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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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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.
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...
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"
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?
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.
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.
In some ways, it's a bit of a chicken and egg problem. You won't get more drivers without more people using the OS -- but it's not worth spending thousands of dollars to create a driver that dozens of people are going to use... on the other hand, people aren't going to use the OS unless you have the drivers. . . . .
rinse and repeat as necessary.
Limiting the hardware you support even more than already would make the lack of users problem even more acute -- and the crowd (large handful?) of people using current hardware that would be orphaned by such a move would be up in arms about it. Far better to take your hit and essentially walk away from the X-86 market. Give end of life support to people running solaris 8 on X-86, and wean everybody else either onto real sun boxes (the preferred for Sun), or onto Linux -- which at least keeps them in the UN*X market.
The other issue (as someone else pointed ou) is that Sun's primary interest in Solaris-86 was probably to keep people intersted in Unix-type operating systems, even if they only had commodity Intel boxes -- but Linux now does that so well, that it's easier (and cheaper) to put together Linux -> Solaris migration tools (done!) and Let Linux and the BSDs handle the X-86 market which they serve so well, already.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
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.
That's not quite true. I've spoken to people inside Sun who say they've been running Solaris 9 on Intel, so it does exist. They're just choosing not to release it yet. Note that the article even mentions that they're not ruling out releasing an Intel version in the future.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
I thought they were delaying it (with no future date announced).
Guvf vf abg n EBG zrffntr
Solaris for X86 may still be around for existing installations, but I don't think many people will consider it a viable product for new installations.
I'm pretty sure this means our company will be scratching X86 off the list of supported platforms for driver development. Third party hardware support may not be a big issue for a lot of companies, but the idea of Solaris for x86 always seemed to be a reliable OS on cheap hardware. This seems to kill that idea.
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.
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?
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."
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.
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?"
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'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
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
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.
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.
mmm, no. having run Solaris/x86 and BeOS for years, Solaris, while quite poorly supported on x86 hardware, still soundly trounced BeOS. which is not to say it was very good: all the BSDs and Linux beat Solaris at least as much as Solaris beat BeOS, but be fair.
also, i'm curious what sort of SMP problems you had. i ran it on quad-processor boxes, and it performed quite nicely; quick and stable. the biggest problem in my mind was always the application suport, which was almost non-existant.
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
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.
it's not clear weather QNX is a Unix or not (they're conflicted themselves), and Darwin isn't commercial (being largely Mach + FreeBSD).
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
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.
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
...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 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!
this is a fairly close-minded view of the world, don't you think? something must either be FSF-approved Free Software (with proper capitalization), or else it's propriatary? that's bogus. Darwin is open source (and Open Sorce); it is free software (but not Free Software); it is built on standards (and, in my limited tests, adheres to them better than Linux). in what way is it propriatary?
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
hawk
it is the mark of a prudent, reasonable person to recomend what they know over what they don't. but i repeat: it is the mark of a very small mind to criticize something just because it's unfamiliar. that's what you did.
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
And don't assume it requires a 64-bit instruction set, either. It may be faster on a machine with 64-bit registers and 64-bit instructions, but it's certainly possible on Boring Old 32-Bit Processors (many C compilers implement 64-bit arithmetic data types, even on 32-bit architectures, e.g. long long int or __int64).
If you want to learn Mac hardware grab an old Beige G3, a copy of Darwin, and a good book on Forth. You'll learn all about the fucking things. Why can't you buy a book to learn to administer Solaris or pick up an old Solaris 8 x86 CD and install that? I've got both Solaris 7 and 8 I got from the "free for developers" program. If you want to learn Sun hardware that good book on Forth ought to be included so you can learn your way around OF.
Heaven forbid you need to learn to use a new operating system to get a job done. You can't just tell management they need to switch operating systems because all you know is OpenBSD, they'll can your ass and get somebody with real skills. I suggest Solaris Essencials and Advanced Solaris Administration as well as your favourite Forth book and some heavy fucking reading.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
With the consumer Dell systems, you're right: the hardware changes from month to month. (It's not just in versions, either; you might get a completely different video or sound card in a system you order a month later.)
However, Dell (and most other major manufacturers) also sells a line of machines that are guaranteed to have the same hardware for long periods of time. The machines are noticably more expensive and less poweful. But if you know you're going to be buying two thousand of them over the next three years, and you have to do your own OS configuration and certification for every new type of machine, it makes sense to pay more for less capability.
The world's most portable OS: http://www.netbsd.org.
Where is this day and age can you find a good book on Forth???
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
If you want a real machine, buy a sparc, otherwise just keep using the free unices on x86...