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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."
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.
Karma: Non-existant. Due mostly to the fact that you smell funny and nobody likes you.
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.
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.
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?
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?
'Internet! Is that thing still around?' - Homer Simpson
As soon as FreeBSD and NetBSD implement good threading, there will be no need whatsoever to run Solaris.
:). I personally detest having to maintain a solaris (sparc) box for my job.
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
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?
"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.
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).
" 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.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
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)
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
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.
What is the state of Oracle on Linux today?
Amazing magic tricks
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?
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.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
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.
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)
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.
you should read everything on the internet as if it had "but I'm probably talking out of my ass" appended to it.
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.
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.
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
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.
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
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.
It isn't a lie if you belive it.