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Sun Solaris 9 for x86 for Evaluation

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the imagine-how-useless-that-would-be dept.

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.""

17 of 266 comments (clear)

  1. Quick Question by Alethes · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Quick Question by tmark · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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 ?

    2. Re:Quick Question by sean23007 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

      --

      Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
    3. Re:Quick Question by jericho4.0 · · Score: 3, Interesting
      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.

      --
      "A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
  2. LX50 SERVER by didiken · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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 ?

  3. Re:When it's out of testing, will it be free? by lvdrproject · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Microsoft did challenge hackers to break into a Windows system, didn't they? Around Windows 2000, if i'm not mistaken?

    :Lav

  4. disk requirements by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    "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.

  5. Wouldnt it be cool if Apple bought Sun? by Znonymous+Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

    --

    Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.

    1. Re:Wouldnt it be cool if Apple bought Sun? by drinkypoo · · Score: 3, Interesting
      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.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  6. Re:Why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    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.

  7. Re:What if I don't have a credit card? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    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.

  8. Who cares by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    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). ;)

  9. Sun not immune to hardware problems by aspeer · · Score: 2, Interesting
    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.

    1. Re:Sun not immune to hardware problems by spinlocked · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

      --
      # init 5
      Connection closed.

      Oh... ...bugger.
  10. Re:Why are Sun Workstations so good? by iggymanz · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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!

  11. Re:Solaris better than Redhat in my experience by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    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.

  12. Installer by Otis_INF · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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 underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.