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Sun Releases Solaris 9 for Intel
nairnr writes "Sun has announced that it is releasing Solaris 9 for Intel. Any takers? According to Sun, it extends the 'enterprise class OS to the X86 market'. How nice of them. Non-commercial usage is available at no charge, while commercial pricing starts at US $99; attractive OEM pricing is also available. Source code for Solaris will now be available. It seems they are after Microsoft, not Linux. More Power to them."
Non-commercial usage is available at no charge
Thats cool and all, but you still have to pay $20 to download the ISOs.
I guess it's a good deal. Free would be better though.
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
The software is free...
Their bandwidth isn't, its $20 for the bandwidth to download it.
Nice way of trying to appear nice, but still screwing you...
The press release is new, but Solaris 9 x86 has been available on Sun's site for a while now. Also, only the SPARC version is free, the x86 version still costs $20 to download or $95 for the media kit. However, since they were originally planning on canning Solaris x86 altogether, this is great.
Solaris is a neat system, and I've enjoyed playing with x86 version 8, though it couldn't replace Linux on my desktop. I have seriously considered using it on my servers though.
How nice of them. Non-commercial usage is available at no charge, while commercial pricing starts at US $99; attractive OEM pricing is also available.
The Solaris 9 x86 download is a $20 charge. The SPARC download is available at no charge. Also, the source was available for free for Solaris 8 as well, so that's not something new.
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
The software is free...
SCSL is not a free software license by the GNU definition, nor is it an OSI approved open source license.
As to whether the Solaris 9 operating environment for the x86 platform qualifies as gratis with a $20 shipping charge, it depends on whether Sun has licensed it for free redistribution to any third party.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Here is the Intel based HCL list, but nothing about Solaris 9 yet.
Novel theory: Modern Man evolved from psychopath
preemptive kernel, threads to handle system calls, real-time capabilities, thread based os, etc. Linux is nice and simple, and severely lacks performance and utility in some aspects that make Solaris great.
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
Last year, Sun really, really wanted to drop Solaris for Intel.
Speculation was that it was for one or both of two reasons:
1) Not to dilute their SPARC-oriented business,
2) Not to dilute their Sun-Linux business.
At a conference I attended, as well as some Sun presentations, some Sun employees were begging customers to demand Solaris 9 for Intel from their sales reps. Seems that there was still a "Solaris for Intel" faction inside the company. Also, the inside scoop was that they already _had_ Solaris 9 for intel, but the higher-ups didn't want to release it.
Customer demand was heavy and it changed the original plan to nix Solaris 9 for Intel. Now it's out.
No big secrets here, just a little historic perspective.
I am having problems with SUN JVM on linux
and considering switch my java servers to
Solaris x86. Does anybody have feedback on
quality of JVM on Solaris x86?
Woops, sorry Sun.
On the other hand the continually growing Unix presence in the world, largely fueled by Linux (I like BSD too, but it has had nothing like the success of Linux) has made it possible for Sun to once again start taking some accounts away from Microsoft (who has been gaining ground on them since NT's release.) This is an especially crucial time because until now the only 64 bit operating systems have been Unix - NT/Alpha doesn't count because of its narrow distribution. Windows on 64 bit is now going to become downright inexpensive with the release of Hammer. There is NO TIME TO LOSE in gaining some ground.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I just got rid of my x86 Solaris 8 workstation setup. I actually used it more than a year, almost continuous uptime.
Solid as a rock but disk speeds were unimpressive, at least on my IDE setup. Went to NetBSD for the desktop and I'll stick with Solaris on servers (sparc).
Granted, x86 Solaris is great for practice.
Yes, it does run on VMware.
Haven't run it on Virtual PC as I don't have that.
Only thing I ran into was that if you're going to run X is that it has no clue what video card VMware is using. No surprise there really. Did what I needed in 256 colors though.
Word to the wise; if you install it, skip the install disc and use disc 1.
That will save you a poop-ton of questions on the forums and usenet.
You've got an easy breezy wind at your back...most of the time.
Solarisx86 was available free or at a symbolic price years ago. I fell for it, and besides not working properly, it managed to destroy my CD-ROM by making the arm whack back and forth violently all the time during the painstakingly slow installation process.
For a single CPU low end box used for non commercial purposes, there were no advantages at all, and it took a lot of effort to get (most of) your linux or *BSD software compiled and running on it
It was interesting for learning purposes though.
Do you know if it is any more suitable for a PC now? Taking into account that the average PC now is about 5 to 10 times more powerful, and Solarisx86 has been developed for a few years more?
Good questions, and well asked.
:P
:P
Is Solaris a graphical OS?
Yes, very much so. It uses an X for hardware management, and for many years has used CDE (Common Desktop Environment) for mime-type association and related activities, which KDE was based off of. Gnome has gotten into the market, however, and is to be the new desktop environment for future releases of Solaris. For many years Solaris has competed with the likes of AIX and IRIX. Solaris supports stereo-3D graphics (read: Virtual Reality, VRML, CAVE, OpenGL) and high performance SVGA, PAL, and NTSC graphics configurations. Because it supports things like multi-head, multi-processor, and multi-threaded applications and configurations, movie studios and game-design companies often use Solaris workstation and server solutions to design and render special effects for Hollywood movies and the like (I may be mistaken, but I believe that Industrial Light & Magic is a Solaris shop... ever see Jurassic Park?).
Is it easier to use than Linux?
Yes and no. It's easier to design special effects for movies, install virtual reality caves, and run scientific data analysis with Solaris. They are both flavors of unix, so the difficulty is about the same, in terms of learning arcane commands and stuff. It's probably easiest to say that Solaris is as easy as Linux... just different. (Your questions is like asking whether or not vanilla icecream is warmer/colder than chocolate icecream...)
And, most importantly, is there any way I could run Windows games on it?
Sure. You could install WINE libraries on your machine, I suppose... But if you get a Solaris box, and download your OpenGL and Java3D libraries, why play Windows games, when you can design your own games? Why play windows games, when you can play VR games?
I heard that Solaris was faster and more scalable than Linux.
It is, on Sparc machines. (And I've even heard rumors to the effect that Linux is faster on old sparc hardware.)
Slowlaris on Intel is a big waste of time for Sun. The only reason they did not kill it is because enough of their large customers insisted they keep it in place. I hope they are charging them an arm and a leg for it, because x86 Slowlaris will only drain resources they need to apply elsewhere (like Sparc Solaris and Cobalt).
Plus you are not bothered with kernel recompilations etc.
Apparently you've never had to deal with patching Solaris.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
You're missing out on one of Sun's biggest points: reliability.
On the Sparc platform size, Sun builds high-end, high-reliability, high-predictability boxes. They want an OS that works (a) very well with the hardware, and (b) with the same reliability features. If they're going to promote porting of other OSes onto their platform, they'll do it on their own terms, and with their own requirements, and that's not very straightforward.
It's smartest, easiest, and most profitable for Sun to constantly reinforce the equation:
Sun = Sparc = Solaris = Solid
Aiding the development of other OSes leads to...
Sun = Sparc = Another processor, with lower MHz than Intel.
Now on the Intel side, there are two factors at work I figure. First of all is the fact that through purchases and blunders, they're moving into it with boxes like the LX50. Given that fact, they (a) want to get Solaris on as many machines as possible, and (b) want to keep their toes in the Linux waters. Add to that, the fact that when they tried to kill of Solaris/x86, there was a large backlash.
So on the Intel side, they develop Solaris and Linux both. Developing SunLinux is a safety measure which in the short term will sell a few more systems to die-hard Linux admins, while developing Solaris/x86 will keep Solaris on machines that people couldn't justify the cost of Sparc gear for.
OK, so this is all rambling. What it boils down to is this: Sun, like most companies, says "We don't sell computers--we sell SOLUTIONS!" Well on the enterprise side of things, companies don't buy computers--they buy solutions. Buying a PC from the guy down the street, installing Linux, configuring IPTables, locking it down, etc. etc. is not as appealing for most companies as buying an LX50/Solaris/FW1 box and having a single vendor for complete support.
Or to summarise the summary, (nearly) NONE of those copies of Solaris/x86 that Sun sells for $20 will go onto serious production machines--the sort of machines that Sun sells and supports. They'll all end up on hobbiest machines, family web servers, and tiny corporate LANs. This isn't enterprise computing, and it's not going to affect Sun's bottom line.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Well, I used 8.0 and it's ok. I don't use it for interactive desktop type applications much anyway. I mostly use it like a server, so video support doesn't matter much. I'll keep it in mind for Sol9, though.
Check out my eclectic infosec blog at InfoSecPotpou
Btw, (off-topic ) does OS X run in VMWare?
Don't believe so, VMWare isn't an emulator, it wouldn't emaulate the Mac processor/hardware etc.
You can't get a threaded piece of code to work on x86 and expect no problems when porting it to Sparc.
Threaded code works just fine unchanged on SPARC and x86; see the Solaris codebase for plenty of examples. =) With very few exceptions, all features available on SPARC are required to be available on x86 as well.
Hell, I don't think Sun even offers an x86 version of their C/C++ compiler.
Search on store.sun.com for part FC9II-602-T999, Forte C 6 update 2 for Intel. The SunONE Studio 7 Compiler Collection seems only to be available (externally) for SPARC, but expect that the 8.0 compilers will be available for both platforms.
OK, so this isn't real open source and it isn't really free.
It's onlt 20 Bucks I hear you scream, but for someone who just wants to evaluate or simply 'play' with it (e.g. see if you can get it going under VMWare) it's too much.
If Sun says it's really open source, why can't just one of us pay the 20usd and bung the 3 ISOs on KazaA or some university FTP server (that way Sun aren't paying for any bandwidth)?
I'm glad I got Solaris 8 x86 before they started charging for it, same with Star Office.
#include <sig.h>
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