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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."
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
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-.
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
- 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.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?
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.
"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.
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.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.