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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.""
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).
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.
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.
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?
Around Windows 2000, if i'm not mistaken?
You're not
Don't forget to think different.
Or you can just download it if you don't want support. [shrug].
May we never see th
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
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!
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?