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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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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...
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?
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?
Well, you can download the Solaris 8 iso images and burn your own CDs of it as well though.
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.
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've got a sunblade 100 - unless you need the fancy video card - which I don't since I just use mine for coding, running weblogic (dev), and oracle (dev) - the $1000 model will work just fine.
It uses PC133 ECC SDRAM, which does not cost a lot of money (I paid $63/512M stick in November). 3x512M + 1x128M, ah, sweet necture of the gods....
Also, think about adding a SCSI controller and HDD if it is for something other than development. The IDE drives won't cut it in a multi-user environment. Should set you back about $300 for an Adaptec 160 controller, and about the same for a SCSI-160 drive. The IDE drive I got was only 15G, not sure what RPM....
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
first off, remember that Sun's primary source of income is from their (very nice) SPARC hardware, not from Solaris (which you can often get free). they have no real incentive to work on an x86 version at all, unless it seems to be significantly helping their Solaris markent (and thus encouraging more SPARC hardware sales).
note also that while your suggestion would reduce their support costs, it would not be trivial, and would likely not reduce them by nearly as much as you'd think. there'd need to be a certification process, and some detailed tracking of what cards of various types are/arn't supported, beyond just the base system. remember that when you by a "Dell Whatever" pre-built system, you have no real idea what exact video, network, or whatever card's in it; Dell (and all the others) think it's fine to change revisions of cards.
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
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.