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Solaris 9 Support On x86 - But With A Price
choka writes "According to this ZDNet UK article, Solaris 9 will return to x86 platform for $99 instead of being free. There will also be a $20 early access version for testing. Support and update will cost $75 per month. However there is no mention on the Solaris web site yet." There's more than just not being free -- originally, rumor had it that Sun was not going to be supporting, in a major way, Solaris 9 on x86 at all -- that decision has now been reversed. See our past article for information about the original decision.
both x86 versions and Sparc (I have an Ultra and I run x86 on a Dell Optiplex). Solaris is SLOW on x86 because of I/O. But as a server, it runs like a champ. The funny thing is, It takes a lONG time to get a usable system with Solaris. A default install is practically useless. It takes hours to install GNU tools, Apache and any other tools I need. I've been using Solaris for about a decade, and I STILL forget that you need to edit 2 files to change the IP. (/etc/ifconfig and /etc/nsswitch). I always thought that was dumb. I only remember that I screwed up when CDE no longer works. Oh well. I will not upgrade to x86_9 unless it has REAL benefits.
If you're not a Liberal in your 20's, then you have no heart.If you're still a Liberal in your 30's you have no brain.
You're mistaken. You can download patches from http://sunsolve.sun.com Support is for businesses who want someone to yell at or help replace machines or something like that. Realistically, you don't need to buy the support (I never have and my system is up to date in patches at least).
Here's the Heliopod blurb *cough*shameless plug*cough* from Oct 4:
By the way, TechTarget.com posted an interview with Chris Baker, Sun's Product Manager for Solaris x86. They discuss quite a few aspects of the OS, including support, driver development, and pricing plans. If you run x86, it's probably worth checking out.-- null
I haven't heard "Slowlaris" since the mid nineties. I guess the System V vs. BSD debate is still going strong. Or, more likely, the poster just thinks the term has a nice ring to it.
/.'ers.
History of the term "Slowlaris" (according to me):
A long time ago there was a mobo named SUN, the Stanford University Networking board. Some folks took this tech and turned it into a product.
They needed an OS for their computer and, after losing their way initially, they eventually stopped upon unix, the Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD). They used BSD as the base and created their OS, which they called, unimaginitivly enough, SunOS.
Time passed, Sun made more and more products, and eventually deciding on a multiprocessor architecture for their workstations. This decision ate up huge amounts of silicon and resulted in a dog of a machine called the sparc 10. The main problem was that there were no multithreaded applications for the multiprocessor hardware. That and the concentration on multiprocessor hardware meant that the cpus, on their own were pretty slow, AND, not to mention the fact that the cpus and mobos were so expensive, owing to the smp arch , that most clients could only afford 1 cpu.
Anyway, around this time Sun thought that, going forward they needed a better kernel to support all this smp shit, so they started on a new kernel, and, why stop there, a new layout to the entire OS.
About this time there was the BSD-SVR5 holy war going on. Most people probably don't realize that before MS, people actually used to argue about which unix was best.
So they renamed SunOS to Solaris 1 and then introduced a new SVR5 OS called Solaris 2. Nobody likes change and Solaris 2 didn't exactly make your sparc 10 run any faster, so most users kept on running SunOS (er. Soalris 1).
This is where the term "Slowlaris" came into vogue, the BSD'ers who didn't like the switch to system 5, talked up the fact that Solaris was sooo much slower than SunOS. Which was not entirely inaccurate, but the real issue was more likely the shitty software they were running on top of the OS.
And then NT and the MS marketing machine hit like an atom bomb and, if not for Sun and Gnu/Linux would probably have moved unix onto the os scrap heap with cpm, amiga, and all those other "speedy" os's loved by