Slashdot Mirror
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."
I heard that Solaris was faster and more scalable than Linux. Plus you are not bothered with kernel recompilations etc.
I think I'll download it and try it out. What the hey, it's free.
Does anyone know if Solaris 9 will run on Connectix Virtual PC and VMware?
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
Quoth the Press Release: "Solaris[tm] Operating System (OS), the number one UNIX platform"
Does anyone know by what metric they figured that? Sales volume? Some kind of security/performance metric? Or is it pure marketing speak for "we think we're #1!"?
--
$tar -xvf
Well...if someone would be so kind as to provide an MD5sum of the actual image, so we could test it against the ISO files that are going to show up on P2P networks...
What's this Submit thingy do?
caveat: i have not seriously used solaris since 7, but at that time it was my 40-hour-a-week os:
if solaris is to be considered "better" than linus it is because of two things:
1. sun hardware. if you complain about "price-performance" on sparc boxen then you don't need those extra couple of point-001s on your performance and should stick with yr hp pavillion. people run solaris because the purple boxes are bulletproof.
2. service. yes, it's outrageously expensive - but when the gbic card on yr database server makes a gentle popping noise and ten million bucks worth of data drifts away like an untethered boat from the pier, you will appreciate that one phone call will have some ubergeek in tweed show up with a bag of pro bono hardware and a shoebox full of patch disk and make everything alright.
this release offers neither of the above points. yes, it's free. yes, it runs on your mom's machine. but unless you need to spend fifty grand on a bulletproof solution, solaris is a waste.
2 1337 4 u!
What's the application support for Solaris-x86 look like? I'm not talking about your opensource stuff that can be built on anything from an XBox to a Cray X1, I'm referring to many closed source apps that people purchase Linux and Solaris-sparc boxes for.
Check out the VMware site first, I believe that Solaris dones't work well with VMware. Something about the video adapater, if I recall correctly.
It seems they are after Microsoft, not Linux. More Power to them.
/. -- chances are some of you *are* that guy). You have some computer assets running an existing proprietary UNIX (HP-UX, AIX, take your pick) on x86. You want some modern OS goodies (built-in web services, enormous RAM & file system capabilities, reasonable security implementations, etc), but you also need to protect your investment in your current system (hardware, your administrators' know-how, blah blah). You're not going to jump ship completely from the *NIX world & go buy a bunch of Windows 2000 licenses... you're going to choose between Solaris/x86 and Linux.
No offense to anyone who agrees with the above, but if you ignore the anti-Microsoft PR banter from the posted story, this statement seems naive. Sure, that press release has a whole section about how Solaris/x86 kicks the crap out of MS Windows Server 2000, but (in my AC opinion) that's just the PR flacky talking. When you think about it, this move really positions Solaris/x86 directly against Linux in the marketplace.
For example, imagine you're the IT guy for a small-to-mid-sized company (hey -- this is
All that said, I don't think Sun is "after Microsoft, not Linux" anyway... they're after $$$ in the current market.
--Mid
I don't get why sun is releasing solaris 9 to the intel platform. I thought they were supposed to be a hardware company?
By releasing solaris for free on the sparc platform they increase the value of their hardware business. By releasing solaris for the intel platform they are decreasing the value of their core sparc platform, because they are giving users the choice of going with cheaper hardware companies. All of sun's engineering talent and effort is going to waste.
What they should be doing is making operating systems like OpenBSD and linux as easy as possible to port to the sparc platform. This way potential sun hardware customers would not need to have these stupid "which unix is better?" debates.
It seems that sun does not want to make any money.
Having it run on your Mom's machine is great for those of us that want to learn Solaris but can't afford a SPARC. Way I see it, this can only increase Solaris mindshare which has to be a good thing surely?
In addition to being a way to introduce people who'd otherwise have no access to Solaris, I think this is a desktop play. Apple has shown that a truly useable consumer desktop for *nix is possible. Sun is working closely w/ Gnome. The KDE folks are getting money from the German government. The next few years promise to be very interesting. It's still a pretty wide open playing field, and what I see happening is Sun throwing their hat in the ring. My next prediction is that they'll be too half-assed about the effort to really gain any traction.
--Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
Hey, that discovery alone was probably worth the time and effort expended in installing Solaris x86. Multiple QA platforms are nice that way. Those extra ports will shake out bugs that you wouldn't have found otherwise.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
You oversimplify a point: "why not just go with truly open source software?" Well, for many reasons, for one, our Samba server locked up and kicked everyone out for no reason yesterday... What about the other servers (MS and Novell)? Well, they are still running with no problem (Some for over a year without even a reboot [hehe, these are the Novell servers that did not need no MS patch! :-)]). Will we go with "truly open source" server software anytime soon? No way. If our more critical systems had hiccuped the way Samba did, we woud have had a major event. The same reasoning will keep Sun people from switching away, or keep prospective new Open Source users (like my workplace) away from Open Source for a hefty long time.
- Install Sunx86
- ???
- Profit!
Actually, I think I know what the "???" may be in this case. That would be: build your SUN chops with a copy of said on one of these nice ch33p b0x0rz and grab hold of some dead trees and with some perserverance and love of knowledge you will get to 3.Quod scripsi, scripsi.
As a hetero (as in many platforms) UNIX admin, I applaud Sun for coming to their senses. One of the things that got me into Solaris in a big way, which also helped me with my job, was the availability of an Intel version.
Its called MINDSHARE.
Now I ended up getting 2 Ultras off Ebay, so I use the Sparc version at home, but I always contended that Sun was being dumb in throwing out the mindshare that they can scrape up just by having a version that runs on cheap Intel hardware. The x86 version of Solaris got me used to it, comfortable with it, and led to Sun hardware sales when I got to a position to recommend some Unix purchases at work. So you see, mindshare can add to the bottom line.
I love Linux, but I also LOVE Solaris. I love Solaris on sparc hardware better, but having a free non commercial x86 version rounds out their offerings.
I wonder who in the company was for it and who was against it, and who actually decided the final direction?
Probably because the Linux community values politics and ideology in addition to technology.
Well, at least in Solaris vi is vi. I swear that the vi clones in linux want to be web browsers, LaTeX typesetters, on-line help systems, and on and on and on. When one of them asks if I want my car washed or my house painted, I won't be suprised one bit. It can be easily argued that many GNU/Linux tools have abandoned some of the KISS principles of UNIX, which is kind of a shame. I still prefer to connect simple tools via a pipeline; everything is just more flexible that way.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Now, it would be awesome if Sun released their compiler suite for less than $100. It is the best compiler for SPARC-based machines (duh) and would fill in where GCC lags behind. Their dbx is pretty good, too. It's also well documented, which makes it very hard to beat for SPARC-based software development.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Though, I don't doubt that there are still some technical limitations of Linux compared to Solaris (and I'd be interested in hearing about them... as I remember it Solaris is supposed to scale to multiple processors better than Linux, though that might be old news).
Anyway, I agree that the various attempts at getting "sort of" like open source are pathetic (the source code under glass licenses and so on).
There are certainly sound conservative reasons a large enterprise should stick with what's working for them... e.g. if you're business centers around Oracle running on Solaris, you're not going to change either of those in a hurry. But on the other hand, if you were starting a new business, you'd be a fool not to think about Postgresql running on Linux/FreeBSD. And even an established business that's looking for ways of cutting costs should at least start thinking about switching.
Put this together and you've got a grim future for closed-source "enterprise class" software.