Sun Solaris 9 for x86 for Evaluation

Rune Tønnesen writes "Sun has listent to their costomers, they have a released Sun Solaris 9 x86 for test and evaluation purposes, it can be downloaded ($20) as part of their OE Customer Early Access software.""

Comments

When it's out of testing, will it be free?

[Anonymous Coward]

If I understand correctly, Staroffice isn't free anymore, because when it was free, people believed it was inferior to the expensive Microsoft Office suite. This isn't an issue for Solaris, however. And Solaris 8 was available for free download. So when it's out of testing, could Solaris 9 for x86 be available for free?

Re:When it's out of testing, will it be free?

[blair1q]

StarOffice is listed at $79.95 for SOHO; less for larger license packs.

Sun should just give up. Looking at the website, they still don't know how to present information so that you can make a rational decision before committing money and very expensive time to installing and evaluating the product.

And they still present "point-and-click" interfaces as though they're something special and different. I can tell from here that unless I get some serious geek mojo going, downloading and running this is going to be a pain in the ass.

The only feature that seems competitive is their touting of "scalability", whatever they want to mean by that. But I've got three running computers in this room, and two on the floor that I could "scale" into the network, so why would I care about massive scalability?

Their market is small, their niche is narrow, and their execution is bush.

Same old, same old.

Re:When it's out of testing, will it be free?

[Anonymous Coward]

Give up? Yes, that's the answer.
Ignorance truly is bliss.

Re:When it's out of testing, will it be free?

[swordboy]

When it goes production, it will be free but you'll need to submit $20 in order to submit a bug report. ;)

Sigh...

This is one of those things that really gets me. If Sun was really worried about stability and security, they'd be giving it away for the masses to put through the ringer. Hell, they could even put up a few boxes on the internet for a "compromise the box and win a prize" type of test. The dollar value of different exploits could grow daily. Eventually, they'd have *proof* of the level of security available.

Actually, MS is the company with the money to do something like this. Can you imagine if they paid the world to hack/bug test the next version of Windows for a year prior to public release? And I'm not talking chump change. Pay the people well for documenting exploits and you'll have a secure OS. That might take a little longer with a Windows OS, but with $40 Billion USD in the bank, I'm sure that it could be arranged.

Today's "Big Hack" exploit is up to $90,000 USD.

Re:When it's out of testing, will it be free?

[lvdrproject]

Microsoft did challenge hackers to break into a Windows system, didn't they? Around Windows 2000, if i'm not mistaken?

:Lav

Re:When it's out of testing, will it be free?

[binaryDigit]

because when it was free, people believed it was inferior to the expensive Microsoft Office suite

Believed? It was significantly inferior. It was majorly slow and didn't behave in a way that people had gotten used to (at least those weaned in the Windoze/Office world). I haven't looked at a version in about 2 years or so, so it could be significantly better, but I doubt it.

Anyway, StarOffice was NEVER intended to be a MSO killer, Sun always intended it to be a Java showcase to prove that it could be used to make "real" enterprise apps (I won't even touch this subject).

Re:When it's out of testing, will it be free?

[Virus1984]

Around Windows 2000, if i'm not mistaken?

You're not

Re:When it's out of testing, will it be free?

[runenfool]

Staroffice was not written in Java, so I'm not sure where you get the impression it was meant to be a Java showcase.

Sun purchased the software from a German company at version 5 (the one you probably used 2 years ago). Version 6 is a big jump in usability and performance (even though launch speed is slow).

Is it MSO? No, but its much cheaper and it get the jobs done. Sound familiar?

If you want to look at a very similar product, go to www.openoffice.org and download the open source cousin of StarOffice. Its not great, but its not bad - and its free!

Re:When it's out of testing, will it be free?

[TheAncientHacker]

StarOffice was NEVER intended to be a MSO killer, Sun always intended it to be a Java showcase...

Actually it was exactly,/b> intended to be a Microsoft Office killer. Sun expected Java to neutralize the advantages of the Intel/Microsoft architecture. The goal was to make Java universal and then get corporate users switched over to dumb Java terminals attached to SUN mainframes running Oracle databases. This would end all those pesky Personal computers and return things back to a centralized architecture with control back with IT management rather than the users. And that would return the fat profits of the old Mainframe/Mini days of the 60s and 70s. You still see McNealy and Ellison dream of this in every speech they make. Luckily, some of us still remember white coat/glass house computing...

Re:When it's out of testing, will it be free?

[TheAncientHacker]

sigh Just when you think you don't need to hit preview one more time... It should have read


StarOffice was NEVER intended to be a MSO killer, Sun always intended it to be a Java showcase...

Actually it was exactly intended to be a Microsoft Office killer. Sun expected Java to neutralize the advantages of the Intel/Microsoft architecture. The goal was to make Java universal and then get corporate users switched over to dumb Java terminals attached to SUN mainframes running Oracle databases. This would end all those pesky Personal computers and return things back to a centralized architecture with control back with IT management rather than the users. And that would return the fat profits of the old Mainframe/Mini days of the 60s and 70s. You still see McNealy and Ellison dream of this in every speech they make. Luckily, some of us still remember white coat/glass house computing...

Re:When it's out of testing, will it be free?

[zerocool^]

Their market is small, their niche is narrow, and their execution is bush.

... and their enterprise computers are just about the best in the business. If you want a powerful mainframe type computer, Sun is your go-to guy. They offer superrior hardware (Ultra III risc chips, etc), great service, and a fantastic operating system. I've heard people claim that solaris sucks because it's so archaic. This is exactly why it works so well - it's been around for a long time, and it's tried and tested.

There's an age-old balance, people. It's called ease-of-use versus power-and-stability. Solaris is not easy to use. It's harder to use than linux. But compare solars 7 to linux... solaris scales well down to the 12 Mhz sun 4c IPC range, while the same OS works great for enterprise servers with 64 Ultra III 500Mhz risc chips. That's scalability. It wasn't until solaris 8 that they gave up on the 4c arch. The 4m still scales well (50-110 mhz range, etc).

If you're looking to buy a 1.3 million dollar computer, you look at sun. The small-computer market isn't the majority of their business dollars. It's the top dogs. Yet, they still listen to the people who like solaris enough to want to use it on x86. How can you fault them for this?

Granted, 1.3 million dollar computers make up a small "niche" of the market. But someone has to fill it, and there is a lot of cash in 1.3 million.

Re:When it's out of testing, will it be free?

[lifeless]

Methinks you mean StarPortal. Star^H^H^H^HOpenOffice was not written in Java. Google on StarPortal.

Re:When it's out of testing, will it be free?

[MShook]

The truth is that it doesn't scale down so well. If you can do the comparison on a small machine 2 or 4 cpus, you'll see that bsd or linux are faster. Slowlaris^WSolaris is really optimised for the big irons not the smaller machines.

Re:When it's out of testing, will it be free?

[alsta]

It will not be free.

http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/02/11/2 6/ 021126hnsolaris.xml?s=IDGNS

"Sun, based in Santa Clara, Calif., posted the download Monday evening at the following Web site: http://wwws.sun.com/software/solaris/, charging users $20 for the software. Sun will follow up the early-access version with a completed release of Solaris 9 x86 in December. The company will probably charge $99 for a single-processor license, Loiacono said."

This is further amplified by the following site;

http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=1872

And I find that it's rather preposterous to say that Sun started charging for StarOffice because people thought its $0 price tag made it inferior to Microsoft Office.

Sun is a company like any other and it needs to see returns on investments. Sun did something rather silly which was to spend a lot of money on the dot-com bubble. The "Free for All" idea is basically dead today, as you can see many companies that used to be free are either gone or are charging. Yahoo! e-mail, PayPal and to a certain degree, even Slashdot has realised that one needs to make money in order to spend it. Hence the big bloated ads.

There is nothing wrong with charging for software. I am sure it's possible to make a business model based on GPL software thrive, but one can't do so unless it is certain that support and other added services are needed. Not everybody who downloads a free copy of Solaris x86 is going to buy a support contract. So charging a nominal, and $99 is not a lot of money, fee will at worst weed out the people who aren't serious about using it anyway.

Re:When it's out of testing, will it be free?

[swordboy]

Microsoft did challenge hackers to break into a Windows system, didn't they?

They did but the box was effectively DoS'ed by the participation so there was no benefit. Plus there was no cash incentive for people who found bugs/exploits.

So we are left to test the production OS. And just as it starts to mature, Microsoft drops support and releases another version. In 2005 when MS drops support for Win2K, it will likely be the most secure Windows OS available at that time. But then they shoot themselves in the foot and remove it from the product catalog. All for the love of money.

This is where the DOJ needs to intervene. It is too bad that MS owns the DOJ, unfortunately.

Re:When it's out of testing, will it be free?

[Anonymous Coward]

.. StarOffice was NEVER intended to be a MSO killer, Sun always intended it to be a Java showcase ..

Nonsense. At the time of purchase conversation was all about how MSO was some 40-45% of MS's profit, and how Sun was "slap" undercutting that by giving away SO via free download. There was also talk of how StarDivision had been working on providing SO's services via a web browser. There was not word one about Java, showcase, etc. (I work at a Sun VAI. There's Sun people around almost every day.)

Re "inferior", don't personally know (or much care) how it compares with MSO on Win(whatever), do know it is MUCH better than MSO on the desktop platforms we actually use (Solaris and Linux). Also that the CFO was sufficiently impressed to dump Excel in favor of StarCalc and have me swap out the accounting dept's W2K desktops for SunRays. Company is now a Microsoft free zone, making my workload _much_ lighter. :)

Re:When it's out of testing, will it be free?

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone bitches about Microsoft moving to a subscription model ("Maintenance" in the Real Computer world), but that sort of pricing structure does wonders for keeping old stable software in production.

My guess is that W2K will be considered good shit by enough businesses that they will pay the support fees to keep it alive until 2008, at least.

Re:When it's out of testing, will it be free?

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm, no. Pay the money and get a real OS, ya cheap bastard.!

Re:When it's out of testing, will it be free?

[Anonymous Coward]

uhhuh, superior hardware hey? How can you say that with a straight face, and then comment about their maximum 500Mhz risc chips?

Suppose you believe a 1Ghz G4 outdoes a pentium IV 4Ghz too?

Re:When it's out of testing, will it be free?

[Anonymous Coward]

>This is one of those things that really gets me. If Sun was really worried about stability and security, they'd be
>giving it away for the masses to put through the ringer. Hell, they could even put up a few boxes on the internet
>for a "compromise the box and win a prize" type of test. The dollar value of different exploits could grow daily.

You dont' actually believe that this is Sun's only procedure to check for bugs, do you? You can't maintain the quality of a product as large as Solaris with random testing as your only or primary means of testing.

The place to start is large amounts of automated regression testing and the use of other types of test tools. (Look at effect of implementing regression tests in GCC, the effect of the NFS testing tools on open source NFS implementations, and the effect of the Stanford compiler on the Linux kernel.) Then, once you've got the code in reasonably good condition, you give it to partners with a disciplined and rigorous testing methodology, and equipment suitable for stress testing. (I doubt many useful boundary conditions effecting my site will be found on Celeron 333s.) Once its passed through those tests, then its time to turn it loose for more testing by end users. Random testing by end users will identify bugs beyond the ones already found and fixed previous to this release. However Sun would have to be run by fools if random testing by end users just prior to release was their only, or even primary, testing procedure.

It is also worth keeping in mind that most of the code for this release has already been proven in the Sparc releases. Sun's goal for Solaris X86 has always been that it be bug for bug compatible. Most of the source tree is the same code.

>Eventually, they'd have *proof* of the level of security available.

Actually, they would have no such thing. Lack of a known exploit does not constitute proof that no exploit is possible.

Re:When it's out of testing, will it be free?

[KewlPC]

As someone who uses StarOffice all the time, I can safely assure you that it is easy to use and install. What's more, it has probably the best at reading and writing MS Word files aside from MS Word itself. Toss in the fact that it runs on several platforms (Windows, Linux, Solaris, probably others), and you've got a damn nice alternative to MS Word/Office.

Last I heard, it was still free for Solaris users.

Re:When it's out of testing, will it be free?

[binaryDigit]

Java was intended to be the killer app, not SO (and as I've been corrected, SO is not a Java app). In any case, Sun always had intended to "give away" SO and even back then M$ was not shaking in their boots. Sun might have fancied thoughts of SO somehow taking some good market share, but doubt that internally they were hanging any hopes on it.

Re:When it's out of testing, will it be free?

[binaryDigit]

I am indeed wrong about SO being a Java app, my bad. But I still hold that Sun never seriously thought that they could make LARGE inroads into the MSO market. They were certainly hoping that on the platforms that M$ ignored that they could secure that market, but in the end, nobody cared since Solaris/Linux/OS2 never amounted to enough on the desktop to make SO even a blip. BTW, I have also heard good things about StarCalc, I just don't need a spreadsheet in my day to day to get past the other negatives.

Re:When it's out of testing, will it be free?

[calidoscope]

And I find that it's rather preposterous to say that Sun started charging for StarOffice because people thought its $0 price tag made it inferior to Microsoft Office.

Apparently one German Bank told Sun that while StarOffice fitted their needs better than M$ Office, they decided to go the M$ route. Reason being is that they were afraid that Sun would not have the same interest maintaining StarOffice if it was free.

There is some non-Sun code in Solaris and Sun does owe royalties for distributing copies of Solaris. One example is the PostScript code licensed from Adobe. I've heard there is a bit of code copyrighted by M$ itself (from the Xenix days).

Re:When it's out of testing, will it be free?

[TheAncientHacker]

*O as released wasn't a Java app but it was intended that it would become one.

Re:When it's out of testing, will it be free?

[cerberusti]

Suppose you believe a 1Ghz G4 outdoes a pentium IV 4Ghz too?

That depends upon what it is doing, in some cases, yes, yes it does.

Re:When it's out of testing, will it be free?

[bolthole]

Informative? How does this article rate "informative"? There is no actual INFORMATION given. Just a vague claim.

" If you can do the comparison on a small machine 2 or 4 cpus, you'll see that bsd or linux are faster."

Faster at what? Terminal velocity,, after throwing the machine out of a hi-rise window? (Meaningless Index of Plummeting Speed) How much faster?

In all cases, in all configurations, or "Well, I tested it on my 64megs of RAM desktop, and linux runs faster, d00d!"

There are configurations where Solaris x86 is slower. There are configurations where Solaris x86 is comparable. There are hardware+load configurations where Solaris x86 is FASTER.

Re:When it's out of testing, will it be free?

[bolthole]

This is one of those things that really gets me. If Sun was really worried about stability and security, they'd be giving it away for the masses to put through the ringer.

You have it exactly backwards. Solaris itself is ALREADY more stable than the average "distro".

Now on the other hand, there are certain solaris x86 drivers that definitely need improving. But Sun being a commercial entity, they tend to get improved when money comes in to improve them. EG: You BUY A SUPPORT CONTRACT, and file a bug.

Re:When it's out of testing, will it be free?

[the gnat]

Except Sun's hardware is demonstrably inferior to most of the other stuff in its class. Sun has a few things going for it that make it the market leader, and they do make nice boxes, but they're not exactly supercomputers.

SGI has made much better computers for a long time; the Origin series blows away any Sun in terms of scalability and price/performance. SGI got into the game too late to have dotcoms lusting over its boxes, and no one will ever brag about their huge Oracle database running on an SGI. Plus, SGI always appears to be headed for the toilet. Still, their OS runs on my old Indigo and on boxes up to 1024 processors. Sun just hit 172 procs, I think. And they don't have anything like NumaFlex.

IBM's Power 4 is much the same deal, except that IBM has a better future and huge existing customer base. Alpha, for sure, and probably PA-RISC as well are superior to the UltraSparc architecture. My impression is that Sun ate up the midrange/lowend market with relatively inexpensive workstations and this enabled it to move into big iron (but I could be wrong- I haven't been doing this for very long). They didn't start making really large machines until they and SGI strip-mined Cray; SGI got the better technology out of that deal.

I used to own an ancient SparcStation LX running 2.5.1, and I loved it- it was far superior to the PCs and Macs I'd used, and it wasn't fast but it didn't feel sluggish either. I liked Solaris just fine, but it didn't have nifty features that would have made it polished as well as powerful and stable. NeXTStep and Irix were more advanced workstation OSes at the time my box was made, but didn't catch on.

We bought an Origin 300 as a file server; we'd have been happy with Sun as well- they're not bad machines, and we were looking for anything better than a crappy dual-P3 Dell box. Unfortunately, a Sun of comparable power to the Origin would have cost more than 50% more and would actually have been less powerful. Um, no.

Re:When it's out of testing, will it be free?

[MShook]

Do your homework and look for fork, switching latency times, IPC speed, etc... between BSD, Linux and Solaris. You'll see that Solaris scales very well on huge machine but does a really poor job on small ones...

Re:When it's out of testing, will it be free?

[zerocool^]

We have some old 4m's (LX/Classics) that still work great. Basically, something i've noticed about Sparc chips is that they don't ever give up. I'm not sure how to quantify this... On an x86 chip, if you slam it with processes, usage, whatever, sometimes they choke. Sparc chips just keep chugging. They may be working slower than they are getting requests for CPU time, but they just keep chugging along.

I don't know, i've never used anything but Sun and x86 for hosting, and, while I'd always buy an x86 because of the fact that I prefer linux and am cheap, I can say that the Sparc hardware, in my personal expierence, is higher quality.

Re:When it's out of testing, will it be free?

[zerocool^]

Suppose you believe a 1Ghz G4 outdoes a pentium IV 4Ghz too?


It is almost as fast in Distributed.net calculations.

No, what I'm saying is:
our 4x300 Mhz UltraSparc II system w/ 1 GB of ram compiles things faster than a dual p-3 1.4 w/ 3 GB of ram. Just as I stated in the origional post.

Re:When it's out of testing, will it be free?

[bolthole]

spoken like someone who believes in benchmarks too much. There have already been posts by people who have specific examples of where solaris outperforms linux and BSD. (mainly in threading cases).

Not to mention that you are misusing the phrase "scales". Yes, linux has lower latency times in many categories. Thats because it is designed to be a desktop/narrow focus OS. That makes it faster on smaller machines, for quite a few purposes. However, that doesnt make it "scale better" than solaris. Just the opposite.

One definition of "scales" is "can run on bigger machines". Obviously, solaris has linux beat. But another definition is "can handle large loads well". Solaris handles those well too, because that is what it is *designed for*. Whereas linux is designed for low latency, non-max-loaded systems. Which means that after a certain point, linux tanks, whereas solaris degrades more gracefully under load.

Quick Question

[Alethes]

Does Sun make most of their money with their really nice hardware? If that's the case, what are the chances they could be considering opening the source for Solaris? I admit I'm fairly ignorant about Solaris, but it seems like this is a good example of a company that could benefit from opening the source of their software by, perhaps, generating a bigger demand for their hardware.

Re:Quick Question

[tmark]

If Sun does make most of their money from their really nice hardware, how are they possibly going to benefit from opening the source ? By having everyone run Solaris on commodity x86 boxes ?

Re:Quick Question

[Temkin]

They don't own all the code. Some of it belongs to whomever owns "real Unix" this week. Other bits are licensed from various other parties.

Temkin

Re:Quick Question

[halftrack]

.., perhaps, generating a bigger demand for their hardware.

If they opensourced solaris under a normal OSS license (like GPL) people would start making it run on all kinds of hardware, and do optimization so that SUN's hardware only becomes an expensive alternative with few benefits.

Re:Quick Question

[user32.ExitWindowsEx]

They did have it open for a while back with Solaris 8.
I think you needed Sun's compiler to build it, though.

Re:Quick Question

[grahamsz]

I spoke to someone at sun about 2 years ago who said that they'd like to OS solaris but some of it is still based on code that they licensed years ago from companies which are no longer around.

I'm not sure if this is still the case, but it'd still require quite a lot of effort to replace this code with cleanly implemented open-sourceable code.

It'd probably make reasonably good economic sense since x86 boxes just cant compete with the higher end sun machines - either in performance or reliability.

Re:Quick Question

[Florian Weimer]

If that's the case, what are the chances they could be considering opening the source for Solaris?

Zilch. I doubt that Sun has full records which source file incorporated code from which source, so it will be a very significant effort to check that the publication under a free software license does not infringe on third party copyright.

And what's so cool about Solaris? The kernel? Maybe, but certainly only the SPARC version. The userland? Oh, please, get real!

It would be nice if Sun opened Java or the Forte compilers, granted, but this won't happen.

Re:Quick Question

[Alethes]

If they were really concerned about cheaper hardware running Solaris, would they want to have an x86 version?

Re:Quick Question

[sean23007]

Apple makes most of their money from hardware sales too, but they didn't open the source to (the important parts of) their operating system. Granted, for Apple the important parts of the OS (GUI/look&feel) can easily be transplanted to another OS, but if it did happen, people would have less incentive to buy Apple's OS, which in turn would give them less incentive to buy Apple hardware. Sun does not want to open their source because if they did, the best parts of the OS could be transplanted to another OS, such as Linux, which would not only make Linux the obviously superior choice on x86, but would also allow it to legitimately compete on Sun's hardware. Sun should not, and will not, open their code, because if they did they would marginalize the desire for their own products, including their hardware.

At least that's how I see it.

Re:Quick Question

[drinkypoo]

Due to encumbrance it makes more sense for Sun (etc) to port any useful code over to Linux over time and eventually discard their own Unix or use it solely for a trusted computing platform. SGI is most likely to go this route because everything that makes IRIX special is application-level crap and some silly widget sets. Sun is least likely I think for reasons pointed out in sibling posts, specifically the fact that they sell synergy, a system whose hardware and software you know will work together.

IBM is in the middle somewhere; on one hand people buy IBM (among other reasons) because they know IBM thinks things out the first and their systems don't change so fast. You get a solid (usually) platform which doesn't have a lot of flux. On the other hand IBM is rapidly porting everything in AIX worth a crap, like their volume manager and their filesystem, to Linux. They're also working on support for excessively multiprocessor systems, right? So soon there will be no reason to run AIX on RS/6000 except legacy apps. If IBM is smart they'll produce (and sell) an AIX emulation package for Linux and phase it out over time, putting their effort into Linux. Then they can make a new release of IBM/Linux (hee hee) whenever there's a new minor stable kernel revision, and point patches thereafter. It might also make sense just to use the linux kernel and stick with all of their commands and utilities. In fact, now that I consider it, this seems the most likely long-term road for IBM.

Solaris is a pretty cool OS from a Unix standpoint, they certainly do things in the Unix way. It's a healthy SVR4 clone with plenty of added functionality. Sun's package manager was clearly designed from a Unix mindset. Their init system is classic System V. The system is easy to work on because it doesn't attempt to shatter your preconceptions about Unix; It looks like Unix, smells like Unix, works like Unix. The only real bummer is that you have to pay a whole hell of a lot for a compiler from Sun, or run GCC which has traditionally generated pretty slow code on sparcs. I guess GCC 3 is supposed to be MUCH better in that regard.

Sun makes most of their money with a) really nice hardware and b) really big service contracts for really nice hardware and peripheral systems. Selling those little 400MHz PCI Ultrasparc III PCs has got to be making them almost no money, but as long as you're not actually losing cash, increasing market share is always good.

Re:Quick Question

[dagnabit]

How about the Solaris kernel being interchangeable with the Linux kernel? Keep all the other "outer layers" the same, but make the stable/scalable Solaris kernel plug into the operating system when it's needed, and use the Linux kernel for the lower-end servers, desktops, etc.

With their rumblings about Solaris becoming LSB compliant, this just might be a good tactic. Keep the best of both...

Re:Quick Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Java is open. Although Sun says you would have to be insane to want to compile it from source (I had no problems), it really is there.

Re:Quick Question

[jericho4.0]

Sun hardware is miles away from x86 boxen. Solaris does not an UltraSparc make.

Solaris on x86 boxes would allow easier intergration of workstations with Sun big iron, so it might ensure more hardware purchases in the future.

Re:Quick Question

[Florian Weimer]

Java is open.

No it isn't, at least not in the sense of the original poster. You can easily get most of the Solaris source code as well (again, third-party code is the main problem). Sun has offered the source code for ages.

Re:Quick Question

[sql*kitten]

Solaris on x86 boxes would allow easier intergration of workstations with Sun big iron, so it might ensure more hardware purchases in the future

And fewer sales of Sun workstations, which is why they don't do it.

Re:Quick Question

[Luminous Coward]

I spoke to someone at Sun about 2 years ago who said that they'd like to [open source] Solaris but some of it is still based on code that they licensed years ago from companies which are no longer around.

Do you mean these comapnies went bankrupt? When a company goes bankrupt, does the software it owns go into the public domain? What happens to the software?

Re:Quick Question

[yorgasor]

Does Sun make most of their money with their really nice hardware?

Heh, you've obviously not been paying attention to their stock value or earnings sheet. What makes you think they're making money? :)

Re:Quick Question

[kriston]

Solaris source code, the part of it they called the "Foundation", was available for the cost of media under a sign-and-fax license agreement about three years ago. It was cancelled shortly after it was introduced probably because the media kit cost $75 and the subset of Solaris source code they let you have was so minimal it couldn't even be used to build a minimal system.

Kris

Re:Quick Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm....perhaps you should read Sun's earnings sheet. Sun is generating cash "just fine" ($5.5B at last report).

Remember:

Profitability is an opinion but cash is a fact.

-Cripti

Re:Quick Question

[Zebbers]

ummm...this article is about x86 solaris. They are doing it. Whether or not they release the source is irrelevant to why Solaris on x86 boxes makes sense.

Re:Quick Question

[Reziac]

In that case, why not release what they do own, and let the OS community replace the rest?? Sun wins because they won't have to do that work themselves (tho they'll no doubt want to vet and tune the results themselves, particularly if it gets used in the next version), and everyone else wins because they'd get access to Solaris source.

Re:Quick Question

[KewlPC]

Unfortunately for you, high stock value does not equal profitability (just ask any ex-dotcom employee), nor does low stock value equal unprofitability. Right now just about everybody's stock value is in the toilet.

And Sun does make a nice chunk of change. Not on Microsoft levels, but they do well enough.

Re:Quick Question

[bovinewasteproduct]

If they open sourced solaris under a normal OSS license (like GPL)

Could never happen. Solaris is still a True Unix (tm) and contains massive amounts of licensed code.

Who does own the Unix rights now adays???

BWP

NICE

[Anonymous Coward]

cool been waiting for this. bought a sun box just so i could use solaris for school work.

first post i think (not flaming)

LX50 SERVER

[didiken]

Well the Solaris 9 x86 version is probably for their entry level LX50 servers

http://www.sun.com/servers/entry/lx50/index.html

what do you think ?

Re:LX50 SERVER

[cprice]

LX50 runs a sun version of Linux, hence the 'LX'.
Maybe you should read the specs on the LX50?

Re:LX50 SERVER

[Anonymous Coward]

Well the Solaris 9 x86 version is probably for their entry level LX50 servers

http://www.sun.com/servers/entry/lx50/index.html

what do you think ?

I think if you went to the original announcement, you'd see it was for both the LX50 and non-Sun hardware.

Re:LX50 SERVER

[Anonymous Coward]

the sun website says "with the option of either the Linux or Solaris[tm] operating environment" so your both right :)

Re:LX50 SERVER

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

Sun has wavered on the whole x86 thing. At first there was to be no Solaris x86 whatsoever, then saying it would be only on Sun hardware (essentially the LX50, i'm not sure if it was named that yet) then eventually saying it would have universal support as they did before.

In part, I don't really blame them for the whole "only on our hardware" thing. x86 margins are razor thin, and OS support essentially means you have to support everything under the sun (umm, sorry about that one). By limiting Solaris to the LX50, they'd lower their device driver and general support costs. They eventually backtracked under all the pressure, and made it a general solution.

Re:LX50 SERVER

[dagnabit]

Actually, Solaris for x86 is a 2nd fully-supported OS for the LX50. It does not come pre-installed on any LX50 though; buy the Solaris SKU and you get the CDs in the box, which you then have to install yourself.

Re:LX50 SERVER

[dohcvtec]

LX50 runs a sun version of Linux, hence the 'LX'.
You can order the LX50 preloaded with either SunLinux 5.0 or Solaris 8 x86. The website also mentions that the LX50 will be supported under Solaris 9 x86.

Re:LX50 SERVER

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you notice this if you click buy:

under operating systems:

Sun Linux 5.0 or Solaris 8 Intel

Sun Linux 5.0?

Was there a one two three or four?

Re:LX50 SERVER

[mlk]

Kind of, in the form of RedHat.
Sun Linux, is based on Cobalt Linux, which is based on RedHat.

Good!

[microbob]

I found Solaris/X86 (2.6->8.0) pretty stable.

In fact, it has been rock solid.

More so than Linux (Mandrake 8.2) on the very same hardware (serverworks mobos).

Re:Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

that's the point, Solaris built for stability

Re:Good!

[MoonRider]

More so than Linux

Also, Solaris x86 supports SMP much better than any free OS available.

Re:Good!

[jaavaaguru]

2.6->8.0

the box on my desk at work runs Solaris 8, which is called 2.8 when talking about compiling software for it. By 2.6->8.0, do you mean Solaris 2.6 to Solaris 2.8?

Re:Good!

[microbob]

By 2.6->8.0, do you mean Solaris 2.6 to Solaris 2.8

Yup!

Re:Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

I understand the SMP superiority, but on x86? Sun HATES x86, and have very little resources dedicated to developing for it.

I think you are comparing Sun hardware SMP to linux x86 SMP, which is not the same thing.

Re:Good!

[microbob]

I think you are comparing Sun hardware SMP to linux x86 SMP, which is not the same thing.

Not really, X86 SMP is much better than any other PC UNIX SMP.

Go read the X86 mail list for *many* examples.

You're right though, X86 is SUN's redheaded-step-child.

Re:Good!

[nachoman]

I don't know much about Solaris x86 but I do know about Solaris versioning.

Solaris 6 = Solaris 2.6 = SunOS 5.6
Solaris 7 = Solaris 2.7 = SunOS 5.7
Solaris 8 = Solaris 2.8 = SunOS 5.8

I assume it would follow for 9 as well.

Re:Good!

[dohcvtec]

Uh, there is no Solaris 2.7 or Solaris 2.8, or Solaris 8.0. The naming convention goes like this:
... Solaris 2.6
Solaris 7 (the 2.x was dropped)
Solaris 8
Solaris 9
This is nitpicky stuff, but some people insist on using the obsolete 2.x naming, which is simply wrong.
which is called 2.8 when talking about compiling software
IIRC, the configure scripts of some software looks in the machine's uname output for SunOS 5.x and puts that x into Solaris 2.x to determine the machine's OS. Or something like that.

Re:Good!

[microbob]

I hear 'ya, but, I see what he was saying. On my Solaris/X86 8.0 system, 'uname -a' says:

SunOS www 5.8 Generic i86pc i386 i86pc

Re:Good!

[MoonRider]

I think you are comparing Sun hardware SMP to linux x86 SMP

No, I'm not. I'm talking about Solaris x86 SMP, which appeared before Linux SMP, and with very good performance.

Re:Good!

[the way, what're you]

I found Solaris/X86 (2.6->8.0) pretty stable. In fact, it has been rock solid.

Yeah, but what happened when you booted it up?

Re:Good!

[KewlPC]

I hope that you mean you upgraded from Solaris 2.6 to Solaris 8.

Otherwise, if you wanted to use the obsolete 2.x naming scheme, instead of Solaris 8 you'd call it Solaris 2.8. Solaris 2.6 was before Sun adopted the current naming scheme.

Re:heh

[Anonymous Coward]

why spend $20, LINUX IS FREE.. isnt that what this is all about? =x

No, stability is what it's all about. $20 is a small price to pay.

$20 for BETA software?

[CoolVibe]

Guess not. I liked their scheme with sol 7 and 8 better. I'm not paying $20 for something I'll probably test once.

Re:$20 for BETA software?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hell, RedHat charges $40 for BETA software. Of course if you want professional BETA software it's somewhere over $100 for RedHat.

Re:$20 for BETA software?

[0x0d0a]

Or you can just download it if you don't want support. [shrug].

Jesus Christ

[damiam]

I know, it's been said many times before. But please, can the editors just read through the stories once before posting them? Is it that hard? No one's perfect, but how can you miss "listent" or "they have a released"?

What makes it even worse is that SlashCode has a built in spell-checker for submitted. Either the editors deliberately disabled it on Slashdot, or are consistantly ignoring it.

Re:Jesus Christ

[0x0d0a]

consistantly

Taco's Law: Anyone criticizing a spelling or grammatical error on the Internet is likely to make an error of the same sort himself in the critique.

Re:Jesus Christ

[damiam]

Yes, but mine isn't on the front page :-)

Re:Jesus Christ

[jericho4.0]

The editors don't correct spelling in submitted stories for the same reason they don't correct the spelling in your posts.

And thats the way I like it.

Re:Jesus Christ

[Com2Kid]

• What makes it even worse is that SlashCode has a built in spell-checker [slashcode.com] for submitted.

Submitted what Mr Language Genius?

Bleck.

Re:Jesus Christ

[damiam]

The difference is that my posts don't go on the front page, and don't have to be approved by an editor.

Re:heh

[Anonymous Coward]

but linux is stable, thats what everyone says. :D

Hardly useless

[InodoroPereyra]

Yes, GNU/Linux will probably in the long run eat up all commercial Unixes, the trend goes in this direction. In the mean time, there are a lot of UNIX sysadmin positions that still require Solaris knowledge.

So, it makes sense to run Solaris on cheap x68 hardware to get some trainning if you are going to apply for one of these jobs. It is much more fun than sysadmin'ing Win* boxes, and whenever the company switches to Linux/BSD you are already working there and you get to do real cool work ;-)

Re:Hardly useless

[binaryDigit]

Cheap? You can purchase SparcStation 10's or Ultra 1's on ebay for ~$20-$100 that will easily run Solaris 9. Now they won't be the most spritely, but if the issue is getting something up and going _cheaply_ can't beat it. Sure is a lot better than messing around with pc hardware that will make Solaris x86 happy. Just plop the cd's in and go. A great way to learn Solaris on the cheap.

Re:Hardly useless

[ealar dlanvuli]

tag

Re:Hardly useless

[user32.ExitWindowsEx]

I've got a dual-CPU SPARCStation 10 for sale on eBay now.

SPARCStation 10 MP (Dual SM-51 CPUs)

Re:Hardly useless

[Anonymous Coward]

Right now the bidding is a $35 - that is cheap.

Re:Hardly useless

[FueledByRamen]

Does it include an actual Solaris license? I don't know about ver.8, but Solaris 9 free download on SPARC is only licensed for uniproceesor machines (looked into it when I picked up a SPARCstation 20 for $15 a week ago)

Re:Hardly useless

[Gothmolly]

Why bother with x68 [sic] Solaris when you can run real Solaris on real Sun hardware? You get:
network booting
OpenBoot
native serial console
fairly standard upgradeable components
It Just Works

Re:Hardly useless

[Anonymous Coward]

that someone actually used a mod point to change a 0 post to -1 amuses me greatly.

You moderators are aware I keep 40-50 karma in my sleep right? I'm just wondering if you do that trying to hurt my karma pool or if your honestly moderating.

Re:Hardly useless

[user32.ExitWindowsEx]

It's Solaris 7. It came preloaded, so I didn't ask.
If I remember correctly, Solaris 8 was actually free for up to 8 CPUs.

Re:Hardly useless

[Wiseleo]

Don't learn Solaris on a PC.

Please. For your production systems, you will have to work with differing device names and the open boot PROM. The OBP is quite different from your average PC BIOS, and you can actually program it in FORTH. In fact, we ask senior sysadmins who claim to know Sun hardware to describe simple secrets of the trade such as changing the hostid using FORTH.

Get a SparcStation to learn this and other fun Sun-specific stuff. SEVM (also known as Veritas Volume Manager) and the DiskSuite are also only available on Solaris, AFAIK and you must know those tools. Getting Oracle to run on Solaris requires kernel modifications, so you better know that as well.

In short, get a SparcStation 10 or 20 and learn this platform the right way.

I can tell you differences between quarterly Solaris releases, so trust me on this.

Leonid

Re:Hardly useless

[Anonymous Coward]

Lessee:

Network booting: Got it, yeah.

OpenBoot. Nope, but we're working on it.
That'd be killer.

Native serial console: Explain please. I use a serial console for Solaris x86 boxes day in and day out, production boxes, mind you.

fairly standard upgradeable components:
Blame the PC industry.

It just works: use the proper x86 hardware and
it'll "Just work" for you too.

Re:Hardly useless

[KewlPC]

You missed the point. If you want to get a job that requires you to know Solaris, why get only 1/2 to 3/4 of the necessary knowledge by running it on x86 hardware? You can get cheap Sun systems on eBay and learn all the stuff you'll need to know.

Re:Hardly useless

[BrookHarty]

Actually, you need 96megs for Solaris9, and most on ebay have will need more memory.

I have a Sparc 20, couldnt upgrade from Solaris 6, so I put SuSE Linux on it. (with upgraded gcc 3.2 rpms)

Re:Hardly useless

[zapfie]

Kindly remove your head from your ass. Nobody gives a shit about your karma, and there is not some moderator plot against you, so don't flatter yourself.

Re:Hardly useless

[Chan]

• Native serial console: Explain please

I'd imagine this means that you can access the bios (or in the Sun case, OBP) over the serial port, something that only a handfull of PC mobos support.

Re:Hardly useless

[Anonymous Coward]

I wasn't accusing them of ploting against me. I was saying some moderators might think they can hurt someones karma if they mod them down, as I couldn't understand why someone would actually use a mod point on that comment, which struck me as highly comical.

Note I said amused not annoyed.

Re:... Ow.

[jdeisenberg]

A quick look at the poster's home page indicates that he is from Denmark, and not a native speaker of English.

Perhaps if you were to make a post in Danish on a Danish website, the grammar and spelling would be perfect, but I know mine wouldn't be.

Personally, I'd be inclined to cut the guy some slack and focus on the information he presents.

Free? Of course not.

[fmaxwell]

It was foolish to release it for free the first time:

They paid for the massive bandwidth used by those that downloaded it.

It ran on hardware that they did not sell, so they made no money there.

Sun probably cannibalized sales of lower-end (e.g. Sun Blade 100) systems. Those who wanted to run Solaris could do so without having to buy anything from Sun.

All of the risks and no profits. Sun had no quality control over the hardware, so if Joe Blow had a system with flaky RAM that crashed all of the time, he'd probably blame Solaris.

It took a tremendous investment on Sun's part to make a version of Solaris that worked on such a large subsection of x86 boxes. This probably took money and time away from profit-making ventures.

Solaris clearly will not be a serious competitor to Windows or Linux in the x86 market. Sun should never have released it in the first place and charging for it is the only rational compromise between doing the smart thing -- discontinuing it -- and appeasing the masses by giving it away for free.'

Sun makes money by making everything work together

[astrashe]

I don't know if Sun can be said to make money on the software, or the hardware, or whatever. It seems to be more about the whole package. They make everything work together.

I used to have a business that used Sun, and the level of support we got (mostly from our vendor, admittedly) was incredible, and we never got that "pass the buck" sort of thing where the software people blame the hardware, and the hardware people blame the software.

I have a friend who works for sun doing support. He had a solid academic background and a number of years of experience doing system administration at fermilab before he joined the company. He spent most of his time supporting clustered systems. The point is that if you have problems and a high level support contract, you talk to smart people.

I know that they used to have (and probably still do have) Oracle gurus on staff, because if you're a big customer you don't want to hear Sun say, "Call Oracle" and the Oracle people say, "Call Sun." You want it to work.

And I remember once I had a system die on me, and I didn't have a spare. My vendor, who usually dealt with much larger customers, kept an inventory of stuff preboxed at an overnight shipping facility. He could call them up and tell them to ship something out as late as 8p or so, and get it there the next morning. I called him in the evening, and he got it there in the morning. He said, "We'll talk about billing later, let's get this shipped before the deadline passes."

It's a whole different world when you have problems. That's what Sun sells. But obviously, it's a lot more expensive than taking a commodity pc that you built for $500 and putting linux on it.

The problem Sun would have with an Open Source Solaris is that people would change it, and that would make support a lot more difficult.

Sun's problem isn't that Solaris is missing features that open source developers could contribute, or reliability issues that volunteers could help them work out. Their problem is that they're caught in a pretty small niche, and other people with a lot of money are coming at them all the time.

And the fact that linux is solid, and that it can be made to work creates a new problem, because it creates the possibility that another company (like RedHat) might be in a position soon to offer the same kind of "we make it work" service that Sun offers.

I don't think there are any easy answers to these problems. Sun seems like a viable company, but they definitely have some challenges ahead.

If you don't have a support contract, if you're a guy with a couple of sparc servers and no lifeline, Sun doesn't make so much sense. You're better off with the commodity hardware and linux. I think that tends to color the way linux guys look at Sun.

Linux compatible? Sun says so

[Brian Stretch]

Sun says Sol9 is Linux compatible. They also include many of our favorite Open Source apps, and many of those are Sun supported.

If we didn't need SPARC binary compatibility for some of the libraries we don't have source code for I could probably convince the Powers That Be to take a look at this at work, especially since I could build a dual CPU Athlon 2400+ development box for cheap. (I have one at home. Real MP 2400+ chips should be available later this month, saving you the nuisance of hacking XP series chips.) Being able to use the same GTK+/GNOME GUI source for both Linux and Solaris development is very, very interesting. Windows has probably already won where I work, but who knows?

Re:... Ow.

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps if you were to make a post in Danish on a Danish website, the grammar and spelling would be perfect

It would be ... I don't know Danish so I would be trying extra hard to get it right. I wouldn't just be guessing at the spelling of common Danish words.

What if I don't have a credit card?

[zardie]

Sun only allow payment via VISA, MasterCard or AMEX. Most people who would make use of the Solaris 9 OS would be students or hobbyists such as myself. I don't have a credit card so I have no way of downloading this software as a result - cheque and postal money orders are available if I spend over US$195.

I wouldn't expect many students to download this one as a result, so we'll have less people with experience with Solaris 9 once they graduate. Guess what? They'll all use Linux.

Also, downloading this OS with an Australian broadband download cap is prohibitive, too, which would add extra costs as well.

Good work, Sun!

Re:What if I don't have a credit card?

[jmauro]

Students in the states have credit cards. They're bombarded with offers the moment they walk into college. At the begining of the year you can't walk 5 feet without getting one. The $20 is really a non-issue.

Re:What if I don't have a credit card?

[user32.ExitWindowsEx]

I don't...I'm a college student. I don't see the need for one now. When I want money, I get in my car, head over to my locak banking facility, and cash a check. It's simple, the car gets used, and I have real cash to spend.

Re:What if I don't have a credit card?

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh.

Then go get a credit card. Or a visa-branded debit card. The latter requires no credit check.

Accept the fact that credit/debit cards are the de facto method of purchasing things online. Why is this so difficult ?

Re:What if I don't have a credit card?

[Anonymous Coward]

+3 Insightful?

Some idiot is still living in the 1950's buying everything with checks and he's modded as Insightful?

What the fuck is wrong with you people ?

Re:What if I don't have a credit card?

[Demona]

Because credit cards are stupid -- because attempting to buy anything you can't afford is stupid. If you can't afford to pay 100% and own it right then and there, you can't afford it and have no business pretending you can.

Re:What if I don't have a credit card?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why I also suggested debit card.

Read before posting next time, please.

Re:What if I don't have a credit card?

[shepd]

>I don't...I'm a college student. I don't see the need for one now. When I want money, I get in my car, head over to my locak banking facility, and cash a check. It's simple, the car gets used, and I have real cash to spend

But, unfortunately, you build zero credit rating this way.

A gently used credit card is a great start to your next loan (and loans are the only way money gets into the system).

Re:What if I don't have a credit card?

[GauteL]

Really? Things are really not the same around the western world.

I do not know a single adult person in Norway that do not have either a VISA or a mastercard or both. Almost all VISAs are however debet cards instead of credit cards. Is there nothing like this in the US?

Re:What if I don't have a credit card?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, if you were to actually READ the parent post, you would realize that he is writing from that ass-backward continent of kangaroos, koalas, and criminals.

As it happens, Debit cards officially outnumber credit cards in the US as of a few months ago, IIRC.

Re:What if I don't have a credit card?

[shepd]

>Almost all VISAs are however debet cards instead of credit cards. Is there nothing like this in the US?

You could ask VISA for a zero limit and simply put money _on_ your VISA and they will use the credit to automatically pay for your purchase. However, due to the ubiquity of debit from "real" banks here (or at least in Canada) there's no point in doing this, especially since it's normally cheaper to use a bank debit card to pay, rather than a VISA (price of a candy bar vs. 3-5% service charge).

Re:What if I don't have a credit card?

[deranged unix nut]

Offtopic - Re: Credit Cards

Credit cards are also a huge liability for college students. I have more than one friend who had to drop out because they didn't use their credit card responsibly.

It is sad, they had more talent than I did, but they are still doing fast food delivery four years after they should have graduated.

Re:What if I don't have a credit card?

[plasm4]

they're not stupid if your return on the money you borrow is greater than the interest paid.

Re:What if I don't have a credit card?

[Artifex]

Credit cards are also a huge liability for college students. I have more than one friend who had to drop out because they didn't use their credit card responsibly.

They're generally only a liability if used irresponsibly. Like cars, prescription drugs, their sex organs, parental rights, etc. If they don't learn how to use credit in college (what do they think their college loans are?), they'll be worse off when they hit the real world and suddenly try, then?

Re:What if I don't have a credit card?

[shepd]

>Credit cards are also a huge liability for college students.

This can be true, but to be honest (and please don't take this personally) part of growing up is managing debt. College is part of growing up (should you choose it) and working through your debt is part of that.

I know, I've been there, done that. But I worked through it. It's all part of those important lessons you gotta learn the hard way. Although there's much harder ways of learning to deal with debt than taking on an extra job (like quitting college... bummer). :-/

Re:What if I don't have a credit card?

[lpontiac]

(Offtopic to all but Australians..)

I believe the Commonwealth Bank will give you a student credit card. $400 limit or so, but that's enough to order Solaris.

Alternately, you could try to get a debit card - a Mastercard/Visa that debits from a savings account, like EFTPOS, rather than drawing on money you don't actually have :P The big four don't do it, but I think St George's does. (Although other issues mean I'll never bank with St George's again.. sigh..) You could also try the building societies/credit unions.

Re:What if I don't have a credit card?

[KewlPC]

In the US, debit cards are all over the place. No credit check required, almost all banks offer them, etc.

My bank offers free debit card service (none of this 3-5% crap), free checking accounts, etc., all for free.

Re:What if I don't have a credit card?

[David Gerard]

Actually, Westpac does a Visa debit card pretty much for the asking. Their online banking also works in any browser that does 128-bit SSL.

Re:What if I don't have a credit card?

[Anonymous Coward]

maybe a moderator who is still looking back at 'The Good Old Days' with a warm heart? I dunno...

Re:What if I don't have a credit card?

[deranged unix nut]

Offtopic:

Agreed, responsible use of credit needs to be learned sometime, but it is a bit easier to pay off $10k of credit card debt when you have a $50k/yr job than when you have a minimum wage job. And you need to start paying on those college loans when you stop going to school, even if you didn't finish your degree and don't have a high paying job.

I know it is just business, but I think that most credit card companies have practices that are as bad as highway robbery.

Then again, I have also known people who have paid money tree 300% intrest (rolling short-term loans over for multiple months) because they didn't want to bother their friends for a $100 loan.

Personally, I knew that I didn't have the money or the ability to pay for things so I refused to get a credit card until I graduated from college. It was just too much of a risk. Same for other temptations - I couldn't afford the concequences of making a mistake, so I removed the option.

Unfortuantely, college offers a huge realm of options and most college students can't afford to make a mistake with many of the options, but some still play with fire and get burned.

Credit card companies just get on my nerves because I didn't want one and I was hit-up to get one at least 20 times a day in the first week of each semester. By the end of the day I wanted to punch the salespeople - it is like setting up a liquer store outside of a rehab clinic - these people have too much to loose and both the institution and the companies are trying to exploit a weakness and ruin their lives.

Re:Free? Of course not.

[binaryDigit]

I sorta disagree.

Sun probably cannibalized sales of lower-end (e.g. Sun Blade 100) systems. Those who wanted to run Solaris could do so without having to buy anything from Sun.

Not really. People don't buy Sun stuff just for Solaris, they want the package. They wanted (allegedly) stable Sun hardware on (allegedly) stable Sun software. I doubt if Sun lost any money to speak of because people were buying Solaris and running it on their Dell's (I personally know of 0 companies running x86 Solaris in a production environment, I do know some that use to as a cheap developers box).

Solaris clearly will not be a serious competitor to Windows or Linux in the x86 market.
I agree, but you're missing the point that it was never meant to be. Sun already had a x86 port when they came out with their i386 boxes years ago. They were just leveraging that work by keeping the code base portable. It's always been a red headed step child and always will be. But generally I don't think it's that massive a drain on their resources.

disk requirements

[Anonymous Coward]

"Disk space: 600 MB for desktops; 1 GB for servers"

I can see taking up 600 megabytes for desktops: office software, X windows, games, pretty pictures. But what is installed for a server that requires that much space?

1 GB = Desktop Install - Office Crap - X - Games - Other junk + n megabytes for server stuff?

How much shit could the server software possibly take? Anyone know? Unless it is just a desktop install + server software. I wouldn't want all that crap on my server.

Re:disk requirements

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, they recomend 256Mb for swap. I do recomend 512+, for all unices.

Re:disk requirements

[spinlocked]

I do recomend 512+, for all unices

Well, I would recommend sizing your swap according to the applications requirement rather than relying on rules of thumb. Use pmap.

And don't forget to configure a dump device - a production Solaris crash dump is a rare beauty and a terrible thing to waste.

Since when is a beta considered stable.

[nurb432]

20 is high for testing versions.. Regardless of their good track record of RELEASED versions of Solaris..

"Media charge" would be more appropriate, until the final product hits the road..

Re:Free? Of course not.

[sql*kitten]

Sun should never have released it in the first place and charging for it is the only rational compromise between doing the smart thing -- discontinuing it -- and appeasing the masses by giving it away for free.'

Well, yes and no. They gave it away on the same basis that they give deep discounts to educational buyers - they more people who know and like Sun equipment, the more people who will recommend buying it when they start work. Sun never intended people to do production work on Solaris x86, it was just a way to get students hooked early.

Now, the cheap hardware is good enough that you can do useful work on it, and you are right, at the low end, SPARC kit is competing (and in many cases losing) against high-end PC kit.

If Sun do want to give Solaris x86 away, it should be under a strict license that precludes it from being used for commercial work.

Re:... Ow.

[Anonymous Coward]

Would you? So you would spend thirty minutes writing a three line post to Danish-dot? And are you so capable that you are certain there would be no errors?

Wouldnt it be cool if Apple bought Sun?

[Znonymous Coward]

Apple is already starting off well in the Server market. What if they bough (or merged with) Sun and incorporated Sun compatibly into Mac OS X Server?

Wouldn't that really give Apple a nice jump into the Server market? Additionally, wouldn't that give Sun some kind of a future?

Re:Wouldnt it be cool if Apple bought Sun?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, that would suck cock, because it would signal the end of the Sparc platform.

Also, Sun is a better company than Apple in general. Apple just smacks of Stalinism.

Re:Wouldnt it be cool if Apple bought Sun?

[Znonymous Coward]

I'm not up to date on the Sparc platform, but is it better than PPC? If Apple owned Sparc maybe they could move to that and get away from the crappy PPC platform.

Re:Wouldnt it be cool if Apple bought Sun?

[Chicane-UK]

Its an interesting point you put across - and I just blew all my mod points as well so I cant bump it up.

I just dont know how easy it would be to merge Solaris & MacOS - would certainly be a killer company though!

Hmmm....

Re:Wouldnt it be cool if Apple bought Sun?

[drinkypoo]

Apple is already starting off well in the Server market. What if they bough (or merged with) Sun and incorporated Sun compatibly into Mac OS X Server?

I don't know what this phrase means, "incorporated Sun compatibly into Mac OS X Server". If you mean, made MacOSX Server run on Sun hardware, the question is why? Apple is (apparently, reportedly) already planning to go to 64 bit PowerPC. The POWER architecture used in non-PowerPC RS/6000 systems is a great RISC setup and is easily competitive with Ultrasparc. Some would say that it's the other way around, the ultrasparc is trailing POWER. Incidentally the PowerPC 601 was a pretty straight implementation of the POWER instruction set on a 32 bit processor, since then many POWER instructions have been removed from PPC (over time.)

As for communications between MacOSX and Solaris, Solaris is one of the Unices for which Appletalk (DDP) support was available for from antiquity, as many many schools have had a lot of macs and a lot of sun hardware. I guess macs are using Appleshare over IP now, and have been since approximately MacOS 8? So any Unix system with netatalk can support modern macs, regardless of Appletalk protocol support. (In theory one could also support Appletalk with a user space daemon anyway, I wonder why this isn't done already? Or maybe it is now.)

And as to MacOSX server being able to talk to Unix, this is a non-issue since it already is Unix, and as such should be capable of speaking NFS, Coda, Intermezzo, or whatever else gets spliced onto it. I'm sure it does NFS out of the box, or at least I'd hope it would; Making it speak NIS, Kerberos, or whatever else SHOULD be no harder than implementing it on FreeBSD.

Wouldn't that really give Apple a nice jump into the Server market? Additionally, wouldn't that give Sun some kind of a future?

Buying Sun would give anyone a nice jump into the server market. Sun controls a significant portion of that space now. I don't know that Apple could actually afford them though, they must be worth an awful lot between accounts receivable (for their service contracts) and material assets.

It remains to be seen whether or not Sun has a continuing future in its, er, future. Certainly IBM is going to be giving them serious trouble if they start offering linux-based clusters of RS/6000s with 64 bit POWER or PowerPC architecture.

Re:Wouldnt it be cool if Apple bought Sun?

[Space Coyote]

Funny, it wasn't too long ago that the rumour mill was churning out stories about Sun buying Apple. Times do change, don't they?

Sun and Apple probably don't have a whole lot to offer each other as long as Sun stays on the Sparc platform and Apple on PPC. Both have install bases that are far too big to change over. Sun's workstation market doesn't need pretty boxes or built-in screens, and apple's server maket doesn't need 64-way SMP systems.

So right now I don't think they really have much to contribute to each other's tech, since Apple wouldn't want to lose sales of their own workstations by giving sun Quartz, and Sun wouldn't want to lose any of their server sales by giving apple access to their interconnect technology.

Re:Wouldnt it be cool if Apple bought Sun?

[Florian Weimer]

No, that would suck cock, because it would signal the end of the Sparc platform.

There are many corporations which expect that the SPARC platform will be around for a couple of years (decades?). If Sun dumps the SPARC platform (or indicates there are plans in this direction), the porting frenzy begins, and Sun will certainly start losing customers. (Even now, a few people are forced to port applications because Sun refuses to sell certain hardware/software combinations to them, but that's probably just the usual crazyness of huge corporation.)

Re:Wouldnt it be cool if Apple bought Sun?

[Anonymous Coward]

Post in the same story you modded in and get your points back if you feel so strongly about it.

Re:Wouldnt it be cool if Apple bought Sun?

[Anonymous Coward]

This would make the most sense because of Apple's hard work to get java into their frameworks and to integrate their GUI control suits. Java would be the killer flagship language for Mac, but right now Sun ties anyone's hands who would want to fully integrate Java, and not have to report to Sun twice a day.

Re:Wouldnt it be cool if Apple bought Sun?

[KewlPC]

Yes, the merger of Sun and Apple would be killer...

so killer that the company would be DEAD! ;)

Well, at least, the Sun part of the company would be dead:
SPARC - dead
Solaris - dead
StarOffice - maybe we'd finally see the OS X port
Java - Apple-ized, which means it would only run on OS X, defeating the whole point of Java in the first place
All of Sun's cool networking stuff - since Apple can hardly even push their own networking stuff (the rackmount machines and OS X), DEAD

No, I don't think a merger between the two is a good idea. It would suck to see Sun merge with (or be bought by) Apple.

But.

[Anonymous Coward]

with all that software, they will have to call it Gnu/Solaris.

Re:But.

[dunstan]

Back in the days before there was a Linux kernel, a lot of people, myself included, were running SunOS4 systems with most of the BSD utilities replaced with GNU versions. Nobody bothers to do this with Solaris nowadays - if you want a GNU based system then you run GNU/Linux.

The big systems in the server room will continue to run Solaris on Sparc - the scalability and RAS features wipe the floor with the alternatives. So you can now expect software developers to need to support two APIs, Solaris and GNU/Linux.

What Sun are doing is to provide choices in how these APIs are made available to users and developers - Solaris on sparc for big iron right down to $2k edge servers, GNU/Linux on Intel for cheap edge servers (with support), Solaris on x86 with a GNU/Linux API utility for mixed mode users.

And providing an easily installable set of GNU replacement utilities takes us back to where we came in. All the end user has to do is choose their option.

Dunstan

Submitted this story five days ago

[haruchai]

Wonder what the heck took so long? Anyway, I did an upgrade install from Sol8 10/01 to Sol9 beta. Went pretty well except I'm once again seeing an Admintool bug where is crashes when I try to load up the Software module.
I'd had this happen before on one of the earlier releases of Sol8 but I don't remember how I resolved it.
I've been using Philip Brown's pkgadm from bolthole.com as a workaround.

Re:Submitted this story five days ago

[Anonymous Coward]

Completely OT, but the Admintool is crashing because you are running XFree86 instead of Xsun and you have not put the xfs fonts into your FontPath.
Add those fonts by running

$ xset fp+ tcp/localhost:7100

Re:Submitted this story five days ago

[Anonymous Coward]

How is this offtopic?

The whole reason to run Sun

[Superfreaker]

Is to run it on their bulletproof Sparc servers.

Why degrade the product with the x86 platform?

Opinion of course.

Re:The whole reason to run Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

to make learning solaris at home inexpensive

Re:The whole reason to run Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

I like Sun HW quite a bit, have worked with it continually since the sun3 era, but I would hesitate
to call it "bulletproof".

Business plan for SUN

[PinkX]

1. Listent to your costomers
2. Release a Solaris 9 beta for x86 at $20
3. ??
4. PROFIT!!

Re:Business plan for SUN

[The J Kid]

IN SOVIET RUSSIA....

we actually make good jokes!

Re:Business plan for SUN

[Anonymous Coward]

IN SOVIET RUSSIA...

good jokes make you!

if you're gonna use a lame line, at least word it properly.

Sun has too many balls in the air...

[dagg]

1. open source
2. java
3. hardware
4. proprietary software
5. fight Microsoft

That would be ok if they were making money in each of those "fields". But I don't think they are. It seems like they are being pushed back from every direction.

I think x86 Solaris is a symptom of their problems; it is not a cure.

--
Sex on a linux box

Re:Sun has too many balls in the air...

[thelexx]

Actually, 1 through 3 appear complimentary to 5 (albeit 3 could be haggled over). Four is the only thing that seems out of place.

$20???

[nnet]

Why would I pay to test when I should be paid to test?

Don't get experience on x86 solaris

[Wee]

In the mean time, there are a lot of UNIX sysadmin positions that still require Solaris knowledge. So, it makes sense to run Solaris on cheap x68 hardware to get some trainning if you are going to apply for one of these jobs.

While getting training on Solaris is invaluable for any *nix sysadmin worth his/her salt, it's my belief that when it comes to experience helping secure a job getting that experience on x86 hardware lies somewhere between "next to useless" and "better than nothing" on the usefulness scale. Anyone that wants Solaris software experience will also want Sparc hardware experience (disk arrays, remote mgmt cards, sbus legacy stuff, etc -- things you don't normally see on commodity PCs). They'll probably want someone who knows enough "Sun" to know what the difference beween an E420 and a SunBlade is and won't get surprised to discover that one of them doesn't have anything more than a console attached to it.

If you want Solaris experience for a job, then you'd be better off buying an old Ultra 5 for 80 bucks than paying for beta x86 software. You'll at least be able to say during your interview that although you don't have any "real world" Sun experience, you have been playing with an old Ultra in your spare time in order to get up to speed or round out your professional experience. I've seen a few people get jobs this way in fact.

You have a much better chance if you get an old Sparc, stick it in the corner, hook up a serial cable to it and run BIND on it for internal DNS or something than playing with x86 Solaris on a PC.

-B

Pathetic

[Anonymous Coward]

I think my brain just had a few hundred neurons just explode

So, you're pretty much down to your last 10 or 20 neurons then.

There are few things more pathetic than someone flaming a non-native English speaker and not being able to put together a coherent sentence in order to do so. From now on, why don't you just shut up when you have nothing of value to say.

Re:... Ow.

[0x0d0a]

He just gave you a free dollop of information, and you're bitching about his presentation? I mean, STFU already.

Why?

[Jacek Poplawski]

Can you give me any reason why should I use Solaris instead Linux on x86?

Re:Why?

[sstory]

Solaris is more esoteric. Therefore a good percentage of /.ers will think you're cooler if you use it.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Solaris is different - the same commands do different things (e.g. killall). Also, your system files are different and Solaris has a lot of utilities for admining that Linux does not. Basically, just because you can admin a Linux box does not mean you can admin a Solaris box - and if you want to get a job doing so, you are going to have to know the differences.

Re:Why?

[Artifex]

Can you give me any reason why should I use Solaris instead Linux on x86?

Because you want to train for Solaris certification without buying yet another box?

Re:Why?

[mrobinso]

> Therefore a good percentage of /.ers will
> think you're cooler if you use it.

Oh fuck... there's a good reason to part with $20. I mean, life just ain't worth livin if slashdot users don't think you're cool.

OTOH, Solaris coffee mugs _are_ cool.

Re:Why?

[mlk]

> OTOH, Solaris coffee mugs _are_ cool.

As are Sun Mouse mats, esp. the £50 metal ones for optical mice ;)

Ahh Uni, normal people nicked pint glassess, geeks nicked metal mouse mats

spelling etc

[sstory]

I've said it before, and I'll say it again, some of you should stop representing yourselves stupidly. "Sun has listent to their costomers"? Stop reading Arcane CLI Commands Vol III, put on a fresh Queen Amidala T-shirt, and go learn some English.

Re:spelling etc

[dubstop]

OK, the spelling is lousy, but the meaning is pretty clear. From the look of this guy's nick, he's scandinavian, probably Norwegian. Maybe you're a polyglot, but I'm not, and I have a lot of respect for people that have taken the trouble to learn my language (perhaps imperfectly), when I'm too lazy to learn theirs.

stability?

[Anonymous Coward]

well, not really.

Re:stability?

[Anonymous Coward]

You must be fat :)

Re:Spelling police

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, at least the guy in the article, spelled "their" right. Better than most of the American population could do.

JUST TO GET IT OUT OF THE WAY

[Anonymous Coward]

ob bitching about ??? Profit! posts

WHY DOES THIS *STILL* GET MODDED FUNNY?! It is lame and played out and ... well, that's enough isn't it?

We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

Re:spellchecker needed....

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not deffendind TacoMeister, I belive it's a quoted lines from Rune Tønnesen email.

Isn't it right, CmdrTACO?

Re:Free? Of course not.

[Anonymous Coward]

I seriously doubt that anyone is using X86 Solaris in a production environment. I strongly suspect that much like myself, many people downloaded the OS and slapped it on an old Dell or Compaq desktop in order to learn something about Solaris. I found it beneficial, I learned enough of Solaris to be comfortable with it. I am now a fan, and would not hesitate to employ Solaris in a production environment running on Sun hardware. Without the free download, I never would have become comfortable enough with Solaris to consider it as an alternative to Linux and BSD systems. I suppose some had the opposite reaction though, installing it on junk hardware and hating it.

Re:Spelling police

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah - how do you misspell 'there' anyway?

Oracle back on Solaris x86?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, now that Sun are giving x86 another good chance with Solaris, is there any chance Oracle might release their DB server for Sol/x86 again like they had before? (btw. anyone still has a link to Oracle 8.1.7 for Solaris x86? I could only download it once and the file was massively corrupt)

Hey, tilegarden.com!

[Otter]

If you're not aware of this -- you can set a signature in your preferences so those of us who don't want to read it can turn it off.

If you relaize that and are just trying to evade the filter, please stop.

Re:heh

[Anonymous Coward]

13:02:28 up 95 days, 22:44, 7 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
Linux netfinity 2.4.19 #2 Sat Aug 3 17:05:54 PDT 2002 i686 GenuineIntel

The last time it went down was when they had the AC cranked and used the photocopier in the hot hot summer, with no funds for even the smallest UPS.

Re:Free? Of course not.

[zerocool^]

Agreed. Very few people run sun software on x86 hardware in a production environment. Most of it is for testing, and/or just checking it out to see what it's about.

Don't run solaris on x86 arch because it's supposedly better. On x86, there are much better OS's. If you really want an SVR4-ish nix, use a bsd or something. I don't know of any popular ones other than solaris. Whatever.

Solaris hardware - I don't know about it being stable - it is as much as anything else, but it lasts forever and is hard working as crap. We still use Sun IPC's at my job, they're 12 mhz, late 80's or early 90's I think, and they still work great. Some of them the batteries have gone out - imagine that - the (soldered in) cmos battery goes out before the motherboard/proc/ethernet controler, etc fail. They're great for console access - if they don't detect a keyboard and monitor, output straight out the serial port.
Solaris hardware doesn't run D.net fast, but it sure does compile things fast. Startelingly so. We have a Dual-Pentium III 1.4 Tualtin with 3 gigs of ram, and it compiles things significantly slower than our 4x300Mhz Ultra II with 1GB of ram, despite being "twice as fast".

This is the advantage of sun. The hardware rocks. The software is built to match the hardware. I think it was more of them saying "yeah, well, if you guys want it on x86, here you go, but be aware it sucks." It might have actually made them money in that people would buy sun hardware after trying it on x86 and giving up on the crappy hardware.

How's your Danish?

[bfinuc]

Anyway, I don't think spelling is that important. Pronounciation varies, why shouldn't spelling?

Re:How's your Danish?

[christophersaul]

It's 'pronunciation' actually. Please sort your Engish out. Spelling's really not that hard.

Re:How's your Danish?

[damiam]

Spelling does varie - color, colour, etc. Sometimes alternate spellings are acceptable. However, as with pronunciations, some spellings are not correct.

As for my Danish, that's irrelevent. Slashdot is an English site. If English isn't someone's first language, I have no problem with that. However, as long as the editors (who are all native English speakers) are going to read it and post it, I think they should take the extra five seconds to correct the more blatent errors.

Re:How's your Danish?

[bfinuc]

I hav a tendency to spell "pronunciation" wrong - or in a non standard way! I usually get "English" right tho. (Or "doch" as the Germans say and write?)

I majored in Chinese and never sorted out the different ways to write "yuan". Especially since I studied Japanese and they use a different set of abbreviations. Gave up on it

Re:Free? Of course not.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think they just keep Solaris X86 around just to appease the US Defense Department (they use it all over the place as a "trusted" OS). I doubt Sun has any ambitions/illusions of ousting Linux from the price sensitive unix market at all.

I give Sun less than 5 years before they go under. There just aren't enough companies out there who want or can afford to use Sun's Enterprise servers when they can get similar or greater performance using commodity gear at substantially lower price points.

Re:Free? Of course not.

[dohcvtec]

If you really want an SVR4-ish nix, use a bsd
Huh? That's like saying "If you really want an apple, have an orange."

Re:Free? Of course not.

[fmaxwell]

I seriously doubt that anyone is using X86 Solaris in a production environment.

It depends on what you mean by "production environment." If you are referring to massive database servers, then you are probably right. But I have seen it used on development machines and in labs. There is no magic in a Sun box and a decent Dell or Compaq server offers a wonderfully stable platform on which to host Solaris.

Re:... Ow.

[Artifex]

Personally, I'd be inclined to cut the guy some slack and focus on the information he presents.

Ah, but you're forgetting the last rule of debates: if you can't attack the opponent's arguments, attack the opponent's character.

Some people come here treating everyone like opponents.

Apple should sue

[nuckin futs]

Sun for copying the "charge money for a public beta" method of making a profit. :p
At least with the OS X public beta you got a nice box, a disc, and a manual.

Re:Free? Of course not.

[Anonymous Coward]

Cool, that is nice to know. Personally, I just took advantage of the free download for Solaris 8 to learn a bit about the OS. As for the Dell or Compaq server comment, I have no doubt that they could run Solaris in a stable manner. I was actually considering people like myself who installed Solaris on a Compaq Deskpro or the Dell equivalent. For what it is worth, it runs about as well as FreeBSD or Debian on a 400MHz Compaq with 380MB of Ram. Not bad at all really. Cheers.

Solaris 1.x and 2.x two very different beasties

[HuguesT]

OK, the O/S on IPC/IPX range is Solaris 1.x. I don't think you can put 2.x on them at all. This is SunOS 4.x which is the old BSD-based version.

The O/S on more modern hardware from the 50MHz Sparc 10 to the Ultra III belongs to the Solaris 2.x series. Solaris 7,8 and 9 are really Solaris 2.7, 2.8 and 2.9 respectively.

I don't think Solaris 9 support the Sparc 10/20 series anymore.

It is still rather scalable, as you say.

Re:Solaris 1.x and 2.x two very different beasties

[Valgar]

Nope, I have Solaris 7 running on an IPX at home (for what reason I did this, I have no clue). That is the highest that this one can run.

Re:Solaris 1.x and 2.x two very different beasties

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong! Solaris 9 runs on the Sun4m series.
That's Ss5's, 10's and 20's.

LX's will run Solaris 8.

Re:Solaris 1.x and 2.x two very different beasties

[Alien Being]

"The O/S on more modern hardware from the 50MHz Sparc 10 to the Ultra III belongs to the Solaris 2.x series. "

The Ultras were the ealiest machines I can remember to not be supported by 4.x. Sparc 10s, and 20s ran 4.x nicely. The latest versions of 4.x even supported dual processors on those machines.

Re:Solaris 1.x and 2.x two very different beasties

[Anonymous Coward]

> Solaris 7,8 and 9 are really Solaris 2.7, 2.8 and 2.9 respectively.

You're mistaken. Solaris 7, 8, and 9 are Solaris 7, 8, and 9. Solaris 7 contains SunOS 5.7, Solari 8 contains SunOS 5.8, and Solaris 9 contains SunOS 5.9.

> I don't think Solaris 9 support the Sparc 10/20 series anymore.

Solaris 9 supports the 10/20. Solaris 10 might drop them though.

Re:Solaris 1.x and 2.x two very different beasties

[KewlPC]

No, the original poster was right. It's more strange versioning from Sun.

Sun stopped the 2.x naming convention around Solaris 2.6, and promptly made a huge leap in version numbers (courtesy of of the Sun Microsystems Marketing Department).

So what would have been Solaris 2.7 was named Solaris 7, what would have been Solaris 2.8 was named Solaris 8, what would have been Solaris 2.9 was became Solaris 9, etc.

Additionally, Solaris contains SunOS 5.x., which is why you'll never hear Sun call Solaris an operating system; they always refer to it as an operating environment. Thusly, if Richard Stallman worked at Sun, we'd probably have to call it Solaris/SunOS ;) (the environment is Solaris, the kernel is SunOS).

Re:Solaris 1.x and 2.x two very different beasties

[bencc99]

I don't think Solaris 9 support the Sparc 10/20 series anymore.

Solaris 9 certainly does work on sparcstation 5/10 (and other sun4m machines, I assume). Looking at the docs, Sun say 9 will be the last release to support the sun4m architecture. It runs surprisingly well, if a little slowly, on my 32 meg 85 MHz Sparcstation 5...

And the reason this is interesting is.......?

[gelfling]

C'mon people - a decade ago you'd be questioning the validity of Yet Another DOS or NOS and why anyone would need it.

Why do I need yet another Unix clone for Intel and why would I want to waste any time learing it or supporting it, particularly a version from a company that is ambivalent, at best about it.

Why are Sun Workstations so good?

[rutherford]

Many people here are saying that the the Sparc computers from Sun are much better than standard PC hardware. What exactly is the benefit. It doesn't seem to be speed/price.

Re:Why are Sun Workstations so good?

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't seem to be speed/price.

Workstation here at the new job is a Dell 1.8GHz P4 w/512MB ram, 2 monitors, 8GB drive, running w2k-pro. Don't know how much it cost but guessing well over $2000. Workstation at the last job was an Ultra 5, 400MHz US-II w/128MB ram, 9G drive, running Solaris 8. Invoice was about $1200, incl monitor. Purely subjective, from the raw cpu speeds one would guess the dell is roughly 4 times as fast as the ultra, yet it seems to only be about 1/4th as fast.

Moral: Raw cpu speed is in no way a reliable indicator of system performance.

Re:Why are Sun Workstations so good?

[iggymanz]

Yes, the Pentium IV PCs certainly look good compared to high end Unix workstations.....found some nice charts here Still, I prefer to admin and work with Unix workstations over Wintel PC's (and by the way, the Sun Ultra 5 and 10 and other PC-architecture machines are crap, avoid them!) As to what is cool about them? one cool thing is that the boot PROM will let you boot into any partition or from any mass storage device.....ever boot your PC (with empty hard disk) from a tape? Or booted and installed a system from another over network with no boot media on new virgin machine? Also, can hook terminal or PC to serial port and have full console access to boot PROM. How about dual 3D graphics cards for CADD or scientific visualization? No problems getting device drivers for native OS. No need to buy seperate SCSI card because built in (except in PC-type crap systems)! And Linux and *BSD support most of devices because there just aren't as many (admins like this). Also, end user has much more difficult time bringing game CD or floppies or other such crap from home to screw up system!

Re:Why are Sun Workstations so good?

[efficacymanUM]

Sun spends a lot of the time on the things that everyone who knows something about computers bitches about, ie the bottle necks in modern computers. Things like wider and faster busses (suns proprietary S-bus, etc) and working on the storage problem (fast drives and scsi) along with inteligent design on the part of the processor etc. Also since they have a control on the hardware (like apple) they dont have to compete with commodity cutthroat hardware so that they can do the little extra nice things that help out. Ie like using the appropriate capacitators and over building the equipment for reliablilty. Since they make a large chunk of their revenue from support, they then build the boxes to last forever. Just my two cents.

They made 8 sequels to that movie?

[Anonymous Coward]

Computers can do that!?

IRIX not just "application-level crap"

[Michael Wardle]

Due to encumbrance it makes more sense for Sun (etc) to port any useful code over to Linux over time and eventually discard their own Unix or use it solely for a trusted computing platform. SGI is most likely to go this route because everything that makes IRIX special is application-level crap and some silly widget sets.

IRIX has a number of assets that Linux does not have, even in the kernel space -- including scalability (support for up to 512 CPUs, 512 GiB RAM), advanced file systems (XFS journaled file system, XVM volume management), advanced networking (Clustered XFS, SAN), standards compliance (POSIX, DII-COE, Trusted IRIX), and a Unix (BSD+SysV) heritage -- that place IRIX in a different league from Linux and *BSD. It's not that these features could not be added to Linux, but at this time Linux and IRIX have different target markets.

AIX and Solaris also have features not found in Linux, I'm just not sure why you singled IRIX out. Don't forget that SGI has also developed a reputation, particularly for high-performance systems and cutting-edge hardware.

That said, many Unix companies do seem to be adopting Linux to some extent. Who knows what SGI will do?

Re:IRIX not just "application-level crap"

[Ozric]

I thought SUN bought the E10K from SGI(Cray) and laughed all the way to the bank....

Re:IRIX not just "application-level crap"

[Anonymous Coward]

support for up to 512 CPUs, 512 GiB RAM

Umm, those are just the "off the shelf" systems, the ones you can easily order. If you want to get a custom box from sgi, they'll quite happily make you a box with a few thousand processors and a couple TB RAM (all running off the one kernel, now that's scalability). With SGI hardware, you can usually get what you want if you are willing to pay for it.

Re:IRIX not just "application-level crap"

[KewlPC]

Who knows what SGI will do?

Judging by how they've behaved over the last few years, I don't even think SGI knows what they're going to do next ;)

Re:IRIX not just "application-level crap"

[IamTheRealMike]

Actually SGI ported XFS to Linux some time ago, and Linux is like 99% POSIX compliant. I'm not sure what you mean about a "Unix heritage". You're probably right about CPU scalability.

I was under the impression though that the thing that made Irix special was its X Server, which is appareently one of the best going, hence its popularity in graphics work.

Re:IRIX not just "application-level crap"

[the gnat]

Also, IRIX (like every commercial Unix, I guess) is hand-tailored to a very specific set of hardware. There are many advantages over Linux in this respect. You can partition off groups of processors for certain tasks, etc. They've also got extremely high-quality compilers.

The coolest thing I've seen so far is the ability to suspend a job and save an image of the running process to disk, then come back to it later- perhaps after several months and several reboots. God, I would kill to be able to do that on Linux.

Re:IRIX not just "application-level crap"

[sql*kitten]

IRIX has a number of assets that Linux does not have, even in the kernel space -- including scalability (support for up to 512 CPUs, 512 GiB RAM), advanced file systems (XFS journaled file system, XVM volume management), advanced networking (Clustered XFS, SAN), standards compliance (POSIX, DII-COE, Trusted IRIX), and a Unix (BSD+SysV) heritage

Don't forget Guaranteed Rate I/O.

Way too many attacks on spelling mistakes.

[mnmn]

I mean hey they happen. Even if TWICE in one artcle, and goes thru the moderators. Even this is statistically possible. Forcus on content please.

But does it come with a...

[Anonymous Coward]

...spellchecker?

Re:Free? Of course not.

[Ozric]

yea BSD or Slack .... that's the ticket.

Re:Free? Of course not.

[Billly Gates]

"If you really want an SVR4-ish nix, use a bsd or something."

Here is a shocker! I do not know if you have heard of it but there is an os called Linux!

Linux is the only free SVR4 unix on the pc available. If you want to blow $300 for a client licensed crippled version of SVR4 that is rock solid, then try Unixware. Its the real unix from Bell labs. There is also sco openserver but it really blows from what I heard and is dying.

*BSD is a BSD version of unix obviously. I prefer slackware, debian, or gentoo if I want a more unix like environment. Redhat and SUSE put all the config files in the wrong places and is not very unix like in my opinion.

Who cares

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want to run any *NIX on x86 then run Linux or one of the open BSDs. My experiece was that Solaris was much slower and not nearly as compatiable. Even Oracle ran better on Linux two years ago than it did on Solaris while running on a x86 server.

Unfortunatley, I administer over 30 SPARC stations, and at least Solaris 8 is a far cry from AIX 4.3+, HP-UX 11.00+, or RedHat Linux, of course this is simply my opinion.

My personal rankings for UNIXs that I have to deal now are:
RedHat
AIX
HP-UX (although I really HATE the patching system and lack of async I/O on filesystems!)
Solaris

Again, I'm only an admistrator of about 60 boxes right now. I feel like I have to hack the heck out of it to get everything set up the way that our large enterprise needs the O/S to work. The other O/Ss are much better to deal with, again, at least in our enterprise, which has about 250 machines.

Sun really has made some efforts to address many of Solaris's short comings, but I feel that they are too far behind. Even Oracle has made it clear that they are distancing themselves from Sun.

I know that many people still swear by Solaris, but at this point I would call Solaris legacy.

Sun's future is JAVA and maybe hardware (if they can get RedHat to support it again). ;) We found it really funny that we had to disable stop-a because it maps to a break on a serial console (think about many machines connected to a serial port terminal server for remote administration). ;)

Sun not immune to hardware problems

[aspeer]

Whilst Sun hardware seems to be built to a markedly higher standard than Intel hardware, there are always risks in going it alone. For all those people toutings Sun's "legendary reliability" it would pay to remember the hardware problems they had a couple of years ago with the UltraSparc II, as reported: here and here in ComputerWorld.

Whilst towards the end they got their act together, the inital response was the same (perhaps even more dubious) than any other vendor. First, deny any problem exists - then try and cover it up (some customers had to sign non-disclosure agreements about the problem, apparently in return for Sun's commitment to fix it in a timely manner). Lastly, claim that the problem caused "no data loss" and was someone elses fault anyway.

If your Compaq server is giving you problems, in the worst case you can ditch it for another brand, eg Dell. If your Sun hardware has an endemic problem, and all your software is build around Solaris, where do you go ?

This is not a tirade against Sun, in general their hardware is a lot better than most, and Solaris remains one of the benchmarks against which other *nix's are judged. It is just a reminder that even the big boys can have quality control and/or reliability problems.

Re:Sun not immune to hardware problems

[spinlocked]

If your Sun hardware has an endemic problem, and all your software is build around Solaris, where do you go?

Fujitsu?

I wouldn't, but you do have a choice. Every systems vendor has product issues from time to time. They all try to hush things up initially, because they are not necessarily aware that the problem is widespread and there's no point in causing panic - especially when initial findings pointed to environmental factors such as heat/EM noise. A single hardware issue is unlikely to affect all models and Sun was more than happy to generously discount on future purchases in order to keep the business. SunService did a stirling job during the E-cache (and the GBIC) issues. My systems were clustered and the problem was taken very seriously by Sun, I suffered little downtime and as such I have few complaints.

Re:Free? Of course not.

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe it should have read: If you want things where they belong, go with BSD or Solaris. If you want everything shoved into /usr/bin, go with Linux.

Lack of imagination

[bstadil]

- I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way. - Mark Twain

- It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word. - Andrew Jackson

Old News........

[Anonymous Coward]

Good Thing I posted this and sent it to the Admins of Slashdot close to 5 days ago...what gives?

Re:Free? Of course not.

[Sverige]

What companies have you been looking at? Plenty of companies have Solaris x86 boxes in production, I wish I could find some of the figures I had at one point. Maybe try a search on google for yourself

Re:Sun makes money by making everything work toget

[mrjohnson]

pfft. So he sent you a new box, that's nice and all but if you'd gone with commodity hardware and FOSS software you wouldn't have had to make the call in the first place.

Any service that I run can easily be moved to another server. Probably with a performance hit (the reason for having multiple in the first place) but it's still much faster to run a tape restore than wait for a system in the mail.

The point is: if you're locked into proprietary software/hardware, it doesn't make a difference how nice the vendor is. You're still locked in.

Re:Free? Of course not.

[Tuzanor]

but linux isn't SVR4, it was coded from the ground up. BSD was sort of forked from SVRx, but had every single piece of code rewritten by the folks at berkley.

Kiosk Mode

[hbo]

One thing has certainly improved with WebStart since the last time I tried it. Kiosk mode includes a web browser that is active throughout the main part of the install/upgrade. So, I hear about the early release from Sun on Slashdot, run off to give my 20 bucks to sun for the ISOs, download them (RCN rocks!), burn them and start the install. Then I log on to Slashdot to record my impressions while the installer is doing its thing.

One thing hasn't changed, however. The installer is still slower than dried guano on an iceberg. I mean, my dual PIII 800 is slow by today's standards, but Linux goes on in a jiffy. They obviously aren't trying to compete with Tux with this product anymore, so there's no incentive to compete feature-for-feature. But I still wonder why this thing takes three hours or so, not counting downloading/burning.

You are SERIOUSLY misinformed

[Anonymous Coward]

But I'm not that surprised. First of all, while you have to pay for StarOffice you don't have to pay for OpenOffice. What is the difference? StarOffice contains software sun licensed from third partys and they pay fees to use that software.

Solaris better than Redhat in my experience

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure what planet you live on but Solaris x86 has always out performed Redhat on my hardware. My latest comparisons are based on desktop-oriented tasks and server-oriented tasks both on the same laptop and workstation. Granted what is lacking is the latest device drivers that Linux is so quick to get, but since I only use IDE drives and 1-year old video cards, that has not been an issue. The laptop is a Pentium 166 w/ Chips&Technologies that needed XFree86 build to use full 1024x768x16bits possible. The workstation is a P3/733 w/ Nvidia TNT 32MB and no extra build of X was required to get 1600x1200x24bits .

The desktop feel was clean and fast on both OSes when idle. When not idle, even doing the cheapest disk task, Redhat graphic response really slowed down. Any significant background operation would really hit Redhat8 bad with Netscape7 performing really poorly. On Solaris9 the negative effect was barely noticable. The worst background jobs to hit Redhat were large filesystem operations, with a good mix of node and data I/O. When building XFree86 on both OSes in the background, it really hurt Netscape7 performance on Redhat, and was not even noticeable on Solaris.

The effects were consistent on both the laptop and workstation. The laptop simply exaggerated the effects more.

Now for Java. No comparison of anykind. Hands down, Solaris9 smokes Linux when it comes to running Java apps. I tested thread-crazy real-world servers where threads are not just token objects but are live and kicking expected to produce results. Not only did Solaris launch the threads faster, it's sycnrhonization across threads was much more optimal. I could easily saturate Redhat with a lower workload and see 100% CPU, while exact same workload on Solaris was 40%. These threads have a high amount of sychronization going on, and was the single largest contributor to the performance gap. Bottom line, big stuff runs better on Solaris. When not running big stuff, there was simply no noticable diff.

Granted I don't need all this OpenGL stuff or gaming, so that might be where Redhat outshines Solaris. Also probably video playback too but for that I use WindowsXP .

Here's stuff I built...

gcc 3.2.1 (bootstrapped from SMC Solaris8 pkg)
GNU* array of make,fileutils,sh-utils...
netscape7
XFree86 4.2.1
XFree86 4.2.99.2
top, lsof, sudo
windowmaker 0.80.2
cvs

what native binary packages?

jdk 1.4.1_01
Acrobat reader 4.05

so what is Solaris x86 missing? Honestly all it needs is a god community packaging effort. Something like *BSD ports system wherer you can
install prepackaged binaries to well known (opt) location, or build them yourself to same or well known location, all with auto-dep recursive binary packge grabs or builds, as required.

Give the community that, and Solaris x86 will become more popular. Not everyone has the desire to build stuff.

Re:Solaris better than Redhat in my experience

[Anonymous Coward]

Try as a server for let us say Oracle. We installed an IBM dual processor server with x-86 Solaris, it was probably Solaris 7. The Oracle rebuild that we kicked off one evening was still running in the morning. We installed RedHat Linux, and we were able to relink Oracle in about 15 minutes. That was the end of my expierence, I never went back, I know others in my corporation that have had similar expierences. Again, I administer a lot of servers, some run Oracle, and we normally do quite a bit of I/O balancing by default.

I really hope you're not comparing windowmaker to Gnome or KDE. Windowmaker is much lighter weight, especially in the RAM department. I noticed no mention of RAM in your system, perhaps you were swapping or not comparing apples to apples? ;)

Give you the benefit of the doubt, one could say that my installation for Linux might be more optimal than your's and your Solaris installation might be more optimal than mine.

As far as a workstation goes, I would still use Linux over Solaris, my expierence, even on a single processor is amazing to say the least. I can even do kernel builds (nice'd of course ;) ) at the same time I watch DVDs. I also play RTCW and have had no problems with Unreal Tournament 2003. And of course the supported software, especially pre-built, for Linux is much more prevalent than for Solaris.

I am also quite happy with my stability and ability to change many kernel parameters on the fly (sysctl), as opposed to hacking /etc/system and rebooting. You might want to check out patching as well, on Solaris it is documented and at least some of the support folks will insist that you must be in single user mode to even apply a kernel patch, which of course decreases a servers available uptime. On Linux the only patch that you need to reboot to pick up (not apply) is a kernel one and they're not as often as Sun's kernel patches. ;)

You have a good point on threads at the moment, you might want to read up on threads for the upcoming kernel, I believe you'll be surprised.

I doubt that Solaris will become more popular, and nowadays I build very little, only the stuff I really want to build, everything else is an RPM.

Again at this point I consider Solaris legacy. Its marketshare is not increasing, while there are of course flaws in Linux, there are flaws in Solaris, overall I call Linux a better general purpose O/S.

Re:Solaris better than Redhat in my experience

[bolthole]

so what is Solaris x86 missing? Honestly all it needs is a god community packaging effort.

Well then, if you think that, and are willing to put in a little shared time yourself, come join in the fun!

Re:Solaris better than Redhat in my experience

[Anonymous Coward]

yup, comparison was apples to apples. Same windowmaker on both OSes, same hardware, same RAM, infact same drive and partition too.

Only glaring difference is I used redhat8 bundled gcc, and on Solaris9 built gcc 3.2.1 .

Did a typo; Netscape7 was a binary install, not source build.

Sun's patching system is quite good; and it has not failed me since Solaris 2.3 days. Barring that, rebooting after a patch is always a good idea. That's why Sun lists it in instructions. This makes sure all apps that might use a patched shared file (or that initialized with a file that has changed) are flushed.

Linux threading is leading the free OS community but they lack simple concepts like folding all threads into a single trackable entity for tools like top or /proc interface . It's baffling to see that many PIDs. If they want to use a PID, fine. But for gods sake, fold them under one slot in top. Maybe it has an option for it that I don't know about? nah!

Re:Free? Of course not.

[puto]

i have the Solaris 8 Kit, and the 9 Kit. They both expressely state they are not for commercial use. Always have.

Puto

Re:Free? Of course not.

[armitage_23]

Agreed. Very few people run sun software on x86 hardware in a production environment. Most of it is for testing, and/or just checking it out to see what it's about.

Don't run solaris on x86 arch because it's supposedly better. On x86, there are much better OS's. If you really want an SVR4-ish nix, use a bsd or something. I don't know of any popular ones other than solaris. Whatever.

We use Solaris x86 at my current job, running on 4x4 Dell boxes and 2x1 no-name boxes. We also have a bunch of boxes running Linux and BSD, but these are not for production.

The main reason for running x86 is that it will scale to more processors better than Linux. (This is especially true when the system was built, back in '99.) The software that we run is heavily multi-threaded, and Solaris has better thread support. It's really as simple as that.

And yes, we've tested Linux (RH7.3) vs. Solaris (2.7) on identical hardware. Solaris won.

Oh the hurt

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you just love when you submit somthing Anonymously and you get high marks?

Wish I would've logged in on a few of mine too. It hurts to not know the state of mind of the average moderator. D'oh! ...and this post is pro'ly +2 funny. Oh the hurt!!!!

Re:Free? Of course not.

[Anonymous Coward]

# They paid for the massive bandwidth used by those that downloaded it.

Agreed, it cost Sun ~$17 per download.

# Sun probably cannibalized sales of lower-end (e.g. Sun Blade 100) systems. Those who wanted to run Solaris could do so without having to buy anything from Sun.

Wrong, Solaris x86 has been available since 1993.

# All of the risks and no profits. Sun had no quality control over the hardware, so if Joe Blow had a system with flaky RAM that crashed all of the time, he'd probably blame Solaris.

*SIGH* All too true. Lamers never get a clue.

# It took a tremendous investment on Sun's part to make a version of Solaris that worked on such a large subsection of x86 boxes. This probably took money and time away from profit-making ventures.

Yep. Which is why they're charging for it now.

Kids, this ain't a microsoft beta.
It ain't Linus's latest brainfart.
This shit works, Now. Been using it for over a year now on both x86 and SPARC.
Sun does things right.

And, I don't have to build another goddamned kernel to use it! Gawd I hate that.
I'd much rather patch and move on.
Sun gives me that.

Sun clearly *CAN* be a competitor to windows and linux. But, it's going to take some convincing at Sun to make that happen.
I, for one will be (and have been) beating on PHB's heads at Sun for exactly that.

Re:Free? Of course not.

[fmaxwell]

Wrong, Solaris x86 has been available since 1993.

While it was available for x86 since version 2.1, it was not distributed for free. Making a free version probably took hardware sales away from the low-end Blade line.

That said, I agree with your points about its stability and proven track-record. And I will add that the single-company vision behind Solaris means that it has a consistent look, feel, and installation that is so sorely missing from Linux. I wish Sun all the luck in the world.

Mea Culpa

[binaryDigit]

You are correct. For some reason I was always under the assumption that SO was a Java app. Actually, for me this is even worse news as SO always felt ponderous and I always had chalked it up to being a Java app, no it has no such excuse.

Re:Free? Of course not.

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm, bsd was forked around Unix V6, SYSVR4 was more of a bringing the bsd enhancements back into the "official" unix.

Re:Free? Of course not.

[binaryDigit]

What companies have you been looking at? Plenty of companies have Solaris x86 boxes in production

I said that I personally knew of 0 companies, I wasn't exactly going out of my way to look for them though ;) I work in the CRM/call center market so I do get a chance to see a lot of decent sized setups where uptime is everything. Lots of Sun/Solaris, more and more PC/WinNT, a few IBM/AIX (and even one or two OS/2) and of course plenty of other misc setups. I don't doubt that there are other industries that might use them, but either way not a large part of Suns big picture.

Re:Free? Of course not.

[binaryDigit]

We use Solaris x86 at my current job, running on 4x4 Dell boxes and 2x1 no-name boxes

Just out of curiosity, what type of work are these boxes doing?

Re:Free? Of course not.

[KewlPC]

What OS were you running on that Dual Pentium III 1.4? That can have a big influence.

goes to creditors........

[DABANSHEE]

...........Well in theory, generaly speaking the liquidators aution off everything to cover their fees.

download solaris iso

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know about you guys.. but I am intriqued to try out solaris, but I'm not willing to fork out $20 for BETA software.

anyone willing to provide me with a link to download the iso?

I have heard that raster is building e17 over for sun..that true?

scott

Installer

[Otis_INF]

The question is... did they update the installer for Solaris on Intel or does the user still have to use a version of fdisk which was also part of MSDos 1.0 ?

And does it support multiboot or not?

Never tried it

[ExEleven]

I must try solaris one day, sounds good. But I still would prefer Linux over any Unix, I am about the only person I know who would willingly say "Its better then the BSD's". Many others think not, but Linux Really has everything you need.

It does need better UFS support. But uou can live without that. Anyway Linux is the Only os that I have that supports hfs.

LINUX IS BETTER

Re:Free? Of course not.

[bovinewasteproduct]

BSD was sort of forked from SVRx, but had every single piece of code rewritten by the folks at berkley.

Huh? Go and check your Unix history. When Berkeley got their first license for Unix, there was NO SysV. Version 7 ( and 32V for the VAX) Unix is what BSD is based on. Here is a nice little chart of the Unix bloodlines.

BWP

Re:Free? Of course not.

[Tuzanor]

I never said it came from version 7 (i used an x because i didn't know which it forked from off the top of my head). According to the timeline you provided, BSD first came off of timesharing version 6, with multiple "syncs/forks" with various UNIX versions over time.

I should have been more specific, i guess. What I meant to say was 4.4BSD-lite had every single piece of code rewritten by the folks at berkley after the lawsuit, while previous versions were "enhancements/modifications" of the origional UNIX source.

Give it away for education

[Microsofts slave]

Get all these kids in grtade school off of their useless windoze machines and put them onto power pumping Sun, Solaris machines.

Re:Free? Of course not.

[zerocool^]

What I was refering to was "if you would like an SVR4-ish OS on an x86 platform". Trying not to say Linux. Trying to say if you wanted an SVR4 on x86, I don't know of anything other than Solaris, and I thought BSD had been forked from an SVR4 tree somewhere along the line. Solaris is def. not anything like a posix system.

Re:Free? Of course not.

[zerocool^]

Heh.
It's running Red Hat 7.2. Because the customer wanted to run Plesk. Which, on that machine, is administoring something like 8500 domains. Don't get me wrong, the box rocks... and most problems we have with it are poor programming in plesk... but yeah. The Solaris box is running Solaris 7, and the other box (the P-III) is running RH7.2 with a 2.4.19 kernel, with a bunch of patches (low-latency, pre-emptive, etc.).

Linux on a Sparc box sux, by the way.

Re:When it's out of testing, will it be tsarkon

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. Sun should charge for software. I don't have any problem with it. In fact I prefer it, because if I buy something I can complain about it, and complaining is good. Also, I can afford it.

OSNews is a site run by fat greasy foreigners who cant speak English properly despite being here for decades; but you'll be happy to know Eugenia Fat Fucking Greek Pig QUIT as full time unwashed grease bitch.

Sun is confused about free for all and open source. I would like them to retreat to core competencies and focus on delivering high and scalable equipment with a solid OS. If Sun wants to boot Linux in the nards, they should lick FreeBSD 5.0's balls up and down, beat Microsoft to the eventuality they must consider (MSFT must use FreeBSD in order to live), and we would all be happy.

IBM will be the most successful of leveraging Open Source to make money on consulting. They can do this and barely get their hands dirty. RedHat has to deal with the OS, they pay a few Linux-capable programmers to fuck with the 390 port, POSIX threads (boy, does line-sucks need threading help), fuck with java and add JFS support. None of this VA LineSucks head over heels shit ; none of this shit like Cobalt CraQ shit servers, which suck donkey fucknuts so bad.

Hey, and Linux fuckers out there, can you please all use XFS exclusively? Or are you all too fucking stupid to realize which is the best filesystem for your fucking cheesy kernel with a random c library and a random c compiler and a random set of hacked and fucked GNU shit pasted on.

FUCK fuck FuCk fUcK fuck fuck FUCK fuck FuCk fUcK fuck fuck FUCK fuck FuCk fUcK fuck fuck LINUX zealots.

Last Post!

[alpg]

XLVII:
Two-thirds of the Earth's surface is covered with water. The other
third is covered with auditors from headquarters.
XLVIII:
The more time you spend talking about what you have been doing, the
less time you have to spend doing what you have been talking about.
Eventually, you spend more and more time talking about less and less
until finally you spend all your time talking about nothing.
XLIX:
Regulations grow at the same rate as weeds.
L:
The average regulation has a life span one-fifth as long as a
chimpanzee's and one-tenth as long as a human's -- but four times
as long as the official's who created it.
LI:
By the time of the United States Tricentennial, there will be more
government workers than there are workers.
LII:
People working in the private sector should try to save money.
There remains the possibility that it may someday be valuable again.
-- Norman Augustine

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