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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."
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.
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
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.
"you may not make copies of Software, other than a single copy of Software for archival purposes."
From Binary Code License Agreement.
Hi!
Not to mention that you have to pay if you are using a multiple-CPU system:
I guess that rules me out, then... :-P
Hi!
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.'"
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.
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?
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.