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

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: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.