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."

Comments

Question

[Znonymous Coward]

Does anyone know if Solaris 9 will run on Connectix Virtual PC and VMware?

Re:not exactly

[mmol_6453]

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...

Re:Solaris is better than Linux.

[Frymaster]

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.

What is Sun's Business Plan?

[simm_s]

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.

Re:What is Sun's Business Plan?

[pmz]

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.

Not really. x86 servers do not compete with UltraSPARC servers in features. $/MHz is only 10% or so of the whole picture.

For example, Sun's servers are built to be maintained. They are laid-out thoughtfully, which often makes an administrator's job mighty enjoyable. They are an investment, where a server can have a useful lifetime of a decade (e.g., I still see SC1000s serving as substantial fileservers even after almost 10 years). Even old Sun workstations make totally reliable DNS or e-mail servers. Ten years into the future, today's Sun equipment will be seen in the same light.

As for modern Sun servers (Fujitsu, too), they have reliability features built from inside the processor on out to the busses and RAM. They are beaten only by mainframes. They leave x86 in their dust.

Re:Of course they aren't going after linux

[wfrp01]

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.