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Sun Reconsidering Solaris 9 for x86
jeffphil writes "This article reports that Sun is meeting with a group of Solaris x86 users called the 'Secret Six.' The group was created to convince Sun to re-examine its previous decision to cancel Solaris on the x86 platform."
As compared to the "OS/2 Only Six?"
While Solaris is older and arguably more stable than Linux, what "real" advantages does it give for anyone on Intel hardware?
Linux has the posix market on x86 machines now. Solaris only runs good on sun hardware, but if you put linux on that same box, it runs better. So again, I reiterate, who cares?
to speed up Java. I only deploy Java to cheap, fast and reliable x86-based Linuxes. No Sun Java tax for me, thank you very much.
Not to sound like a troll, but everyone bitches about Microsoft and lack of competition, but look what they did. The whored their software out everywhere (practically giving it away) and are now reaping the benefits. Sun, Apple and company never took this route (and they had better products!) and have suffered in the long run.
Don't bitch about Microsoft when you are unwilling to make the same sacrifices!
Scott McNealy showed up to the meeting in a penguin outfit.
mp3's are only for those with bad memories
So much for the "Secret."
"Entertain the Brutes"
Amazon has a book on who the secret six really are.
Sun should release the source code to Solaris x86 under the GPL. It'd squash linux like a bug.
Aren't the machines on the ISS Solaris boxes? I think I remember reading some of the logs where Commander Shephard (first expedition) complained about fighting with Sun boxes. Appearantly, astronauts aren't the greatest Solaris administrators (which is fine IMHO).
I think it would be very nice if Sun offered both Solaris and Linux on its new lines of low-end servers.
Solaris shops can purchase these servers knowing they will work very well in their workplace, and Linux shops can purchase these servers knowing they will work very well in their workplace.
Solaris can also help Sun differentiate their Intel-based products from those offered by other companies, such as Compaq and IBM. I know the Sun Intel servers will be better (with the familiar RAS features, etc.), but it might be hard to convince the PHBs that this is the case (since they are too used to bending over for M$ and cheap PCs).
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
I didn't think x86 solaris had that many users.
Just leave it canceled... Please?
The problem with Solaris for the x86 is that it was overpriced.
I wonder if Sun would consider Open Sourcing Solaris. They give it away for free as it is and only charge for support. If they put it under a GPL type license they are now alleiviated of much of the development costs and still keep a large share of the support market. In fact that will likely increase the user base which would also increase their support revenues not to mention the huge brownie points they'll get from the development community. I don't know if it would be as profitable as the license fee the secret six proposed but it's definatly better than just letting it die.
I stole this Sig
A discussion here at Slashdot on how ppl became Unix admins was a good starting point for me. Before this, my old firm standardised on Solaris on Intel. Granted, there are few advantages aside from the ones already mentioned, but I do think it helps to see how other entities (the BSDs, commercial and OSS) as well as Sun approach the Unix methodology and architecture differently.
I had always meant to download Solaris8 from Sun, and I stupidly missed doing so by some two days. If this happens, I intend to reactivate my Solaris license and rip that sucker to disk, just so I can mess around with it. Practical, no. Interesting enough, definitely.
There's also the 'hire me' factor - I'm sure that while there is no shortage of Linux/BSD-capable admins, HR-robots probably generally don't consider this when they look for people with Solaris abilities. Not a good thing, but that's life.
========================================
Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
Sun: So..Lets uh.... lets go over our findings so far.
S6: Ok..Here's uh..here's what we've got so far. Between the uh..the six of us...uh, 1 of us has heard of Solaris for x86. That would be uh... 18% of the population."
Sun: Fantastic. 18%. Wow. Management is gonna love that. 18.. wow....18% of the... wow. The new "insanity first" initiative here at the company is going to get off to a...uh..to a really, really impressive start. You know, just uh...acting like Linux doesnt exist just wont cut it anymore. We need to be REALLY insane this quarter... We need to uhh...raise the bar on....you know, management says "we need more insanity" and we need to deliver. We cant be insane enough, if you ask me....So.. Lets not only act like Linux doesnt exist, but lets get really crazy. But lets keep it sane. Crazy, but sane. uhh..Ok. Can I have a graph of your figures? Y'know, uhh..something to show them..?"
S6: Uhh.. Sure, here you go. A graph that shows that 18% of us have heard of Solaris for x86."
Sun: Fantastic. Ok, before I..before I uh...hand in my reccomendation on going forward with Solaris 9 for x86, lets uh..lets recap. Ok. We need to be insane. We need 10% minimum.. So you're uh...you're saying we meet both, uh..exceed both. Right?
S6: Uhh..yeah. Yes, definately. We've got a final figure of 18%, and we're insane. Thats correct.
Sun: Great. Ok, one minor concern.. This line here, this graph is sort of..uh..flat.. Its just a flat line going..uh..across the page. Can we do anything with that to uh...make it..you know, more uh..positive?
S6: Here. Let me show you.. (papers ruffled)
Sun: You guys are incredible. Thanks so much. How about we uh....tenatively, 9 AM tomorrow? We'll go over our results. I..uh...yeah, 9 AM sounds good for me.
S6: Ok. 5PM? Sounds good. 3PM. Gotcha.
Sun: Gotcha. 11:21 AM. See you then, gang.
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
Sun shot themselves in the foot again.
While Solaris 9 for x86 sounds quite good. Will Sun be able to offer some form of stability. I once looked at installing 8 on an Intel box, but after installer failures and then finding the sections in the online docs: 1. Prior to install bugs you need to know about 2. Installer bugs 3. Post install bugs I was scared away from Solaris 8. :)
No offence to you all, but this isn't exactly a forum for activism, rather passivity. I really had hope that this would become a forum for grassroots movements to discuss strategies and responses, but it's nothing of the sort. These are the type of discussion that I start and try to respond to, but fruitlessly.
Before I go, can anyone suggest a good alternative? Where the discussion is about what to do, not just mental masturbation / entertainment.
I'm posting as AC now for my own reasons. Thanks and enjoy.
Just when I thought I had the last version of Solaris Intel 02/02 on DVD in Beta form.
Key word for Solaris x86... LAPTOPS! How else are you going to easily show %customer% your product without lugging around a Blade 100 everywhere?
Just compile your app for Intel and show it to them. iirc SparcBooks are pretty rare now..
About 2/3 months ago I downloaded the beta of Sol9 for Intel. It has been deleted since. I can't see it being a big deal for Sun to go forward since almost all the work has already been done. I think they were just dipping their toes in the Linux pool.
I Run Solaris on my Sparc boxes, and Slackware Linux on my Intel. I play on Linux, but work on Solaris It is the better OS (at this moment in time).
Have you ever seen a room of Brand new, realy nice pc in a CS department never used?
well in my uni there is such a room, since the sysadmin installed only Solaris on these i386 no one uses them. nor will i
i was hoping that now sun dropped i386 that these machines would be recovered, b4 their monitors are burnt out, from always being on and solaris not supporting apm to put them in standby.
i doubt sun will ever be able to fully support i386, hell even the i386 unix's dont fully support all i386 hardware
sun isn't going to be able to develop/maintain solaris/sparc and develop/maintain solaris/i386 it'll be too clostly w/o enough reward
2.2GHz Uniprocessor x86 chips can smoke 4-way Solaris Sparc chips with their pathetically low clock speeds and ridiculously high prices.
Go away Sun, you had a good run.
Because it is needed something to make concorrency to linux to keep the "competition" for inovation... (as windows isn't except in market share, and only DoJ don't seam to see why).
Is Solaris 8.0 for x86 available as a free download or one has to buy the official CD's.
Sun has pulled this kind of deal before. They were going to yank the Solaris source code at one point. Then this was canceled because users were outraged.
Each time Sun has tried to do this, they've ended up re-instating the thing. Personally I would hope that they would stick with keeping Intel off this time. They can't charge for Solaris, so they don't make any money on it. In fact, it costs them a shitload to maintain it. Virtually no commercial vendors have software for Intel, but they do for SPARC.
Solaris for Intel ends up in the hands of students and cheapskate companies that don't want to shell out the money for a Sun. They make zero dollars off of it. I sold my Sun stock a long time ago and unless they stop meddling around like this, I would probably refrain from ever buying more.
Kudo's to Sun on this one.
It's not that I'm all that fond of x86, I just love the example that they are setting here. They make an executive decision, there is a public uproar, and they stop and reconsider.
Even if they don't decide to continue supporting x86, they have given us a clear signal that they are listening to our opinions, and are willing to negotiate/cooperate with the community.
That is what is missing in some Monopolies that have had a lot of media coverage lately. Some companies will do things that no one likes, completely ignore everyones complaints, and then pretend as if everyone was in favor of it the whole time.
More big companies should have an approch like Sun's.
Sigs are out of style, so I'm not going to use one...oh wait..
Just like if the RIAA were to suddenly come out with thier own MP3 download system, it wouldn't work well because they were too sluggish and let the market saturate with the competitor's product. There will be a market for this, or course, but it will be very small. Linux has eaten up everyon who wants intel unix. Some people may want solaris on intel so they can cheaply test out stuff they are eventually oing to put on thier big iron, but the average user will already have thier needs met.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
On the next episode of "Here comes the SUN":
Bullets continue to fly in antarctica as Tux takes on the Evil Polor Microsoft Mafia. Will he make it in time!? Also: The Secret Six meet again; what will their nepharious plans be for the x86 platform? Find out next time on "Here comes the SUN"!
[Trigun H.T. theme for end credits]
My Blog: http://nic.dreamhost.com/
CS students write programs in college.
CS students need a platform to develop on.
Sun hardware is expensive.
Intel hardware is cheap.
Linux runs on Intel.
Solaris runs...uh, ran...on Intel.
College kids develop on LinTel.
College kids get job at big company and buy LinTel.....not Sun.
-ted
I tried x86 Solaris....
And I thought Linux was a pain to find stuff in. I had no idea how convoluted it could be to find the simplest of config files.
They are everywhere on Solaris: /etc, /usr/etc, /local/etc, /stand/over/here/etc, /hold/mouth/just/so... it was a pain in the ass.
The advantage of Solaris is many, many years of constant work and improvements. The disadvantage is many, many years of kludges and bizarre filesystem changes that have to be kept around for historical reasons, or the script written back in 1869 by some contract beard that nobody understands breaks horribly and sets fire to the machine room.
Which is why I give Solaris admins deep kisses, with tounge.
T(H)GSB
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
This article reports that Sun is meeting with a group of Solaris x86 users called the 'Secret Six'.
It's not too damn secret now, is it?
I got more rhymes than Jamaica got Mangoes.
CS students write programs in college.
CS students need a platform to develop on.
Sun hardware is expensive.
Intel hardware is cheap.
Linux runs on Intel.
Solaris runs...uh, ran...on Intel.
College kids develop on LinTel.
College kids get job at big company and buy LinTel.....not Sun.
-ted
I had a hell of a time trying to install Solaris 8 on x86. Hardly anything I had was supported and it choked about 90% of the time. In spite of my bad run in I really hope that Sun will release Solaris 9 for x86. If they play their cards right and either write more drivers or incorporate Linux/BSD drivers for Solaris I think it could flurish as another OS to choose from.
It's not what might be euphemistically called... usable. I've done my own unscientific tests (installing and running on a box) of Linux and Solaris x86 and I have to tell you Solaris is fantastically slow. I'v recently upgraded to a Dual Athlon and was considering retesting Solaris, just to see if it would be merely slow now, instead of painful.
+1
Runs a 106-processor x86 box?
Not counting Sequents, which wouldn't be running Slowlaris anyways.
It's a poor fit, just like Linux on Sparc.
Run those P4's for more than a few weeks in your datacenter and I'm quite sure you'll see plenty of smoke pouring from the cases.
Nobody in their right mind runs large installations of > 1.4GHz x86 processors at the moment, they're unstable.
What a twit. I've seen plenty of Sun boxes with uptimes over 2 years. Try that with a 2.2GHz P4 (heheheh, had to go for the cheap shot).
... a Beowulf cluster of... erm. Nevermind.
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10)'
Their's a great Dr. Octopus joke in all of this somewhere but I'll be damned if I can find.
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
Back when I was in college, I did a similar survey of the women on campus. 94% said they would sleep with me within 90 days. Turns out that they were only interested in getting a free copy of Solaris.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
I am pretty sure that a company I used to work for, NCR, is one of the six. They build and sell really big MPP database servers. They need an extremely reliable and _trusted_ OS to run on these servers (which run in a loosely coupled configuration -- remember MTBF is the product of the MTBF of all the parts) and they don't want to support their own flavor of *nix just for their own niche product. In their particular market, telling customers that they run these special, expensive, multi-terabyte databases on linux is not gonna cut it. Solaris for x86 is just the ticket for them. I believe that they have customers running solaris 8 for x86 so SUN's decision to back away from this OS really puts NCR (and potentially their customers) in a bind.
Have a NICE day.
If rumors of a possible intel buyout of sun are true, I wonder how the prospects of continued support for x86 will fair.
"Can't sleep. Clowns will eat me"
I use it to compliment my SPARC. I love it. All I need now is a second hand RS/6000 and I'm in bidness!
If you're not a Liberal in your 20's, then you have no heart.If you're still a Liberal in your 30's you have no brain.
I paid Solaris to ship 2 releases of Solaris/X86 to my door, and they haven't contacted me about this! What do the Secret Six got that I ain't got?
"Don't worry, it's not loaded." --Terry Kath
In my opinion SUN should stop thinking of themselves as a hardware company only. I think they should split the company in two, one hardware one software.
The the software one, the one producing Solaris should make it as easy as possible for software developer to release their software on both SPARC and Intel, and then force them to sell both versions.
I love linux, been using it for 9 years, but there is no real word application for it, and software shop are very slow to port to it. On top of that companies are afraid of it.
If today companies could buy all the software they can buy for Solaris on SPARC for Intel boxes running Solaris, I know that they would.
This would be the best thing happening to UNIX in a long time, as all those companies trying to cut cost going to NT (or whatever it's called now), would have a very viable alternative: Going to Solaris (that they already use) on cheap hardware.
Yves.
The dream of running a substandard operating system on a substandard processor lives again.
Good for Sun. I believe AMD's Hammer is slated for release fall 2003, and Intel's Itanium for the next year (I could be off by a bit - haven't checked recent release schedules).
So, I think they should still be supporting lower-end 64-bit hybrid chips, which is the next evolution of the ia32. If they stay in the game now, I think it's more likely they will continue to develop for these platforms, as 64 bit processors become cheaper and more plentiful. Could do wonders for Solaris mind-share if you have a powerful, commercial, established OS (and arguably presently better at some things like SMP) running on a relatively inexpensive machine.
What I can tell from 90% of the posts so far, that the people who rip on Solaris are actual UNIX neophytes. The closest thing to UNIX that ANY of these numbnuts have ever touched was Linux. Maybe if they got out of their bedroom and got a job in the REAL world, they'll see that UNIX drives the world. Not Microsoft,not even Linux. Whether it be Solaris, AIX or HP/UX.I love Linux, but it's not the be all, end all. I doubt half the people who are giving sneers have ever SEEN CDE besides the clone xfce on Linux (and I doubt that!) How many of the people sneering at Solaris are using IE6 to post? Hmm?
If you're not a Liberal in your 20's, then you have no heart.If you're still a Liberal in your 30's you have no brain.
Sun made Solaris 8 available for home/non-commercial use a while ago, and you could download .iso files. They subsequently removed the .iso files from their web site, and now you have to purchase a media kit.
.iso files?
Does anyone have a link to a mirror of the
I think Solaris x86 is most helpful for this type of situation where companies are deploying in-house created custom apps, not looking for commercial software to target the platform.
I'm still waiting for Solaris/PPC... Come on Sun...stop slackin.
We have had some interesting bugs with solaris 8 that we never had with 7. In fact we probably will be staying away from solaris 8 on our next project. Any one else having troubles with qfe nics???? I mean if you snoop it off the network and it says one thing and then the interace says another............that can't be a good thing.
Me too...I'm a professional AIX administrator (also Solaris, Irix and (ick) Win2K.) I love smitty. Wanna setup a site on Sourceforge and get started? :-P
All those interested, e-mail me.
My journal has hot
1010011010
Using Netscape 6.1. :1 -query sun)
I run Solaris x86 on a Dell Optiplex GX1. It installed without a hitch. I also have a SUn SparcSation 5 I got off of Ebay for $100. It's a headless system. (Truth be known, I'm accessing my solaris box remotely. (X
I administer all my home servers (I run 10 servers!) and administer them all thru one monitor. The joys of *NIX. So there is a t least ONE person on slashdot who uses Solaris_x86!
If you're not a Liberal in your 20's, then you have no heart.If you're still a Liberal in your 30's you have no brain.
We have had a lot of problems wiht our solaris 8 boxes....any one else seen problems from solaris 8 and 7. We are particularly having problems with our qfe nics.
I heard that Intel might be working on a Pentium based server racks (Like the Netra) which are NEBS compliant and they will be running a Linux on Intel platform.
If that happens, think about how cheap this will be! I think this might be the reason why they are re-evaluating...
Even though sun doesnt officially "support" laptops, Solaris still runs on a heck of a lot of em.
http://www.bolthole.com/solaris/x86-laptops.html
College kids get job at big company and buy LinTel.....not Sun
...
Recently hired recent college grads have no say at big companies, or medium sized companies, or
Your theory is basically what Apple has already tried and failed at. What people use in k-12 or college has little impact on what shows up in business. More and more the influence is in the opposite direction.
Linux displacing Sun has little to do with what college kids prefer. The real problem for Sun is that many of their customers did not really need the performance or extra capabilities of their systems, all they really needed was a good general purpose Unix box. Linux is displacing Sun for such users in academic and business environments due to simple price performance.
Excuse me.
Thank you.
QFEs are only for sparc, not x86.
Besides which, I thought sun was stopping making them now.
SMP is intrinsically not a scalable approach. The Linux community has concentrated on approaches that actually are scalable, like clustering and process migration.
So, if you want a gold-plated SMP machine, just get the real thing from Sun or IBM. If you want cost-efficient scalable systems, go with Linux on PCs.
They only offer their free Solaris license for 2= CPU systems and not for commercial applications, iirc. (I'm honestly much to lazy to reread their license to confirm :)
In my opinion, its more likely they are distributing an x86 version for free to get more people using it on regular PCs to learn it. That way, there will be lots of people able to admin it and recommend their companies to purchase Sun's higher end SPARC server hardware.
Would this make Linux irrelevant instantaneously?
If we could wrap a scalable, sound, SMP-capable GPL kernel around Debian or Red Hat, would we think twice?
Or what if Sun were to release and maintain free Solaris for Itanium as well as x86? Would that be the kiss of death for HP-UX and AIX 5L? Why do they hesitate?
Granted, the Solaris kernel has weaknesses. UFS has to go. I hate /etc/system, I'd much rather tune on the fly with 2.4. patchchk is what up2date was several years ago. Sun's continued reliance on CDE/ksh/zip to get everything done really makes me ill. Solaris needs to be the UNIX of the 21st century.
What is the possibility of Sun convincing Apple to integrate large portions of Solaris into Mac OS X? Would they be willing to give it away to Apple? Why haven't they done so to build up market share?
I am a Sun stockholder. I would like to see Sun publicly considering these actions. I want to see some bombast from Steve and Bill. If Sun, Apple, and possibly AOL collaberate on an x86-os, they will kill Microsoft.
Sun needs to wake up to the potential of its own power. As it stands, they are difficult to distinguish from roadkill.
Attn: Mr AssPussy,
No, that makes you the pitcher, and him the catcher. (aka Taco and Hemos).
Where did you find "a lot of companies"?
"Dead" means "dead". Don't touch it. And solaris is dead. Especially on x86 platform. I would prefer to have a heterogenous system of SMP/x86, Dual-Mac and Sparc all running Linux then the one with Windows on SMP/x86 and MacOS on Dual-Mac and Solaris on Sparc.
In fact in out research environment we have found that Solaris X86 can be optimized in a multi-cpu environment to run faster, more stable and with more portable ( from our sparc ) code.
Solaris just runs better and faster under multicpu systems than does Linux.
Single cpu though linux is better
Yep that is right. They are only fo sparc. They still make em.
wrong, and wrong.
Right now, you can buy the media for $45, you can run it on as many machines as you like, with 1-8 cpus, and you can do whatever you want with it, commercial or otherwise.
On Sun 220's please respond.
SGI were/are doing work on linux on the MIPS Origin 2k machines to prepare for the IA-64 Origin 3k and have linux running on 64 node 128 CPU Origin 2k, see:
http://oss.sgi.com/projects/LinuxScalability/
--paulj
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
Anybody out there that has actually done any admining on the two??? My preference is on Solaris 7.
You have been trolled.
I done seen both CDE and Open Windows both multiple times even at one sitting. You sits down and it says username and you type in your username and then all the sudden it says password and all the while there's the little white box to your right that says CDE or Open Windows or some such. Then you hit enter again and a short while later this purple background comes up and this big gray bar at the bottom and you can run programs with it. Real nice like.
If Sun is to be believed in their presentations, the x86 and SPARC version share 80% or more of the same code base. Sun has told computer makers they have to write and certify drivers and compatibliiy themselves now. So that doesn't leave a lot for Sun to do in order to support two platforms.
I would say its more a marketing decision to get Solaris x86 users to move to new low end Sun boxes.
The poster of Ask Slashdot says:
"After searching Google, sourceforge and every other search engine I could think of..."
And Bowie J. Poag says:
USE GOOGLE. Not "Ask Slashdot".
Either Bowie J. Poag finds some comic relief in making himself look stupid, or he got distracted again from busy fingering his own asshole.
Your sysadmn must be a dipshit, because it works just fine for me.
Solaris is SVR4 UNIX. Linux is a piece of shit. Any questions?
bwaahahahahahaha!
OK, these people want to use cheap hardware, but they're using Solaris because they think they're too stupid to deal with Linux. If you were Sun, would you want to be liable for supporting these people? Talk about the 1% of the customer base that generates 99% of the support costs... If you had sold them Sun boxes, at least you'd know the hardware worked, not to mention having gotten some money from them.
...at least according to all the tests I've seen.
I thought the only use for Linksys nics in Solaris/Intel (or any respectable network OS for that matter) was to redirect air flow...
what goes around, comes around
One of the best little known firewalls to be found, and it is FREE on Solaris. This thing kicks the snot out of PIX and many other firewalls in a standalone configuration (it isn't too great for a large deployment of firewalls because it has no distributed management capability, ohwell). It has a real firewall front-end and frankly is one of the worst cases of mis-marketted technology next to the Alpha CPU. If you have Solaris 8, go download a copy of sunscreen and try it out, it rocks.
So if you wanted a GOOD firewall, cheap; dont think linux, BSD or any other variant. Until recently you could get x86 solaris with sunscreen.
tora
As a regular reader of comp.unix.solaris, I am fairly familiar with these guys. They are called the "Not so Secret Six". this will explain why.
I wholeheartdly agree that continued development shoudl be done on Solaris 9 for the x86. Sparc's are optimized for bandwith i/o. The x86 enables you to do more computationally intensive tasks, on cheaper hardware, and still have large sparc servers to run oracle on, both running solaris.
I mod down any one who says "I'm sure I will get modded down for this"
Even though X86 Solaris isn't that popular (or even that well respected), it can still serve a useful function.
Until recently, the only access I had to hardware that would run a current version of Solaris was at work.
I've been using X86 Solaris at home for a few years and it's pretty decent. It doesn't have the following of Linux, but it's still quite solid and for most things you can't tell what hardware is underneath (assuming you do a good job picking decent hardware up front).
For those people who want to learn Solaris, or for small companies on a budget who want to step up to SPARC hardware later, it can't be beat. Until the recent dot-com blow-up you didn't have access to decent SPARC hardware at a reasonable hardware.
Don't anthropomorphize computers, they don't like it.
Always figured it was a bug in 'snoop'.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
Off topic (well, sorta)
Have you compiled MySQL with GCC under Solaris for x86? When I did (on many different boxes) the configure script thought that my g++ was a cross-compiler (while it wasn't), but gcc was OK. After many hours of searching the web and usenet, with no results at all, I thought about something like this: for the time of building MySQL I renamed g++ and made a symlink to gcc named g++ and MySQL was fine. I don't remember how I thought about it but my workaround saved the day. :)
Anyway, I wonder, do you know
what's going on?
I'm not using Solaris now,
but I'm still curious. Thanks.
~shiny
WILL HACK FOR $$$
Sun not only needs to re-examine whether to deploy Solaris 9 for x86, but it needs to support x86 hardware much better. Ever try to get sound going on Solaris 8 for Intel? Ever look at the Intel Hardware compatibility list? it sux. This is where Sun looses out to Linux big time.
However, for some companies that standardize on Solaris for Servers, they like to keep that standard on intel since Sun did provide it.
I work for a University where I maintain 8 or so Sparc servers and 40+ intel boxes for a Lab. The university standardized on Solaris a long time ago. I've been trying to get them to switch to Linux, but *sigh* not going to happen. If Sun can get its act togethter, get better support, get an actual Journaling file system for intel like they have on Sparc (Veritas), it will make a stronger argument for companies that have standardized on Sun's OS.
-- DuckWing
What is going on? When I try to look at the original article my browser hangs up. It is a Mozilla built about 25 days ago (not sure exactly what version) and it came with SuSE 8.0.
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
Anyone has any experience?
Thanks.
Yes, clearly those who don't agree with your idiotic position are neophytes. Excellent argument technique.
Take a look at benchmarks on Linux versus Solaris x86 java VM.
Solaris sucks, it is so slow
www.gentoo.org
SLOW laris
The ACID compliant one.
A lot of comments here center on performance and Sun hardware expense vs. Intel. Can anyone with ACTUAL experience comment on performance differences on the "personal" sized computers? You can get a new SunBlade for a 2-3k with lots of memory (check out aceshardware.com for their experience), and we all know what you can get for 2-3k in the Intel world. Assuming that the Intel computer has components listed as compatible by Sun (very important) has anyone ever compared Solaris 8 on the two architectures? Or Solaris 8 on Sparc vs. Linux on Intel (same price range, same tests). Of course 1,000 kinds of tests could be made, but any comparisons would be interesting. I mean, no really believes the fud about gigahertz. Hopefully with all the strong opinions someone has actually done real comparisons...
Sun EOL'ed software support for the "Quad Ethernet" 10baseT card. The Quad Fast Ethernet 10/1000baseT card is still sold and supported.
If you haven't done so, download patchdiag and the latest patchdiag cross reference file and run it on your system. It will tell you what patches you need based on what hardware you are running.
I believe Sun completely rewrote the TCP/IP stack for Solaris 8, and that may be part of the reason for the bugs, but they have probably been fixed by now.
I do not have definitive numbers to report but I have experimented with Solaris 2.7, Red hat 7.0, and OpenBSD 3.0 on two intel boxes: a 450Mhz Compaq P3 and a 2 x 550Mhz Compaq Xeon both with 17" screens and basic graphics boards.
At the time I was working for a client who had a bunch of gear sitting around and I volunteered to give a short course in understanding and deploying Unix so we installed and de-installed a number of times to get people to look beyond specific details to see the essential sameness of the processes and the resulting Unixes.
OpenBSD had fewer problems, and overall better performance than either of the others with big differences in installing the GUIs and using them. Solaris felt jerky, Red Hat was Ok, and OpenBSD felt like a Sparcstation on both machines.
The gap was, however, much smaller on the dual processor than on the uniprocessor with Solaris on simple things like "repeat 10 man -k csh" a good 30% slower than BSD or Linux on the uniprocessor but not noticeably different on the Xeon.
I didn't run serious tests and wish I had. If anyone out there has access to the gear and some time, perhaps you could run some of the standard
linux mini-benchmarks (see http://www.tux.org/bench/ for samples) and report
the results?
...is in line for an update, finally! it will be interesting to see what happens. linux on ultrasparc, solaris on x86, new gui for administering solaris via a browser... i do hope they get movin' however.
Please go fuck yourself. Stop trying to save face with our community. Your a fucking corporate cancer. We don't need you. Fuck off.
Russian Russian Russian RussianDollSig DollSig DollSig DollSig
I hear that! When I got out of college I used to implement the newest offerings from vendors....now i'm more inclined to put less glitzy, reliable as a rock type systems in place. They screw up less and I get more sleep at night.
I guess i'm getting older.
-ted