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

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

[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.

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 ?

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.

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?

[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: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.

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?