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."

Comments

Sol/x86 disappearing is not good

[Antity]

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.

Re:Sol/x86 disappearing is not good

[Jburkholder]

>Sun has removed the download links to Solaris 8

Although they removed the links to the download page, it appears that you can still download x86 solaris 8 from sun by just changing the 'sparc' to 'intel' on the download link

Good thing too, I had decided to cobble a machine together to install solaris over the holiday break and had downloaded the HCL to make sure I was using stuff that was supported. I have the machine assembled, but I hadn't downloaded the CD images yet. Guess I'll be doing that tonight.

Just buy a sunblade 100? HELL NO

[upstart1234]

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.

Re:Just buy a sunblade 100? HELL NO

[Quaryon]

Huh? The networking is built in, as pointed out by another reply. Also, the big advantage of the Sun Blade 100 systems is that you don't need to buy any other Sun hardware - they take commodity PC133 ECC SDRAM DIMMS, standard IDE hard disks, standard PC monitors and use a USB keyboard and mouse.. so don't look at Suns' inflated prices for these components.

It cost me around £1200 for a fully working 64-bit system with 2Gb RAM at home (the boxes are much more expensive here in the UK as usual) which is easily comparable to a "reasonable" development-standard PC workstation with the same levels of stability.

(I have two - one at work and one at home - they're great - try them!)

Q.

Solaris 9/x86 really killed or just deferreded?

[Waldmeister]

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.

Re:Solaris x86 is pretty irrelevant anyway

[(H)elix1]

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....

Re:Why dont they ...

[anothy]

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.