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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."
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-.
- 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.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.
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?
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.