Sun to Sell Unbundled Solaris 9

An anonymous reader writes "Sun VP John Loiacono told eWEEK that the company is scrapping its plan to limit Solaris 9 support to Sun x86 hardware. Loiacono said the version for non-Sun hardware will retail for $99 for a single CPU and that the company is committed to supporting both Sun and non-Sun hardware in the future. Sun will also publicize the compatibility test suite it used internally, and said it may ultimately open the code for the product to the open source community."

Comments

This is great...

[M$ Mole]

Solaris is a kick-ass OS...and as much as I'd like to have my own Sun Blade sitting right next to my BSD box, I don't quite have the free cash for that kind of hardware. For someone like me who has to test in all kinds of environments, the possibility to get support on any setup is rather important as well.

Re:This is great...

[aje]

I'd say it's a shame running Solaris on x86. I've tried installing Solaris 8 on my old Duron, and it actually doesn't work. It fails during the installation, printing a kerneldump on the screen... :|

Running Solaris on an x86 is like running Windows 3.11 on a Pentium 4. Solaris is built FOR and runned BY 64-bit systems.
What's your opinion?

Re:This is great...

[guacamole]

Uh no. Solaris has been designed as a portable OS. It still fully supports lots 32-bit only sparc hardware and it might even boot in 32-bit mode on certain 64-bit sparc systems. Saying that Solaris is optimized for 64-bit hardware is probably wrong. The x86 might not be well optimized but I didn't find that to be a big problem. The biggest problem with Solaris x86 is that driver support is terrible. I looked at the HCL and I mostly see four, three, and sometimes two year old components. If you want to run Solaris on x86 you better plan your hardware purchases extra -carefully-.

Re:This is great...

[yatest5]

In a lot of ways, Sun is the MS of the commercial UNIX world, but they have an impressive record of making contributions to the community. the most notable contribution was probably NFS, and Sun gave it away long before most of us had ever heard of the GPL. Solaris has lots of goodies in it, obviously including great NFS support, but also pleasant standardisation and maturity, which Linux still somewhat lacks. Solaris is also rock solid. Sure, Linux can have multi-year uptimes, but it doesn't really compare to Solaris. When you want to run a giant website with 100's of CPU's, you turn to Solaris, and you don't even care that you get raped on the price of the hardware.

I imagine that Sun is doing this because they know they won't make any money pushing beige box PC's. (SGI sure didn't.) By just selling the OS, they may not sell a ton of copies, but the profit margins on software are pretty sweet, if you can pay off the cost of development.

Indeed.

Re:This is great...

[cscx]

Well according to this-here ad on Slashdot, we should be running Microsoft Small Business Server!

Re:This is great...

[larien]

From experience, I've been able to run Solaris 7 & 8 on x86 hardware in a lab environment quite stably. The biggest issues you'll find are:

• No sound drivers for anything other than Sound Blasters; probably not a biggie, and you can download drivers for SB64/128
• Pick your network cards carefully; check the HCL.
• Poor/non-existent X support. You almost have to use XFree86 to get any useful X windows.
• Poor support for IDE; DMA is limited.

If you can work around that, you'll do OK, but linux will probably run smoother on commodity x86 hardware.

Re:This is great...

[molli123]

The Support for 32Bit Sparc will be avaiable in Solaris 9, but probably not in the next release.

Re:This is great...

[4rt00r]

Saying that Solaris is optimized for 64-bit hardware is probably wrong This is very debatable . Have you ever experienced how slow Solaris 8 runs on double CPU x86 . Consider that Solaris is maybe the only platform where 64-bit computing has native support with exception of DEC .

Re:This is great...

[chegosaurus]

True, but a couple of points:

> No sound drivers for anything other than Sound Blasters; probably not a biggie, and you can download drivers for SB64/128

The one thing I don't like about Solaris on x86. I've *never* been able to get the OSS soundcard drivers to work on my system. (Dual CPU - something goes very screwy and system usage goes up to ~95%!)

> Pick your network cards carefully; check the HCL

True, but many non-HCL cards can be persuaded to work without too much trouble. I've got a great system, works beautifully except for the sound card, which I don't miss, and none of it is on the HCL. (Oh, maybe the SCSI cards..?)

> Poor/non-existent X support. You almost have to use XFree86 to get any useful X windows

Not so bad as it used to be, especially with the porting kit. The XiG Accelerated-X server, or Summit as I think they call it now (www.xig.com) is very reasonably priced, works with anything, and generally *rocks*.

> Poor support for IDE; DMA is limited

Solaris IDE support really sucks, even on SPARC. Give it SCSI disks - it loves them.

Re:This is great...

[4rt00r]

There will be no other Solaris after this one . Sun will close it immediatelly if this last atempt doesnt cover the dev/main cost and I doubt it very much coze the power of Solaris is on the patches on that means once released they have to maintain it for the years to come which considering the huge battle on x86 will be worhtless . Also open source it will never be an option for Sun .

Re:This is great...

[cbreaker]

When you want to run a giant website on a machine with 100's of CPU's, you CAN'T turn x86; there is no such machine.

There's not many OS options when you are talking about machines like that; you have to use the OS that the manufacurer provies.

You turn to Solaris because that's what Sun machines use, and Sun machines can offer a ton of computing power while still being a lot less money then large scale mainframe offerings from IBM and Sgi.

Not to say that the *only* reason people choose Solaris is because they have to use it when using Sun machines; I'm sure a lot of times people choose Sun machines because of Solaris.

Re:This is great...

[AKnightCowboy]

When you want to run a giant website on a machine with 100's of CPU's, you CAN'T turn x86; there is no such machine.

Only the quacks try to run a "giant website" on one machine. There's not point when you can buy hundreds of cheaper x86 boxes for much much less than a multimillion dollar high end Sun server and cluster them. You'll get better performance in the long run. Now, maybe a database server or something is another story, but web servers are easily clustered.

Re:This is great...

[Rayel]

Solaris on x86 runs like a dog, $99 ? For the terrible hardware support, I'm not convinced. Sparc Solaris is a different kettle of fish however......

Re:This is great...

[wwwillem]

Only the quacks try to run a "giant website" on one machine.

Well, in typical Sun based architectures you will neither find the web servers running on big-box hardware. It is more typical to have the web servers deployed on a rack full of Netra T1's and then behind that a large Sun system for the application server and the database.

Re:This is great...

[jasonditz]

Actually the hardware is surprisingly affordable if you're willing to go a little lowend.

I'm in the process of building an UltraSparc box of my own using an old ATX SparcEngine UltraAXe. I bought all the components (except case) on eBay and have only spent about $200 (and that included a UW SCSI card and 18 GB 10k drive).

That gets you a 300 Mhz UltraSparc IIi, 256 MB of RAM, an 18 GB 10k UWSCSI drive, a 16x DVD Drive (ATAPI) and a UWSCSI card. Granted, its not quite a Sun Blade, but its still not terrible.

Re:This is great...

[Golias]

My understanding is that RDBMS heavy-lifting has always been the Killer App of Solaris. A Sun box running Oracle has pretty much been the "let's buy the cadilac" solution, for anybody who doesn't want a mainframe, for almost as long as these solutions have existed.

And a lot of "giant websites" are really just serving up HTML output from giant databases. Clustering a bunch of x86 boxen might work fine for something like The Drudge Report, where accepting lots of hits is the only priority, but it's not the way to go for everybody.

Re:This is great...

[jazzmanjac]

You turn to Solaris because that's what Sun machines use, and Sun machines can offer a ton of computing power while still being a lot less money then large scale mainframe offerings from IBM and Sgi.

You can also turn to HP-UX where you'll get about twice the processing power of a Sun box at the same price.

Re:This is great...

[heatmzr]

I think you're hitting the issue dead on the head. Solaris is a wonderful and stable OS.... on Sun hardware.

I work for an x86 OEM. One of my responsibilities is testing support of Solaris on our commodity x86 hardware.

Frankly, Solaris's lacks support for most recent x86 hardware that we've used, and the hardware that is supported is poorly supported, or works with only a particular version of hardware (ex. tulip class NICs are listed as supported, but in reality it is only some tulip cards that will work; many do not).

What is Sun's motivation to provide _good_ and _broad_ support for commodity x86 hardware? I don't see it. And obviously Sun is having a hard time locating it themselves.

IMHO if Sun wants to support x86 they should stay on the course of supporting Sun hardware only, and supporting it well, in the tradition of Sun. Continuing the limited and poor support of x86 can only tarnish Sun and Solaris's reputation.

Leave the commodity x86 hardware to those who have the resources and interest to do it well.

Finally

[theta]

This is great news. Can't go wrong for 99 bucks.

Re:Finally

[netphilter]

$99 is all right, but free is better...let's hope they open the source and give it away :)

Re:Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

You are the embodiment of the open source community. A fucking erosion of the software economy.

Re:Finally

[AKnightCowboy]

I wouldn't trust Sun even if they did. Staroffice was free, now it isn't. Solaris 8 was free, now Solaris 9 isn't (on more than 1 processor capable systems). I would say they've operated by following the drug dealer's game. The first hit is free but the next is going to cost you big time.

Re:Finally

[4rt00r]

Ok . You maybe right , but consider that Sun is a company and NOT an Open Source movemment or something simmilar , also to worsen thing have a look at the lastest events on 64-bit market , seems that is going to be a reall overkill on the comming years from both AMD and Intel , Ultra is fadding out bit by bit , the latest bet of Sun ( in the long run ) is Java and J2EE . Everything in Sun history (not even Sun , maybe all major commpanies ) looks like drug dealer game , that is the market game I'm affraid

Re:Finally

[Melantha_Bacchae]

An AC wrote:

> You are the embodiment of the open source
> community. A fucking erosion of the software
> economy.

True, there are plenty of greedy warez dudes that think Open Source is just another free handout. But Open Source itself is based not on greed, but an economy of generousity. Everyone benefits, even the sharer.

Sun has contributed a lot to the industry over the years. I was using NFS shared partitions back when Windows was still trying to figure out how to task switch. And while Java is not (yet) an open standard, it has employed a lot of programmers, and made a lot of other companies some serious cash. It has even given Microsoft a big headache, which is all to the good. ;)

If Sun opens Solaris, good for them. I'm sure people will learn a lot from their code, and the fixes the community makes will benefit Sun in turn (as will the good will generated). If they choose not to, it is their choice to make. At least they will be making their OS more affordable, which will help them compete with Microsoft (giving them more headaches ;).

"Lightning shines on wavey beach, and all clouds are made right:
Happiness Appears!"
From the song "Infanto no Musume" in the Japanese version of Mothra (1961).

G Countdown: 25 days (www.godzillaoncube.com)

Re:Finally

[Jon_E]

employees have to eat too you know .. all code and no food makes some people rather irritable and prone to silly redundant comments

dual booting solaris?

[jkosturko]

does anyone know of a way to dual boot solaris with say linux? maybe it was just the version that I downloaded, but it wanted to wipe the drive and repartition in order to install.

Re:dual booting solaris?

[Anonymous Coward]

There are lots of howtos online. I believe the trick is to boot from floppy or CD and temporarily change the partition types of the Linux partitions, because Solaris uses the same ones. After installation of Solaris, you change the types back.

Re:dual booting solaris?

[Stephen VanDahm]

Better yet, is there a way to dual-boot Solaris and Linux in such a way that the two OSs can share the same /home partitions?

Steve

Re:dual booting solaris?

[4rt00r]

I personally use FreeBSD's boot loader which is nice and uses F1, F2 .... to boot the desired OS and it doesnt have the issues of Lilo or other 1024 problems . I'd recommend it strongly .

Re:dual booting solaris?

[OrangeSpyderMan]

IIRC Linux can mount UFS partitions, and read solaris disk labels, so the best way to do it would be to install Solaris, then linux and simply mount the /home as UFS in linux. Again, there are FAQs all over the place about Linux/Solaris dual boot, I believe I even saw one on BigAdmin once. If not groups.google.com is your friend.

Re:dual booting solaris?

[wwwillem]

and temporarily change the partition types of the Linux partitions, because Solaris uses the same ones

That's correct, Solaris uses the same partition type as the Linux swap partition. During booting Linux suddenly also sees all the slices within the Solaris partition and your partition numbering goes suddenly haywire.

But there is a trick for that, which is to start the disk with your Linux OS partition (not too big, because the Solaris partition can't be too high), then your Linux swap, then your Solaris partition and than an extended partition with your Linux /home.

This would make your /home probably hda5, but after Solaris installation it suddenly becomes hda11 or something similar. The trick is now to put both hda5 and hda11 in your fstab (or just the hda11) and you are all set.

Re:dual booting solaris?

[Anonymous Coward]

The 1024 problem has been non-existant for years.

Sweeet

[mikeporter]

Looking forward to the January release, too bad it is going to miss Christmas! ;)

Re:Sweeet

[Tpenta]

So why not go for the Early release that is ude a few months earlier?

Solaris is a nice UNIX

[Anonymous Coward]

In a lot of ways, Sun is the MS of the commercial UNIX world, but they have an impressive record of making contributions to the community. the most notable contribution was probably NFS, and Sun gave it away long before most of us had ever heard of the GPL. Solaris has lots of goodies in it, obviously including great NFS support, but also pleasant standardisation and maturity, which Linux still somewhat lacks. Solaris is also rock solid. Sure, Linux can have multi-year uptimes, but it doesn't really compare to Solaris. When you want to run a giant website with 100's of CPU's, you turn to Solaris, and you don't even care that you get raped on the price of the hardware.

I imagine that Sun is doing this because they know they won't make any money pushing beige box PC's. (SGI sure didn't.) By just selling the OS, they may not sell a ton of copies, but the profit margins on software are pretty sweet, if you can pay off the cost of development.

Well, it's 4:00 am here, and I am still at work, so I don't imagine this post was at all coherent. God Bless Orange Soda. cheese fish is moose.

Re:Solaris is a nice UNIX

[guacamole]

I really doubt anyone is running a website on a 100 CPU server. Using a single large unix server as web webserver is just not very practical or economical. It is very easy to distribute the load between multiple cheap, comodity x86 servers. They scale greatly for this kind of application. Databases and such is a different story..

Re:Solaris is a nice UNIX

[mirko]

I don't quite agree.
I am working as a sysadmin for a huge company.
The reasons we chose Solaris are

• Sun's support (with a SUN/GOLD => repairs are to occur during the working day)
  
• Sun's hardware (really stable with a nice hardware-monitoring from the OS => we can detect a Power supply failure before it has some productive consequences)
  

Now, the OS itself is quite simplistic, I mean you have to GNU-ize it a lot to achieve a comfortable level of functionalities (Apache, vim, bash -now supplied-, GCC! ...).
I still wonder why they don't provide a decent ANSI C/C++ compiler that we need when it comes to patch/recompile some Apache module (Vignette requires the commercial SUN C Compiler to be rebuilt)...
It's mostly a question of support and feedback from SUN and other developpers (Oracle, Vignette, Broadvision, Silverstream...).
Now, considerig Solaris alone on a lambda/PC, I guess this is not as interesting as you lose functionalities that only Sun's hardware fully provides.

Re:Solaris is a nice UNIX

[ChadN]

the most notable contribution was probably NFS, and Sun gave it away long before most of us had ever heard of the GPL.

Uhhh, just to clarify, Sun published the specs to NFS, but (as far as I know), did not open source, or even publish, their code (I'll gladly accept corrections on that, BTW.)

Re:Solaris is a nice UNIX

[Doctor_D]

In 2000, I would have agreed with you that most sites would just throw a slew of linux boxes running apache to host the website. At my old job that's what me and a couple of others were proposing--we so wanted to get rid of the boss installed M$ IIS server--for many many reasons.

In 2001, I got a job with Sun. I went to a customer site to monitor an E10k, and I asked them what they were running on it, when they said their website, I was shocked. The usual answer is a ERP system with a database of some sorts. I have heard of clustered E10k's hosting websites, but I haven't heard of F15k's running websites.

So, since an E10k can only scale to 64 UltraSPARC II processors, you're right....as far as I personally know that no one is running a website on a 100 cpu system (which would imply a F15k).

Re:Solaris is a nice UNIX

[Meech]

I agree with your point, except I would argue that Sun's greatest contribution is Java.

Re:Solaris is a nice UNIX

[haunebu]

I really doubt anyone is running a website on a 100 CPU server.

He didn't say a 100 CPU server, he said a 100 CPU website. And he's right. The site we run has hundreds of CPUs behind it (web servers, app servers, databases), and they're all spread across Solaris machines. I've never seen a commercial company run a similar service using Linux.

You're right in that none of our boxes has 100 CPUs in it, but that's missing his point...

Re:Solaris is a nice UNIX

[Anonymous Coward]

The reasons we chose Solaris are...

Dell has comparable hardware support (4 hour turnaround) and lower end comparable hardware is so much cheaper (particularly the disk arrays, 2U servers, etc) that you can buy two for the same cost and keep one as a live standby while you wait the four hours.

you dont get the software support for your unix on dell, though. and i admit that when you use sun hardware, you can feel that it is made to run and run and run - the boot PROM, serial console, hardware monitoring, it adds up to a real server, something the intel world just tries to be (they keep throwing more and more add-on cards to replace the functionality. oh well)

Now, the OS itself is quite simplistic, I mean you have to GNU-ize it a lot to achieve a comfortable level of functionalities

quite simplistic yet somehow it eats up disk space on the install - ugh.

with 9 it is much more OSS'ized, with apache and openssh included among other things. and default install eats up more space - no wonder we have 72 gig drives now.

oh, i installed Solaris 8 onto intel the other day and it required about 4 reboots. reminded me of MS OS's.

Re:Solaris is a nice UNIX

[Wiener]

I agree with your point, except I would argue that Sun's greatest contribution is Java.

I wonder if you'll get modded Insightful or Flamebait...

Re:Solaris is a nice UNIX

[isaac]

The reasons we chose Solaris are ... Sun's hardware (really stable with a nice hardware-monitoring from the OS => we can detect a Power supply failure before it has some productive consequences)

I've got eight (nine?) words for you: 400 MHz UltraSPARC II with 8 meg ecache.

I'm guessing you started working with Sun hardware sometime after that particular debacle.

The most stable hardware I've had the pleasure of working with was (pre-Compaq) DEC AlphaServers. I recall one particularly hard-working pair that had some 637 days of uptime (basically, they had been working non-stop since they were first built) - the only reason we had to reboot them was to apply Y2K patches. No cache-coherency problems there.

-Isaac

Re:Solaris is a nice UNIX

[evbergen]

I've never seen a commercial company run a similar service using Linux.

Google?

Re:Solaris is a nice UNIX

[mirko]

The average uptime we have here is 400 days.
the only time we had to reboot the server was when the executive staff decided we should re-organize the server rooms... :(
But well, I still have several SUN (and HP) web servers that have past the 1k-day uptime :)
I also happened to set up some Compaq 360 / FreeBSD rack servers which have Remote Insight Port...
These would be perfect but the hardware is quite shitty and Power Supply failures forced us to shut these down in order to replace these :(

Re:Solaris is a nice UNIX

[rplacd]

I believe Sun released NFS v4's source code, but that's a relatively recent event.
What Sun did release was ONC RPC; you could download and build portmap/rpcgen/etc for your OS. It's a necessary precursor to running NFS.

Re:Solaris is a nice UNIX

[timeOday]

I assumed he meant "total cpus" (whether or not on the same memory bus), i.e. google would be a 100 cpu website, so would a site with a dozen 8-way Sun boxes (well, almost).

Re:Solaris is a nice UNIX

[AJWM]

I believe that Sun published a reference version of NFS source, but didn't open source their optimized internal version until much later.

I'd also add NIS (aka yellow pages) to the list of Sun's notable contributions. That made NFS a whole lot more useful. (You really don't want the situation where user 'fred' has different UIDs on two machines both NFS-mounting /home (or /usr/users, back when).)

Re:Solaris is a nice UNIX

[poot_rootbeer]

Just because some morons are using an E10K to serve a web site doesn't mean that there's any good reason to do so.

I suppose if the big iron is running a website in addition to other services that actually need to run on that kind of hardware, or if the application layer of an n-tier web architecture resides there, with a gaggle of load-balanced cheap Apache machines in between it and the World, it might be okay.

Re:Solaris is a nice UNIX

[cshuttle]

I appreciate Sun's contributions to the Unix world at large, but while I read your article I:

• Created a JFS system
• Created a volume group for my users data that is locked down only for them
• Extended the filesystem for their VG by about 2GB on the fly Mirrored their VG on the fly by typing the command:

mirrorvg uservg hdisk1 hdisk3 (Note the complete lack of slice designations or plex designations)

• Issued another command to sync up those mirrors
• Loaded a dynamic driver into the OS to operate my Digiboard concentrator card without a reboot.
• OOPS, I screwed up the configuration of the device...I just de-allocated it and reconfigured the driver automatically.
• Crap...I need to add another disk to that volume group. Just did that dynamically. Allocated the space for it also.
• Ehhh...why not? I just created another mirror of the disk onto the newly imported disk.

Funny how I can do all this through either the command line or from a completely comprehensive & modular user interface. How much of this can you do with just a base OS? No disksuite, no additional packages, just out of the box, without a single reboot of the machine?

Sun hardware is outstanding, I will grant you that. But I can see no reason on God's green earth that every Admin alive shouldn't be chucking Solaris in favor of AIX.

Re:Solaris is a nice UNIX

[naChoZ]

I'm a solaris admin myself. Has anyone heard anything about x86 support for iplanet products, maybe netscape ldap, etc...?

Re:Solaris is a nice UNIX

[M$ Mole]

The ColumnStructure class will not be serializable, and is read-only, so you can provide empty implementations for the methods the grid will not call.

You'd be surprised. A lot of larger corporations that run complex web apps and happen to be big Solaris shops run web apps on configurations of this kind. I remember one client who was evaluating ColdFusion and decided to put together a new DEVELOPMENT box that happened to be a 45 processor Sun box. According to the client, the 2 production servers for that site were both 100+ machines (they ended up not going with CF because of the cost - Macromedia charges per cpu). Granted this client was doing more heavy lifting with their web apps than most people, and they are the exception rather than the norm, but people like this are out there.

Re:Solaris is a nice UNIX

[M$ Mole]

DOH, wrong clipboard info...dammit...Mamma always said that you's supposta copy an THEN paste, but I never did listen too good to Mamma back then.

The quote was SUPPOSED TO BE:

really doubt anyone is running a website on a 100 CPU server

Now I must go and figure out what this "Pre-view" button is since I obviously have the "Sub-mit" one down.

Re:Solaris is a nice UNIX

[bolthole]

Yeup. And I know of .. umm... "a company out there" that just bought a 15k with 72 CPUs, to run an application server for the backend of their core website.
I suspect they may end up throwing the extra CPUs in there eventually, too :-}

Re:Solaris is a nice UNIX

[bolthole]

Sun support for "SunONE" stuff like directory server, will allegedly be added piecemeal.
directory server will be the first thing added.

One CPU?

[acehole]

I've got a dual system, does that mean it wont install on my system or just wont make use of smp?

Re:One CPU?

[Anonymous Coward]

You probably have to buy a more expensive version if u want more than one CPU...

Re:One CPU?

[Anonymous Coward]

i'm pretty sure the single CPU thing only refers to what you're licensed to run not what the OS is capable of. Sun gave out a bunch of Solaris 9 on SPARC DVDs that were only licensed to run on one CPU but it runs fine and uses both CPUs in my Ultra 2 workstation no limiting software locks or anything like that.

Re:One CPU?

[Anonymous Coward]

If it is like the Sparc version, it merely means that using it with multiproc boxen is illegal.

Re:One CPU?

[4rt00r]

Yeah . But maybe it will be dicontinued in the future . Sun main market has nothing to do with x86 except for Java .

Re:One CPU?

[chegosaurus]

Wondering the same thing myself. $99 I don't have a problem with. Solaris is my OS of choice and I'm happy to shell out for it. But if they're going to want, say, $400 for dual CPU then I'll stick with 8.

Solaris really is sweet on a dual CPU system. Yes, it sucks on crappy hardware, but for my money it can't be touched on decent kit.

Finally, just to preempt a few of the "why pay for Solaris when Linux is better and it's free as in beer and it's free as in speech and my leet AMD Gentoo boxen do everything an E15k does but faster" posts that invariably come with any Sol x86 story: SOME OF US JUST LIKE IT, and don't mind parting with a bit of cash now and again. m'kay?

Re:One CPU?

[rnd()]

I heard something the other day that made me wonder: A friend told me that his company had been forced to switch from Oracle on Linux to Oracle on Solaris for purely performance reasons. They are now running a 3500 with 4 processors.

What is the state of Oracle on Linux today?

Re:One CPU?

[rplacd]

I don't know about Solaris 9, but Solaris 8 ran just fine on my dual-processor usparc box at work. I believe its license limits it to systems with fewer than eight processors.

open sourced in the future

[jukal]

Sun will also probably open source this product sometime in the future. As such, it will work with the community to put together a hardware compatibility list that expand the range of systems known to work on Solaris on x86.

Interesting, maybe. But nowadays, open sourcing seems to mean everything between giving a quick peek into the sourcecode and releasing it under a license which poses no restrictions at all. Anyway, is there some pieces in the codebase that are especially worth waiting for - if the license would allow utilizing them for other purposes?

Re:open sourced in the future

[guacamole]

Note that the posted didn't say "open source the code for open source community". The poster said "open the source for open source community.." Solaris is really one of Sun's few crow jewels. I really doubt they'll open source it. They might release the Solaris code the way they did for Solaris 8 a year ago, though.

Re:open sourced in the future

[Anonymous Coward]

the open sourcing appears to refer to the hardware compatibility testing suite - not Solaris

Re:open sourced in the future

[jukal]

the open sourcing appears to refer to the hardware compatibility testing suite - not Solaris

Yes, this seems to be the case in this article. However, I found this maybe more interesting one (Making Solaris open source)

Clip (Sun chief engineer Rob Gingell, August 28, 2002 ):

The really valuable thing to us is this community. Not all predecessor communities have agreed to operate on the same IP principle that the Linux community operates on. Getting by that is a real impediment to throwing open the kimono and saying, "Here, Solaris is now open sourced." So, some of it has happened, and we are working on the rest of it. We may never be able to do it all because we may never be able to reach an agreement with the originators of the stuff. In short, the answer is that we're just sort of chipping away at it

This might be worth submitting to /. as a separate story if it has not already been here.

Re:open sourced in the future

[molli123]

Look at Star Office- Version 5.2 could be downloaded for free and version6 has to be paid for. I dont think they are going to show their sources, they are probably going the other way. The Release of Solaris for x86 is because the recognize that their hardware is too expensive for the desktop and they want to earn in that area, too. No doubt Solaris (i just saw Sparc) is a graet OS for great hardware, able to do things, you can't do with Linux, but it simply is too expensive for the desktop.

Re:open sourced in the future

[mark_lybarger]

IIRC, version 5.2 was from Star Division, not Sun. If it was sun, it was released right after the acquisition from Star Division, thus under the Star Division license. StarOffice has always been, AFAIK, free for non-comercial use. The fact that it now costs a little lets those people who need the extras that OpenOffice doesn't offer get them at a REASONABLE price.

SUN gave a HUGE contribution to the open source community by opening up OpenOffice. Distributions can now install open office by default with out any license issues. Even hard core GPL distributions such as Debian can have it in their stable branch.

I really doubt that SUN is releasing their x86 version to gain desktop market. Contrary to the /. crowd, *nix isn't a popular desktop platform, and I wouldn't bet the farm that solaris is going to change that.

There's a nitche market for users who like or want to learn solars to further develop their careers at places that spend huge money on SUN hardware. There's also 2-3 people who prefer it over other *nix variants but just can't get their hands on the hardware. I've got an ULTRA-5 sitting idle on my desk right now (and 3 in the next cube) because my P2-366 is easier to use. Should I need to prototype a web site in JSP, I guess it's available to save my laptop some ticks.

As far as opening their sources, I don't think it's the solaris sources they're talking about, but the compatibility test sutes. The bread and butter for sun is solaris, hardware and support. By them protecting the internals of solaris (the API is open), they're protecting their support revenue. If they open source solaris, that opens the flood gates for other companies to offer support for their hardware and software. I doubt we'll ever see that from SUN.

Re:open sourced in the future

[__aahlyu4518]

"Contrary to the /. crowd, *nix isn't a popular desktop platform,"

I never knew the /. crowd was a popular desktop platform... LOL

But seriously. If apple created a GOOD (and popular) desktop product with OS X which has BSD underneath, then why wouldn't Sun be able to do a similar thing with Solaris on x86 ? Ok... it doesn't look like they are planning anything like that, but OS X is the proof that a *nix CAN be a good and popular desktop OS.

Re:open sourced in the future

[mark_lybarger]

i wouldn't argue that *nix can (and certainly is) ad good desktop OS, but i'm not so sure how popular it is. i guess it's what you define popular as. OS X is also a nitche market desktop operating system. I believe MS has about 95% desktop saturation right now, and I don't see that number changing as fast as Netscape Navigator's hold on the browser changed. i think it will take a huge revolution in the corporate world to get those numbers to change. the education market might change a little faster due to economic budget restraints, but the corporate world is where the big changes neds to happen.

Re:open sourced in the future

[EvlOvrLrd]

Sun could create a desktop platform that could be as good at OS X. But the #1 reason that they have Solaris for the x86 platform at all is for the server market. In comparison to native Sun hardware, x86 is still by far cheaper. Thus giving some bean counter a corner to cut, as most of the popular server applications for Sparc are also developed for x86 running Solaris.

Another reason why there isn't a big push to try to make a desktop platform is the development cost. Because it is generaly a cheap 32bit server platform, they don't have to generate as many drivers for hardware as they would if they 'wanted' to make a true desktop environment. The consumer cost alone would rank such an OS up there (maybe more than) what MS puts out.

But IMHO, for the desktop, you still cannot beat Linux on x86. For supported hardware and performance reasons alone. But don't think that I will give up my Sparc 5 desktop at home anytime soon!

Re:open sourced in the future

[wwwillem]

If apple created a GOOD (and popular) desktop product with OS X which has BSD underneath, then why wouldn't Sun be able to do a similar thing with Solaris on x86?

Do the math: With 20-50 thousand copies sold for 99 bucks, Sun can spend 2-5 million dollar before becoming a charity organisation. I'm pretty sure Apple spent a few :-) more millions on developing OS-X.

Halfway there....

[noelp]

This is good news - but one of my main uses for Solaris is an Oracle platform. Oracle no longer support Solaris on x86, which is a shame because Oracle 9i on Solaris 9 on x86 would be a very interesting proposition. Anyone know of any plans for Oracle to resupport x86 for Solaris? With Sun seeming commiting itself towards it, would it be a mistake not to?

Re:Halfway there....

[mark_lybarger]

If you need Oracle 9i and you need x86, there's Oracle for Linux I'm thinking Oracle ran a few performance tests of x86/Solaris/Oracle and x86/Linux/Oracle, then chose the platform that would give them the marketing numbers they need (and the performance their customers NEED). Originally Oracle/Linux was more a developer training tool, now it seems to be attempting ot compete with SQL Server. GO Oracle!

Re:Halfway there....

[gorilla]

If you're running Oracle, it shouldn't really matter what OS you're running under it, so why not go for the fastest?

Re:Halfway there....

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle 8i is still there but you need to purchase it.

Re:Halfway there....

[Anonymous Coward]

Stay tuned. Oracle is talking to Sun. We may yet see Oracle 9 for Solaris x86

Re:Halfway there....

[Anonymous Coward]

Well because what OS you run does matter, if for example stability matters. If you don't want to see kernel freeze as Linux does under heavy load or don't want your kernel panic or just want a decent UFS that is present in Solaris x86 w/logging (not ext3 that corrupts data). or don't want your memory manager to start killing random processes when out of virtual memory!

Threads are coming, really!

[alan_d_post]

As soon as FreeBSD and NetBSD implement good threading, there will be no need whatsoever to run Solaris.

When they'll be done is an open question, of course. The Net folks in particular tend to refuse to rush anything at all.

In the meantime, I can't see how solaris x86 is that much nicer than gentoo or debian (aside from having a working NFS implementation :). I personally detest having to maintain a solaris (sparc) box for my job.

Re:Threads are coming, really!

[guacamole]

As soon as FreeBSD and NetBSD implement good threading, there will be no need whatsoever to run Solaris.


Huh? What about vendor support? Application support? Is oracle(and several hundred or thousand solaris-only applications) certified to run on FreeBSD? Are Veritas storage products supported on FreeBSD? Is there a company that provides a 24/7 on-site hardware and software support for FreeBSD systems? Lots of people would actually take Solaris over FreeBSD for a number of other reasons as well simply they -like- the OS..

Maybe we're talking about different uses. Solaris will certainly remain -the- enterprise datacenter OS whether *BSD has or not a good threading support.. Of course, there are many areas where it is better to use Linux or FreeBSD. There is no one OS that fits all needs.

Re:Threads are coming, really!

[Anonymous Coward]

> I can't see how solaris x86 is that much nicer > than gentoo or debian

One word: SCALABILITY !

Try that with the Linux kernel.

Re:Threads are coming, really!

[CoolVibe]

Amen. I agree wholeheartedly.

This use-the-right-fucking-tool-for-the-job-already attitude is exactly the way people should look at it. It's how I solve my problems. It's how I keep the users and the customers happy. It's what gives my network stability.

It's nice that people advocate some operating systems, but real admins already know what they are going to use. The right tool for the damn job.

Re:Threads are coming, really!

[Unregistered]

Small point about Oracle. There are instructions in the FreeBSd handbook on exactly what needs to be doen to amke it run on BSD. Probobly not official from Oracle, but it will run i guess. I don't have the money for it.

Re:Threads are coming, really!

[OrangeSpyderMan]

Probobly[sic] not official from Oracle, but it will run i guess. I don't have the money for it.

You just hit the nail right on the head. The kind of people who shell out for Oracle are never going to go for a "not official...but it'll run" OS. On the first incident, the first thing Oracle support will say to you is to install it on an approved platform and try and reproduce the problem.

You shell out the money for it because you need it.
If you need it, then it just has to work.
If it has to work, you'll need support.
If you need support, you'll need to be on a supported platform.

Re:Threads are coming, really!

[Gothmolly]

It's not threads, its about hardware. Can *BSD run on a 16 CPU box with hotpluggable CPUs, power supplies and hard drives? Can *BSD allow you to slice up the machine into arbitrary sections, and do resource management at that level?

You buy a box that gives you 5 nines up uptime, and they ship the OS to do it with - its a nobrainer.

Re:Threads are coming, really!

[Anonymous Coward]

5 9's my butt. No unix has that kind of uptime. And NO -- you can't slice it up into arbitrary sections. You can only divide along CPU lines and clusters of CPUs at that!
You want 5 9's? Get an IBM mainframe running VM/CMS. Period.

Re:Threads are coming, really!

[smccrory]

> You shell out the money for it because you need > it.
> If you need it, then it just has to work.
> If it has to work, you'll need support.
> If you need support, you'll need to be on a supported platform.

Excellent summary, I can tell you're an experienced admin, manager and/or developer.

When I have a need to use funky hardware/software combinations, I assess the risks as well as the benefits, and that includes political, maintenance and support considerations. I can't think of a situation where I work that FreeBSD and Oracle would pass that litmus test.

Anyway, I'm not so warm on Solaris 9.x on non-Sun Intel architectures. Sun's support for 8.x on Intel was meager at best, and hardly anything ran on it. We badly wanted to run Solaris on a Compaq Proliant that we had available, but because of the weak support and my company's disinterest in the political risks of Linux, we had to install, yes, Windows.

Re:Threads are coming, really!

[Anonymous Coward]

>I personally detest having to maintain a solaris >(sparc) box for my job.

Then quit your job. There, that was a no-brainer, wasn't it?

Re:Threads are coming, really!

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course there is one OS that fixes all needs. It's called "Windows NT" -- at least that's what management at my company told me. We replaced all of our SUN systems with NT. Very frustrating. Can't wait till the next virus.

Re:Solaris is maybe the best UNIX

[4rt00r]

About the webserver-park I personally doubt that there is one existing right now considering that Linux is so cheap and has some cluster availability .

Sun Hardware can be cheapest!!!!

[moorewr]

"Raped on hardware?" You may be behind the times.
Sun is actually the cheapest way to go to put
100 servers in a farm - the SUnFire V100 is $800 -
at least in the educational market - I can get a
sun rack server in the door cheaper than I can any
rack x86 server.

Re:Sun Hardware can be cheapest!!!!

[4rt00r]

Why ? Why to be cheapest when you can earn money ? Why to be cheapest when you r alone ? Chaepest than what ?

Re:Sun Hardware can be cheapest!!!!

[friscolr]

Sun is actually the cheapest way to go

it all depends on what you are spec'ing out.

Dell 1650 - $4,163.65
2 P1.4 ghz processors
2 GB RAM
1 36GB 10k drive
2 gige NICs
add 2 GB RAM for $1131
add 1 36 GB 10k drive for $217
optional: redundant power supply, hardware raid, 4 GB RAM max, 3 drives max

Sun LX50 - $5,295.00
2 P1.4 ghz processors
2 GB RAM
1 36 GB 10k drice
2 10/100 NICs
add 2 GB RAM for $2250
add 1 36 GB 10k drive for $480
optional: 6 GB RAM max, 3 drives max

you save over $1000 for the comparable Dell, which comes with more options than the Sun (excluding the 6 gb total RAM).
If you max both out, you get the Dell (with raid and redundant power supply) for $7000 and the Sun (with 6 gb RAM) for $11,600.

You can find greater savings in disk arrays from both vendors.

Re:Sun Hardware can be cheapest!!!!

[moorewr]

I'm not referring to the LX line, but to the SunFire V100, which does in fact run $100 street for a 400mhz UltraSparcII, an 18gb hd, and 128mb. It isn't apples-to-apples with your dell example, but it is much cheaper as a 1U member of a server farm.

Re:Sun Hardware can be cheapest!!!!

[4rt00r]

Holly !

Thats huge but bo these thing run on 32 0R 64-bit platforms ?

Re:Sun Hardware can be cheapest!!!!

[moorewr]

Late reply: 64-bit UltraSPARCII - 400 mhz still I believe.

Why wouldn't I just use Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Its kind of nifty and all to run Solaris on PC hardware, but at the end of the day what am I getting?

Solaris is no great shakes; its just good enough to run on Solaris hardware.

Its like Linux. Its no great shakes, but its pretty firmly entrenched as *the* x86 Unix (With apologies to the *BSD crowd).

Re:Why wouldn't I just use Linux?

[Un pobre guey]

Linux is gratis and libre, and $99 bucks will get you a packaged distro that beats the living crap out of Solaris or Windows with respect to all the software you get.
Come to think of it, Solaris and Windows appear to be hitting the same price point. What demographic is Sun aiming at? How many copies can they expect to sell a year? Who's market share do they think they can erode? How will they, or can they, market to the average Joe?
SUNW

Unless...

[tkrotchko]

" It is very easy to distribute the load between multiple cheap, comodity x86 servers"

Unless you have to save state information; then it becomes significantly more difficult. If you run an app server, then you have that cost. If you need a high-availability DB, then you have a significant cost.

Don't get me wrong; using cheap web servers is the way to go, but its not magic; there are other costs involved.

Re:Unless...

[rnd()]

ASP .NET allows you to do this by automatically storing session state info in a MSSQL database. Of course, this solution isn't free, but it's probably a bit cheaper than a 100 processor Sun.

Re:Unless...

[4rt00r]

Fuck .NOT , their solutions are always based on M$ tech , which is for desktops only , not the server market . Solaris IS the server market . Besides .NOT is still vaporware .

Re:Unless...

[John_Booty]

Unless you have to save state information;

If you're talking about per-session state information, it's pretty easy to just set up your networking hardware to do per-connection round-robin load balancing, rather than per-request load balancing.

Re:Unless...

[Zack]

PHP also allows for session information to be stored in a database. (Or memory, or file, or you can even write your own functions to handle session loading and storing)

Re:Unless...

[gorilla]

Depending on the website, you might have to hold more than just per connection information. For example, a website I look after has to grab a whole pile of information when someone logs in. That takes a comparably long time, about 30 to 60 seconds. This data is shared among people, so that two connections might have the same information, so it has to be saved in a way that every connection can potenitally get that information.

Re:Unless...

[buswolley]

Its wrong to moderate the parent as flame bait just because he mentions a M$ product. Disagreeing with, or counter-suggesting the political views of /. is not a good reason for being flaimbait.

/. is about freedom of speech ,ideas and ideologies. Not about suppression of conversations that go against your ideologies.

Otherwise you are just as bad as any DMCA, RIAA, or Bush administration.

Re:Unless...

[Anonymous Coward]

I love how people cream their shorts over the stupidest little things.

How difficult was it to write your own db-backed session object. 10-20 lines of code? Most people did this anyway because the built-in ASP session was so slow and shitty.

(IMO, the parent deserves the flamebait mod for implying that Unix people buy 100CPU machines to store web state. OK, maybe for EJBs...)

Re:Unless...

[rnd()]

implying that Unix people buy 100CPU machines to store web state

No such implication was intended, as should have been clear from the context of the post. Further, the server was mentioned because I was referring to a "non-free" solution.

Actually, you won't answer the more important

[Anonymous Coward]

question.

You said:

"and don't mind parting with a bit of cash now and again. m'kay?"

I don't think many people mind paying $100 for the OS, but after its installed, then what? The hardware support is minimal. The Solaris software base isn't there because its all for SPARC. So you have something that looks like SPARC/Solaris.

So what?

No, I aint' a huge fan of Linux, but the apps are there, the HW support is 2nd only to Windows XP, and it's widely supported.

Just saying "I really like it" shows us more about you than Solaris X86.

Re:Actually, you won't answer the more important

[chegosaurus]

Well, since you asked...

Hardware support is plenty good enough for me. It works just great on the two machines I have. So it won't work with some obscure ISA token ring card, and it won't run on ARM processors. What do I care? It works for me.

As for software, yes, a lot of commercial stuff is SPARC only. But then, I can't afford licenses for commercial stuff, and I really don't need any of it anyway, so that doesn't matter to me either.

On my Solaris machine I've got everything I need. Bear in mind that pretty much anything that comes as source will build on Solaris. The exceptions are crappy little programs put together by people who can't see further than Linux, and I don't miss any of those.

I'm struggling to think of an application that runs on Linux but not Sol x86. The only one I've ever missed was the Audiogalaxy satellite, when that was worth anything. It was pretty easy to get the Linux binary running through lxrun though.

I'm not sure Solaris has the multimedia stuff Linux does, but I'm not really into that, so I don't know. If I reinstalled my machine with Linux, I'd just put on all the apps I now have on Solaris.

All the "big name" open source apps run just as well on Solaris as on Linux.

I'm not sure what you mean by widely supported. If you mean a tech support community, there are plenty of Solaris people round and about, and they're generally pretty experienced and smart. Too much of the Linux community is leet haxors who think they know it all and really don't know shit. In terms of support, the documentation for solaris (docs.sun.com) is second to none. The depth and quality is a different class to anything you can find for Linux.

If you mean that people who write open source software don't explicity support Solaris, again, what do I care? I've got the source, and I'm smart enough to make tweaks to port things. I enjoy the challenge, and I get to contribute something.

I've made my living out of Solaris for a good while: it's the Unix I know better than all the others, so it suits me to use it.

I say "I really like it" because, when choosing the operating system I run on my computer, that's all that matters. Arguing about "the best" operating system is like arguing about the best band, or the best film. Ultimately it's pointless. You go with what feels right for you. Unix is incredibly configurable. You can make any flavour do pretty much anything if you have the time and the smarts.

That probably does say more about me than about the OS, but it keeps us away from OS holy wars.

If that's the case

[Anonymous Coward]

"Solaris is really one of Sun's few crow jewels"

If Solaris is their crown jewels, then I suggest everybody dump their Sun stock immediately.

Solaris is a minimal "good enough" OS. You certainly don't look at it and say "Oh, its wonderful". AIX as an OS is probably nicer, and nobody is saying its one of IBM's crown jewels.

I mean, its okay to like and use sun, but lets not gush over the computer equivalent of meatloaf and mashed potatoes.

Re:If that's the case

[Anonymous Coward]

AIX as an OS is probably nicer

ROTFLMAO

Re:If that's the case

[zeugma-amp]

I'm not sure what it is that you are laughing about.

AIX has both strengths and weaknesses, as do all OSes. For stability, I've been quite happy with AIX.

At the place where I used to work, we rolled out a major OS upgrade on a bunch of AIX boxes 1190 days ago. I recently had someone check those boxes out and 90% of them have not been rebooted since!

I'd hate to be involved in another upgrade on those systems though, as they'd previously run for about 2.5 years continuously. After another 3 years of constant, uninterrupted operation, I wouldn't place bets on how many of those disks would not spin back up if they were ever stopped.

Re:If that's the case

[Anonymous Coward]

I used it. It's the best UNIX ever.

So bite me.

vendors

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun is telling their vendors to skip 9 and go to 10. If that does not tell you something about how good it was

Re:vendors

[Anonymous Coward]

The vendors I have talked to have put me on notice that because pulled out of Intel Platform with Solaris 9 last spring, then have moved thier resources to LINUX. With money as tight as it is, these guys informed me that developing for SUN's Solaris 9 is not going to happen.

As a stockholder and code monkey

[(H)elix1]

Sure, this will help... As a Sun stock holder, this pains me. Again...

They buried any chances of x86 support when they 'killed' Solaris 9 flat out and gave marginal driver support for Solaris 8(x86). When it might have mattered, they held back. When it no longer does, they release and ignore linux.

The entry level SunBlade was a huge disapointment on a personal level - not sure what I expected for a $999, but for about the same cash I got dual x86 CPU's and SCSI hard drives. After adding an Adaptec 29160n card, it is still a dog. Guess which one is a web server and which one is my primary development environment.

They release a 'free' Java Application Server after giving the JBoss people the finger. They release a 'free' app server, giving every other partner the other finger who use to say 'use Sun hardware' when it matters.

They gave the log4j and a few other groups the finger when they did a 'not develped here' move and folded in some junky classes into JDK 1.4

Not that I'm bitter.... but I have not seen anything that looks like a solid move in a long time. Perhaps merging with HP/Compaq next week?

(shaking head and walking away)

Re:As a stockholder and code monkey

[4rt00r]

This is the market . Point . Sun is not an Open Source movement or project or any thing like these philosophies . Sun is a hardware company and everybody knows that , the rules of the game are to make profit considering the stocks are nearly 0 which makes the situation even worse for new investment on their Ultra improvements . Sun is holding tight to Java technologies as thier latest resort of money . JBoss is not Java certified !!! Clearly these are not solid moves on the long run but they give Sun the possibility to re-enter a hostile x86 market (Solaris 9 on x86) .

Is Solaris that good?

[evocate]

I've heard many claims that Solaris is very reliable - more reliable than Linux. How much stability comes from Solaris itself, and how much comes from Sun's end-to-end control of the hardware? Solaris has had the advantage of running on machines that were not only well-designed, but designed and built to the specifications of the OS group. Linux has rarely if ever had this luxury. When Solaris 9 is running on ferrel x86 hardware, will it display the same reliability as it's UltraSparc sibbling? More importantly, will it even prove to be as reliable as Linux?

Re:Is Solaris that good?

[Alien Being]

I think the main reliability advantage for Solaris on Sparc (vs on generic x86) is that there are fewer device drivers to get right.

I don't buy your theory that Solaris reliability is due to Sun's control over hardware. The OS group probably has some influence over CPU/MMU design, but not over the various controllers within the system, many of which aren't even made by Sun. Sun's hardware is top quality which enhances the overall system reliability, but not OS reliability. I don't blame Linus if my motherboard shorts out.

Linux is already capable of long uptimes, so I think Solaris's main advantage over the penguin on x86 will be that it gives Solaris apps a cheaper platform to target. Sun would rather that people buy Sparc, but they probably realize that it's better to give them Solaris/x86 than to lose them to Linux/x86 or Windows/x86.

Re:Is Solaris that good?

[cybrthng]

Uptime on all of our Solaris servers is usually over a year. We wouldn't trust our Oracle Financials and Web applications to anything else.

Great Support, Great Warranties, Great Service and excellent prices for what you get. Consider a 4 cpu V880 costs 50k, but you get 8 gigs of memory and 350 gigs of diskspace and a system that is "hot upgradeable" and the cost of downtime for your business is over 1 million dollars a day. That 50 is pennies to the cost of downtime and being able to throw in more cpu's, memory or change devices WHILE STILL RUNNING (solaris 9) is worth it.

Uptime counts when your business relies on it. Linux is great and all, but i need the stability or Solaris with Veritas in combination with EMC arrays and the support contracts that go around everything.

We aren't talking about simple needs when you usually buy sun equipment in which case if your looking for low end hosting boxes and what not, they're still even a bargain considering how many customers you could loose when your systems crash or need upgrades.

Re:Is Solaris that good?

[evocate]

I think the main reliability advantage for Solaris on Sparc (vs on generic x86) is that there are fewer device drivers to get right.

Ok, you stated better what I was really trying to say. Because Sun OS and hardware designers collaborate, there are fewer devices and so fewer drivers to write. This lets the OS group focus on reliability within the narrow device range. I agree with you that this collaboration probably does not result in better hardware.

I can see why a cheaper target platform for Solaris apps will help Sun - more Solaris installations means more chances to upsell customers from low- or no-margin Intel boxes to high-margin Sparc boxes. I can even see how this might lower costs for existing or future Sun hardware customers by giving them cheaper development or staging systems. What I am trying to figure out is how Solaris x86 could benefit a site that does not and will not need to upgrade to Sparc hardware. Is Solaris better than Linux on Intel hardware?

Re:Is Solaris that good?

[pmz]

I've heard many claims that Solaris is very reliable - more reliable than Linux.

It's more accurate to say that Solaris is extremely reliable. There's oddball bugs here and there; however, I've witnessed a Solaris kernel panic once only after forgetting to upgrade a device driver after upgrading from Solaris 7 to Solaris 8. Otherwise, I work my workstation pretty hard months at a time (rebooting only when doing routine maintenance). The servers here are similarly reliable.

How much stability comes from Solaris itself, and how much comes from Sun's end-to-end control of the hardware?

The software itself is very robust. The hardware does help when the hardware has extra reliability features (RAID, ECC, hot-plugging), which the software leverages for better uptime. Random hardware failures are the most common cause of Solaris downtime.

When Solaris 9 is running on ferrel x86 hardware, will it display the same reliability as it's UltraSparc sibbling?

Generally, yes, but the device drivers are different and can have bugs unique to the x86 platform. The lower reliability x86 hardware would probably be more significant.

More importantly, will it even prove to be as reliable as Linux?

In the long term, Solaris should prove more reliable than Linux, because Sun has a more conservative approach to software upgrades and maintenance. There is generally less risk associated with updates to Solaris versus updates to Linux.

Re:Is Solaris that good?

[sad_]

At work i have to admin HPUX, Solaris and Linux machines. I don't touch HPUX that much because i really don't like it (luckily for me i'm not the main hpux contact :P), so in fact i should be able to make good comparison between these 3 beast.
I've seen all three of them panic over time, though all of them should be considered stable. solaris and hpux machines tend to panic more due to some memory or cpu gone bad. linux has some more problems with certain drivers which can cause very weird things, but if you use hardware from a respectable source you should be (mostly) ok too. (besides a server doesn't have/need exotic hardware, and has no need for X running).
solaris and hpux have very good diagnostic tools, which i most certainly miss in linux.
but what it all comes down to is that the big win for sun/solaris (and hp/hpux) is that they run on big ass machines which those crazy dba people _insist_ on having to keep their multi-terabyte oracle db running with respectable responce times. that's not all ofcourse, but the serviceability of these machines hardware is also fabulous.
i'm sure linux will get there one day, like with the sgi 64cpu machine introduced some weeks ago.

Re:Is Solaris that good?

[Alien Being]

"What I am trying to figure out is how Solaris x86 could benefit a site that does not and will not need to upgrade to Sparc hardware. Is Solaris better than Linux on Intel hardware?"

The existence of Solaris/x86 could be a benefit to a shop that already has an investment in Solaris apps or Solaris talent.

Solaris makes a better NFS server than Linux, so that's another potential benefit.

I'm not sure, but Solaris might have some security certs that aren't available for Linux.

Solaris doesn't evolve as fast as Linux, so long-term support (without unnecessary updates) is a more reasonable expectation.

Solaris is still probably better at file-locking and other primitives, but I have nothing to back that up.

I think on x86 Sun has too little, too late to really hurt Linux. That's OK though, it will find its niche. I'd really like to see Sun do some work on Linux/Sparc. Last time I ran it, it was dog slow and was nowhere near ready for the big boxes.

Re:Is Solaris that good?

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to work for Sun in their Sustaining Engineering department (bug fixing). Maybe my perspective would help. I used to work on these really hairy bugs, sometimes for weeks. Stuff like RPC returning a strange return code only under some really weird conditions. But someone would call it in and we would fix it. This is the kind of stuff that a Linux developer would give up on and a Linux User would just scratch his head and accept.

I remember when they tried testing Linux NFS in connection with Sun and other vendors' NFS implementation with controlled tests. Linux NFS was a mess in comparison. It's better now, but I'm pretty sure there are lots of corner cases lurking in Linux that may never have been properly tested.

Also, there are a couple of things that help with reliability. It's a lot easier to track down strange problems with the ability to do kernel core dumps. Sun has lots of internal tools that let you analyze the core file and dump out relevant kernel data structures.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not bashing Linux. I run it at home as well as solaris x86. Linux usually has all the latest utilities, but Solaris is just really stable. My uptimes are usually related to needing to unplug or move the system. Another thing is that my window system uptimes are quite large as well (meaning that I can stay in the window system without having the window system fail or need to be restarted). That is definitely not a linux characteristic in my experience.

In other news

[ealar dlanvuli]

Statan called, he said he might need a new heating system.

Pigs are now flying outside my window.

I might actually get a sun box at home.

Re:In other news

[Anonymous Coward]

how in the hell is that offtopic...

god damn moderators are so fucked on this site, if you don't try karma whoring they screw you every time.

Solaris sucks for developers

[Anonymous Coward]

Great, this probably means that the platform migration from Solaris/x86 to Linux is now off for the gov agency where I work (contractor). And don't talk to me about stability, because with the ill-conceived architecture here any stability benefits are moot. (Not that that a migration to linux would help THIS problem, but I digress.)

Back to my point, that Solaris sucks for developers... My last two projects were open source web dev projects using mod_perl on Linux/Apache. I had poked around with some simple perl stuff on Solaris in the past and thought it was OK, but man it is driving me nuts now. I mean, how the hell do you get vi working without all kinds of funky characters appearing in edit mode! (After a few hours of work and lots of google searching, I still don't have this problem fixed completely). And I really miss the great SW that comes by default with linux: bash, locate, etc, etc. I know this stuff can probably be installed, but not in the bureaucratic hell where I reside.

End of rant, please mod this down for lack of any coherent thought process...

Re:Solaris sucks for developers

[jtharpla]

Regarding Vi, what the hell are you talking about? Just install Vim from the Software Companion CD...it's got all the Gnu stuff you know and love. Or go sunfreeware.com. Then grab a decent terminal program...PuTTY is free and works quite well. Set your TERM type to something decent like ansi or vt100. And for bloody-sakes, don't use the arrow keys on a PC...h,j,k,l -- then tell me how you're having problems.

Re:As a stockholder and code monkey

[(H)elix1]

JBoss is not Java certified !!!

That was more about Sun being petty - or could it be they were about to release their own app server? Ever look at Sun's 3.0 portal product? You want certified -- they took a page right out of IBM's 'lets not use a standard structure'. Better with the latest cut, but I expect more if someone wants to wave the standard.

One of the things they got right, IMHO, was embracing Apache Tomcat as the reference platform for servlets and JSP. I use Tomcat as a starting pont for porting to all the servlet engines. They should have done the same with JBoss. Well, I use it for the EBJ porting anyhow.

Sun is a hardware company
It took forever (and a day) for them to roll out something faster than a 500mhz sparc. Sure, for over 15k you might get clock frequencies from 900MHz - 1.2GHz, but from a strait hardware perspective they lagged. I see my AMD 'P' rating stomp all over the other 'workstation' boxes, but I spent a lot of quality time with a 500 IIe and quad 900 MHz UltraSPARC III Cu boxes too -- mhz still matters for sparc!

Quality on the 1U units is lacking to. I have not had issues with the new SunFire's, but the old ones went bad (2 of 12) within 4 months. I expect more from a 'hardware' company. Fool me once...

they give Sun the possibility to re-enter a hostile x86 market (Solaris 9 on x86)
Fool me twice... Not a snowball's chance in hell. They EOL Solaris x86 once already. It was a great way for folks to learn how work with Solaris while not horking up _my_ boxes, but not worth the cash for a multi CPU box to 'learn on'.

This is the market.
True. Everything is in the red. I just don't see anything that would cause a bump if the markets were normal.

Sun couldnt make up their mind so we went elswhere

[Anonymous Coward]

Having a large Sparc server farm, we were really happy when Solaris X86 came out even though it did have some issues.

We used Solaris x86 for application testing, development, support systems for the primary Sparcs (like failovers), training etc etc.

Then right after I had finished with all the Technical Panels, Management Panels and other govt crapola , Sun pulls the rug right out from under us by dropping the x86 platform.

Well now those systems are all Custom ISOs of RedHat linux on Dell hardware built in-house and they have been running flawlessly. Ive just finished (and got approved) the ok to upgrade our Sparcs by dumping them and using dual processor dells instead.

Its a shame IMO. I really like the Solaris OS but after the crap Sun pulled I dont trust them anymore. Theres no reason to believe that they wont yank the x86 support again.

Oh and im not a RH zealot either. If Sun hadn't done what they did it would be a Sparc/X86 mix on the networks instead.

Still ill always keep one sparc in my lab just to keep up with the skillsets needed to run it.

Solaris drawbacks

[emil]

• First and foremost, Solaris patchchk. This utility, written in perl, generates an HTML page which must be read by a browser. Now, RedHat up2date, which I like a lot, is python-based, and RedHat goes a little overboard with python support in the OS. patchchk is awful compared to up2date, but I must confess that I haven't used it in some time.
• Solaris perl is built with Sun's C compiler, and this perl version cannot be extended by gcc. If you lack Sun cc and you need to extend perl, then you must reinstall in a separate location and then manage two installations. You cannot uninstall Sun's perl without breaking lots and lots of things.
• The Solaris package system is an abomination. Please, PKZIP is something we should have left behind in our DOS days. Let's integrate bzip2 into something with the speed of RPM.
• If you want an LVM, you have to load DiskSuite, and the documentation leaves a great deal to be desired.
• UFS, Sun's native file system, supports journaling, but is loaded by default without it and very little mention is made of the importance of turning it on.
• Solaris is certainly better than HP-UX with /etc/system (versus rebuilding the HP-UX kernel every time you change SHMMAX). However, AFAIK, Solaris must be rebooted for changes to /etc/system to take effect. I know that HP-UX is very recently getting dynamic kernel tunables, I hope Solaris is as well. I certainly enjoy them in Linux.
• Some of this stuff is really old. Seriously, do we really need both awk and nawk? HP-UX standardized on nawk, but really we should all just switch to gawk.
• Along these lines, it's time to remove every SysV utility that can be replaced by a GNU equivalent. Every commercial UNIX should be doing this.
• Both Sun and HP are still trying to get out of Motif/CDE. What's the holdup? CDE on my workstation makes other people ask me if I drive an Edsel.

Solaris suffers from the same problem as all commercial UNIX: the question of GNU integration. They now rely upon GPL utilities in a BIG way, but they are hesitant to integrate them properly and make them work well. In the meantime, there is enough SysV cruft that hasn't been touched in years that you could realistically call this OS "Solaris the Living Dead."

It's time for Sun to concentrate on the OS components that it does well, and throw everything else to GNU.

Re:Solaris drawbacks

[Anonymous Coward]

This is an admirable list, I guess you might actually have had to work with this OS :)

Re:Solaris drawbacks

[Get Behind the Mule]

• Some of this stuff is really old. Seriously, do we really need both awk and nawk? HP-UX standardized on nawk, but really we should all just switch to gawk.
• Along these lines, it's time to remove every SysV utility that can be replaced by a GNU equivalent. Every commercial UNIX should be doing this.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, ...

As old as this stuff is, removing it would place a monstrous burden on untold numbers of sysadmins and programmers out there. Believe it or not, very many of them are critically dependent on utilities that are really old. They wrote scripts eons ago that work well, and their systems depend on them. They would be hamstrung to the point of desperation if they disappeared.

Re:Solaris drawbacks

[pmz]

The Solaris package system is an abomination.

At least, the Sun package database (/var/sadm/install/contents) is plain text and fully greppable. It is actually very nice. RPM would be a good choice if it didn't suffer so much from bloating featuritis.

If you want an LVM, you have to load DiskSuite, and the documentation leaves a great deal to be desired.

The DiskSuite documentation is fine. I learned DiskSuite all by myself just using the Answerbook and the man pages.

UFS, Sun's native file system, supports journaling, but is loaded by default without it and very little mention is made of the importance of turning it on.

People who really want and need journaling already understand its importance.

I know that HP-UX is very recently getting dynamic kernel tunables, I hope Solaris is as well. I certainly enjoy them in Linux.

The Solaris `ndd` command allows run-time changes to many tunable paramters for device drivers. The 'mdb' man page mentions some things about modifying a live system kernel, but I have never tried it.

Some of this stuff is really old.

Some of Sun's paying customers are pretty old, too.

it's time to remove every SysV utility that can be replaced by a GNU equivalent.

Only after those GNU "equivalents" are actually standards-compliant. Also, the GNU tools often abandon the KISS philosophy of UNIX, which often gets in my way (yes, extra features can be a PITA). It slices, it dices, it cures the common cold...but I just want a text editor!

CDE on my workstation makes other people ask me if I drive an Edsel.

CDE does exactly what it was intended to do. It is very functional and useful and is very appropriate for a workstation. However, Sun is responding to the "eye candy" kids out there by adopting GNOME as a replacement for CDE.

Re:Solaris drawbacks

[larien]

Ok, let's pick some holes in the arguments:

• patchck; yup, the old version at least gave you a plain text file. However, there's nothing stopping you writing a wrapper round it to parse things out.
• I've managed to get perl extensions installed using gcc; you just have to edit the Makefile to use gcc instead of cc. Alternatively, make a symlink from /usr/bin/cc to /usr/local/bin/gcc.
• PKZIP=zip/unzip; that does more than bzip2, even if bzip2 does have a better compression algorithm. I'm not sure where this comes into the package management in any case.
• LVM: the documentation on docs.sun.com (i.e. the same as the answerbooks) is fine. I've set up mirrors, concats, stripes and RAID-5 volumes using that documentation.
• If your admins don't know about UFS logging, hire better admins. There are also occasions when it isn't always prudent to enable ufs logging. That said, I do think it may well be about time they enabled it by default.
• Setting kernel parameters: as someone has said, some can be set with ndd; adb is available for some others, although a reboot is required for others with /etc/system. At least with /etc/system, if it goes wrong, you can at least boot from CD and edit the file (unless you use VXVM for your root disks or something wacky like that).
• What's the hardship in having awk, nawk *awk all on one system? It takes mebbe a meg of disk space and keeps $DEITY knows how many user scripts working.
• SysV commands should only be replaced as and when their GNU equivalents provide drop-in functionality; i.e. they respond to all the flags that the SysV ones do in the same manner. Again, some scripts may rely on some arcane switch and/or the output from the command being absolutely identical.
• CDE fulfilled a design goal, that being all Unices looked identical (or at least similar). I personally don't see the problem with CDE, even if it doesn't have all the bells and whistles of Gnome/KDE.

As I've implied above, the SysV "cruft" is there for the end users; even if you don't use any of it, what is the harm in it staying? The harm in removing it is to break a large portion of user scripts and completely piss off your customer base, many of whom have large wodges of spending power.

Re:Solaris drawbacks

[xyloplax]

1) patchck and Patch Manager both suck. I use patch bundles from Sun, which RH lacks. up2date sucks if you are not a paying customer and traffic is high (such as with any popular security problem). apt-get rocks.

2)Install in /usr/local and put that first in path. I have never had to manage the Solaris default Perl. CPAN works with the /usr/local copy and all the solaris perl-dependent scripts have /bin/perl hardcoded in the shebang.

3)Solaris package system needs improvement, but I have learned to like it. PKZIP? What are you talking about? The Sol pkg format is a bunch of directories, a checksum/mapping file, and an info file. It is not zipped. Neither are datastreams made by pkgtrans. The BSD pkg format is a tar.gz file, and I find that it's the simplest out there.

4)SDS is mildly retarded in that you really should have more than 3 disks for the state databases not to barf all over the place if you lose a disk. I am no fan of the Linux version, either, though. Veritas is my friend, but is $$$.

5)UFS non-default journaling pisses me off.

6)HP-UX is one of the most irritating operating systems ever invented. God, it does not come with a trace utility, nor a sniffer, and iostat has ONE option. Some Solaris tunables are dynamic, in that you can use adb (hahaha) to do it. I wish Sun would do sysctl.

7)Oh you mean like /usr/bin/ta? Well that's nothing. Try every unix distro in the world having /usr/bin/ed in it. Ed, along with nroff, were on AT&T Unix version 1.0.0

8)Agreed, but won't happen for backwards compat reasons. Sun just got around to adding the -h option to things like df and du in Sol 9. I don't blame Sun for all of that stuff thought: OpenSSH no longer supports ports, so Sun did the right thing with distributing thier own version with Sol 9, and even not trying to do privsep until the wrinkles are ironed out. As for the other GNU utils, Sol 9 comes with some on the stock OS and on the Companion CD. Though Sol 9 comes with Gnu equivs prefixed with "g" which makes the need for a for loop to wrap "ln" to symlink to the proper names. Unfortunately they need to include SysV tar to untar all of the old SysV tars out there!

9)I have sucessfully avoided using Sun as an X terminal for years. Long live Linux, FreeBSD and (recently) cygwin.

10)See 8) Perhaps GNU should work on being compatible with all the SysV variants of it's utils? I doubt that would work in practice though. RMS would throw a clot.

11)Sun emasculated Linux by not supporting it for high-end server features. Once Linux can do Dynamic System Domains, DR and AP on SPARC, it will be a landmark point for Linux.

Re:Solaris drawbacks

[Anonymous Coward]

5)UFS non-default journaling pisses me off.

Having problems editing files? or customizing your jumpstart? Believe it or not, but there are situations where logging yields worse performance than with .. and if you're a comptent admin with a stable system you shouldn't be crashing that much anyways..

11)Sun emasculated Linux by not supporting it for high-end server features. Once Linux can do Dynamic System Domains, DR and AP on SPARC, it will be a landmark point for Linux.

What do you expect? The linux community only recently realized that an interruptible kernel was really a good idea, and with the critical mass of modules and code going into the kernel - you know what a nightmare of support that would be?

Re:Solaris drawbacks

[bolthole]

Solaris perl is built with Sun's C compiler, and this perl version cannot be extended by gcc. If you lack Sun cc and you need to extend perl, then you must reinstall in a separate location and then manage two installations.

Err, no, you just need to know enough perl, to know that you need to hunt down and adjust Config.pm to use gcc and corresponding flags instead of the default SunCC stuff.

Re:Solaris drawbacks

[Tpenta]

You could also simply install perl from the companion cd. It installs in /usr/local and is compiled with gcc.

I've done this, it works fine.

Re:Solaris drawbacks

[bolthole]

reasonable idea, wrong place.
stuff that installs to /usr/local is from www.sunfreeware.com, NOT "the companion cd".

Re:Solaris drawbacks

[Tpenta]

You are of course correct, the stuff from the companion installs in /opt.

It's taken them long enough...

[iiioxx]

Sun made a colossal mistake the day they announced that Solaris x86 version 9 would be indefinitely deferred. And I think they realized it about 10 minutes after they announced it. They drastically overestimated the popularity of the Sun hardware platform, and totally discounted the fact that a lot of budding sysadmins would like to cut their teeth on Solaris, but can't afford a Sun Blade to do it. Ever since then, they've been trying to backpeddle while saving face. Looks like they've almost gotten back to where they started. Now they just need to offer Solaris x86 version 9 as an option of the Free Solaris program ($95 for unlimited non-commercial use on up to 8 cpus) and we'll be back to the parity of platforms we had two years ago.

Re:As a stockholder and code monkey

[xdroop]

Different tools for different jobs. Linux is a good general purpose OS with lots of software available for it.

On the other hand, I need an OS to serve NFS to my sparc. (IDE disks are cheaper than SCSI.) To put it mildly, Linux (with kernels 2.2 and 2.4) sucked, so I run Solaris/x86. I don't need any of the other crap that comes with Linux -- no, I need an NFS file server.

I probably should have tried a BSD, but I had Solaris/X86 and found it to do what I needed it to.

I for one am glad to see a general availability of Solaris 9 for x86.

Easy solution...

[emil]

Sun submits patches to the relevant projects that guarantee behavioral compatibility.

The "we can't upgrade because stuff will break" crowd really gets on my nerves sometimes.

Re:Easy solution...

[duck_prime]

Sun submits patches to the relevant projects that guarantee behavioral compatibility.

The "we can't upgrade because stuff will break" crowd really gets on my nerves sometimes.

On the other hand, there is much serenity and beauty in knowing that you can write your scripts and then not worry about having to rewrite them every 3 years.

Sure, Sun could conceivably patch all the gnu utils so that they have a system V compatibility mode, but it would likely not work out (what do you mean the "-x" flag is "already taken"? What do we do now?). Seems like a huge effort for exactly zero gain, unless I'm missing something.

Please advise.

Re:Easy solution...

[irix]

The "we can't upgrade because stuff will break" crowd really gets on my nerves sometimes.

You must be a Solaris sysadmin. Let me give you a Solaris developer perspective :-)

I have complicated package install scripts that rely on many of the old Solaris SysV stuff to be there. If it isn't, things will almost certainly break.

The suggestion I would have is put the GNU stuff in /usr/local/bin for now - and this is exactly what Sun is doing. After some period of time, announce that you are deprecating the SysV coammands. Some period of time later (several releases) consider reversing the situation - make the GNU stuff the default, leave the old commands somewhere else.

We still have plenty of customers running Solaris 7. When you have high availablility high transaction systems, you make upgrade moves slowly and carefully. I know this isn't the way Linux works, but Sun plays in somewhat of a different market.

Re:Easy solution...

[emil]

Easy, we call it SunOS 3.

What, you had scripts that broke between SunOS 4.1.3 and Solaris 2?

Sun wants to be on the desktop. Solairis is a dinosaur. Linux isn't going to work out anytime soon. Something has to change.

Re:Easy solution...

[emil]

The suggestion I would have is put the GNU stuff in /usr/local/bin for now - and this is exactly what Sun is doing.

So you're telling me that Sun's current attitude towards GNU is right? You don't deal with perl much, do you?

The situation is technically similar to RedHat 7, where two versions of gcc were included - it's not such a drastic piece of brain damage, but the effect is much longer. The system is fragmented and is not true to itself.

Here is what I really suggest that Sun do: take Red Hat Linux - remove the Linux, insert the Solaris kernel, and the minimum of supporting utilities to make it run. Maintain LSB status if at all possible.

Then offer Solaris/Classic and Solaris/GNU. Certify each for the high-end. Announce that they will merge into sunos 3 within 5 years.

If Sun really wants to set the world on fire, GPL the kernel, then integrate SGI's XFS into Solaris as a native filesystem.

And the day that HP-UX/Itanium was available for purchase, Solaris/Itanium should have been available for free - the port is finished and is sitting on a shelf at Sun - but I digress.

Really, Sun can end the Linux question anytime they want - just by opening their kernel. Who else can claim this? Who else has come so close?

Re:Easy solution...

[iainr]

Umm no, if Sun want to ship a version of Linux then they'll produce their own release....oh hang on they're doing that now with Sun Linux 5. The higher end Sun market want an OS that will stay stable (in terms of how the OS looks to applications) for a long long time and Sun don't have the finances and or the developers in order to maintain two parallel OS tracks like that. Hell they're having trouble keeping one OS on two platforms.

Sun take backward compatibility very seriously, there are people running Sunos 4.x binaries on Solaris 8.

Oh and why would they market it as Sunos 3 that would be several steps backwards surely

Re:Easy solution...

[emil]

Umm no, Sun's Linux is a repackaged Red Hat Advanced Server. I believe that Red Hat has some preferential access to OpenOffice in exchange.

There is definitely a higher-end crowd that wants a stable platform. There is also a higher-end crowd that likes the latest tools.

And if Sun takes backward-compatibility so seriously, then I'll just mail you my IPX and you can load Solaris 9 on it.

And gawk is several steps backward from awk/nawk? Really?

Re:Easy solution...

[irix]

So you're telling me that Sun's current attitude towards GNU is right? You don't deal with perl much, do you?

Well, I do, but I have the Sun compiler, so I am not so concerned. As long as Sun ships their own compiler, it makes sense to ship Perl compiled against it, no?

If they start shipping gcc as part of the core Solaris install then maybe, but otherwise I don't think it makes any sense.

Re:Easy solution...

[iainr]

yes, but it's sun's release, they are providing the support on the hardware and though I've not seen it I'm assuming they've tweaked some things.
Certainly they've had the stuff long enough to play around with it.

The main advantage Linux has over x86 is the device driver support and linux is so strong in this that I don't see how Sun is going to make any headway by shipping SUNOS 5.9 kernels with gnu software. If I were involved with the x86 team I would be trying to figure out a way to use the linux driver code base (or the people developing it).

How close to the latest tools do they want to get, the latest release, the latest beta release? the latest alpha release? yesterdays cvs code? which should Sun support? I've no idea what kind of testing and validation Sun do with the software they do use but I'm assuming that the

Well, we were talking in terms of solid long-lived things like software and OS's not ephemeral here today and gone tomorrow hardware but if Sun are still allowing academic source code licenses I'll take a shot, mail it to

Iain Rae
11 Burnside Terrace
Biggar
Lanarkshire
Scotland
ML12 6BY

And no I don't see gawk as several steps backwards from awk/nawk, not having used SunOS 3.x I wasn't aware that it was shipped with it. I'm still puzzled thoug, why you want sun to go
SunOS 1->2->3->4->5->6?->3
but I suppose It's no sillier that going
Solaris 1->2->7->8->9
and
linux 5->???? ;)

Re:Easy solution...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually I've been storing GNU stuff in /dev/null.

If I wanted to use Communism I'd move to Cuba!

Solaris x86 just doesn't fit

[southpolesammy]

While I think that Solaris x86 would have been a good idea if it had caught on somewhat better, it hasn't and the Linux/*BSD world has more or less taken over the x86 platform for UNIX-like OS's.

Based on this, it would be in Sun's best interest to do one of two things. Either bring Solaris (both SPARC & x86) upto speed with the standard offerings of Linux/*BSD with the GNU software included and supported, or pull out completely of the x86 arena and reallocate company funds on a strengthening of the SPARC platform.

If it were me, I'd do the latter since there is a double whammy with Solaris x86 which is that users aren't buying Sun hardware, and therefore do not need hardware support either which hits them both on the sale and on the ongoing support contracts. If they can get people to stay only on the SPARC platform, it benefits Sun's bottom-line better, while allowing them to better focus on their own products.

xsun/xfree86 drivers

[StandardDeviant]

There's a package you can download that is a compilation of XFree86 drivers "packaged" to work with xsun (for the !clued, that's sun's X11 implementation). This is, for example, the easiest way to get your Nvidia card to work if you decide to give solaris x86 a shot on said hardware... Also it apparently helps out a lot with laptop support. Here's the URL.

Open Source Solaris?

[brandonY]

If they release the source for all of their tools, too, this means that suddenly open source has a decent debugger, dbx, a compiler that rivals gcc, and lint! Joy!

WARNING: PetsWarehouse is no longer Slashdotted!

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry for the offtopic post, but this is important.

See this story from yesterday for more details. Pets Warehouse has recovered from the Slashdot Effect and is back up. Click the link, click the link, click the link! Don't let Robert Novak, Slashdot enemy-of-the-month, earn one more dollar from his website!!!

Also, e-mail them and tell them what you think! Call them at 1-800-991-3299 from a payphone: they'll have to pay for the 1-800 call *and* for the payphone usage!

Show them the POWER of Slashdot!

Re:As a stockholder and code monkey

[4rt00r]

As a stockholder

Regarding the stock I think it's time to sell the fucking Sun considering the .Not offer from M$ wich will eventualy take a share of the enterprise market and the forthcomming battle in the 64-bit CPU market .

Jboss issue.

Personally I think that Sun and co. (M$, IBM etc) will allways play like that if there would be a chance . They play _that_ game because they CAN afford it . Sun considers Java technology its own and I think it has the right after what has given to the Java OpenSource projects in general , the reward is big , controlling of the JCP , but at least Sun dont have controll on the XML technology which would make thing frightening . I dont belive that a company chooses one product based only on price exp a server-side component of the bussiness . Would JBosss had made a difference in the entry-market against .Not offerings from M$ . I strongly doubt that coz M$ is still vaporware at the momment and Sun has all the tools to play the _big guy_ , and he does it well .

It took forever (and a day) for them to roll out something faster than a 500mhz sparc.

100% true . But did the market really suffered from this , Sun created the Sparc market .

why the *hell* would anyone want to do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

What's wrong with the Solaris commands? Why do we need to break compatibility with GNU commands? WHY?!? do you *need* bash (bloated again shell)? If I see one more script with #!/bin/bash in the header, I swear I'll castrate the developer...
(and I use the term "developer" loosely).

What do you get for your $99?

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

Would you get full-up server apps or would it be some silly workstation configuration?

Re:dual booting solaris? - GRUB N/T

[Reglar_Joe]

SSIA

What about AIX/HP-UX?

[atlantis_tin]

Even AIX, HP_UX, etc. 'were designed and built to the specifications ... ' - but they don't have the kind of reputation as Solaris does. So, can we give Sun the credit it deserves?

suns linux strategy??

[JDizzy]

Interesting, it seems sun is going to sell SOlaris 9 for $99 USD. But what about all those grand plans they had for Linux? I mean, at one point Sun was going to make Linux kernel + Solaris userland to be the x86 mega system. That way Solaris on x86 would have all the advantages of open source driver development. Lets face it, this is a much better idea that the one currently being driven my Sun to sell Solaris 9 on Intel, and just continue to ride sick horse. Going down this path means more money is being spent at Sun on the Intel side of things, and that takes away from the Sparc side of stuff. Linux kernel already has like 10x more supported hardware that the Solaris kernel. Yeah, the Solaris engineers can look at the Linux kernel and reverse engineer code for their own, but isn't that just stupid when you could just have the linux kernel? Besides, the people who use x86 solaris is mainly schools that teach unix to students, and cannot afford a sparc box in front of each student, or some other institution that is penny-pinching. SO the people they are hurting is the people who might be helping Sun the most.

Re:As a stockholder and code monkey

[(H)elix1]

How do you say... I can only loose about $5 more a share (pre-split price). Taking the loss might be worth more than holding on... have to run some tax numbers.

The JBoss thing bothered me as a develper. Shipping something more than reference J2EE SDK's -- that hurts partners, that makes a difference where effort and tuning goes, which has a bad effect on share price

yay for Sun!

[Anonymous Coward]

Solaris is extraordinarily well-written. It's better than BSD code, which is itself much better than linux kernel code. I'm glad Sun is making this great OS (partly derived from BSD heritage and SYSV heritage) available for the ubiquitous PC. With commercial Solaris and freely available FreeBSD, there is no reason to run linux other than not knowing there are better choices.

Re:yay for Sun!

[4rt00r]

It's better than BSD code, which is itself much better than linux kernel code

Not nessesarily , BSD is highly tweaked esp for the x86 where Solaris lags way behind .

I'm glad Sun is making this great OS (partly derived from BSD heritage and SYSV heritage) available for the ubiquitous PC.

That was tiiiime ago and PC isn't that ubiquitos on the servers arena .

With commercial Solaris and freely available FreeBSD, there is no reason to run linux other than not knowing there are better choices.

This is true . Linuz sucks alot

Re:As a stockholder and code monkey

[4rt00r]

Dunno . That Your problem Buddy . I myself was burned out at the RedHat Linux fiasco . But Sun _will_ rise someday if that stays for a week , be careful . For the momment personally I'm considering some subsuidary commpanies that rely on J2EE and .Not technology , but more on .Not . People belive in M$ . Thats all I want . Hope something will come out . Dunno .

About the JBoss , I dont think it really has any huge impact on the arena considering there are many better offers out there . And noone gives a shit as it comes up to shares , erverybody is your partner , shares are temporary stuff .

Sun's greatest contributions...

[zak]

SunOS=>SVR 4:
Proper virtual memory.
Vnodes.
LWPs.
Fine-grained, adaptive kernel locks.
POSIX compliance.
The list is very very very long. People forget that, vanilla as Solaris may seem, Sun was probably the biggest contributor to Unix "state of the art" (except for SGI and Sequent's work on integrating CC/NUMA into a Unix system). Linux is just barely starting to scratch the surface of where Sun was 5-7 years ago, as far as kernel and userspace libs are concerned.

Re:As a stockholder and code monkey

[Tpenta]

EOL'd?????

No, it was never EOL'd. It was deferred. There is a big difference. From everything that I am reading and hearing. All that stopped happened was that it was not brought to market. Development never stopped.

[I am also a stockholder]

Last Post!

[alpg]

Real software engineers don't debug programs, they verify correctness.
This process doesn't necessarily involve execution of anything on a
computer, except perhaps a Correctness Verification Aid package.

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