or mercy, about what a shitfest this OS is on Intel. There is NO excuse, Linux can be made to simulate a Sun environment with precious little effort. Thank GOD that Sun finally decided to can this thing. Now I get to sit back and laugh hysterically since they have no choice except to use Linux. SuSE + Oracle = 10,000x faster performance on Intel than Solaris.
In case you couldn't tell, I have enough frustration energy from dealing with this OS to light up a small star system for a few years...
I've nothing against Solaris on SUN hardware, mind you. It kicks a hell of a lot of ass there. There's something very nice about an OS optimized specifically for the hardware it runs on. Must be why Mac users are always smiling (or it could be the drugs they are on, what do I know...)
Hell is being intelligent in a world full of idiots.
I installed on an x86 box a while back but hardware support was such a joke. I figure that if I wanted *NIX on support on x86 I'd *BSD or Linux. If you _really_ need Solaris you are best off running it the all hardware supported Sparc line.
I look it at like this, Mac OSX looks good, in fact from what I've seen it looks pretty good, and I've read about the x86 port of Darwin, would I install it? Hells no! Because when the OSX has features added or changes made, how it affects the x86 port will be an afterthought if given any thought at all. If I want to run OSX, I'll buy a Mac. If I want to run Solaris, I'll buy a Sparc.
Solaris on Intel isn't that popular. There are plenty of UNIX-type OSes for Intel, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD... Solaris is designed for more powerful hardware, but it loses its luster a bit on x86, plus Sun has to put valuable resources into trying to support the advances in x86 hardware with each new release, which has to be a nightmare compared with supporting the hardware that Sun designs.
Sun has also begun to support (half-heartedly) Linux, which can pretty much take the place of Solaris on Intel. Let the Free Software community support the commodity hardware, which Sun can then pick up and sell on low end boxes, and let Sun put its resources towards the OS that goes on their expensive and money-making hardware.
It is a slight bummer, but it's not really a shock. Sun is tightening its belt, and they're going to want to cut back on things that don't add a lot to the bottom line. With any luck this will mean a little warmer support for Linux and other Free Unices...
I maintain a university Lab of x86 Solaris 8 machines, as well as a bunch of sparc servers (like the new blade 1000). Sun's support of x86 hardware has been lack-luster at best. Solaris is still a Sparc OS.
Sun now has their Blade 100 sparc machines, which are PC-like (pizza box style), include firewire, usb, card reader, and more. Why should they support x86 Hardware? They only did it to compete with Linux. They Lost!
-- DuckWing
this would have been reported differently.
For example, if some Linux distribution decides to stop supporting Alpha (well, I *do* work for Compaq!) or Sparc, the media would be sounding the death knell for those processors.
So... where are the obits for x86? [smile]
"May I have ten thousand marbles, please?"
as a cobalt user, i have to agree, though i believe that this is in the works. the line has not been updated for quite a while. expanded to control devices, but not updated. the move to solaris on an x1 like platform, would create a logical way to move up to bigger hardware, and allow for chip sales...
Solaris x86 was a good stable pc unix. I've used it on various servers for years, but the biggest problem is most vendors of the "killer apps" refused to port thier unix versions to this platform due to political reasons, not technical or even marketing reasons. They claimed that the market wasn't there, but they were all lying, the real reason is pressure from M$ to not port to Solaris x86. I worked as a software developer for 5 years for an outfit that made a niche business management and accounting package that primarily ran on HP9000 and Sun SPARC servers. When Solaris x86 2.5.1 was released (and the first really good & stable Solaris x86, IMHO), we chose to port our product to x86 and NT to try to sell our systems to smaller size customers. M$ got wind of this plan and came in and made a deal with my boss to provide lots of free development and server software to us if we signed an agreement to never support our product on any other Intel x86 server O/S platform other than Windows NT (specifically to *not* develop for Solaris x86 and also OS/2, but we never planned to support OS/2 anyway). Of course my boss agreed to this, being the cheapskate he was and wanting the free goodies. The NT version of our product sucked badly, never sold very well and the company went down the tubes. The rest is history.
And the performance of it was TERRIBLE !
The price of Sparc hardware, especially the AX engine stuff is soooo cheap now!! For under $1000 you can get ATX formfactor sparc processor computers.
Whenever I have conversations with my associates and I hear them bragging/bitching about "lets write a new OS" -- my first argument against is "device driver hell"
NO ONE has that much freetime in their lives to write driver dujour for hardware X
Look at the limited set BEOS supported and ask yourself the same question
Old age and treachery almost always overcome youth and skill.
I absolutely agree with you. Not only are people just taking a peek at it, and then going back to another OS - but they're also giving up due to lack of hardware support.
The "out of box" experience with Solaris for x86 was pretty poor, IMHO. One of our former employees paid the $25 or whatever for a copy of Solaris for x86 when they had that promotional deal going - and we couldn't get it to support A) our Crystal sound chipset built onto our Dell motherboards, B) our nVidia graphics chipset, or C) our 56K internal modem cards. Of course, that wasn't even beginning to worry about such extras as USB support.
Oh, I'm sure some Solaris fan will come along and tell me "You just needed to download driver X and Y from web site Z!" -- but that's not the point.
I'd expect a commercial Unix to support basic devices like my video card right out of the box. I had much better hardware support in Linux, and I'm not paying anything for the rights to install it.
You're dead on. Sun's primarily business is hardware. So making an x86 port of solaris seems silly when they could spend the money/manpower of improving what is their best chance in the longrun -- staroffice -- of breaking microsoft's deathgrip. In fact, I'm a bit surprised they even want to make Solaris. Sun has the support capabilities to roadmap an end of life for Solaris and plan to release linux instead, and they could spend their time tuning linux for sparc processors. Solaris already has a lot of POSIX compliance (like its own pthreads library), and even sun sysadmins would take to linux -- I'd say Solaris and Linux feel like closer cousins from an administrators point of view than Linux and BSD.
I'm the network administrator for a small Indian tribe in Oklahoma. Recently we were forced to make a decision as to the operating system to use on our server for our newly laid network. One of our first ideas was Solaris, but as the tribe was far from willing to put out the money for a decent Sparc we were forced to stick to the x86 version. Unfortunately, although we tried 12 different machines that conformed to the Solaris HCL 100%, we were not once able to get the operating system up and running successfully. Each time when the machine finally booted (after several hours spent poking through one installer segment after the other (and trying to get the netscape kiosk whatsit to behave properly))... anyway... when the machine finally booted, the X server started and the machine froze hard. This is regardless of configuration. We tried IDE and SCSI, for video we tried Nvidia then ATI then S3 then 3dlabs. For network cards we tried everything from an Realtek 8139 (ew) to a 3com 3c905C. No matter what we tried we got the same result. Unfortunately the tribe then decided to spend 80K (4x what I make per year) on a huge rackmount compaq server with NT4 preinstalled. Grr to Solaris x86. That's all I have to say.
-----------------------------------------
Remove the Greed which plagues mankind.
I've never had a problem with Solaris x86 supporting the hardware I had. However, my intention was not to use it as a workstation. I might also not that I've used fairly standard higher priced intel boxen. (Proliant stuff's mostly) Granted some people do use Solaris as a workstation OS, but I felt it strengths were in its stability as a server.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
This ought to quell the discussion about having Apple release OS X for x86. Sun is the most Apple-like company out there (making the OS and the hardware) and if they don't want to help Intel, I can't imagine Apple would either.
Anyone know how to install Solaris 8 on a dual-boot system? I gave up after it couldn't figure out (dos) disk partitioning scheme. Would have tried putting it on my pentium 233 just for kicks if it wasn't for the fact that the @#%@# thing needed 64 meg just for to run the install program.
I know this is picking at nits, but as a community, can we please refrain from calling people in sales and marketing "suits"? The first thing I thought of when I read this article was a legal suit in a court of law, and I'm sure that's the last thing Sales & Marketing (S&M?) wants to be associated with.
That cheering sound you hear from the direction of Cupertino is that Javasoft people, who no longer have to pretend that Solaris x86 support is more important to them than Linux.
Well,
About a year ago I decided it was high time I get a little more experience with this demon known as Sun. At that point I was a hardcore Linux/X86 kinda guy with a love for Digital Unix as well.
So I pulled a Proliant from the back of the NOC and began installing Solaris 7 X86. Note, these compaq systems are Solaris certified (ie, every piece of hardware we had will work). The install went flawlessly and the box was up on the network upon completion. Granted solaris has a few *extra* features in inetd, but anyone with some sense can chisel that down to what is needed.
I could go into detail on everything I've done with the system, but the there really is only one bottom line. Solaris isn't a bad operating system at all. As long as you have all of the dependencies, most applications compile fine. (well, what I've used on the server end).
Sun support for non-customers has been fairly well. They release patches and updates frequently (not sure if its too frequently, but at least they fix their problems).
I've been happy with this operating system and I'm going to miss not installing and using 9.
The system is not without faults and I'm not an expert. Like any other piece of software, there will be times when it will frustrate the hell out of you. Thus is the nature of technology and if I damn Sun for it, I have to damn everyone else. (oh hell I do that all the time)
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
did they just release a few months ago the porting kit to allow x86 XFree drivers to be used in Solaris on x86? They seemed like they were trying to boost the market for x86. I think they really are missing out. The best way for them to get people into their OS is to give it away at colleges, and with discounts. Apple's Educational discount can be pretty good, depending on what you are looking at. Sun's was just a joke. Plus, they only put on low end machine, not any real workstations. I understand the discount would still not make an Ultra 10 a bargain, but still, if there was a discount, I would have picked one of them up instead of an iBook with YDL. Now I have a RISC processor, with OF, and I didn't have to break the bank.
One Token Ring to Rule them All, One Search Engine to Find Them, One WAN to bring them in, and TCP/IP Bind them...
Data General has unix and they sell X86 base machines. These are not PCs, they are proprietary hardware with Intel processors.
Does that count, or do they really mean "PC Architecture X86 Machines"?
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
This is pitiful. First the recent article where they stopped giving away the Intel binaries, then this. Damn.
Don't know about the rest of you, but I don't have a spare three thousand dollars to get a SPARC-based processor to run Solaris on. However, I want to do Unix system administration, and I'm sure I'm gonna run across Solaris someday. Would be nice not to have to learn on the fly, so to speak. OpenBSD (what I'm using) is POSIX-compliant, but Solaris has a whole set of quirks all its own. Wish I'd gotten into this a few months earlier, when I *could* have downloaded Solaris for Intel chips and learned about it... even if it isn't the most current version.
Oh well. I'll learn Linux, I'll learn BSD, and I'll try to convince my future employers that Solaris is a proprietary piece of shit and that they're much better off with something of the BSD family. Thanks a lot, Sun.
Pain(n): when you're telnetting into a box doing somethin cool, and some luser calls for help with a 'critical error' ad
Neither one of these is a unix.
Just because something might happen to have a posix compatibility layer does not a unix make.
--- I do not moderate.
I have heard from numerous people that Solaris x86 is slow and hard to set up. I use an x86 box to JumpStart my Sparcs and it is definitely not slow! Of course my machine is a dual Celeron rig with 768 MB of RAM and 2 UDMA 100 drives. I find that Solaris x86 performs extremely well given that you install it on hardware that fits the HCL. And that is where the problem lies with people installing Solaris x86, I read through posts on alt.solaris.x86 daily and see people trying to install Solaris with any hardware they just happen to have then bitch about it not working or being too slow! With any OS there is a learning curve and I guess some people just aren't up to the task. As far as the Blade 100 argument goes, we have 13 Blades at work and 4 of them had to have either system boards, CPU's or other components replaced. The performance of a Blade 100 sucks without a memory upgrade due to the excessive paging in the base configuration (128 MB). We dropped in a second 128 MB stick so that we could install Sun Management Center and the paging virtually stopped! So I wouldn't go around saying "buy a Blade 100", I won't! I think Sun's management is missing the point with Solaris x86 and the "bottom line". Yes it costs them money to produce it, but if you want to expose the maximum amount of people to it, what easier way than to make an x86 compatible version. Admittedly it might not support some hardware but at least you could use it for some things (like JumpStart servers) and use it as a tool to convince management that Solaris is the way to go. From a learning standpoint it is far easier to build an Intel box that will run Solaris than to buy a Sparc (remember most people learning Solaris do not know the "ins and outs" of Sun hardware). Hopefully Sun will "wake up" and continue to produce Solaris for Intel, even at a loss.
on the desktop, there was no choices except
Solaris X86 or SCO.
Some applications REQUIRE C2 (and I don't mean
just "designed for C2", but C2 APPROVED).
Oh well, I guess those applications will have
no choice but to migrate to Windows XP for
its reliability and security.
To everyone bitching and moaning about "terrible hardware support" or "miserable performance", how many of you got the source under the Sun Community Source License and wrote a driver for your favourite NIC/gfx card/RAID interface? Or are you just not interested in hacking on what you can already get from Linux?
What a pity. The advanced installer Sun used to setup Solaris 8 on x86 will truely be missed. So modern, so flexible, so truely up to its task to adapt to the hardware and harddisk partition tables.
*sniff*. Now no-one will ever experience the true joy of installing Solaris on x86 using this 22nd century technology...
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
Obviously, having to support the vast amount of devices out there has been one of the most major contributors to the downfalls in operating systems.
... (Microsoft, most notably missing from the list).
There is a project, UDI (Uniform Driver Interface), which is working to rectify the situation, though. It's intent is to even the playing field, by providing source (and in many cases binary) compatibility for device drivers across os and hardware platforms. All the major players are involved - IBM, Sun, Intel, HP,
They already have reference drivers working for several platforms... It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
I know quite a few ISPs that host on PC powered Solaris machines. Their "big iron" runs on SUN hardware, but little hosting jobs are done on PC boxes, not EXPENSIVE sun boxes.
Looks like a winner for linux and apache!
-ted
see here and look for the fourth story down.
good luck
Spoken like somone who has no idea what they are talking about.
I admit you're correct about that. Where is 64 bit integer math used other than in databases and in financial calculations (which must represent integer numbers of cents)?
Don't knock 64 bit integer math.
As soon as I know where it's used, I won't knock it.
And more importantly they have more registers to work with so your not constantly having to juggle. Intel and AMD pull some overly smart tricks ... X86 really is crap as an arch
I agree, but for practical applications such as web browsing, listening to music, 2D gaming, etc., what advantage does a 64-bit arch have over 32-bit RISC archs like ARM, PowerPC, and MIPS, each of which has many more usable registers than x86?
Will I retire or break 10K?
If there were no unix for a platform, there would be opportunities for a software vendor. There would also be opportunities for a vendor with a notably superior solution. There is *no* incentive for a hardware manufacturer to have tis own unix. One of the more important things linux has done has been to provide a common reference point--prior to this, it wasn't feasible for vendors to settle on a competitor's *nix as a standard., due to the admission involved. Now that there's a non-competitor that *is* the standard, it's economically more efficient to the hardware vendor to back that.
hawk, who has a paper on this on his web site.
And there's a bit of spite involved, too
Off the R.I.P. Solaris x86 topic but...
Sun will discount all their hardware educationally not just their low end. The edu discount on a SunBlade 1000 (not exactly a low end workstation) was 20% -- which was $2k off the base price (ordered in October). That same discount is available on a V880 (ordered in November) base unit, the SunBlade 100 (very low end, ordered in December), and the Ultra10. Discounts on other parts range from 20-40% depending on the category.
Compare that flat 20% to Apple's whopping $50 discount on the Imac2 for educational price ($1799 for the top of the line base configuration vs $1749 educational) -- at least Sun would've saved you $360 on the unit. Or try to "Ultimate configuration" for the G4: $3499 vs $3289. (Figures from the Apple educational store web page). Again Sun's 20% looks a lot better to me.
This is not to say that Sun's offerings at the lower end are attractive when compared to Apple, and Sun doesn't have something to compare with your choice of an iBook.
However the educational discount that Sun offers is certainly better then what is available from Apple.
The worst thing about this for many of us is that it means the end of Solaris on laptops. The Sparc alternatives (http://www.naturetech.com.tw) are simply too expensive to be a practical alternative for someone wanting a cheap, portable Jumpstart server. But then, getting Solaris to run on a laptop can be a time-consuming, frustrating endeavor.
...as it is not supported by Oracle 9, so you've probably had growing ammunition for your Linux switch for some time (but not SUSE - anything but that!).
People say that the Sun X server is more stable than xfree86, although I haven't seen that to be the case on Solaris-x86. Still, it would be great if the xfree86 people would agree to supply the X server (esp. for an exchange of GPLed source code).
In fact, Sun should seriously evaluate:
I assume that all the source code has been publicly available for all this stuff, but no one could work on it because of the NDA...
Sun should adopt more creative cost-cutting measures to keep it alive.
I think this does not bode well for Star Office. It is hard to understand how Sun justifies putting money and resources into this non-revenue-generating hobby while the company is cutting in other places. If I worked at Sun I would resent management putting cash into this while cutting my bonus!
Where did you find this, I looked under their promotions, and I NEVER saw anything like this. If you could point me to a link, I would _Greatly_ appreciate it. Yeah, the only portable Sparc I found that was worth the money was at www.naturetech.com.tw, they have a sweet one that uses the SparcIIe processor. Nice setup.
One Token Ring to Rule them All, One Search Engine to Find Them, One WAN to bring them in, and TCP/IP Bind them...
...US$999 last time I heard.
:)
Can't say I'll miss Solaris x86. Had a few nice things (Java 1.2, CDE, Palm syncing with CDE apps), but the hardware support was very spartan. No SB Live support, ATA66 didn't work. Plus, it just seemed to lumber along with a lot of disk IO (on an Athlon 500 w/ 256M RAM). Software was OK but "mature"; Staroffice 5.2 (make Emacs look svelte), a lot of free & open source stuff (GCC, old Gnome, old KDE, etc). I get all of that and more from FreeBSD; well, except CDE, but there's XFCE.
A moment of silence, please, for Solaris x86. R.I.P.
It's a very dark ride.
I'm hearing great things about Sun hardware, what about buying an old SPARC Solaris box on ebay? Would it worth the $$ for a student just to play with a real unix?
Ah, but again your ignorance irritates me.
You must have a h*ck of a time around children. I admit that I lack knowledge in this field, and that's why I'm asking somebody who knows it better than I do.
MIPS is a 64-bit RISC architecture
The MIPS architecture taught in a popular computer architecture textbook is still 32-bit.
64-bit architectures have been all around us for over a decade
But what concrete advantages do architectures with 64-bit integer registers provide over non-x86 architectures with 32-bit integer registers, apart from the fields I already mentioned (multigigabyte databases and finance)?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Lets face it. People who buy Sun's do it more for the hardware than for the software. They would be far better off raising the hardware price, dropping Solaris, and switching to Linux on all the Sparcs. It would be much more cost efficient for their engineers to focus on optimizing the Linux kernel for Sparc then to try and force it with Solaris.
Their CEO is just going to half to face it that Sun will never be another Microsoft.
That's good news.
Cobalt defined the 'server appliance' market, and Linux made it possible. Sun's hints at switching it to Solaris only got in the way.
Now if only they'd try to sell the damn things. Has anybody ever seen a post-Sun Cobalt ad?
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
I couldn't understand what made Solaris x86 such a great idea... when the HCL could be printed legibly on a postage stamp, it just seemed to me that running Solaris on your x86 machine made about as much sense as running Windows NT on your Sparc 5...
Now, if they would have done some emulator work and given (slow) binary compatability, I could see why one might want to spend a kilobuck on a cheap PC instead of five on a cheap Sparc, but as it sat, I couldn't make heads or tails of what market it was aimed at.
-JDF
You said it first, so you buy the first round.
/.?
;+)
Now, how many folks read
Rough luck being you.
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
http://redbrick.dcu.ie/~valen/epic.txt
is this pronounced slow-AAAUUUGGHHH-ris or slow-AIR-is?
hawk
Working on one right now, and it has a builtin gig-e and a 10/100. You're probably right about the bigger stuff, though.
Something you should all be interested in...
Compatibility of Solaris and Linux Application Programming Interfaces
Some of the freeware libraries and supporting utilities that were available on the Solaris 8 Software Companion CD are now integrated in the Solaris 9 operating environment. As a result, software application developers can now develop and compile their freeware applications more easily in the Solaris operating environment. Libraries include glib, GTK+, Jpeg, libpng, Tcl/Tk, libtif, and libxm12.
maybe solaris on 2.2ghz P4 was faster than any SUN box for the same price?
Goodbye, proprietary x86 unices.
PCs are not commercially viable.
This has got to be one of the dumbest comments ever spoken on Slashdot.
Can you imagine Linus (or Alan Cox or whoever) putting in optimizations into the kernel to support Sparc hardware to the possible detriment of x86 hardware? Can you imagine Linus *caring* and working on a problem that a Sun customer has when running on a box with more than 32 cpus?
Sun makes great rock-solid hardware. Sun makes great, rock-solid software. As a system admin, software and hardware that keep running or detect problems and let me know about them are more important and valuable to me then Linux feature du-jour ("We support cool new graphics cards!") Even if Linus did insert hardware specific enhancements to the operating system, could you imagine how large the kernel would be with Sparc, Alpha, MIPS, etc, enhancements all trying to get into it? It would bloat worse than anything from Microsoft, and without true regression testing, it would be absolutely impossible to verify that Compaq's Alpha optimizations don't cause problems for something on Sparc.
What I care about is the fact that my operating system will continue working in the event of a hardware failure that is recoverable. Lost a cpu? Solaris shuts it down automatically, and reboots to prevent data corruption from corrupted buffers that the misperforming cpu might have touched.
With the LOM (Lights Out Management), you can remotely reboot a Sun box, and never have to visit the hardware for anything except a hardware problem.
The linux kernel is a fine piece of software. However, it is certainly *NOT* up to the task of managing the stuff that Solaris has been excelling at for years. Sun sells service contracts that mean something, and will get your problems resolved. Several years ago (with the introduction of Solaris 2.6) we had a problem with the network code and hard drive code interacting under extremely heavy loads, and causing problems. Within 4 hours, we were talking to the engineer who had overseen the rewrite of the drive code, and he solved our problem for us. Can you imagine trying to get a hold of "joe@somewhere.com" to find out what the problem with the network driver code for a POS 10/100 nic card that was made in 96? Wouldn't happen, and it makes it difficult to recommend Linux is situations where you absolutely have to have reliability, and are willing to pay for it.
> Their CEO is just going to half to face it that Sun will never be another Microsoft.
Of course it won't be another Microsoft. They make a quality product. In addition, the correct word is have, not half.
I wonder how this is going to affect system administration at the University of California, Berkeley. We use Solaris 8 x86 machines in the undergraduate labs, along with a SunRay "cluster" running off a SparcStation.
My feeling is that we use Solaris because it's something of a standard as far as Internet communications goes. It doesn't provide all these extra libraries or APIs that you might find on Linux, BSD, or Windows while still complying completely with all the standards. I could easily be wrong here since I've never had access to HP-UX, AIX, etc. But if you coded network stuff for Solaris, I was able to get it to compile and run on Linux and BSD. Not so the other way around.
I also have a Solaris 8 x86 box at home (previously Solaris 7 x86) for the sole purpose of development at UC Berkeley. My home box is also used as a test machine for Solaris x86 compatibility of the Open Mash project I work on.
If x86 support is removed for Solaris 9, then those Solaris 8 x86 boxes in the undergraduate labs will eventually have to be replaced by a non-Solaris OS, as Sun's application development and support leaves Solaris 8 behind. At this point, that would mean Linux or BSD. Hard to say which, since there are currently both BSD and Linux machines running for undergraduate use, but probably BSD. It also means I'm either going to have to get a SparcStation or be stuck with Solaris 8. And I doubt I'm getting a SparcStation.
Sun may need to rethink the role Solaris x86 plays from a long-term viewpoint, instead of a bottom-line viewpoint.
If you want a real machine, buy a sparc, otherwise just keep using the free unices on x86...
Sun has some pretty cool educational discounts for hardware. Currently you can get:
/ sc hoolZone2.jhtml
Sun Blade 100 workstation with 4 memory slots, 3 PCI I/O slots, 2 EIDE disk bays, 10/100-Mbit Ethernet, 4 USB, 2 IEEE 1394, 1 serial and 1 parallel port includes:
(1) 500-MHz UltraSPARC-IIe Processor, 256-KB External Cache
128-MB Memory (1x128-MB DIMM)
Sun[tm] PGX64 On-Board Graphics Accelerator
(1) 15-GB 7200 RPM EIDE Disk Drive
48x CD-ROM Drive
1.44-MB Floppy Drive
Smart Card Reader
Solaris 8 Operating Environment Pre-loaded (Recovery CDs must be ordered separately, see below Solaris Media Kit option.)
HD15 connector for PC monitors (See below for monitor options.)
For $795, and for only $700 you can grab one of the really nice 21" monitors that everyone should have.
Yes you have to prove that you are in school, but for that cheap how can you pass getting some of this stuff!
http://store.sun.com/docs/specials/workstations
Hell you can even get things like Netra, or even a Netra 4 pack...
NT