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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).
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.
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 ;-)
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.'
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.
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?
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!
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.
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.
with all that software, they will have to call it Gnu/Solaris.
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...