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

IN SOVIET RUSSIA

[IN SOVIET RUSSIA]

Sun Releases You!

eat my

[Anonymous Coward]

long dick. that is all.

fp?

[Anonymous Coward]

fp?

Wow...

[Vermyndax]

Who will they sue when no one buys it or puts it on the shelves?

--Vermyndax

Re:Wow...

[Anonymous Coward]

everyone who breaches contract, I suppose...

like every other company as well

Solaris is better than Linux.

[MisterFancypants]

As much as I dislike Sun, I have to admit that Solaris is better than Linux. Probably because Sun's engineers put technology before politics and ideology.

Re:Solaris is better than Linux.

[Gropo]

How much better could it possibly be? I'm no 'closed OS' hater, by any means, but a choice between the volume of development that has gone in to Linux compared to the volume in Solaris9-x86 just cannot equate to superiority IMB.

Great of rinterfacing to the back-end, I suppose - beyond that?

Re:Solaris is better than Linux.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, imagine GNU without all the BS involved.

My boss asked me the other day if I was a socialist! I said no, but I do use linux. I like it for scp/ssh/co$t is all. Not big on the idealogical crap that comes with it.

Keep the battle for an open minded society alive!

Re:Solaris is better than Linux.

[GhostseTroll]

A professor at the University of Mississippi is giving a
lecture on the supernatural. To get a feel for his
audience, he asks: "How many people here believe in
ghostses?" About 90 students raise their hands.

"Well, that's a good start. Out of those of you who
believe in ghostses, do any of you think you've ever seen
a ghostse?" About 40 students raise their hands.

"That's really good. Has anyone here ever talked to a
ghostse?" 15 students raise their hands.

"That's great. Has anyone here ever touched a ghostse?" 3
students raise their hands.

"That's fantastic. But let me ask you one question
further... Have any of you ever made love to a ghostse?"
One student way in the back raises his hand.

The professor is astonished and says, "Son, in all the
years I've been giving this lecture, no one has ever
claimed to have slept with a ghostse. You've got to come
up here and tell us about your experience."

The redneck student replies with a nod and a grin, and
begins to make his way up to the podium. The professor
says, "Well, tell us what it's like to have sex with a
ghostse."

The student replies, "Ghostse?!? From ah-way back there ah
thought yuh said "goatse."

Re:Solaris is better than Linux.

[dmanny]

I wish you would have given us a little insight as to the specific ways that you find Solaris superior. I am not doubting you. I will probably get Solaris and play with it soon. It is just that as I do so (once again after many years, but not on a x86 platform), I would like to have in mind other's opinions of the areas where it offers more...

Re:Solaris is better than Linux.

[REBloomfield]

I don't think you should compare volume of development. Think of it as usefulness in an Enterprise situation. Scalable SMP support anyone?

Re:Solaris is better than Linux.

[Anonymous Coward]

How is it better? It takes days to get GNOME to run "right" on solaris and you have to install "everything" onto a sun box because it comes with NOTHING. Solaris is more stable I'll grant you that, but when something goes wrong you are all alone. Its not user friendly at all. An OS should not be physically painful to use and whats up with CCE on Solaris it will NEVER fully die.

Re:Solaris is better than Linux.

[axxackall]

I don't see any politics driving people to prefer Linux vs Solaris on their PC servers and desktops around the world.

Sun may declare that they want Windows users, but in fact usually non-Windoes users are smart and/or free enough to choose operating systems. Therefore, Sun wants Linux (as well as BSD) users to switch to Solaris.

There are three evils for Linux: Microsoft, Apple and Sun. Not sure which is worse.

Re:Solaris is better than Linux.

[awa]

I respect your views but, as a longtime solaris AND linux user, I have to say I disagree. Solaris is much better than Linux in certain aspects and viceversa. For most of my needs Linux is the best choice (price, feature and performance-wise). For some applications, though, Linux does not come near the scalability and stability of sun boxen with solaris ( GNU/Solaris :-) ? )

It all boils down to selecting and using the appropriate tool for each and every task and associated circumstances - including luser and sysadmin comfort.

Re:Solaris is better than Linux.

[wfrp01]

As much as I like Sun, I have to admit that Linux is better than Solaris. Probably because the Linux community values politics and ideology in addition to technology.

Re:Solaris is better than Linux.

[xanadu-xtroot.com]

Sun's engineers put technology before politics and ideology.

Please elaborate. How does the personal feeling of a person effect his/her code and also how does that effect the project in general?
Take RMS for example. He's quite vocal about his feelings about Open Source and all that, but how does that effect his code?
Alan Cox with that whole not putting an entry in the Changelog because of the DMCA (IIRC...)?

Does this make Linux worse because of these (although only two) examples? These fellows are damn good coders yet still voice their opinions on "politics and ideology". Please explain how that hurts Linux and OSS on the whole. I'm really curious how you may feel your post was not Flaimbait.

Re:Solaris is better than Linux.

[gammoth]

Yeah, the free market idealogical crap is soooo much better.

Re:Solaris is better than Linux.

[grub]

My boss asked me the other day if I was a socialist! I said no, but I do use linux. I like it for scp/ssh/co$t is all

Then why not use OpenBSD? After all, it costs the same and they are the ones that wrote the OpenSSH package you find so useful.

Re:Solaris is better than Linux.

[warrior_on_the_edge_]

I wish you would have given us a little insight as to the specific ways that you find Solaris superior.

They way it handles threads, and virtual memory management and.......

Re:Solaris is better than Linux.

[kindbud]

We call Solaris "OOS":

(wait for it :)

"Oracle Operating System"

Re:Solaris is better than Linux.

[Prof.Phreak]

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.

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.

Re:Solaris is better than Linux.

[Gropo]

I never entertained the idea that Sun intentioned Solaris-x86 for enterprise-level applications.

Why would 'IT-Manager-X' lean towards Solaris for the back-room Xeon cluster, when there are already thousands of near-identical configurations leveraging Linux beautifully around the globe? Is the scalability A) that much more extensible under Solaris? B) all that common a need? C) Worth the relatively miniscule newsgroup/bbs/irc channels for support?

I have always figured Solaris-x86 for a 'mindshare' stunt, nothing more... Perhaps /.ers with experiences in back-end Solaris-x86 would care to clarify?

Re:Solaris is better than Linux.

[bwalling]

How much better could it possibly be? I'm no 'closed OS' hater, by any means, but a choice between the volume of development that has gone in to Linux compared to the volume in Solaris9-x86 just cannot equate to superiority IMB.

The volume of development in Solaris has had focus. The volume of development in "Linux" (are you referring to all packages, because I'm not sure your arguement works as well kernel vs kernel) has resulted in 50 different tools that do the same thing a slightly different way.

Re:Solaris is better than Linux.

[Boone^]

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.

Re:Solaris is better than Linux.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, they can charge $20 for the BW, and it'd be all fine by me as long as they don't bitch when it gets distributed on other places. Over P2P networks or if some other site wants to mirror it and offer a free download (fileplanet, sunet, whatever). If the $20 actually is to cover for BW then I don't mind at all.

Two thumbs up Sun, this is a real nice move!

Re:Solaris is better than Linux.

[REBloomfield]

Well, the first time we got a SPARC (netra), it was running a filtering system for Internet access, and it was the only system that did run a filter at the time (It also did gateway email scanning).

We eventually replaced it with an x86 box with NT when the software was migrated, but I do miss the CDE desktop (and yes... i know Linux has an attempt at it...)

Re:Solaris is better than Linux.

[patter]

but a choice between the volume of development that has gone in to Linux compared to the volume in Solaris9-x86 just cannot equate to superiority IMB.

I don't follow, from what I can see, Sun's had a team working full time on Solaris since 1983, Linux was a pet project started in 1991, released in December of that year (and bearing little resemblance to what we have today).

Or did the (almost) 10 year jump cause Sun's engineers to rest on their laurels, waiting for Linux to catch up?

I'm not sure anyone can say for sure, but what number of people are working _full-time_ on Linux? More than Sun employs? Or maybe the same number?

Maybe I'm missing something, but I'd say that Sun's had longer to get things going, which doesn't mean it's better, but it certainly doesn't mean it's had less development.

Re:Solaris is better than Linux.

[Anonymous Coward]

There are three evils for Linux: Microsoft, Apple and Sun. Not sure which is worse.

Linux is evil for Linux, too.

Re:Solaris is better than Linux.

[Anonymous Coward]

And OSS stands for Operational Support System where I work.

Re:Solaris is better than Linux.

[UU7]

Yup, I have to agree. On SUN hardware, it's ROCK solid. We had a cpu burn up and it didn't bring down the box (14 proc). A quick swap and you're back at full capacity :)

Re: Solaris is better than Linux.

[Black Parrot]

> 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.

Garsh, I didn't know James Bond worked for Sun!

Re:Solaris is better than Linux.

[JPriest]

Because it's a complete product. It feels like a commercial product. Using Linux feels like testing a beta product. Solaris also feels _much_ more stable. I have solaris 8, mandrake 8.2, and a windows 2000 workstation I use at work.

Re:Solaris is better than Linux.

[Euan Buchanan]

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?

Re:Solaris is better than Linux.

[adamruck]

I would rather a system come with the bare essentials then large quantities of crap *cough* redhat *cough*

Its not user friendly at all. An OS should not be physically painful to use... if using solaris cuases you physical pain, I think you need to find a new hobby/profession

Screw user friendly, if the required task can be performed, and the system is still stable, then im happy. Think of the reverse situation, hmm, I clicked the "make it work" button and it didn't do anything, then five minuets later my system died. Which one would you prefer?

Re: Solaris is better than Linux.

[basso]

...some ubergeek in tweed...

Garsh, I didn't know James Bond worked for Sun!


Tweed? James Bond??? NEVER!

Re:Solaris is better than Linux.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, didn't anyone tell you that size doesn't matter? ;)

But seriously, something being in development for a long time is not a measure of how good it is. For instance, take Mozilla. Sure it's good. But did it warrent the amount of development time? Contrast this with Opera 7. A complete rebuild pretty much. Just as cross platform as mozilla, smaller, faster, etc. etc.

The advantage that proprietary developer have over open source is focus. They can move faster (smaller team of more talented peopl), devote all their working time to their task, and of course communicate easier.

During my undergrad in computer science, we had two main undergrad servers. Comparable in hardware power, one ran Linux and the other rand Solaris. From the words of the admin himself, "We have to reboot the Linux server four times a day, we never have to touch the Solaris server." Don't take this as a flame against Linux, but don't discount something just because it's not "open source".

Solaris has a *long* track record of proven stability. That's why it's known as big iron in the industry. It probably won't get you much on the desktop over Linux though, the big differences show up only under heavy load.

Re: Solaris is better than Linux.

[Mr Z]

I think the parent was thinking of Q, not Bond.

Re:Solaris is better than Linux.

[ceswiedler]

Solaris certainly has its advantages in code maturity. But one of the biggest advantages Linux has is that they care not a whit for binary compatibility, and can therefore rewrite things from scratch when they want to, keeping only source compatibility (and often not even that). Solaris and other commercial OSs, for obvious reasons, must make sure that they provide easy upgrade paths for existing customers and applications. Therefore, they must keep legacy code and interfaces around, and must avoid making changes which might cause incompatibilities.

It's certainly annoying that you can't depend on code to run across Linux kernels without recompiling; it makes commercial software (particularly driver) development a nightmare. But it allows Linux to make extremely rapid changes and fix mistakes. It's highly unlikely that any commercial OS could have changed as rapidly as Linux has over the last twelve years. That speed of development, combined with the fact that Linux is consciously modelling itself after another OS, has probably equalled or exceeded the extra time and resources Sun has put into Solaris. At this point, Sun's only real advantage is their ability to produce both the hardware and software, and not worry about portability.

Re:Solaris is better than Linux.

[ceswiedler]

In 'production' kernels (2.4 and lower) you're right. The latest development series, however, adds both better threading support, faster syscalls, and preemptive scheduling. It will take a while for these features to mature and stabilize, of course.

Re:Solaris is better than Linux.

[jedidiah]

How it "feels" is completely irrelevant.

In the end, the only thing that matters is results.

I am not sure if I know of anyone that would deploy servers with Mandrake.

If anything feels like "testing a beta product", it's Solaris running CDE (rather than Mandrake).

Re:Solaris is better than Linux.

[rutledjw]

Does Solaris x-86 have good SMP? Last I used it (about 2 years ago) is was definately the unloved OS of Sun.

It didn't have proper J2EE support and in general didn't perform very well. We did a Java test with Windows (completely unscientific, granted) and it ran neck-and-neck to a little slower. I was annoyed and installed Linux (2.4 kernel had just come out) which did better.

Of course this was on a single CPU system, so SMP could well have been a different story.

Re:Solaris is better than Linux.

[Anonymous Coward]

The Solaris kernel is much more mature than the Linux kernel. It is pre-emptible, multi-threaded, supports dynamic loading of all kernel modules, and very stable. The drivers available for some devices are a bit lacking but SUN is trying to fix this now. It's development model is geared towards stability, and speed having been designed for the server. This means that if you are planning on using it for your desktop you have a little work ahead of you but I have done it for years. Linux for my gaming, Solaris for my work.
For those running Solaris on Intel, if your disk is slow run eeprom and you will see a setting to turn on UDMA. SUN turned this off by default as many UDMA controllers especially older ones where a bit flaky when using generic drivers.
For GNU software go to sunfreeware.com SUN already ports many linux apps to Solaris.

Re:Solaris is better than Linux.

[Anonymous Coward]

I saw some Oracle benchmarks lately... Conclusion: Solaris is the worst/slowest platform for Oracle ;)

Re:Solaris is better than Linux.

[pmz]

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.

Re:Solaris is better than Linux.

[lp_bugman]

I just got a HyperSparc 4 CPU 200mhz that runs on and Old Sparc Station 20. What can be cheaper than that ?? Other thing to remember is that Solaris on x86 is not the same as Solaris on Sparc. Some important pices are mising like OpenProm

Re:Solaris is better than Linux.

[Anonymous Coward]

yawn

Re:Solaris is better than Linux.

[grenlunde]

I'm an avid Linux user, but don't often use Solaris. Regardless, I'm intrigued by your comment. Can you give some specific examples of why Solaris has such an edge, in your opinion?

Re:Solaris is better than Linux.

[axxackall]

Somehow I am sure that I was modded down by Solaris zealots - only Solaris zealots could mod as a troll the post correcting the parent by saying that Solaris is more intended for Linux users rather than for Windows one. I wonder what will be a meta-moderation of that mod.

Re:Solaris is better than Linux.

[Anonymous Coward]

For most of my needs Linux is the best choice (price, feature and performance-wise). For some applications, though, Linux does not come near the scalability and stability of sun boxen with solaris

Boxen? Boxen? Say it again, asshole!

Re:Solaris is better than Linux.

[Gareth Williams]

I think you must be getting vi confused with emacs ;-)

Besides, you can still install plain old vanilla vi on linux boxen - well, I have on my Debian GNU/Linux system at least. So you've got choice, no need to bitch :)

Re: Solaris is better than Linux.

[basso]

Ah. Well, it _was_ a funny image. Thanks.

Re:Solaris is better than Linux.

[UU7]

AC got your tongue ? :)

Re:Solaris is better than Linux.

[pmz]

Besides, you can still install plain old vanilla vi on linux boxen

Yes, but I feel that is unnecessary work. For example, in Slackware, vi is a symbolic link to elvis. The first time I launched elvis to edit an HTML document, elvis rendered the HTML! I had to go out of my way to read and learn how to disable that option--an option that should be disabled by default. If I wanted to render HTML, that's what lynx, mozilla, netscape, opera, konquerer, etc. are for.

Man...

[sardonic2]

Where's that free x86 Solaris CD? friend of mine signed up for a Solaris 9 x86 free CD thing. Turned out not to be, just a typo on their part.

Re:Man...

[TheJesusCandle]

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.

Re:Man...

[ShavenYak]

Wow, what a great job you did of cutting and pasting this post. I'm impressed.

Re:Man...

[Anonymous Coward]

FYI: It's just been posted on Usenet. Currently installing it.

Re:Man...

[TheJesusCandle]

Wow, what a great job you did of cutting and pasting this post [slashdot.org]. I'm impressed

Thank you for pointing this out. Im still tweaking my methods for duplicating other peoples +5 comments, but as you can see, its not working out all that well at the moment

Every comment ive ganked has been a +5 but at the most i grab a +2 for my efforts. Apparantly good posts have a half life.

Of course some of them net me a +3 or +4 from time to time, but usually when that happens, somebody like you blows the whistle and the mod points drop

I'd love to post original and insightful comments but that takes too much time and effort, and isnt as much fun as manipulating the people in the discussion.

The Jesus Candle -- Duplicating posts with religous fervor

Re:Man...

[PalmKiller]

Didn't they do this once before? I wonder, because I got a version of Compaq Tru 64, Solaris for Sun hardware and solaris for x86, Digital VMS and SCO Unixware and SCO OPenserver and all about the same time a few years ago. I think I had to pay like $10-20 bucks for some of them for media costs, but the licensing was free.

Re:Man...

[foonf]

There is a Tru64 "hobbiest license" that costs about 100 bucks or so. I thought this was always the case. OpenVMS can still be had for free however. Solaris/SPARC is free for non-commercial use, so was the Intel version (through 8.0) when it was available, which it no longer is. Now that it has been ressurected you have to pay $20 for media, no free downloads. Some time in the SCO-Caldera-SCO transition free licensing for OpenServer/Unixware was dropped, they sell media for $100 now and its unclear whether you have to pay for a license on top of that for single-user use.

Re:Man...

[ShavenYak]

Every comment ive ganked has been a +5 but at the most i grab a +2 for my efforts. Apparantly good posts have a half life.

Perhaps that's the problem... the +5 comments stand out so much, that your repost gets noticed more easily. I bet if you snag +3 comments you won't get noticed as easily, and in fact if you can cleverly find places to post them, you might out-do the original.

I'd love to post original and insightful comments but that takes too much time and effort, and isnt as much fun as manipulating the people in the discussion.

But funny comments don't take much time and effort. I've probably gotten more karma from funny than insightful or interesting.

Cool!!

[DJ FirBee]

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.

Re:Cool!!

[drightler]

I have done benchmarks on Solaris vs. Linux on both x86 and UltraSPARC and Linux is faster. Solaris is certainly more SMP scalable.

Re:Cool!!

[Pflipp]

Plus you are not bothered with kernel recompilations etc.

Uhh, you can't compile the kernel, because it's propietary. That's still something different.

Re:Cool!!

[d2003xx]

I heard that Solaris was faster and more scalable than Linux.

I think this depends on the platform. Maybe what you heard is not true for IA32. And the future of linux is far more bright than solaris.

Plus you are not bothered with kernel recompilations etc.

Stupid newbie... Why not just use modules?

Re:Cool!!

[pyros]

Care to post the results? I'd assume that where lots of threading is an issue Solaris would beat Linux. I'd expect running things like Oracle and Weblogic Solaris would be the Shelby Cobra to Linux's Camaro.

Re:Cool!!

[slashdot_commentator]

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.

Re:Cool!!

[Billly Gates]

Solaris 8 and 7 are slow as mollasis on intel. They are optimized for the sparc and sun wanted them to appear slow so customers would buy Sun's.

Re:Cool!!

[Sayjack]

The truth is an old computer science adage "it depends". It's easy for the casual user to judge Linux as alot faster than Solaris. Linux kicks butt given the demands of a single user while Solaris tends to shine when you get 20 users on some significant piece of hardware.

IMHO, Solaris scales better at present, however, with the new linux kernel changes geared towards the enterprise Linux is evolving very quickly into a real contender. The 2.5 kernel sports block I/O enhancements, new O/(1) scheduler, kernel preemption, new reverse-mapping VM, and thread enhancements just to name a few. Linux is evolving faster than any other operating system out there. The next 5 years should be really fun.

Re:Cool!!

[simm_s]

The problem with Solaris 8 Intel was that they developed it, few companies used it, and it costed a crap load of money to support and maintain. They tried to kill the project which was bleeding money, and the small community that did use it fought back. They had no choice to update and rerelease for Solaris 9.

There is no strategic masterstroke here. They f*cked up and now they are trapped.

erm..

[REBloomfield]

Non-commercial usage is available at no charge

Apart from the fact you have to cough up $20 to pay for the download, which personally, i think blows...

And has anything changed since this was announced on the 1st of December as an 'early adopter' evaluatation?

Re:erm..

[dubbreak]

yeah.. last time i was on the sight solaris 8 was like a $40 dl (at one point it was free).. I'm gonna have to check it out, but i'm really doubting that it is a free dl. I love solaris, but when there are so many free distrobutions that do the job for me I think i'll leave solaris for work at the universities and such.
but what do i know?

Re:erm..

[REBloomfield]

well, solaris 8 has been free for at least 2 years.... just a shame it's so picky about the hardware it will install on. If SPARCs were cheaper, I'm sure more people would use them.

Even their thin client is over £1,000....although it's very pretty ;) and we know how that helped Apple (and no flames, i've got an iMac!)

Re:erm..

[dubbreak]

well, solaris 8 has been free for at least 2 years....
to bad it isn't now, check it out if you don't believe me. $20 american for either solaris 8 or 9 (and i'm canadian! i can't afford $20 american!). By free they mean no licensing (you still have to pay for either the media or the d/l).. don't believe me? check here.

Re:erm..

[linuxghoul]

you mean "free as in free speech, not as in free beer"? ;)

Ghoul

Re:erm..

[christophersaul]

Sun Rays are not a 1000 squids! More like 400 or so.

Re:erm..

[HerrGlock]

If SPARCs were cheaper, I'm sure more people would use them. ...

Ugly Ultra 10 333MHz/ 128MB/ 4GB/ CD/

Regular price: $3,895.00 Sale price: $375.00

It all depends on where you shop.

DanH

Whoohoo!

[Hanashi]

I've been waiting for this. Solaris for Intel gets too little love. I tell you what I like about it: On my (relatively cheap) PC at home, I can run it in a VMWare session and test out things that I will later use on the SPARC version. It should be great for OSS developers, who can compile and test their applications on their desktop, even though they don't have the SPARC hardware. It's source compatible, baby!

Also, I write about system administration and security topics, and it's nice to try out certain procedures. I don't have a SPARC at home, so using the Intel version under VMWare is a lifesaver.

Re:Whoohoo!

[Dr_LHA]

I've been waiting for this. Solaris for Intel gets too little love. I tell you what I like about it: On my (relatively cheap) PC at home, I can run it in a VMWare session and test out things that I will later use on the SPARC version. It should be great for OSS developers, who can compile and test their applications on their desktop, even though they don't have the SPARC hardware. It's source compatible, baby!

Yeah - I once thought this would be a great solution to getting all the sparc/solaris code we have here to work under Linux (as our Sparc machines were aging and breaking). Sadly I found out real quick the reason the code didn't work under Linux has nothing to do with the OS but the opposite Endian-ness of the Sparc vs x86. :-(

Re:Whoohoo!

[Anonymous Coward]

Notes -

I purchased the $20 download version of solaris 8. and ran it under vmware 3.2. It works, but...

- Getting solaris on vmware to use anything other than 640x480 vga is not easy. Pointers if you got em?

- If you are used to installing linux, solaris is completely different. Definitely get a book.

- Solaris 8 sucks up all the cpu cycles it can, even if it is doing nothing. Something about HLT, I forget. You definitely want to have a dual cpu machine if you plan to run solaris in vmware.

Re:Whoohoo!

[slashdot_commentator]

It should be great for OSS developers, who can compile and test their applications on their desktop, even though they don't have the SPARC hardware. It's source compatible, baby!

What are you babbling about? How can you even imply that you're a programmer?

You can't really use Solaris x86 as a testbed for Sparc platforms. They are binary incompatible and aren't even 100% structurally compatible. You can't get a threaded piece of code to work on x86 and expect no problems when porting it to Sparc. Hell, I don't think Sun even offers an x86 version of their C/C++ compiler. You'd have to develop with gcc, and that will run like a dog on Sparc (compared to a Sparc specific professional product written by a competent programmer).

Also, I write about system administration and security topics, and it's nice to try out certain procedures.

Now THAT is the only selling feature of x86 Solaris.

I don't have a SPARC at home, so using the Intel version under VMWare is a lifesaver.

Why are people so intent on running their machines so slow? Hasn't anyone ever heard of dual-boot?

Re:Whoohoo!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hell, I don't think Sun even offers an x86 version of their C/C++ compiler

Wrong.

Re:Whoohoo!

[f0rt0r]

Have you ever heard of speeding development/testing time? Running 2 other OS's in VM's plus having your main OS to up and running all on one machine saves a lot of time.
Think about it, if you want to test your code ( say OS neutral Java code )across systems, would you rather A) Copy the .jar file over the virtual network connection in VM and then run it on each OS and see the results in a few minutes without ever shutting down the Java IDE, B) copy the code to a commonly available media ( cd, floppy, network share, etc ), reboot into other OS , login, and test, then repeat the process for each OS? Personally, I would take choose A) , and even better than A) would be to have separate system running each OS.

Btw, (off-topic ) does OS X run in VMWare?

Think about it.

Re:Whoohoo!

[JohnnyBigodes]

Why are people so intent on running their machines so slow? Hasn't anyone ever heard of dual-boot?

Everyone has, but not everyone likes rebooting every five minutes, especially when developing for several OSs and testing out stuff. I do this myself. VMWare *is* a lifesaver.
However, it's only a lifesaver as much as you need one. If you don't need to be switching OSs that often, then rebooting does fine.

Re:Whoohoo!

[madhippy]

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.

Re:Whoohoo!

[duvalrus]

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.

Re:Whoohoo!

[jedidiah]

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.

Re:Whoohoo!

[kscguru]

Definitely won't - you're absolutely right it's not an emulator, it runs x86 code directly on the processor, and makes LOTS of assumptions about the underlying hardware being x86.

Re:Whoohoo!

[toblak]

The point of VMWare is that you aren't limited to dual-booting. What are you suppose to do if you are writing code to run on multiple Window OSes. Have one machine for Win98, another for Win98SE, a third for NT 3.51 a fourth for 3.51 SP1 etc... The great thing about VMWare is that you only need one workstation and multiple virtual machines to test the code. What if you are testing the interaction of your program and various anti-virus programs. With VMWare it's simple. Start out with a "clean" operating system install your program install one of the anti-virus programs and test. When you are finished, close down VMWare, discarding any changes you made, and you are back to the clean operating system you began with. Dual booting doesn't give you that option, unless you want to reinstall the operating system 5 times a day.

Re:Whoohoo!

[slashdot_commentator]

As for moving to media, I believe Solaris can read ext2 filesystems (or linux with ufs filesystem, when patched) so I beleive you save a step there.

As a developer, I would not presume that running anything under a VMWARE environment would represent a valid test of a target environment. (Only a native test would suffice.) Also, as a professional developer, I would still prefer two machines running, or develop exclusively in the native environment. But I never understood Java developers, and I can sort of see an efficiency in not rebooting.

Re:Whoohoo!

[Anonymous Coward]

- You may want to try the xfree86 porting kit to get a higher res working (download from Sun).

- Solaris 9 may have added the CPU halt instruction. Can't remember if it made it into one of the earlier updates.

Re:Whoohoo!

[christophersaul]

Buy some new Sparc machines then!!!

Re:Whoohoo!

[adam613]

I'm not sure this is still accurate, but last I heard Darwin/x86 would not run under VMWare because there was no video driver available.

Re:Whoohoo!

[karlm]

If you want x86 on a Mac, look into Bochs (Free) or VirtualPC (proprietary).

Re:Whoohoo!

[Anonymous Coward]

As a long time kernel developer at Sun, I just have to respond to these (mis)statements:

> You can't really use Solaris x86 as a testbed for Sparc platforms.

We do. All the time. Some of the engineers do Solaris x86 kernel builds on their laptops while riding the train to work. 90+% of the code in Solaris is common between Sparc and x86. Sure we also develop and test on SPARC... but software development happens everywhere. I'm posting this from a Athlon 2400+ XP machine I built for home use... it runs Solaris 10, btw.

> They are binary incompatible and aren't even 100% structurally compatible.

But with very little effort it is completely possible to write portable code.. Unless you really work at it w/ unaligned integer dereferences, etc, most code just works on both Solaris SPARC and Solaris x86 w/ a simple recompile. Machine differences are properly hidden via header files...

> You can't get a threaded piece of code to work on x86 and expect no problems when porting it to Sparc.

See above. The kernel is the most intensely multithreaded piece of code in Solaris and most of it is portable.

> Hell, I don't think Sun even offers an x86 version of their C/C++ compiler.

This needs fixing. We're obviously using one internally.

> (admin) Now THAT is the only selling feature of x86 Solaris.

Other than a nice development environment, stability under heavy memory loads, threads that work properly, standards compliance,...

- Bart

Re:Whoohoo!

[Anonymous Coward]

Use CD 1 to install; it's pretty simple.

Solaris 9 x86 uniprocessor code now uses HLT instruction. This aids use under vmware and minimizes laptop power consumption. Note that this is NOT done on MP machines (to avoid high dispatch latencies, necessity of cross-calling possibly idle cpu, etc), so MP machine under vmware will still not be optimal.

- Bart

Re:Whoohoo!

[Dr_LHA]

Buy some new Sparc machines then!!!

Which is exactly what I did.

Free?ish

[Znonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Free?ish

[PincheGab]

Hey, it'd be cool if they gave the $20 to free/OpenSource software products, no? At least eh $20 acts as a filter, the downloads will probably be faster because only mildly serious people will be using up the bandwidth...

Re:Free?ish

[The AtomicPunk]

Wah!

They pour a lot of money into developing it, they're only asking to recoup some money if you use their resources to download it.

What's your beef?

Download it and copy at will, it's FREE.

Re:Free?ish

[Znonymous Coward]

I'm a poor student who wants to learn Solaris 9 so I can convince my company to buy it. Thats got to be worth something right???

Re:Free?ish

[cybaea]

Download it and copy at will, it's FREE.

"you may not make copies of Software, other than a single copy of Software for archival purposes."

From Binary Code License Agreement.

Re:Free?ish

[reve]

> Download it and copy at will, it's FREE.

Actually, even the free version of Solaris is licensed per-CPU. So you can download at will, but certainly not copy.

Re:Free?ish

[Anonymous Coward]

You are also a pear shaped, pasty white, no life loser nerd.

Re:Free?ish

[Anonymous Coward]

You didn't have to preface that with you being a student. It's quite clear that you have no idea how real business works.

Re:Free?ish

[Znonymous Coward]

You want a pice of me? Puck azz be otch?

Re:Free?ish

[cybaea]

Non-commercial usage is available at no charge

Thats cool and all, but you still have to pay $20 to download the ISOs [sun.com].

Not to mention that you have to pay if you are using a multiple-CPU system:

For systems with a capacity of 2 or more CPUs, users can purchase licenses...
Licensing Policies

I guess that rules me out, then... :-P

Re:Free?ish

[Znonymous Coward]

It's also quite clean that you aren't man enough to sign in and face moderation. Ho Bag.

Re:Free?ish

[bmetzler]

Hey, it'd be cool if they gave the $20 to free/OpenSource software products, no?

Maybe they *do* use the $20 to continue to invest in their free/OpenSource software products. They do have quite a few of those, you know.

-Brent

Re:Free?ish

[GreyPoopon]

Why doesn't somebody approach Sun regarding mirroring so people can download from an alternate site (not tying up Sun's network) at no charge? If they say no, then it isn't free.

Re:Free?ish

[Anonymous Coward]

No because unlike you I am not gay.

Re:Free?ish

[Anonymous Coward]

Option #1- anonymously make fun of a pear shaped loser
Option #2- actually be the pear shaped loser that people make fun of.

I choose option #1, and you are just pear shaped to ignore.

Re:Free?ish

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder what type of results that would return... Free?ish...

Freedish
Freefish

Re:Free?ish

[nege]

Has anyone mirrored ths ISOs? That would make sense...

Re:Free?ish

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey "Znonymous Coward", it looks like you have backed yourself into a little corner here. You make fun of an AC because he won't sign in to face moderation, but your getting your ass kicked by the moderators. Whats your next move?

Re:Free?ish

[wing.app]

Hmm so they're actually selling it to us...and they dont want us to copy it and give it to friends, because our friends wont buy it then?

HOLY SHIT THEY ARE RIPPING OUR CIVIL RIGHTS AWAY!

Re:Free?ish

[christophersaul]

Even as a poor student, $20 was always available for cools stuff!

Re:Free?ish

[bogidu]

Hey , that's cool, download costs are less w/Sparc binaries though! Wonder if my isp will give me a break if I toss out my x86 boxes and buy a couple sparcs?

not exactly

[greechneb]

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...

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:not exactly

[l33t j03]

I agree with you completely, Sun has every single one of us backed into a corner and is screwing our brains out with their voluntary $20 download deal. Those Suns of bitches should rot their asses off in prison for this type of shit.

Yesterday I was driving past a hamburger stand and they had a sign out "2 Chesseburgers for $2". Bastards are screwing me all to hell I figure. $2 for some cheeseburgers. I swear I get screwed like that every time I drive by some store that has signs.

Flipped open the newspaper this morning. The damn grocery store was advertising buy one get one free cans of beets. My big problem was with the 'buy one' part. That kind of hook is just a set up to screw a guy. Indeed, I think I was being screwed right then and there, while reading the paper. They act all nice with the 'get one free' part but behind your back they're standing just there just screwing away.

I say we stand up for our rights. No longer should we let people screw us by asking us to enter into a completely voluntary retail contract where in return for a price determined by the market we receive some good or service. That kind of shit has to stop somewhere or next thing you know web sites will be asking you to give them money in exchange for not serving you ads. I don't want to live in that kind of world and neither do you.

Re:not exactly

[Mr_Silver]

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...

For crying out loud, it's $20. For that you get something which many thousands of man hours have been used to produce you such a thing. Sure, you would have loved to get it for free - but once you accept that it isn't going to happen, you'll see it isn't that bad a deal.

Sure, you can download Linux for free. But don't begrugde Sun for asking $20. Hell, it's not as if they're charging you lots of money for it and they'll quite happily let you make copies of it and give it to your friends - unlike some companies. All they want is twenty lousy dollars!

Remind me not to get into buying rounds of drinks with you if that sort of amount is that big a deal to you.

Re:not exactly

[Anonymous Coward]

I am guessing you have sold used cars at some point in your life...

Re:not exactly

[Rinikusu]

Why is it always "Screwing you" when someone decides to charge for something? Is the farmer "screwing you" because he wants something for his labor? Is the musician "screwing you" because he wants to do it for a living and requests that you buy his CD or pay to let you see him perform (I know folks who rip the music off from Kazaa and then bitch about having to pay $5 to see them live). $20 is a fucking STEAL for this kind of software, it helps pay those engineers so they don't have to worry about rent. You Free people need to go get a real fucking job and move out of your parent's basements and see what the rest of the world is doing.

Re:not exactly

[jedidiah]

The problem with such comments is not that $20 is screwing the customer. That $20 is screwing Sun. Many of us have had bad experiences with Solaris x86. A $20 download is certainly not going to get us to change our minds.

Like many things in the marketplace, the demand for Solaris x86 CD's is highly elastic.

If they're so cool with 3rd party distribution, then where is the 3rd party distribution for this?

Re:not exactly

[Jugalator]

I don't think it was the price that bothered him, but that there *was* a price on what was called "free".

Re:not exactly

[Anonymous Coward]

> Nice way of trying to appear nice, but still screwing you...

Heres a great way to avoid that screwing.

Get up out of your free bed, eat a nice breakfast of free food, get in your free car and drive to the free airport. Then part your car in the free parking and take the first free plane to the airport near Sun's corporate offices. Take the free taxi to the corporate office and demand your free copy of Solaris. Don't forget the three feet of free paper documentation. Reverse the process to get back to your free apartment. Then install it on your free PCs! Don't forget to take a break with some free beer and snacks.
Its easy to get caught up in the excitement of installing free operating systems, so don't forget to drive in to work where you volunteer what, 50-60 hours of your time for nothing to some corporation? Of course, the great thing is that chicks dig all the free stuff! Like free movies, and free restaurants!

Re:not exactly

[blair1q]

Don't be impertinent.

Calling something free to get people to the point where they're ready to take delivery and then charging them $20 for a normally free service is a bait and switch.

Re:not exactly

[Anonymous Coward]

But the sign didn't say "2 free cheeseburgers for $2"

So you have no analogy, no point, and no clue.

Re:not exactly

[Anonymous Coward]

Way to pick a tiny part of the argument and quote it out of context. His point was that you aren't getting screwed by Sun because you can either choose to pay the $20 or not.

Regardless, even if the sign did read (not 'say') "2 free Cheeseburgers for $2" the analogy would still work. you either pay the $2 Shipping and Handling fee to get the burgers ot you decide not to.

Re:not exactly

[techno_dan]

What do you not understand about the word free? When they advertise it is free, but vharge you $35 (Canadian) then it is NOT free. They should have advertised (For $20US) that would have been the truth. Work out the math. If 10,000 people download it a day for one month, then 10000 x 31 x 20 = $6.2 Million. They cannot be paying that much a month for Bandwith. I will just wait for someone to put it on P2P to download for free (Actual)

Re:not exactly

[Stonent1]

I've never seen solaris yet on p2p networks. I have a legal Solaris 9 x86 non-commercial license that I obtained from Sun, so I should legally be allowed to download it from p2p networks and use it.

Re:not exactly

[Rinikusu]

WTF? Look, bitch boy. Read here:
this fucking article

Read it closely and you'll answer your own fucking question.

Give me your paypal and I might send you a nickel so you can buy yourself a fucking clue.

Re:not exactly

[Anonymous Coward]

who is that hot chick on the bsa website?

ahhh... who cares anyway... their all a bunch of bastards. Long live piracy! Arg!

Re:not exactly

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh come on, a drink is worth $20. Solaris/x86 isn't worth wiping your ass on. What can Solaris/x86 give you that a chocolate dildo can't? Huh?

Re:not exactly

[Anonymous Coward]

should unix connect kansas?

How negative...

[PincheGab]

According to Sun, it extends the 'enterprise class OS to the X86 market'. How nice of them.

Ok, so what is going to actually please this person? Sun gets closer and closer to the Open Source idea, and all we can have is sarcasm in the post? We should be CELEBRATING! Thanks, SUN!

Re:How negative...

[UU7]

but it isn't linux ... ;)

Nice move on sun's part, although.. the nice thing about sun is the hardware as well as the software. A cheap x86 box isn't exactly a reliable platform for any OS.

Re:How negative...

[nairnr]

Ok, Ok. I forgot the smiley. :-) I honestly am quite impressed with Sun. While being a Linux fan, I appreciate the diversity of options. Visibility of powerful, stable Unix options enhances the position of Unix for other applications.

Re:How negative...

[scrawny]

but it is nice of them. i didn't read sarcasm in that at all until you pointed it out.

...all we can have is sarcasm in the post?

no, there is also information about Sun bringing an enterprise class OS to x86, and more. i guess you were being sarcastic. trying to convince us that your glass is half-full isn't working.

Re:How negative...

[ajs]

I'm going to go out on a limb here: You cannot approach being open source.

This can be compared to the statement that you cannot approach being pregnant. You simply are or you are not. To quote Yoda, "There is no try, only do."

How's that? Well, quite simply, unless your source code is available for modification and you can run the software wherever you need it, and you can contribute your changes to whatever maintainer you please (note that I just excluded, for example, qmail), then you cannot build an open source community around the software. You can certainly have a strong and dedicated community (Windows even has one), but you cannot build a community that has the same benefits. You cannot have the people who need to scratch the itch scratch it at will for themselves and anyone else with the same itch.

Ultimately Sun will decide who can collaborate on their own versions. They will maintain a centralized set of priorities, and contributors outside of Sun will be viewed as submitters of bug-reports that compile, not co-workers.

This is not open source. This is a company, faced with extinction via open source, trying to hide in the tall grass. Hint: it's not going to work. I say this being a big fan of what Sun did for the industry in their day. It doesn't matter. The more they say, "look, we have the benefits of open source too," the more people will begin to ask, "why not just go with truly open source software?"

Linux, BSD (amusingly, Sun's old source code base), and many other smaller-niche free systems are rapidly eclipsing the proprietary operating systems. You look at MS and see very little movement, but that's because they're so large and move in different circles for now. When you look at Sun or HP you begin to see the devastation that these upstarts are creating in the industry. Why? Because collaboration with your peers is powerful. Collaboration between customer and vendor is almost always not.

Re:How negative...

[PincheGab]

You overcomplicate it... My entire point was that this company is going more and more toward the open source model. I was saying that the trend can only be a good thing.

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.

Re:How negative...

[b17bmbr]

Linux, BSD (amusingly, Sun's old source code base), and many other smaller-niche free systems are rapidly eclipsing the proprietary operating systems.

isn't BSD dead?

Re:How negative...

[doom]

I think you guys are missing the point of the original sarcasm. The press release is bragging about bringing "the enterprise class OS" to intel hardware, as though this platform didn't already have an enterprise class OS... Arguably Linux and FreeBSD are "enterprise class" (certainly they're in use in many entrerpises).

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.

Re:How negative...

[AstroDrabb]

" Well, for many reasons, for one, our Samba server locked up and kicked everyone out for no reason yesterday..."

For every 1 Linux nightmare story I have 101 M$ nightmare stories. What about China Internet Attacked by Worm Virus? This affected an entire nation! Not just one country. Also, samba is NOT Linux, it is a program that uses a reverse engineered version of the SMB protocol. It's only purpose it to let a Linux box interact with a M$ Network. If you want to set up a stable Linux network, you don't use samba.

Re:How negative...

[Doomdark]

I believe sarcasm was aimed at "enterprise class OS to the x86 market" comment. Many already consider couple of OSes in this segment (various BSDs, Windows NT and its ilk, Linux) to be "enterprise class", and x86 version of Solaris is generally considered not to be nearly as good technically as its Sparc counterpart.

Re:How negative...

[ToastedBagel]

> Ultimately Sun will decide who can collaborate on their own versions. They will maintain a centralized set of priorities, and contributors outside of Sun will be viewed as submitters of bug-reports that compile, not co-workers.
> This is not open source. This is a company, faced with extinction via open source, trying to hide in the tall grass.

I disagree. In the end, an open source project needs to have a benevolent dictator to decide what goes in and what doesn't. I recall Linus Torvalds's comment posted at the slashdot a while ago (http://www.lib.uaa.alaska.edu/linux-kernel/archiv e/2002-Week-44/0094.html), and in that, he pretty much says that he decides the direction of Linux. Billy Joy played a similar role back when he was working on BSD. Richard Stallman also plays a similar role in GNU world. In order for a project to move to a certain direction with speed and power, someone or some company needs to take a lead role.

Having said that, I support Sun's position. I personally like how they get involved in Java community. I like how they contribute to open source projects such as Tomcat. I like how they supported Tcl/Tk. I might not be disproving your point, but I want to say that I support Sun's position

Re:How negative...

[ajs]

You are correct, at least partially. I agree that a benevolent dictator helps a project (see Perl version 5 up until 5.002 and Linux as examples). However, it is not at all required. See Perl after 5.002; The X Window System (committee with many forks); GCC (formerly B.D. type, now committee with many forks); Apache; Gnome; Mozilla; and many, many other projects for details on ther ways it can work and work well.

Ok, so now let's take that back to the Sun/Solaris example and see how it applies. Sun is taking the role of dictator, but a) they cannot be deposed if the users dislike the direction the software is taking b) "small forks" (like ilinux; egcs; phoenix; etc) cannot be made, maintained and then merged back in as required c) priorities set by Sun on compatability with external software and/or standards cannot be re-set by users of the software without wholly maintaining thier own fork.

I'm not saying that what Sun is doing is bad. I'm not saying that Sun will fail to re-capture some of the market lost to Linux and BSD in the short term. I'm actually not taking a stand on either one, and just waiting to see what happens.

What I am saying is that Sun cannot walk halfway down the road to open source software development and reap half the benefits. In fact, I would agrue that they won't get within an order of magnitude of the boost to creative input, collaberation and niche-filling power of an open source project.

Should we pat Sun on the back for this move? No. Sun is responding to market pressures in the same way that Microsoft is. If they were responding in the way that Netscape did, I would be patting them on the back because they would have joined the community and put their eggs into the global basket that is open source collaberation.

That's the interesting part, really. As more an more companies ponder what becoming open source would mean, they all come to the point of thinking, "would I have to give up my valuable source code, and let others benefit from my years of work?"

I understand that sort of provincial attitude, but it's warped. It doesn't look at the flip-side. Why would Sun not want to benefit from Linux's or BSD's work on user-mode virtualization? Why would Sun not want Solaris x86 to gain access to the vast array of hardware that Linux supports? Why would Solaris customers want to live without a well-supported version of gcc with the improvements that Sun could ultimately make to it for Sparc?

It's hard to look at the move from proprietary to open source software positively because it breaks the business model of proprietary software. It makes a vendor think in terms of their value-added instead of the value behind secret software. Sun would have to let go of the safety-rail and become a Solaris services provider, and that's a scary thing.

The problem is that ultimately (I'm talking about years down the line) their choice is to do just that or watch either MS or Linux or both put them out of business. I do not envy them this choice, because even if they make what I think is the right call, I think they're probably too late.

Free you say?

[Anonymous Coward]

Solaris 9 Operating Environment, SPARC Platform Edition - FREE
Solaris 9 Operating Environment, x86 Platform Edition - $20 US**

**Discounts are not applied to products purchased through the Free Solaris Binary License Program.

from http://wwws.sun.com/software/solaris/binaries/get. html

Not exactly new...

[ImpTech]

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.

Re:Not exactly new...

[Eraser_]

I think those fees are a great determiner of who was actually wanting solaris/intel, vs those who just said "But you can get rid of that!". Sun is asking us to all put our money where our mouth is. I for one, won't, I don't have much interest in Solaris past the uses I have for it on our current servers. However, I imagine a lot of you do, and i would encourage you to plunk down the 20$ and buy it. Another reason could be that they don't get any money from hardware sales to accompany a sparc purchase of solaris.

Re:Not exactly new...

[LoadWB]

I actually submited this information a couple of weeks back, and it was rejected.

2003-01-19 16:38:39 Sun Releases Solaris 9 for Intel (articles,sun) (rejected)

::shrugs::

I am not a fan of Sun..

[prh1999]

I am not a fan of Sun, but I do like the fact they released Solaris for Intel machines and made it free for none commerical use.

Question

[Znonymous Coward]

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

Re:Question

[REBloomfield]

Solaris 8 does, at least on VMwarem, so I would have thought 9 would too...

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

do you still need that crazy 'create the image in linux, then move it to a windows box' hack to run it under vmware/32?

(yes, i'm aware of why it occurs)

Re:Question

[REBloomfield]

dunno. :) ask the guy a few posts up who uses it ;) I was just being helpful...

This post

Re:Question

[4minus0]

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.

Re:Question

[ebacon]

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.

X :1 -query vmwarehost is your friend, or Xnest, if you prefer.

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried it a few days ago with VirtualPC 6 for Mac. Even though the About VirtualPC dialog reports a Pentium II with MMX, the Solaris 9 boot detects a 486 and refuses to continue. If anybody figures out how to get around this, I'd be interested. In the meantime, I downgraded to Solaris 8. Even with that, I've been having problems getting it to initialize the DEC21041 ehternet device that VPC emulates.

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM ThinkPad 600X ???

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't know about Solaris 9, but I've started playing with Trusted Solaris 8 on Virtual PC for Windows. It complains a bit during install, but its running.

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Ditto. Busy installing it on VirtualPC right now.
The graphics options are a bit limited (S3 Trio64) so I set mine up as 1024x768x16. So far so good and no problems yet. On CD 2 now. It found a conflict with Soundblaster and Soundblaster something else which I ignored.

Re:Question

[4minus0]

Bravo, old chap.
That did the trick.
I'd mod you up if I had the points.

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Fucking asses! I posted that I was installing it a while ago and my post diappeared. Yes!It does run under VirtualPC!

vs. Microsoft

[Sogol]

I can hardly see how this will affect Microsoft.
Windows attracts a large user base of non-technical users, who don't care about volume managers, ssh, etc. If Sun are seriously trying to dig into Microsoft's market share, they better include ported versions of Deer Hunter and Solitaire.

Re:vs. Microsoft

[rmadmin]

And what if they are trying to dig into Microsoft's Server market? IIRC (And I'm obviously not an MS user), the most basic license you can get for a stand alone Win2k Advanced Server is $1200~. Personally I would take Solaris over Windows anyday.. but I'm a technical person.. but when you talk about servers you are talking to geeks. Well, unless its an MS Server... then anyone can point and click! (And forget to patch their SQL server). :-d

Re:vs. Microsoft

[bmetzler]

I can hardly see how this will affect Microsoft.

Really now. Microsoft might have started out with selling cheap consumer desktops, but those margins are starting to get mighty thin. I think that Microsoft wants to see some of those larger margin server deals.

IOW, they want to start competing for the market of those who *do* care about volume managers, ssh, etc.

-Brent

Re:vs. Microsoft

[mrpuffypants]

and don't forget about the box game that everybody on windows plays...

you know the box game: it's when nothing is on your desktop so your use the selection box to randomly select things and make the box flip, get bigger, etc.

fun fun fun!

Re:vs. Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

$1200 ?

I picked up W2k Advanced Server at the local computer show for $179. CAL's are extra, but W2K Pro and WinXP Pro qualify as CAL's. Shop around, sheesh.

Re:vs. Microsoft

[glitch_]

That is actually one of the BEST games to ever be developed. I remember wasting hours upon hours playing it. By far worth the investment of Windows. :)

Re:vs. Microsoft

[antifun]

This isn't Insightful at all. Sun is not battling Microsoft in the consumer desktop market, nor does it have any reason to try. We're talking about servers here, and all MS servers* run on Intel hardware. *with the possible exception of the last 3 machines on Earth still running NT on Alpha...

Re:vs. Microsoft

[slashdot_commentator]

It will not affect Microsoft one whit.

The product does not exist as a strategic solution to Microsoft, or anyone else. It exists purely because some of their customers thought they had to have it (Lord knows why). Sun was prepared to discontinue the x86 version, and it is what they should have done.

Re:vs. Microsoft

[Smelslykfish]

I doubt that for $179, it would pass a BSA audit. :) Can we say...Greymarket. Or is that Gray

Re:vs. Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

Those would be DoD machines...

Re:vs. Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

It should, because I called Microsoft afterward and checked on it. I gave then the CD-KEY, the name of the company I bought it from, and they asked my about packaging and stuff to insure that it was not a counterfeit, and it satisfied them. If Microsoft signed off on it then the BSA can kiss my ass.

Re:vs. Microsoft

[mrseigen]

And one of the few Macintosh games to be ported to Windows, instead of the other way around...

Re:vs. Microsoft

[gilgongo]

The company I work for has just won the pitch to deliver Microsoft's below the line advertising and "CRM" campaign for .NET (as in the product line as much as the framework) in the UK and perhaps Europe. It's a £750,000 budget over 6 months I think.

I had a read of the pitch briefing documents they sent us and nowhere does it mention Linux or Solaris as being significant theats. They identify Sun has being in financial difficulty and therefore less able to keep up the profile they once had.

They're far more worried about IBM and Oracle, so the brief we have is to stick into the idea of .NET being able to run rings around the old dinosaurs etc., and to present .NET as a viable platform for the "enterprise". The key word for the campaigns will be "agility". It'll be interesting to see what kind of results this has (since our performance as an agency will be measured using "key performance indicators"). They seem to be pinning a lot of hope on development turn-around and quick-and-easy, but is that what high-end corporates want? I'd say it was strength and security myself. I'd be happy to sacrifice some whizz-bang "agility" to avoid some skript kiddies busting me open on port 80.

But hey, I work in the Technical Department of a SME, what the hell do I know (apart from the fact we now need to spend £30K on hitherto pirated MS software licenses for fear of being busted)?

Re:vs. Microsoft

[Smelslykfish]

I've seen vendors selling for that price but I assumed something has to be up. How can they offer it so cheap ? gotta wonder...
If it is for personal use thats one thing but to put it on a commercial server. Those BSA audits can cost alot of money, not to mention my job.

legal Question

[betanerd]

Would it be legal to set up your own mirror and offer the free downloads of the OS?? If the $20 is actually just for the cost of downloading (ha) this should be possible.

Re:legal Question

[Znonymous Coward]

Forget that, just look for it on P2P in 3,2,1.

Re:legal Question

[bmetzler]

If the $20 is actually just for the cost of downloading (ha) this should be possible.

I didn't really read the EULA for the Solaris x86 downloaded but I'm pretty sure that redistribution is prohibited.

-Brent

Re:legal Question

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't really read the EULA...

It is obvious that you didn't read it.
You can redistribute it to people who will use it non-commercially.

$95????

[Anonymous Coward]

It's certainly worth $95 but they claim it's free and you only pay for the media and shipping costs which is a giant load of crap. I think the $20 for a download is fair enough but screw paying $95 to have it shipped out.

Re:$95????

[Edball]

The $95 is for commercial use. The $20 shipping/handling/etc is for private x86 use - private SPARC use is free.

Re:$95????

[Anonymous Coward]

No, read it again.

The $20 is for Download Only. If you want the free X86 media shipped out to you for personal use it's $95.

Again, it's certainly worth $95 but I detest the whole trickery behind it all.

Re:$95????

[stanmann]

Well, for $95, you get the CDs, the DVD,all the extras(devkit, openoffice, etc), and hard copy documentation. Sounds like a good deal to me. If I can convince my wife... I'll be getting that.

free CD

[Anonymous Coward]

You can actually find a free sample CD here - (Link shortend by snipurl). Just fill out the forms, and Sun will send you an educational copy of solaris 9. I think you are allowed one license per download. Can't recall, and I don't have time to read the fine print.

"#1 Unix"

[Johnny Mnemonic]

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!"?

Re:"#1 Unix"

[The AtomicPunk]

Despiting being a big fan of Solaris x86, I'm pretty sure it's the latter. :)

Re:"#1 Unix"

[rmadmin]

"AOL, So easy, no wonder its #1!"

I rest my case. :-)

Re:"#1 Unix"

[Justarius]

It's actually marketering. According to IDC's figures last year, HP has the number one spot with something like 43% (8% or so of that came from the Compaq/HP merger) and Sun at something like 38%. Their market share might of increased over the course of Q4Y02 with the pervasiveness of the Vxxx line. We'll have to wait like another month to see the offical numbers from IDC.

Re:"#1 Unix"

[mr_z_beeblebrox]

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!"?

OK, listen....Solaris, buy it so I can keep my job...
Solaris, the number one Unix platform...
While the first may get a few alternative techie types to buy it, it is probably not "market savvy" I think that is the metric they used :-)

Re:"#1 Unix"

[buzzsport]

By platform - they mean hardware/software. Solaris has maintained the #1 ranking for quite some time. Gartner/Dataquest has had Sun listed as the #1 Unix Platform for a long time (even though market share is decreasing). Instead of sharing a sun.com link -- her's something recent from news.com basically reiterating the #1 Unix Platform statement.

http://news.com.com/2100-1001-983347.html

Re:"#1 Unix"

[Arcturax]

They probably just think that. From what I understand, Sun is more likely #3 Unix platform if you consider home users + enterprise. Apple's Mac OS X would be #2 and Linux would be #1 slightly edging Apple out.

However if they mean just enterprise, then Sun could be #1 at this time. However Linux would have to be a pretty close second. Not sure where OS X is yet since Apple is only just now dipping its toes into enterprise in earnest. They have had Mac OS X Server for almost three year now, but they only recently started their big push for Enterprise with the X-Serve and OS X 10.2's major enhancements designed as much for enterprise as the end user. It will be interesting to see how they do in the years to come.

I'm sure someone somewhere has actual numbers on all of this.

Re:"#1 Unix"

[gothamNY]

It's most definately not marketing speak and reflects sales of it's servers. Check out
a recent cnet article which states "The product overhaul comes at a critical time for Sun, a company striving to maintain its No. 1 ranking in the marketplace for Unix servers."

Cnet has posted articles reflecting actual sales and Sun is (barely) #1. I can't seem to find the article with the figures, however it's definately not simply "marketing speak."

Re:"#1 Unix"

[Sun Tzu]

Sun is the #1 Unix seller by revenue in the U.S. (as of recently, anyway... IBM may have overtaken them since). However, virtually all of their sales includes a rather expensive piece of hardware (or three...) and other, priced, Unix-specific Software licenses.

Therefore, to fairly compare Linux to Solaris, you would have to include all of the hardware that Linux runs on as well as all of the other software in that installation. Even free copies of Linux would produce some pretty impressive numbers when measured that way.

So, Sun does have a rationale for claiming #1 Unix -- and it's even better than the old SCO claim of #1 which worked like this: We sell more copies of Unix than Sun, et. al., so we're '#1'. Two copies of SCO Unix running on a PC is twice as many as one copy of Solaris running on a 1000-user Sun 10000. Linux? That's not Unix -- it ain't certified with the magic Unix label. Ergo, we're #1. Heh.

Send us your Linux Sysadmin articles.

Re:"#1 Unix"

[TheCrazyFinn]

On Enterprise class stuff, It's a toss-up between Sun and HP. Solaris would be #1, but HP-UX+True64 is larger than just Solaris, AIX also would be more common than Linux. Enterprise != Your webserver.

Linux is probably in a dead heat with Solaris on the low-end server Unix, and it's a MAc OS/Linux race on the Desktop, with Mac OS X way out front.

Re:"#1 Unix"

[mrm677]

Lets not forget that Linux can't be considered Unix. It is a Unix clone. It is not Unix.

Re:"#1 Unix"

[SN74S181]

You can't just lump HP-UX and True64 together like they're the same product. They are completely seperate OSes, even if they (now) come from a single vendor.

Small correction

[bconway]

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.

Re:Small correction

[Jahf]

If you're using Solaris SPARC, you purchased hardware from Sun. Therefore at some point in the past they have recouped the download costs by rolling it into the hardware purchase.

If you're using the x86 version, unless you have an LX50, you have not contributed anything to the cost of deploying the rather large disk images.

I see no problem with this personally, but I also feel that it will probably hamper the adoption of Solaris x86 since the extremely cost-conscious users (or, in other words, cheap Linux geeks ;) will not bother. I suppose it means Sun doesn't care so much for that crowd and that makes some sense since Linux has a pretty good lock there.

Duh!

[PincheGab]

This may the beginning of having people switch _servers_, not desktops! Which freekin' *nix will take over the desktop? The Mac is the closest to doing that, and its chances are near nil.

Re:Duh!

[Anonymous Coward]

People still run Windows on servers? Nigga Please!

$20 is a "shipping charge" only if...

[yerricde]

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.

Re:$20 is a "shipping charge" only if...

[thedarkstorm]

I didn't think that the FSF or the OSI dictates what is free and what isn't Free. No, I'm not trolling .. but making a point.. think about it.

Sure it's free...

[spudwiser]

but it costs $20 to download. i love big companies.

Re:Sure it's free...

[PincheGab]

i love big companies

I guess you'd rather have the download be free (from a small company), but they would have a 768K DSL and then NO ONE would be able to get it...

Re:Sure it's free...

[Anonymous Coward]

This isn't about bandwidth.

They want $20 from everyone no matter what. For each and every copy. Go read the download page. You can only use it on a single machine and every user MUST register, which means plunking down $20. If you want to use it an a second machine you have to go through the process again. If it was only about the bandwidth then they would let you install it on as many machines as you wanted (saves on the number of times you need to download a copy) and they would let anyone host it who wanted to (saves on Sun's bandwidth) including, wait for it, P2P filesharing.

I have no problem with them charging money for their OS, but don't call it free when it isn't.

I can't seem to find a HCL

[Odinson]

Here is the Intel based HCL list, but nothing about Solaris 9 yet.

Re:I can't seem to find a HCL

[dubbreak]

thank you, now i know that geforce cards are not supported! Plus nvidea has none (nice that they have freebsd binarys though)... maybe i'm out there but i thought geforce chisets were pretty common.. argh

Screwing who?

[Anonymous Coward]

You wouldn't pay a lousy 20 bucks for a mature, rock stable open source operating system? Jeebus. Scrooge should worship you.

Foobar.

Re:Screwing who?

[EvilAlien]

I promise to meta-mod as Fair for anyone who moderates this comment as +1 Funny or -1 Off-topic.

Awsome

[endrek]

Awsome. I'm exceedingly limetied on resources, but this would make getting a solaris box much more viable currently. Gret for learning. Eventually one day I might consider picking up an ultrasparc box anyway. Mmm. Yeah. Can't wait fo solaris 10

Re:Awsome

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't wait fo solaris 10

Don't be silly. It's going to be "Solaris X".

Re:Awsome

[iggymanz]

You can get very cheap Ultrasparc Sun boxes already loaded with Solaris 7 or 8 on eBay...a year ago I bought Ultra 170e for $200 (and now they're going for HALF that), and besides the Solaris 8 loaded on it, I've put 2.6 and 7 on it also (multiple OS's so easy on Sparc with SCSI compared to PC world).

must be crazy...

[Anonymous Coward]

they must actually be TRYING to go after the linux market...however, if people think that Linux has a "long way to go" before it's usable, then solaris has a "really log way to go" before it's even half as usable as Linux. They might get a few servers to switch, but definitely no desktops.

Re:must be crazy...

[Prof.Phreak]

I doubt they're even interested in desktops. Sun never was. Workstations, maybe, but desktops for non-techies? No way.

Re:must be crazy...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's funny, i've got an ultra running solaris 8 and a RDI powerlite sparc laptop running 2.6. On my *desktop*. GASP!!!

Sun caves in to customer demand

[lildogie]

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.

Re:Sun caves in to customer demand

[oldmanmtn]

Also, the inside scoop was that they already _had_ Solaris 9 for intel, but the higher-ups didn't want to release it.

I don't think this is any sort of news. It certainly wasn't some secret skunkworks project. The x86 builds never stopped. Projects that putback into Solaris always had to ensure that they didn't break the x86 build. It was all the other stuff that goes into releasing software that was halted: support, marketing, documentation, huge QA resources, etc.

For commercial products, writing the code is the easy part.

Re:Sun caves in to customer demand

[Anonymous Coward]

I've read that they had Solaris 64 running on Itanium simulators as early as Solaris 7, and yet even with Solaris 9 we still see no Itanium version.

Now Solaris on an Itanium box.. that'd interesting.

Of course, I say this as I install a patch kit on an E4500, so I'm happy enough with SPARC.

Watch that knee jerk!

[xmutex]

More power to them! Because they wouldn't be Microsoft if only they could! No sir! God Bless Sun! Hail Sun, the doer of all Good and Right in this wicked land of Microsoft!

Sun! Sun! Sun!

Re:Watch that knee jerk!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes,

Believe it or not but some of us are actually Pro competition. You see, competition in a free marketplace actuall helps the average consumer and is generally regarded as a good thing.

Updated graphics drivers?

[s3xyb17ch]

One thing I disliked about Solaris 8 x86 is that there wasn't a good amount of natively supported graphics hardware, and the drivers it did have were for fairly older graphics cards. I'd always have to compile and setup xfree86 just so I wasn't running in 640x480x16colors. Does anyone know if they have drivers to support modern graphics hardware?

Re:Updated graphics drivers?

[Anonymous Coward]

They've got nVidia drivers (Geforce2 /TNT) if it's any consolation. I didn't check the ATI list.

Hey, quit complaining

[ajhenley]

yes the download or the media costs $20, but have you seem how big that thing is? Sun has costs like everyone else, and from my reading of the eula, it seems like once I buy the cd I can make copies or loan the cd to anyone I want as long as they have noncommercial use in mind, I don't see this as a big deal...

Re:Hey, quit complaining

[SN74S181]

Unfortunately, you have to agree to the new license to download Solaris 9. I downloaded Solaris 8 back before they implemented the new agreement. My license says I can run it on machines with more than one processor. I have two SparcStation 10's that both have two processors in them. The license changed midway through the 'free Solaris 8' campaign and anybody who clicks through the newer license can't run Solaris SMP for free. Even on a little SparcStation 10 with two 50 MHz processors, like mine.

Source available... how free is it?

[4lex]

I did not get clear information about how "free" or "available" the source is. Sun is actively developing OpenOffice.org (besides StarOffice), which is a very good thing (for me, at least). Can somebody get into detail about Sun's relation with free/libre software (comparing, e.g., with better known MacOSX case)?

Why x86 binaries are bigger

[yerricde]

The Solaris 9 x86 download is a $20 charge. The SPARC download is available at no charge.

There's a difference here: There have to be more drivers included with an x86 operating system distribution because there are so many different variations of x86 hardware, unlike with the SPARC platform where Sun Microsystems and SPARC Intl. are pretty much in control. Drivers take disc space. Granted, drivers won't fill a CD, and the Solaris OE has always lacked drivers for the newest hardware, but it's still something to be considered.

Re:Why x86 binaries are bigger

[antifun]

There's a difference here: There have to be more drivers included with an x86 operating system distribution because there are so many different variations of x86 hardware, unlike with the SPARC platform where Sun Microsystems and SPARC Intl. are pretty much in control. Drivers take disc space. Granted, drivers won't fill a CD, and the Solaris OE has always lacked drivers for the newest hardware, but it's still something to be considered.

I bet SPARC is bigger and I'll tell you why -- sparcv9 is 64 bit. If Sun is still shipping 32-bit as well, then you've got the text equivalent of triple the size of the 32-bit sparc only. (I don't want to get into the relative SPARC/x86 code size war. My experience is that 32-bit sparc code is about 90% of the size of equivalent x86 code.)

I really don't think Sun is expecting to make any money on Solaris 9 anyway, so their $20 charge seems more like a disincentive for people to actually use it. Given their incredible marketing acumen and crack support team (sarcasm?), it wouldn't surprise me.

Sun unintentionally getting killed by Linux

[ntaylor963]

This just shows that Sun is reacting to getting killed by Linux. Linux is shooting at Microsoft, but hitting Sun with friendly fire.

The simple fact is that Linux is most suited to Sun's core market (realiable servers), and Sun is losing market share big time to Linux. On the other hand I believe that last year Microsoft went from 92% to 94% of the desktop market.

Re:Sun unintentionally getting killed by Linux

[chadworthman]

Sun's core market is not being stolen by Linux. Sun's big money comes from big servers with lots of processors. Their core market is the SunFire line (x800, and the E1xk), not the Blade line(comparable to PC).

Re:Sun unintentionally getting killed by Linux

[antifun]

Sun's core market is not being stolen by Linux. Sun's big money comes from big servers with lots of processors. Their core market is the SunFire line (x800, and the E1xk), not the Blade line(comparable to PC).

True.

Sun's getting killed by the general reluctance of big companies to spend money on huge servers. This is in part because of general global instability (terrorism, economic downturn, imminent war, etc.), in part because there are lots of slightly-used servers floating around thanks to the dot-coms all going under, and in part because they have no idea what they are doing.

Sun is throwing money away pushing Solaris for x86 (if you can call this "pushing") and even for their workstation-class machines. Sun's throwing money away continuing to make workstation-class machines; the move away from Sun on the scientific desktop to Linux is well underway. The Blade I am stuck with is a fine machine, for a Sun, but a PC costing half as much with any recent Linux leaves it in the dust performance-wise, hardware-support-wise, and usability-wise.

Sun is in serious trouble if they don't stop wasting valuable resources on areas of business that will only become less profitable for them. I don't think they realize this, or at least they don't want to realize it.

Re:Sun unintentionally getting killed by Linux

[axxackall]

last year Microsoft went from 92% to 94% of the desktop market.

Whose is that OS/comapny that lost desktops to Microsoft?

Appla claims it's getting more and more desktop users, especially switchers from Microsoft. There are many news about Linux begins to get on desktops.

So, who else I missed? Whose users switched to Microsoft? SGI? Palm? Non-computerized desktop users?

Re:Sun unintentionally getting killed by Linux

[SN74S181]

Likely, the total number of 'desktops' is growing, and as it grows, more people are picking (or being assigned) to Microsoft desktops.

Re:Sun unintentionally getting killed by Linux

[axxackall]

So, you are saying that today % of people picking up M$OS is higher than a year ago?

Again, it's not consistent with a big noise from Apple and Linux news sources. I don't like marketing noise, but I don't think that Wallmart and other are ignoring those statistics when offering pre-installed Linux desktops.

Something is telling me that all those %-numbers are somehow "fishy".

Re:Sun unintentionally getting killed by Linux

[SN74S181]

Well, I don't think Walmart and others are ignoring Microsoft's persecution of places that sell a 'naked PC,' so they put a filler OS, the equivalent of the cardboard computer monitor that office furniture stores use for display purposes, on their 'bare' machines. Besides which that's only a WalMart.com deal. Go into any WalMart store across the country and try to buy a machine with Linux installed on it. They'll look at you funny.

And Apple has always been about making a big noise. Something Shakespeare, about sound and fury....

This is, of course, Slashdot so we need to say it:

Linux is winning! Yay Linux!

or something.

Re:Sun unintentionally getting killed by Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

lol.. this is skewed...

Realistically, Sun may be losing people on the low end (1-2 CPU) systems to Linux boxes.. Linux boxes with less then 4GB of memory and a couple CPU's are cheaper then comparible Sun's, and are faster.

On the other hand, we have E4000 systems with 12GB of memory and 12 UltraSPARC CPU's running MySQL at QPS levels I've never seen from a Linux machine. It is in the these high end machines that Sun commands an advantage.

Frankly, Linux will not be ready for the "big iron" rooms until well tested Linux solutions on high end (8 CPU or more) 64 bit machines are available. Without 64 bit support, large applications just cannot run effectively on a Linux based system because no single app can grab enough memory.

Re:Sun unintentionally getting killed by Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Why run the gimpy MySQL on hardware costing hundreds of thousands of dollars if not millions of dollars? Sounds like a troll.

Would any /. reader care to answer this ? - Thanx

[Anonymous Coward]

HELP NEEDED in Switching to Linux from Windows

Yesterday, I bought SuSE Linux 8.1 Professional for 79.99. But then I read something about better fonts in Redhat.

Should I return the $79.99 SuSE Linux 8.1 Professional box and get the $149.99 RedHat 8.0 Professional instead?

Note: I prefer to buy a packaged version instead of downloading.

Which is the best Linux Distro ? And which has the best usability (fonts, performance, compabitility etc.) vs price ratio ?

I am also planning to run a website using slashcode [slashdcode.com] someday...

Thanks /. readers for your suggestions :-)

Since I don't know...

[Kipper the Llama]

Is Solaris a graphical OS?

Is it easier to use than Linux?

And, most importantly, is there any way I could run Windows games on it? :P

Re:Since I don't know...

[4lex]

As far as I know, it is as XFree86 as linux, so, definitively yes, it is graphical.

If you know about something called Gnome, you might find this interesting :)

http://wwws.sun.com/software/star/gnome/

Re:Since I don't know...

[Frymaster]

Is Solaris a graphical OS?

well... there's openwindows:

here's the text

here's the picture

Re:Since I don't know...

[VoidEngineer]

Good questions, and well asked.

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? :P

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? :P

Re:Since I don't know...

[KillerHamster]

Solaris is graphical in the same sense that Linux is. A Google search finds several screenshots:

http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8 &oe=utf-8&q=solaris+screenshot&btnG=Google+Sea rch

It's been my experience that Solaris is not really any easier or harder to use than Linux, just different.

Re:Since I don't know...

[Kipper the Llama]

Thanks for the answers!

Mostly, I'm unsure about Unix-based systems after my experience with using Red Hat. I was raised on DOS and Macs so it was definitely a different experience. Mostly it was the device management, internet protocol, and the terminal that confused me. And, when I went looking for help many Linux users were outright rude about it.

Why play windows games, when you can play VR games? :P

Because I'm lazy!

Re:Since I don't know...

[jellomizer]

I am not sure if you like open wondindows or not. But Open Windows has been slowly fadding out for CDE and now GNOME. To say the interface for Solaris is only Onen Windows is like showing RedHat 8 configured to run FVWM. Its still there but most people dont use it anymore. There is a good change the the U albany needs to upgrade their servers from 2.5.1 to something later.

Re:Since I don't know...

[__aafutm5472]

Wow, that's an old picture. I'm no fan of CDE/Openwindows, but it doesn't always look like this. On my Ultra 10, I run Solaris 9 and WindowMaker. Sitting at it, it's visually identical to my Linux machine. I even have BASH as the shell, same as on my Linux machine.

I typically run Solaris on my servers, and Linux on my workstations, with the exception of the Ultra 10.

Re:Since I don't know...

[Anonymous Coward]

ILM is/was SGI-based and now migrating to Linux.

You may be thinking of Pixar. Their render farm for Toy Story was made up of SPARC 5s and recently it was E4500s.

Re:Since I don't know...

[Listen Up]

Actually, if you were weary about RedHat Linux, then I would certainly tell you that Solaris is NOT easier to work with than RedHat Linux. I administer and use a RedHat server and desktop system and have administered and used both Solaris 7 & 8 for Intel and I will tell you that Solaris is exactly the same, if not more difficult, than RedHat Linux to use. If you are used to using Windows or a Macintosh, then you are in for one hell of a ride with Solaris. To someone with 10+ years experience in operating systems, servers, and desktops, I even spent a little time working with Solaris to get it to the point that it was usable as a desktop OS. Try configuring a modem for PPP access. Good luck without a TON of experience working with configuration script files, unless that has changed in Solaris 9, you might not be internet enabled for weeks or months, depending on your level of Unix and Solaris knowledge. Always make sure you can access the internet during the install and after the install in case you need to ask a question or look something up. Otherwise, you are going to wish you had. Don't be afraid of Solaris, just respect it. Solaris is pure Unix. Be prepared and you will love it. Be unprepared, and you will hate it. Good Luck and I hope you love it!!!

Re:Since I don't know...

[Animixer]

(I may be mistaken, but I believe that Industrial Light & Magic is a Solaris shop... ever see Jurassic Park?).

Yes...I also noticed the somewhat-prominent placement of some SGI Indigos in the server room scene. :-) I think ILM switched to number-crunching on Sun a little after JP, but still did the interactive work on SGI. I believe at this time they have a lot of linux boxen....could be wrong though, I'm not as big in the graphics scene as I used to be. :P I just hope I'm not confusing ILM with pixar!

Re:Since I don't know...

[Anonymous Coward]

yup, exactly.

Re:Since I don't know...

[Anonymous Coward]

don't the sell WAB\I anymore?

Suggestion for SUN ...

[bockman]

Add another CD with packaged open-source goodies pre-compiled for Solaris/Intel ...

Thinking of it, please do the same for the next release of Solaris/Sparc ...

If you do that, you will get very happy customers ... although may be they will be not so ready to spend money on some of yours over-priced software products

Re:Suggestion for SUN ...

[fim32]

obviously someone who has never dealt with solaris. currently, if you purchase the media pack (buy the cd/dvd's) you get a cd with open source goodies pre-compiled (sounds like what you asked for? also, there's quite a good website out there www.sunfreeware.com that has them all, as well.

Re:Suggestion for SUN ...

[Anonymous Coward]

They already do provide that CD image.

http://wwws.sun.com/software/solaris/freeware/

Re:Suggestion for SUN ...

[bockman]

I did know of the site, from where I downloaded several packages when working on Solaris. But they are 'unofficial' packages. I did not know of the CD: last time I handled the purchase of a Sun box for my company (several years ago with Solaris 7), there was not such a thing.

Rock stable on what hardware?

[yerricde]

You wouldn't pay a lousy 20 bucks for a mature, rock stable open source operating system?

I won't pay for an operating system unless I can guarantee that it has driver support for my hardware. That's why I pay for Microsoft Windows and pay for those Linux distributions that I have tested on my hardware.

How good java is there?

[krokodil]

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?

Re:How good java is there?

[Anonymous Coward]

Concerning the JVM:

Not as good as on Windoww, better than the linux version.

It's very solid and stable, but it's just not as fast as the Windows version.

Re:How good java is there?

[axxackall]

Dispite all the marketing fluff and bluff, Sun doesn't like Linux, that's why Sun's JVM works flawlessly (mostly) only on Windows and Solaris.

And that's the reason why many Linux user prefer Blackdown JVM.

By the way, Sun's Linux JVM is not for Linux - it's only for Linux/x86. Blackdown's version of Linux JVM is for most of working Linux platforms: x86, PPC, Sparc, Arm.

Re:How good java is there?

[Anonymous Coward]

JVM on Solaris x86 is an excellent choice. Let the cheaper x86 CPU eat into JVM performance issues, and couple that with the robust threading implementation of Solaris, and you get one hell of a scalable JVM on x86. However, if heap requirements are huge, a 64-bit OS is required. Solaris AMD64 anyone?

Oh, and yes, we stressed the hell out of it by loading one of our most threaded, and sophisticated telco OSS application and it worked flawlessly.

Re:How good java is there?

[SN74S181]

I clicked on the link to Blackdown.org and it took me to their site. Then I tried finding those 'cross platform' binaries you talked about.

Where's the binary for my NetBSD RS/6000 box?

Heck, I couldn't even find the binary for that box (PowerPC) if I wanted to switch it to Linux.

Or a source link on the page.

Re:How good java is there?

[axxackall]

Blackdown is "Java Linux" thing - read their home page.

And you may want to improve your web surfing skills. Because, in 10 seconds from the first (home) page I found that they still have Java for Linux/PPC.

Damn that $20 download

[BierGuzzl]

How long until this is available on gnutella?

Re:Damn that $20 download

[Elvisisdead]

Good point. If everyone would sit on their hands/wallets for a few weeks, it will make it out to P2P. Then you don't have to spend the $20.

Re:Damn that $20 download

[stefanlasiewski]

How long before you discover the trojans on your Solaris-from-Gnutella?

Re:Damn that $20 download

[Anonymous Coward]

its already on emule, or at least it is when im on...

Re:Damn that $20 download

[Anonymous Coward]

It's on Usenet. Try (ironically) alt.binaries.warez.linux

Re:Damn that $20 download

[Anonymous Coward]

Are the MD5sums for the ISOs on sun.com? If so, sure, otherwise, I'll get it from sun directly... when I have $20 to spare (starving grad student).

Shift in Sun's thinking?

[Gizzmonic]

Earlier versions of Solaris on Intel were half-assed and limited, I have had the opportunity to use this one, and I have to say that I'm pretty impressed.

The first "right step" that they have made is including the GNOME desktop environment. GNOME replaces the venerable CDE and upstages the purple K Desktop Environment.

Sun has thrown their support behind aopen standards, and they should be saluted for their recalcitrant embracement of Linux. Perhaps their stock will go over $1.00 now.

Re:Shift in Sun's thinking?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, it's already rocketed up to more than $3 after your irrelevant post.

Sun invented open standards, for God's sake.

Of course they aren't going after linux

[drinkypoo]

Linux's market share is growing most aggressively. Furthermore it is Unix so there is a certain victory for all Unixes when Linux succeeds, as long as it's not taking market share away from Sun.

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.

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.

Re:Of course they aren't going after linux

[drinkypoo]

It makes sense to me, on all counts, including half-assedness. However I do think that Sun knows what I know and have been pointing out for a long time, thus it cannot be an original thought anyway (I didn't come up with it on drugs.)

This is the thought; Solaris on the desktop is ONLY useful in ONE instance, ESPECIALLY on x86, because there are free (beer AND speech) operating systems which are technically superior on x86. This ONE instance is a case where all of your servers are running Solaris, and you want the same operating system across an entire enterprise. This is what made Windows NT popular, the ability to run the same OS on the server and the desktop. (Well, that and the ease of use it brought to server management, but that is part and parcel.)

Otherwise, it makes far more sense to run Linux on the desktop. There's more support for Linux every day; One assumes that Solaris support is actually tapering off slowly due to packages which formerly required solaris moving to requiring some other OS. (Many software packages are targeted at a single OS, as well you know. It's amazing how many of them were targeted at SCO Xenix and later SCO Unix.)

Why the download charge for Intel ?

[timlewis_atlanta]

I don't understand why they're charging $20 for Intel but not for Sparc. It can't be for covering the bandwidth (do you seriously think it should cost $20 to download a few gigs of data ?), so there must be some other reason.

Putting a charge onto a "free" developer version doesn't seem like a good way of encouraging developers to download and try it out.

Sun should also consider that the fewer developers who are using the "free" version on small Intel boxen, the fewer developers there will be to work on projects using the commerical version on large scale hardware. Limiting access to your products is not a good way of making them popular !

Re:Why the download charge for Intel ?

[erikdotla]

I think it's pretty clear why they're charging $20.

It may not cost $20 to download the Solaris stuff to one person (say on a company T1 that they already have), but I think they knew that the release of this information would incite rioting in the form of Slashdot-like attention. Which it did.

They didn't want to look like Valve/CS and be caught with their pants down, so they ramped up their servers and bandwidth. They had to pay for all this, before anyone downloaded it. They just want some of it back.

Re:Why the download charge for Intel ?

[slashdot_commentator]

AAAAaaaaarrrrrrrrrggggggggghhhhhhhhhh!!!

Doesn't anyone understand?!?!?

Sun does not make money on Solaris x86. Sun does not want to piss away its limited financial resources to market Solaris x86 as an alternative to Linux or Microsoft! Sun does not plan on attracting developers using its Solaris x86 product! If Sun tried to make a push to dominate the x86 platform, in a few quarters Sun would be out of business!

Sun (on some level) has decided its a hardware company. They do not make make their money on hardware, they do not make their money off their OS. They make a SYSTEM, a finished computing product that touts higher reliability, scalability, and reasonable system maintenance cost, and makes their money on support contracts!

Sun (at the moment) has a cushy deal. They have a market niche that Microsoft cannot currently enter, and have been able to fend off IBM. If they went x86, they would have to deal with x86 market realities. They would not be able to make a profit on their hardware, they could not sell their OS at a higher profit margin than Microsoft, and because its such a stable product, anyone who would run x86 would not bother paying for a usurious service contract.

Sun planned to kill x86 Solaris. The only reason they did not was because enough service contract paying customers told them not to. Sun is not stupid enough to be losing money on a product they did not want to invest in. So they charge $20 for the CDs, and that pays for the server/bandwidth bills. I'm guessing the reason why they didn't charge more is that Marketing did not want to give customers the idea that it is a cheaper (thus lower quality) OS than Microsoft. So they call the $20 a handling charge, rather than imply that Solaris is worth $20-100. The reason they do not charge for Sparc is because only a handful of people (outside of corporations) own Sparc hardware. Its a hassle-free door for service contract customers who need to grab a copy of it. They've already made their money on the Sparc OS (from service contracts).

No developer capable of writing a sellable product would consider making a business writing Solaris software on non-Sparc equipment. There is, and there will be, no market share for x86 Solaris. The pro, at minimum, will buy a used Ultra 2/5/10 off of ebay, and work from there.

Re:Why the download charge for Intel ?

[Anonymous Coward]

No developer capable of writing a sellable product would consider making a business writing Solaris software on non-Sparc equipment.

Admittedly, it's far from their only product, but Cisco does ship certain devices running Solaris/x86. I don't know how many other vendors do this, and people just never know what's under the covers.

Re:Why the download charge for Intel ?

[simm_s]

Are they a hardware company, a system solutions company, a software company, or a professional services company. I don't even fscking know anymore.

Say for the time being they are a hardware company their strategy is to find large contracts develop a solution an pump the customer with as much hardware as the customer can afford. They then drop parasitic professional service representatives to bleed money out for the life of the project.

I agree with you on the point that the goal of solaris is not to make money. Logically it is there to attract and lock you into the hardware platform. Problem is they make no money if you put solaris 9 intel on a dell machine

This $20 download scheme is dwarfed by the costs of developement, validation, and support. If solaris intel was the cash cow you claim it was why did they try to kill it?

I'm guessing the reason why they didn't charge more is that Marketing did not want to give customers the idea that it is a cheaper (thus lower quality) OS than Microsoft.

So they give it away for free, huh?

Re:Why the download charge for Intel ?

[slashdot_commentator]

This $20 download scheme is dwarfed by the costs of developement, validation, and support. If solaris intel was the cash cow you claim it was why did they try to kill it?

Read. I never claimed Solaris x86 was a cash cow. I agree, its development, validation, and support dwarfs whatever money they could make charging $20 for downloading. I really think the $20 is to defer operation costs to make it available AND discourage non-contract sun users from downloading it.

They don't need to charge for Sparc. Why? Who the hell is going to download Sparc Solaris? The contract users that they already sucked dry, and the 0.00001 percent of their user base that didn't pay for a service contract. Boo hoo. The OS is not where they make their money. Contrast a thousand rogue sparc machines with a couple hundred million PCs trying to download Solaris x86 without having paid Sun through service contracts. They lose money on x86 Solaris bigtime.

Why offer Solaris x86 at all? You f**king stumped me with that one! I thought they should have never released Solaris 9 x86, and just kept supporting Solaris 8. By the time Solaris 10 comes around, Solaris itself may become economically unviable. It certainly won't seem like the same beast, with Gnome2, Grid computing, that "New Network" thing, etc.

Well, enough customers bellyached for Solaris 9 x86 and Sun caved. Why don't they charge full price and profit on the beast? I have no f**king idea, unless enough of those bellyaching customers added x86 CPUs to their service contracts. They should chose close to its full price. The Sparc customers would say "This is no deal" and chuck it for Sun Linux for GUI apps, or a Blade for cheap development platforms. And then they could kill the beast. I've speculated elsewhere perhaps they think it could be come a replacement desktop for XP.

Why only charge a $20 handling fee? Why does Radio Shack charge $3 bucks for a catalog I used to grab for free. Once a year I would buzz by my Radio Schlock for the catalog. Didn't like the products, just wanted parts, cables, tool, and occasionally a goofy gadget I couldn't get elsewhere. Now they can't even get me to go there for parts. The geniuses that decided to charge for the catalog belong to Marketing. Ask them why they wanted to discourage my business. Same thing with $20 Solaris x86. My guess was that if it was too high, Microsoft would claim their OS is cheaper by the CPU. If they charged too low, the Sparc people would try to bang down their support contracts, or migrate to x86. So the Marketing answer is to not charge for it at all. It doesn't muck up the service contract pricing (per CPU). Sun doesn't want to be sucked dry by 100 million downloads, so they stick $20 on downloader, BUT CALL IT A SERVICE CHARGE. I've said this already in the previous post. If it isn't clear now, you're not going to get it.

Future Directions

[Justarius]

I wonder with this new annoucement what Sun's future is. I used to work on Sun equipment for a long time, until I got converted over to Tru64. Each has it's strengths and weaknesses, but I always found Solaris much simpler, YMMV.

If they're recognizing the fact that they need to expand into the market with Intel-based solutions (as much as we can personally hate them, they're not a bad platform - the problem is the OS that runs on it right now), it would be interesting to see if they make the effort to port to Itanium.

I know most of you might hate the idea of the Itanic, but it rumours are true, and that the 2005/5006 version of the Itanic is mostly based on Alpha, then we'll have a good OS running on excellent hardware - what could be better?

help me, i dont understand.

[Anonymous Coward]

is that "free" as in "free beer" or "free" as in "costs US$20"?

Re:help me, i dont understand.

[JPelorat]

it's "free" as in "$20 worth of beer"

Re:help me, i dont understand.

[erikdotla]

lol man, that's cruel.

It's free, but costs $20 to download it. You're compensating them for their costs of distributing the free product to you.

After you have it, it's free for non-commercial use. However, the license terms under which they are distributing it haven't been fully dissected yet, so...

How appropriate

[jarkko]

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.

Re:How appropriate

[Anonymous Coward]

Solaris x86 disk access speed is even faster than that for Linux. You were just too dumb to enable DMA.

Re:How appropriate

[Anonymous Coward]

Solaris 8 has a write throttle of 384 kB (i.e. a write() does not return before all the datas except the last 384 kB were being written).

I think Solaris 9 is shipped with a write throttle of 16 MB.

Re:How appropriate

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear AC: Sorry to ruin your parade, it was slow w/ DMA, -100 drive+controller.

Get lost, thanks.

Brilliant troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Just naive enough to sound legit, but the classic barbs thrown in. Very subtle. I commend you sir.

Solaris and VMware

[sjanich]

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.

Re:Solaris and VMware

[Stonent1]

It works fine for me.. Google!

Re:Solaris and VMware

[Hanashi]

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.

Re:Solaris and VMware

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, xfree86 works fine on Solaris x86 if you don't want to use the Sun X server.

It's the trademark. #1 UNIX� != #1 *n?x

[yerricde]

Does anyone know by what metric they figured [that the Solaris OE is the #1 UNIX platform]? Sales volume?

I'm guessing Sun's press release refers to sales volume among UNIX® brand products. The GNU/Linux operating environment is not a UNIX brand system, and neither is any of the free BSD systems. The Solaris operating environment is, and it just might have the greatest sales volume among UNIX brand systems.

Yeah, and I'm Betty Crocker

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems they are after Microsoft, not Linux. More Power to them.

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 /. -- 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.

All that said, I don't think Sun is "after Microsoft, not Linux" anyway... they're after $$$ in the current market.

--Mid

im an idiot

[epukinsk]

everybody laugh at me because I wear baggy pants
http://info.astrian.net/jargon/terms/b/bagg y_pants ing.html Aren't i dumb

Where's that source code?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't give a sh*t about the binaries, I want access to the source code. They don't seem to have that one available for download...

I am not just going to switch to Sun when I don't need to. Linux works just fine for anything that I have to do, and I develop custom servers that invade everyone's personal freedom ( according to some people ).

I just want to see if I can learn anything from software that has been touted like the crown jewels.

Random Developer TypeA

Re:Where's that source code?

[Anonymous Coward]

Aren't we important?

They paid for it when they bought their machines

[yerricde]

I don't understand why they're charging $20 for Intel but not for Sparc

SPARC platform users paid for the download of a couple future versions when they bought their machines.

It can't be for covering the bandwidth (do you seriously think it should cost $20 to download a few gigs of data ?)

IP packet transit to a country other than the United States and Canada just might cost $20 per GB.

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?

[LarryRiedel]

My guess is that Sun thinks of Solaris as a very good operating system which they have dozens/hundreds of talented people making better all the time, and which seems to perform better on 8+ CPU sparc systems than any other OS.

I think Sun respects that some customers want to have the same operating environment on their x86 machines as on their sparc machines, and rather than make those customers run Linux on sparc, they provide the capability to run Solaris on x86. A side benefit is letting people with x86 machines try Solaris and develop applications for it.

I think sometimes Sun tries to succeed by giving customers what they want, rather than trying to gain advantage through manipulation.

Larry

Re:What is Sun's Business Plan?

[TeknoHog]

> 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.

Not necessarily. X86+Solaris isn't a fair match for a proper SPARC system. The x86 version is a nice teaser which might help new people migrate into the SPARC platform.

Re:What is Sun's Business Plan?

[wantedman]

To test Solaris 9, you would need a Sun right? Sure, you can buy a Sparc on Ebay for $100 bucks or so, or a Ultra 66 for $1000 or so, but that is a waste to just test it. Instead test and if you like it, use Solaris 9 on an Intel System for $20 bucks.

Now after your company switches over to Solaris, you're definitly going to have enough people who say, "Why are we running a system that is designed for the Alpha Processor on the x86 architecture?" to convice management to switch over.

So Sun may not be interested in money as much as Sun is interested in getting their product used. The more need / market saturation for Solaris, the more Suns get sold.

Re:What is Sun's Business Plan?

[swordgeek]

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.

Re:What is Sun's Business Plan?

[oldmanmtn]

I don't get why sun is releasing solaris 9 to the intel platform. I thought they were supposed to be a hardware company?

Yeah, and?

Sun sells x86 hardware. Now it runs Solaris as well as Linux.

People who buy $1M database servers also need cheap web servers to run the front end. If they can run the same OS on both sets of machines, it makes the whole package more appealing.

People who buy big SPARC machines need software to run on them. Solaris x86 makes a damn cheap way for ISVs to develop software. As long as you don't do anything stupid, it's a simple recompile from Solaris x86 to Solaris SPARC.

Re:What is Sun's Business Plan?

[Ctrl-Z]

I guess you haven't been paying attention. Scott McNealy and Sun have made Microsoft an enemy, much as Larry Ellison and Oracle have. This decision is not based on bettering Sun as a corporation, but sticking it to the Man (Microsoft) in any way possible. The fact that this gesture is unlikely to harm Microsoft at all just serves to make this action even more irrational than it already is.

Regardless, you shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth. Although many would say that Solaris X86 isn't much of a gift.

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:What is Sun's Business Plan?

[Anonymous Coward]

Alpha Processor? Ultra 66?

Other than your crazy inaccurate facts, I agree
with you post mainly.
x86 solaris will be good for people to train on,
to put an initial system on, or to use if they
have alot of x86 systems, like say compaq proliant
6500s. But bear in mind that Sun has been selling
solaris x86 for awhile and it has always been worse
than the sparc version, and not just because of
the underlying hardware. Given the choice myself
I would deploy linux on the hardware. But if I
had to choose between 2K and solaris/x86 i'd
take solaris.

Re:What is Sun's Business Plan?

[slashdot_commentator]

Thank You! Someone who actually understands the market enough to ask a relevant question!

I like Sun and its equipment. It kills me that they are pissing away resources to support a product that cannot make them money. They should not have released Solaris 9 for Intel.

Supposedly the reason why they decided to resurrect Solaris x86 was that enough paying customers were banging the doors when they heard the impending execution. But I have no clue why those customers needed Solaris 9 for x86.

You can't really develop Solaris on x86 platforms and port the code to Sparc. Its not binary compatible, or even 100% internally compatible. So they aren't saving money there. And the plan would have to include using gcc, because I don't think Sun offers an x86 compiler. Whatever patch maintenance support they hoped to keep could have been maintained in Solaris 8 x86. In fact, its highly unlikely customers will want to migrate platforms to Solaris 9 (x86) given its precarious state. Did they really plan on running Sun One on x86s? Perhaps they know they cannot move to Linux, and wanted to knock down Microsoft on the XP licenses by implying they'd move to Solaris x86. But I have not heard that being cited once as a strategy.

My guess is there are a lot of legacy trading systems using CDE/Motif/OpenLook interfaces, and they decided to cut corners by using x86 PCs, rather than Sparc workstations. It'll be cheaper for them to pay Sun for the software support costs, rather than port the legacy code to linux/windoze. But it still doesn't make sense to lobby Sun to release Solaris 9. They'll never port to it, and by the time Solaris 8 x86 goes EOL, they'd have to move it to a newer system anyway. I speculated it might be cost effective as a Java platform, but you're better off developing on a windoze client, or linux if you were planning to move away from windoze. Until someone presents a credible scenario, I'm guessing more than one large company has an idiot for a COO/CIO, who's operations/cost plan is dependent on x86 Solaris clients.

Re:What is Sun's Business Plan?

[simm_s]

Sun sells x86 hardware. Now it runs Solaris as well as Linux.

Sun sells x86 hardware at an inflated price. I could go with Dell or build my own cheapo PC box, then install Solaris 9 or Linux on the cheap. Sun makes nothing.

People who buy $1M database servers also need cheap web servers to run the front end. If they can run the same OS on both sets of machines, it makes the whole package more appealing.

So what? Sun does not make any money from that. You are basically condeming the low-end SPARC machines e.g. netra X1 to a slow death. And linux is close enough to solaris on the command line interface.

People who buy big SPARC machines need software to run on them. Solaris x86 makes a damn cheap way for ISVs to develop software. As long as you don't do anything stupid, it's a simple recompile from Solaris x86 to Solaris SPARC.

Big deal I could cross compile from a Linux machine anyway. I don't really need Solaris x86 for that. That argument is moot anyway since I don't have to pay sun for the hardware to develop on. My point is that sun makes no money from me if they don't sell me hardware. Sun should want me develop code on sparc machines only not intel because their core business is hardware!

Re:What is Sun's Business Plan?

[simm_s]

Not really. x86 servers do not compete with UltraSPARC servers in features. $/MHz is only 10% or so of the whole picture. [Are you kidding me!?]

Sun Hardware is in a life or death stuggle against Intel Hardware. I agree that the old Sun hardware was as solid as a rock, but there quality assurance for hardware is minimal these days.

Dont give me that lame-o well the SPARC architecture can support 100+ processors and how fireplane is ultra fast. Administrators are thinking in terms of Server Farms and distributed processing today not SMP or NUMA. In a distibuted world you want the best bang for the buck for each node and that is where intel kicks sun's ass. Monolithic reliability is a dying issue, distributed reliability has taken over.

Re:What is Sun's Business Plan?

[oldmanmtn]

>Sun sells x86 hardware at an inflated price. I
>could go with Dell or build my own cheapo PC box,
>then install Solaris 9 or Linux on the cheap. Sun
>makes nothing.

Which reinforces my point. Sun sells x86 hardware. Maybe you're not buying it, but somebody is. If somebody is so eager to buy Sun gear that they are willing to pay a premium, doesn't it seem reasonable to think they might want Sun's OS as well?

>> People who buy $1M database servers also need
>> cheap web servers to run the front end. If they
>> can run the same OS on both sets of machines,
>> it makes the whole package more appealing.

> So what? Sun does not make any money from that.

If having a cheap Solaris front end available makes it more likely for a customer to buy an expensive Solaris back end, then of course they make money on it.

> You are basically condeming the low-end SPARC
> machines e.g. netra X1 to a slow death.

The Netra machines are designed explicitly for the telco market. The availability of an x86 Solaris has nothing to do with them. Sun does have some general-purpose low-end SPARC machines that might be affected by this release. I dunno what that impact might be. I'm sure that occurred to Sun's marketing folks.

> And linux is close enough to solaris on the
> command line interface.

That's an awfully narrow view of the world. They are certainly not close enough at the API level.

>> People who buy big SPARC machines need software
>> to run on them. Solaris x86 makes a damn cheap
>> way for ISVs to develop software. As long as you
>> don't do anything stupid, it's a simple recompile
>> from Solaris x86 to Solaris SPARC.

> Big deal I could cross compile from a Linux machine anyway.

Not if you wanted to make use of anything other than bog standard Unix system calls. Without the user environment available, you can't make use of anything in the Solaris libraries. At the very least you would need the API stubs to compile against, and then you couldn't do any testing whatsoever.

> My point is that sun makes no money from me if
> they don't sell me hardware.

That's correct. And irrelevant. Your one person. That's not where they're going to make their money.

> Sun should want me develop code on sparc
> machines only not intel because their core
> business is hardware!

Exactly. But with Solaris x86, you can do all of your development and testing on the cheap machines you referred to above. Then "porting" to SPARC really is as simple as a recompile. So, Sun has just given you a cheap way to do your development _and_ make your software available on SPARC, which is the "volume" Solaris platform. More software availability means more hardware sales.

Everybody wins. You get a cheap development platform, SPARC users get more software, Sun sells more hardware. It's a virtuous circle, which doesn't rely on Sun getting any income whatsoever directly from x86 Solaris.

Re:What is Sun's Business Plan?

[simm_s]

No you're missing the point. Sun = Sparc = Solaris = Solid is an admirable point but they should be thinking: Sun = Sparc = I don't care = $$$$.

Not Sun = I don't care = Java = Slow
Not Sun = Intel = Solaris x86 = No Money, wasted resources, more software expense, more validation costs, trapped.
Not Sun = Intel = Linux x86 = Validation of Linux as a server platform, thus customers believe that SPARC is irrelivant.

I am convinced that the people running sun do not want to make money.

Re:What is Sun's Business Plan?

[bedizened]

Last time I checked (Solaris 8), Sun would give you the operating system for free ... but then charge almost $2000 for the Forte compiler.

It doesn't look like this has changed it all, at least by looking at the website. Of course, Sun may be totally justified by doing this - they have to recover their costs somehow, and besides, it may not matter for a server machine - but at the same time, comparing saying Solaris is free in the same way as Linux is a bit deceiving.

I would be curious what other think about this ... for instance, is the gcc available for Solaris? Does Forte (Sun's compiler collection) have any advantages?

Re:What is Sun's Business Plan?

[Animixer]

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.

Actually, I think it is a very smart move of them to keep the intel port alive....think about it: maintaining the portability of one's software (especially an OS) to other platforms has its benefits.

Everyone thought it was brilliant when Apple announced it was porting parts of its OS to x86. They just don't want to be locked into one processor only....maybe Sun's thinking the same thing, or just covering its ass? Maybe we'll see an ia-64 port some day?

At any rate, it is easier to maintain the portability of code rather than try to hack it in in a desparate effort later on.

Re:What is Sun's Business Plan?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope. 15 years ago, SUN stopped being a hardware company that only needed an OS to support their computers. Today SUN is trying to sell you solutions. (and not that kind on "solutions" where you select some shrinkwrapped product, install it on some new PCs and leave.)

Sure, often they seem to charge for the hardware parts of what you buy and give you some (but not all) of the software for next to nothing. But for them, this is more a price policy. (You get what you need cheap for development and initial employment, but start to pay real money when you upgrade to take serious loads or becomes dependant on real reliability.) Besides customers like to get something real back whan they pay real money. A box appears more real than software. (This is way more true and important than you would think.)

Today if you are trying to do something serious (using a web-service as an example). You never use only one big-ass box for everything and leave the rest. You use a combination of web servers and database servers and what ever other specialized servers you need.

You can use cheaper non-redundant 1U boxen for serving static web pages. Creating a cluster of these is a trivial task. Making the cluster reliable is then mostly a questrion of removing non-working servers from the cluster and perhaps dynamicly assigning new servers to the specific task if needed. A compentent system developer will make a something that does most of this in a week. SUN will sell you software that will do all of this.

But you cannot make a serious application by serving static web-pages. You have changing data (like any page on slashdot.) You have data that should be handled with care. (Your internet bank must not forget that you have paid a bill.)
You have running applications doing real logic.

Moreover, SUN is trying to sell in three-tier-solutions for serious use. Cheap front-end systems 1U, 1CPU, completely replaceable (for example web servers) somewhat more heavy application servers 2-8 CPU, cost effetive redundance, an outage mean a localized loss of work/data (for example running some java applications, scaleability depends on application) and backend database servers (typically oracle) or SAN systems where multiple-box scaling more difficult (or next to impossible, depending on application) more interdependencies, an outage hurts a lot, data loss may mean out of buisness.

For SUN there is currently quite a shift from vertical scaling (big boxen that never crash) to horizontal scaling (lots of small boxen that may crash sometimes, but that won't hurt the overall service). This can be illustrated by the fact that they recently bought a Norwegian company called Clustra specializing in extreme reliability and extremely low latency databases using a cluster
of small cheap boxen.

The traditional (oracle) clustering techologies uses few big boxen, shared disk system (redundant by itself), big redundant box, hot stand by replacement (only one box handles transactions for a single database at any time.) If you have multiple databases you can spread them over the cluster to attempt to balance the load.

The clustra database uses data stored multiple places, a single node will never have all data in the database any piece of data will reside on more than one node. A single transaction can affect data multiple data (of course), it may even affect data on all nodes in the cluster. All nodes containing data that is involved in a transaction must agree on wether a commit is successfull or not, even if any single node may crash or othertvise become unavailable during the transaction. You can upgrade the OS or clustra software without any downtime for the database. There are tools that will do this automaticly.

Untill recently this was only for very specialized applications like telcom roaming databases. But now there you can use ODBC/JDBC for access and more and more

Actually, with the clustra consept, reliability will be higer with 2n half performance, twice number of crashes el-cheapo boxen than n solid database servers. This opens for using trow-away hardware on the most holy dome of big never-stopping boxen. The ideal clustra node is an 1 CPU, 1U, no special redundance box with a single local disk. (IDE is fine)

But don't ask sun for a clustra database to save money. Expect to pay for the extra reliability.
Expect to pay way more than the hardware of the big box with redundant everything and oracle.
This is an example of software that won't be free or next to free for quite a while...

The clusta consept is not unique. I could have used an olther example, like the older multiple-small-box web solutions of Cobalt, also bought by SUN. The lesson from Cobalt is that multiple small boxen is not bad if you have tools for administration that takes avay the work of dealing with every single stupid box.

In more and more areas there pops up solutions to get reliability and performance as the big iron or better with el-cheapo hardware. The number of situations you can scale like this may still be a minority, but they are growing rapidly.

The point is that in this picture Solaris x86 and SUN-branded Linux on X86-boxen makes completely sense. SUN needs both the big redundant boxen and the small, sold by the dozen, thingies. In addition to testing and development, they are used in server-farm and clustering niches and some of these niches may, in the long term threaten to take over a substancial part, or who knows even all, of SUNs big solid box market.

Re:What is Sun's Business Plan?

[simm_s]

Forte C++ allows you to compile 64-bit programs. GCC only has a 32-bit target. If you purchase mid-level to high-level servers sun gives you a free single user license for Forte C++. That is an intelligent strategy.

If you buy hardware you get free software, thus attracting developers to your hardware platform. If you like the software and want to upgrade to a multiuser license you buy a multiuser license. Money is made either way.

Re:What is Sun's Business Plan?

[simm_s]

That works if you are a software company like microsoft. Sun is a hardware company. If you do not buy sun hardware sun's stock price goes down (as if it can go down any lower). Platform portability for a free operating system is not a business plan especially when you are a hardware company.

I cannot understand why this is such a hard idea to grasp for some slashdotters.

Re:What is Sun's Business Plan?

[swordgeek]

"Sun = Sparc = I don't care = $$$$"

This is a neat theory. It's not how business works in computing.

Why buy Sun? Why would ANYONE buy Sun from the equation above? My equation had a 'take to the purchasing manager' result, and that is SOLID. "I don't care" (assuming you mean about what OS is run on it) isn't something that makes business decisions. "I don't care" doesn't sell computers. Flexibility of OSes on Sparc is COMPLETELY irrelevant. In fact, nobody really cares what Unix variant is on a box when they're buying it. They know that when they buy Sparc, they're buying into Solaris, and that combination should be unbreakable. If they weaken that link, THEN their sales will suffer.

And x86 just isn't the same market. It never has been, and it never will be. Nothing that Sun does on the x86 side will substantially affect their Sparc sales. The Intel stuff is neat and perhaps profitable, like the SunRays, but it's not an integral part of their business, and it won't sway anyone towards or away from buying a Sparc.

Re:What is Sun's Business Plan?

[simm_s]

Which reinforces my point. Sun sells x86 hardware.

Now customers have a choice to go with sun and use solaris or go with dell, hp/compaq, joe schmoe's hardware shop, ibm, etc. Sun is doing a good job at giving other hardware providers an edge over their sparc market. That edge would be a cheaper price!

If having a cheap Solaris front end available makes it more likely for a customer to buy an expensive Solaris back end, then of course they make money on it.

Why do you think a customer would want to use a Sun as a backend solution. You only could hope that they would want to unify the front and backend. And hope is a bad business plan.

That's an awfully narrow view of the world.

No it is just reality. Even on the kernel level Linux has adapted Sun technology such as the Slab Allocator. I use linux and solaris every day the interface is pretty damn close. Not exact but any competent administrator should be able to work with the differences.

At the very least you would need the API stubs to compile against,

What mystery APIs are you talking about libc, libm, curses? A cross compilier should be able to manage compiling and linking to any target platform. A cross compiler/linker does not care what hardware it runs on, it only cares that the machine code it generates is proper. I could easy download Solaris API's from a free solaris CD and link to any "special" API I want from a linux machine. That is the point of a cross-compiler.

That's correct. And irrelevant. Your one person. That's not where they're going to make their money.

That was rhetoric; It does not make any sense to reply to that ^_^.

Everybody wins.

Everyone but Sun unfortunately.

Re:What is Sun's Business Plan?

[Stardate]

Not anymore. with gcc 3.2.x you can make 64-bit executables for the UltraSPARC! not that anyone uses it... in fact, almost every executable (even intensive ones like gzip) distributed with Solaris is a 32-bit sparc executable... why doesn't Sun distribute a full 64-bit system?

Give Sun a Break- $20 for a server class OS..

[wegster]

The subject says it all. While it would be certainly _nice_ to simply download the ISOs for free, think about this:
1. Sun's come a pretty far way towards at least being more 'open source friendly,' and making free downloads available for products that would normally go for (IMHO exaggerated) prices otherwise. Java, SunONE (used to be Forte), etc. Contrast this to Microsoft if you'd like- has anyone seen MS make a version of Windows free, even opened the source to (agh!) Win3.1, or given a free version of MSVC/C++? I think not. Redhat and others sell their free versions of Linux on CDs and have increased prices over the years. Companies DO need to make some money, and no matter how much we wish _everything_ were free (I do as well), I highly doubt that at $20/download they will ever come close to even recovering 10% of their investment in Solaris 9/x86.

2. It isn't a bad OS. The x86 versions of Solaris have some definite differences from the Sparc/UltaSparc version as far as development goes (some library differences), but it's a pretty stable, decent OS, and most Solaris open source software can be made to build on it fairly easily. You'll need to go to GCC/G++ for development obviously. It's quite stable, even if earlier versions (I've run x86 Solaris 2.6, 7, and 8 previously) don't have near the HCL that Linux does.

3. It's another step in the right direction for Sun. Bearing in mind that they won't make any $ at all off of the x86 line, all hey're really doing with it is trying to gain a few more supporters in the 'new to Unix' camp, which may help in Solaris/Sparc sales down the line, and get some good will in the open source/tech community. Not a bad deal all around.

Ok, ranting off. Lest I be 'attacked' for any sort of anti open-source, anti-Linux, or anything else, I've been pushing Linux at every company I've worked for as developer and admin, as well as open-source options where they're available. I've replaced many a Windows server in my time...but do realize that companies do ultimately need to regain _something_ on their investment...so those of you that still buy RedHat or Suse on CDs in order to 'give something back' to their respective companies...$20 isn't a bad deal at all.

Re:Give Sun a Break- $20 for a server class OS..

[Anonymous Coward]

1) None of their supposedly open-source licenses that I'm aware of are actually approved OSS licenses. Their big guns (Java, Solaris et. al.) are still all closed source. How are they more open again?

2) That isn't in dispute. It's more a question of false advertising..$20 for a free download?

3) Is it now? They do want to compete with Linux, but what about their big-iron servers? Will they be selling as many of those $100,000 monstrosities when they could build a competing x86 system for far less?

Not quite believable.

[Anonymous Coward]

I would recommend that your next troll not include any special HTML formatting. That made me feel like it wasn't as authentic. However, your comment about better fonts was really good and added a bit of believability to it.

All in all, I rate this troll 3.5 out of 5 stars. Keep trying!

Re:Not quite believable.

[Anonymous Coward]

Should I scan my CompUSA receipt showing the purchase and email you to make it more believable ?

Re:Would any /. reader care to answer this ? - Tha

[erikdotla]

Happy to answer it.

You read something about better fonts in Redhat. Keep in mind the Linux community is fanatical about their favorite distributions and will argue the finer points of them until their dying day, with no resolution. Don't listen. Pick a distro and spend some time with it.

Should you return Suse for RedHat? No. But not because SuSe is better. I haven't even tried it. I say NO because you need to stick with the one you have, and spend some time with it. Don't get caught up in this nonsense. I switched distros about 6 times before I realized it was a never ending cycle. I was switching for the wrong reasons - to get some feature the other had. If you spend some time with it, and learn it, you'll usually find that any feature on one distro can be had on the other, if you spend some time with it, and learn how to install it yourself.

You prefer to buy a packaged distro. Good, your investment will discourage you from switching distros once a week.

Which is the best distro? You're better off not asking this question. It's like asking "Which is the one true faith?"

I haven't used Slashcode but I'd imagine it works with Apache, and Apache works with everything.

You *might* want to read some of the distro comparisons that you'll find on Google, but don't spend too much time on this - it will never end. Pick one, stick with it. Only switch if your existing system collapses and you're itching to try something new, BUT you're comfortable with migrating your data and dealing with the quirks of the new distro.

You said you prefer to buy a packaged version, but you didn't say why. The only reasons I can see is that you get the manual, or you don't have the bandwidth or a CD burner. You'll really want to get decent bandwidth to download stuff, you'll learn faster. If you don't have a CD burner, that's understandable, neither do I (at home anyway.) If it's for the manual, you will find that searching online documentation is more efficient.

It's hard to learn Linux and linux apps from a book, by reading it start to finish (unless you're extremely disciplined.) More often than not, you're just trying to get something to work and need some specific information. Searching online documentation (or /usr/share/doc) is usually better.

PS: Mandrake is the best distro. :)

Has it improved?

[rve]

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?

Re:Has it improved?

[Hanashi]

It's much improved now. I admit that the original versions were crap. Also, keep in mind that even the SPARC machines Sun sells have a lot of standard PC parts in them, so the Intel port is naturally more compatible. Not perfect, but still good.

What about SMP?

[waveguide]

Maybe just my hw, but I tried S8 on my home box (Tyan dual-PIII) and it did nothing but hang on the install. Has anyone tried 9 on a multi-CPU Intel box?

Re:What about SMP?

[octogen]

I'm running Solaris 7 on a Tyan Dual Pentium III-S, and it works just fine.

I don't think that the Tyan system board is the problem - what about your computer's scsi/graphics/network devices?

Another important thing to mention:

DON'T USE INTEL NETWORK ADAPTERS when running Solaris! All Intel network cards have had a design error for at least 6 years, and Intel still didn't fix that (Windows drivers and the Linux kernel module circumvent the problem, which is called "Receiver lockup bug" by the Linux developer community). The Solaris driver does not fix this (hardware-caused) problem, for this reason the network card may "lock up" sometimes - a cold restart is required to get the network device back online (you really need to pull the plug for at least 20 seconds).

Re:What about SMP?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've used Solaris on MP Intel machines going back as far as a Dual Pentium 133 system running Solaris 2.5.1 (Solaris 9 is actually Solaris 2.9). THe motherboard was a Tyan Tomcat, for reference.

I've also got SPARC machines with 12 CPU's in them in our data center, and Sun sells machines that'll take up to 192 CPU's or something retarded like that.

Given that Sun says the Solaris code is less then 5% platform specific (SPARC to x86, and once upon a time, PowerPC), I'd say that this speaks volumes about the ability of Solaris to work effectively in SMP environments.

Thanks for the coffee coming out my nose...

[siskbc]

...asshole! ;)

Damned good point tho. We really have some self-righteous SOB's on here who feel entitled to all software, without writing a single decent piece of software themselves. $20 for a mature OS with no license limit, and people BITCH. Ingrates.

Re:Thanks for the coffee coming out my nose...

[jedidiah]

Sysadmins are the genuine frontline of marketing. We are the people that are going to go to the guys with the money and recommend product. It's always in the best interests of software and hardware vendors to get on our nice side. The easier it is for one of us to put up a proof of concept system, the more likely it is that Solaris x86 will trickle into corps and bring expensive Sun boxes along for a ride.

It's as if you were asleep for the last 10 years of Linux market penetration.

Re:Thanks for the coffee coming out my nose...

[fmaxwell]

The easier it is for one of us to put up a proof of concept system, the more likely it is that Solaris x86 will trickle into corps and bring expensive Sun boxes along for a ride.

If $20 is a stumbling block to you, then you are probably the worst-paid sysadmin in the world.

But even ignoring my uncalled-for snide remark, keeping the "free software" kiddies from sucking up all of the bandwidth is worth $20. Having downloads stall or crawl down at a glacially slow pace is a much worse impediment than paying $20. Amazingly, the $20 fee actually dissuades many of the "ISO collectors" that prowl the net.

Re:Thanks for the coffee coming out my nose...

[jedidiah]

It also dissuades many of us with prior experience with Solaris x86 that aren't particularly interested in paying for the privelege of being disappointed again.

If Sun doesn't want sun.com to get swamped (which is an absurd idea anwyas), they could allow other sites to mirror this.

As far as being poorly paid goes: I'd rather buy a V100 than pay for a Solaris x86 demo download.

Re:Thanks for the coffee coming out my nose...

[fmaxwell]

It also dissuades many of us with prior experience with Solaris x86 that aren't particularly interested in paying for the privelege of being disappointed again.

If you were disappointed before, the Solaris x86 is probably not the OS for you. Others have been very favorably impressed with Solaris for x86 in previous incarnations. I have used it in v7 and v8 and was quite happy with it.

If Sun doesn't want sun.com to get swamped (which is an absurd idea anwyas), they could allow other sites to mirror this.

While Sun has a lot of bandwidth, it is not unlimited. I know that download speeds were much less impressive when Solaris v8 came out and was freely available. Also, by not allowing other sites to "mirror" it, they maintain control on the distribution and users can be sure that the ISOs are not corrupted, intentionally or otherwise. Yes, I know about MD5 checksums, but many people will download and burn ISOs without ever checking them.

As far as being poorly paid goes: I'd rather buy a V100 than pay for a Solaris x86 demo download.

I'm sure that Sun is happy to hear that. If you want to buy a Sun Fire V100 to set up a proof-of-concept system, I'm certain that Sun will be more than happy to help to configure a system that meets your needs.

Re:Thanks for the coffee coming out my nose...

[jedidiah]

You make it sound like this release should only be for the pre-converted. If that is the case then it really is a tremendous waste of resources. They might as well just charge the old full price if that is the case.

More widely dispersing the product is much more valuable than charging a nuisance fee for it.

Re:Thanks for the coffee coming out my nose...

[fmaxwell]

You make it sound like this release should only be for the pre-converted.

No I do not. I said that it was probably not the OS for you if you already decided that you did not like it at the previous version levels. It's not a drastic change from recent revisions. $20 is a great deal if you have never tried it or have been impressed with previous versions.

They might as well just charge the old full price if that is the case.

I was unwilling to buy it at the old full price, but I paid my $20 and downloaded it earlier today. That appears to counter your claim.

More widely dispersing the product is much more valuable than charging a nuisance fee for it.

Multiple retorts follow:

1. Sun's internal information: Do you know something about Sun's costs and marketing studies that the rest of us do not? If so, please share. Sun has given previous versions away. They've charged for previous versions. I think that they have a pretty good idea of what is in their best interests.

2. ISO collectors: As I said before, if the $20 discourages the ISO collectors, then it is worthwhile. Sun probably has no desire to have their bandwidth sucked dry by people that download the OS and put it on a shelf to "try later." Someone who spends $20 on a product is much more likely to actually use it than someone who just picked it up for free.

3. Commercial respectability: Many people believe that businesses are hesitant to use "free" software because they are suspicious of it. It has been widely speculated that Sun's reason for charging for StarOffice was to make it a respected, commercial product, not to make a bundle selling it. Many, in fact, believe that there will be more copies of it in use at businesses because it is NOT free.

4. The kiddie factor: Ask for a credit card and you eliminate lots of downloads by kids -- who are, by and large, not potential customers for Sun hardware and software.

I just don't see how $20 should be an impediment to any professional who has an interest in Solaris 9 x86. If I thought that a proof-of-concept demo would impress my clients/employer, then I'd spend the $20 in a heartbeat.

Re:Thanks for the coffee coming out my nose...

[jazman_777]

Also, by not allowing other sites to "mirror" it, they maintain control on the distribution and users can be sure that the ISOs are not corrupted, intentionally or otherwise.

Kinda like OpenBSD's OpenSSH, which happened to be running on a Sun box. Oops!

Re:Thanks for the coffee coming out my nose...

[jedidiah]

1) Yeah, I know something that Sun doesn't. I'm a Linux user now and will likely advocate Linux replacements for Sun deployments in the future when hardware allows primarily Sun was originally too cheap to make a non-SCSI version of Solaris in '93 and had poor 3rd party vendor support in '97.

The longterm effects of neglecting future mindshare can be a BITCH.

2) Irrelevant. Let others distribute it.
3) Irrelevant. I've witnessed firsthand as corps deployed Solaris x86 over Linux for no other reason than it was completely free for small scale commercial use. Corprate+Free will always trump Hippie+Free to suits.
4) Redundant. Also blatantly false.

Re:Thanks for the coffee coming out my nose...

[fmaxwell]

Kinda like OpenBSD's OpenSSH, which happened to be running on a Sun box.

So you're saying that Sun Microsystems controlled the distribution of OpenSSH? If you say so...

Re:Thanks for the coffee coming out my nose...

[fmaxwell]

1) Yeah, I know something that Sun doesn't. I'm a Linux user now and will likely advocate Linux replacements for Sun deployments in the future when hardware allows primarily Sun was originally too cheap to make a non-SCSI version of Solaris in '93 and had poor 3rd party vendor support in '97.

If you make technology decisions based on what companies were doing five to ten years ago, I pity your employer.

The "non-SCSI" version of Solaris that you wanted a decade ago ('93): I guess you never considered that Sun's decision to only release only a SCSI version might have been based on market demand, engineering costs, and performance, did you? You say that they were "too cheap." Well, bucko, they are in business to make money. Did you expect them to lose money on a charity version of the software just for you?

But you still didn't answer my question: Do you know something about Sun's costs and marketing studies that the rest of us do not? Your earlier statements imply that you do.

2) Irrelevant. Let others distribute it.
[referring to bandwidth and ISO collectors]

You don't know what you are talking about. To download the software, you have to provide Sun with valuable marketing information, including your name, e-mail address, mailing address, job description and company name (if applicable), phone number, etc. You have to request licenses for the number of systems on which you will use it. If Sun released their software to mirrors, they could not collect that information. You also have no idea as to whether their attorneys consider the pre-download, click-through license to be necessary to protect their intellectual property.

3) Irrelevant. I've witnessed firsthand as corps deployed Solaris x86 over Linux for no other reason than it was completely free for small scale commercial use. Corprate+Free will always trump Hippie+Free to suits.

Not irrelevent -- and you've just created a straw man argument. I never claimed that "suits" would not prefer "Corporate+Free" software to "Hippie+Free" software. Nice try.

4) Redundant. Also blatantly false.
[Referrung to my comment: 4. The kiddie factor: Ask for a credit card and you eliminate lots of downloads by kids -- who are, by and large, not potential customers for Sun hardware and software.]

What was false? Do you think that kids generally have credit cards to buy software? Do you think that most kids are "potential customers for Sun hardware and software"?

I previously left one comment you made unanswered:
It's as if you were asleep for the last 10 years of Linux market penetration.

Sun is in business to make money, not to give away software to people too cheap to spend $20. Mandrake tried developing software and giving it away for a free download. Despite having one of the most popular Linux distros, Mandrake's business model failed and they are bankrupt. Market penetration isn't worth shit if your company goes bankrupt.

Summary: You've got a chip on your shoulder about Sun. You have whined about everything from the current measly $20 download fee to Solaris requiring SCSI a decade ago. This isn't about Solaris. It's about your transparent attempts to promote Linux. You had no interest in this release of Solaris x86 from the beginning. Your initial comments about a hypothetical "proof of concept system" were just a smoke screen. You have gone out of your way to criticize Solaris at every turn while praising Linux. You said it yourself. You are a "Linux user now and will likely advocate Linux replacements for Sun deployments in the future."

Please don't respond. Your bias has been exposed and you are just going to dig yourself a deeper hole if you reply.

Re:Thanks for the coffee coming out my nose...

[jedidiah]

I don't make technology decisions based on "old grudges". It's merely the effect of Sun neglect. While they were sleeping, someone else stepped in and showed their mettle.

Also, if the pisspoor 3rd party vendor support that plagued Solaris in '97 has changed I would be receptive to any genuine updates on this matter. However, Linux is already filling that void.

1)Your reasoning is ass-backwards. IDE was the more standard configuration in those days. In all likelihood it would have been the cheaper option to support and would have allowed for PC economies of scale to be exploited.

Your claim is also made absurd by the fact that Sun did infact eventually manage to support IDE.

Also, if various collections of hobbyists could support IDE hardware, the cost argument is really absurd and unsupportable.

2) You are highly naieve. Most information collected in such forced registration procedures is total garbage.

Point 4 is blatantly false because Sun doesn't need to host the files and it's got one of the biggest fattest pipes on the planet. You are just groping for bullshit reasons to make Sun's actions seem reasonable when they were probably thought up by some clueless middle manager or marketing twit.

Re:Thanks for the coffee coming out my nose...

[fmaxwell]

I don't make technology decisions based on "old grudges".

Then don't bring up crap about what Sun was doing back in '93.

Also, if the pisspoor 3rd party vendor support that plagued Solaris in '97 has changed I would be receptive to any genuine updates on this matter. However, Linux is already filling that void.

Always the plug for Linux. As I said before, you are simply a Linux shill who is using this discussion to tout Linux and put down Solaris, a competitor.

If I want to run a high-volume mail server or e-commerce web site, why should I care if there is a third-party port of Tux Racer? If I am running satellite simulation and control software on Solaris, why would I care about the existence of third-party browser plug-ins?

1)Your reasoning is ass-backwards. IDE was the more standard configuration in those days. In all likelihood it would have been the cheaper option to support and would have allowed for PC economies of scale to be exploited.

IDE was not the "standard configuration in those days" for scientific workstations and servers -- because IDE performed so poorly. "Market demand" for IDE support in Solaris has nothing to do with the peripherals on your home PC. It has to do with the peripherals run by their market segment -- scientific workstations and servers. I said that the decision was based on "market demand, engineering costs, and performance." In '93, it would not have made sense for Sun to incur the "engineering costs" to produce a feature for which there was little "market demand" (in their market segments) and that would have resulted in poor "performance."

Your claim is also made absurd by the fact that Sun did infact eventually manage to support IDE.

Again, I'll try to make this easier for you. The IDE drives of today are much faster than they were in '93. As a result, many scientific workstations and low-end servers now use IDE, so there is a market demand that was not there in '93. That justifies the engineering costs to support it.

Also, if various collections of hobbyists could support IDE hardware, the cost argument is really absurd and unsupportable.

Hobbyists are donating their time and not doing it for profit. By your twisted line of reasoning, Sun should have been able to write their whole OS for free because hobbyists developed Linux for free.

2) You are highly naieve.

And you are illiterate. Buy a dictionary.

Most information collected in such forced registration procedures is total garbage.

The information that I supplied was true. You are assuming that your willingness to lie is typical. I doubt it.

Point 4 is blatantly false because Sun doesn't need to host the files and it's got one of the biggest fattest pipes on the planet.

You don't know whether Sun needs to host the files or not. You have not discussed the matter with their lawyers. You do not know how allowing sites to mirror the files would affect the IP rights. You don't know if Sun is trying to keep open the option of removing the OS from distribution at some future date. Having it on mirrors makes that a lot harder to do. While Sun has a lot of bandwidth, they are actually using it. That's why they bought it. You seem to think that it is limitless. It's not.

You can now go lie in bed and stare up at the picture of Linus Torvalds on your bedroom ceiling. Sorry to upset you by discussing a non-Linux OS.

Re:Would any /. reader care to answer this ? - Tha

[erikdotla]

One other thing - if you need to ask the community a question, and you don't do it in the right place (such as asking about distros on a website under a topic about Solaris x86 news) you'll generally get no answer.

For best results try newsgroups, or sites dedicated to helping people (experts-exchange?)

how do they not target linux?

[walterbyrd]

>>It seems they are after Microsoft, not Linux. More Power to them

I'm sorry, that doesn't sense to me. I think Linux and FreeBSD are encrouching on Sun's territory more than MS.

modern hardware?

[MellowTigger]

I tried to install Solaris 8 for Intel. I really wanted to make it work, but I simply ran into a dead-end trying to find any graphics or network cards available locally that would work with it. I finally gave up and shelved my cd's.

Someone already posted the Hardware Compatibility List, noting that it doesn't seem to be updated. That was my same problem with Solaris 8, the equipment all seemed to be too many years old.

Are there any rumors that Solaris 9 includes new drivers for more recent equipment? Has anyone successfully installed it with modern video/ network equipment? I'd like to hear a success story before I try again.

DL is commencing

[andyring]

Well, I forked over 20 clams and am downloading it now. Looking forward to getting home and giving it a try. Lets see if I can go with a triple-boot box, RedHat 8, Win2k and Solaris.....

Re:Would any /. reader care to answer this ? - Tha

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought /. had the best and most experienced Linux brains among it's readership..

is this really news?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems this was news in in October.
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-960756.htm l?tag=fd_t op

We have have had our media kit for Solaris 9 x86 for quite some time now.

mirrors?

[erikdotla]

I'm trying to determine where on their site it establishes whether it's OK to mirror the x86 ISOs.

http://wwws.sun.com/software/solaris/binaries/bc l. html

That BCL license seems to be in full effect, even on the x86 version, unless I'm reading it incorrectly. There's a big round-robin on the site navigation when you attempt to find the license (without registering anyway.)

re:Solaris on VPC

[Anonymous Coward]

Version 9 doesn't load on the Mac version of VPC. The installer thinks it has a 486 CPU, so it won't install.

it's not free, it's $20

[Anonymous Coward]

$20 shipping I could see, especially if it came with a manual like 8 did. But bandwidth just doesn't cost that much. Their download pages claim 3 CDs is the average size, unless you get every last package. $20 for 2.1 gigs transfer? No.

"After you have it [after you pay $20 for it], it's free for non-commercial use"? No, it's not free, it cost $20. Are schools even teaching logic these days?

That's like saying, "After I paid $12,500 for my car, they gave it to me for free." Or, "After I paid $5 to the McDonald's register weasel to take my order, they gave me what I ordered for free."

SOLARIS IS FOR SERVERS RETARD

[Anonymous Coward]

640x480 is fine on a server.

Re:SOLARIS IS FOR SERVERS RETARD

[s3xyb17ch]

I suppose you do all your solaris development in text mode, always run lynx or telnet to browse the web, etc. etc. Solaris is a great platform for running a gui environment because it's rock solid.

Re:Would any /. reader care to answer this ? - Tha

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for the detailed answer. I think I will keep SuSe Linux but the fonts really suck (I am someone used to Windows fonts).

Is there a way I can load fonts from my licensed copy of Windows to Suse ? (I have licensed copies of Windows 98/ME/2000/XP on my 4 boxes and 5th box has Suse Linux now)

I am a software developer by profession and have worked on Unix about 10 years ago in college... since then it has been IBM and Microsoft platforms... Now I think it's time for Linux...

Does it come with the compiler?

[dbm1175]

I know you can get GCC for Solaris on i386, but do you get Sun's Workshop compiler? A native compiler is always nice.

Re:Does it come with the compiler?

[Anonymous Coward]

That will be $2,000, please. Aw, is that too much for you? Too bad.

Re:Does it come with the compiler?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can download a "Try & Buy" version of Forte 6 for Intel that will work for 30 days. That should at least be long enough to decide whether or not you're missing out because the compiler you use is $2000 cheaper.

Forte 6 Update 2 Try & Buy

Re:Does it come with the compiler?

[Anonymous Coward]

GCC is much better anyways, as far as compatibility goes. Most open source software is designed on and tested with GCC, so it's best to stick with it.

THe only time I'd say that Sun's compiler is a good option is when you're dealing with 64-bit SPARC applications, which Sun's compiler builds quite nicely.

Now, I should add that I have a 64 bit version of MySQL running with 8GB of memory allocated to it (proof of it's 64-bit'dness). I built this from source using GCC 3.2 on Solaris 8.. no problems and performance is fine.. better, in fact, then a 2.95.2 built 32bit version running on the same machine.

Point is, GCC gets the job done across the line of bit depths and CPU architectures... and with it's no hassle price tag you should stick with GCC unless you have a real specific reason to use Sun's.

You said it, brother!!!

[fmaxwell]

Nice way of trying to appear nice, but still screwing you...

Yeah! Why should I have to pay them for the bandwidth that I use? In fact, I think it really sucks that they won't pay the cost to FedEx the CDs to me. Cheap bastards.

And they conveniently don't mention that I have to pay for the blank CDs after I download their ISOs. First screw me out of $20 for gigabytes of bandwidth and then I find out I have to supply the blank CDs. Assholes.

Why can't they follow the Mandrake Linux model where they give away their product AND supply the bandwidth for free? It seems a shame to abandon that business model just because it drove Mandrake into bankruptcy.

Too little and too late for suntel

[Billly Gates]

All the major big vendors have left solaris on intel fearing its dead thanks to McNeal mentioning solaris 8 is dead and they will no longer support it. Now they are doing an about face.

The vendors will not come back now fearing Sun can still kill it at any time and Linux is a less risky decision. Linux totally ate all of the early solaris on intel marketshare.

The only thing you can run on it today are OSS apps. Kind of expensive for just this not to mention FreeBSD and any Linux distro have both the OSS apps and commercial support and they are cheaper and more supported in hardware. Also solaris is optimized for the sparc so performance is not so good on intel anyway.

Sun already has their own Linux distro for their Lintel servers. They have lost millions already for solaris on x86 and they should relise that its already dead and its a sunk cost investment because McNealy opened his big fat mouth.

Re:Too little and too late for suntel

[elmegil]

Except that there are customers who demand that Solaris on x86 continue to be a viable option. Keeping those customers happy and buying Sun equipment across the range is important.

Re:Too little and too late for suntel

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually you can use this for development for the Solaris environment on cheap X86 boxii which is a nice thing for alot of people. Most solaris stuf will compile and run just fine on a Sparc that was written on Solaris on X86. (all of my stuff does anyways)

Plus, Soalris is a very nice OS and there is still some hard core fans who like to use it and would like to be able to run it on fast X86 hardware. That said it's probably just a matter of time before Linux makes it obsolete.

i got my copy at linuxworld

[Anonymous Coward]

i was talking to a guy at the sun booth and he gave me a copy of it. haven't installed it yet. maybe someday.

my gentoo installation has been working out real well, so i don't forsee a change.

Re:Would any /. reader care to answer this ? - Tha

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there a way I can load fonts from my licensed copy of Windows to Suse ?

Absolutely. Whatever your feelings about their software, their fonts are terrific. Mandrake has an automatic tool to import Windows fonts. Suse may too, and I think KDE has one. Or do a Google search for Linux and Microsoft fonts -- yoou'll find something that tells you how to do it.

A few links:

[XtrippX]

solaris.9.intel-u2-x86-install.iso solaris.9.intel-u2-x86-v1.iso solaris.9.intel-u2-x86-v2.iso

Re:A few links:

[Anonymous Coward]

and what exactly are those links supposed to do?

Re:A few links:

[Anonymous Coward]

Install Emule from:
http://emule.sourceforge.net/
then click on those links again...

Re:A few links:

[Anonymous Coward]

Here are the fixed links:

ed2k://|file|solaris9intel-u2-x86-installiso|630 78 4000|3aebe3c9f3f8f3864fe44762a9b4b111|/

ed2k://|file|solaris9intel-u2-x86-v1iso|41713664 0| 7f8e246c0c3c0e4a391a3fd5617f9847|/

ed2k://|file|solaris9intel-u2-x86-v2iso|42958848 0| 893925aa95b1b3d66d1b22b9036be5d8|/

(remove the spaces /. puts in)

But I haven't seen any sources yet...

hardware support.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly, I already paid the $20 for the beta of Solaris on i386. It turns out it didn't like my Dell Laptop. However any linux distro likes my hardware.

but there's no software!

[DuckWing]

I maintain several Solaris systems, both sparc and 40 intel systems (our Unix Lab). The problem with Solaris is there's no software for it! no Java 3d like on Sparc, no SVG plugins for Netscape or any other SVG software used in our computer graphics course here at the University. Hardware compatibility is abismal, only supports limited Nics and video cards, no DRI, limited sound card, and so forth.

Sun does not do any marketing to entice companies to port their applications to Solaris x86. Even sun doesn't provide decent support, no Java3d, have to use Mesa for OpenGL, no Journalling file system like Veritas for Sparc.

I'm sorry, but I just can't take this seriously until Sun gets serious. Anyone that says Solaris is better than Linux on Intel Hardware needs their head examined.

Re:but there's no software!

[Magus311X]

I'm going to agree with you here, and SPARCWare isn't terribly expensive. For about $300 I managed to snag an Ultra5 on eBay with a 333MHz UltraSPARC IIi (with 2MB L2) 512M of memory, picked up a Type5 keyboard and mouse, and threw in a 20G 7200rpm disk.

Why? I ran Solaris for x86 and it was more trouble than it was worth. Performance wasn't exactly fantastic either. I picked up the Ultra5 and haven't had any real regrets since.

Re:but there's no software!

[Anonymous Coward]

Here Here ..

iPlanet doesn't even have Enterprise Server running on Solaris x86, and Sun -is- iPlanet these days.

SPARC's the shizzle anyhow. :P

Re:but there's no software!

[chegosaurus]

Journalling filesystem? DiskSuite, or put "logging" into your vfstab.

You really don't need VxVM unless you've got *lots* of disks.

good experiences with Solaris on Intel

[porky_pig_jr]

I've used Solaris 5 and 6 on Intel, if I remember correctly. It was fairly good experience, and system was performing well. I did have to use Xfree86, since whatever came from Sun had fairly limited support of the graphic adapters, but moving Xfree86 into Solaris was fairly easy operation, no brainer. I probably will take a look at Solaris 9. In general Solaris is very solid and stable system (starting around 5 or 6).
It sucked big time before that.

Testing facilities

[z_gringo]

I run a large testing Facility in the Telecom industry. I believe that we could use the SolarisX86 in the Labs for free under this license. Do I understand that correctly, we previously had 1 SolarisX86 box, and this was several years ago. We would have like to have had more, but these days, we've relied for heavily on Linux where possible. We still have some HPUX, and Solaris on Sun hardware etc, but if we could freely use the SolarisX86 in a test environment, that would Great!!!

(if not, we'd just keep using Linux, but diversity is important in this case)

Re:Testing facilities

[Anonymous Coward]

It's free provided that it's on a single CPU machine.

From Sun's site:
Q.

How can I get a free Solaris[tm] software binary license?

A.

You can use the Solaris Operating Environment at home or at work without paying a license fee. For only the cost of media plus shipping, you can use the software on an unlimited number of computers with a capacity of 1 CPU. Downloads are also available.

Linux still roxors

[xombo]

Until they make this free, Linux will still roxor, since normal linux developers don't want to pay for anything, and everything in the world should be free. Thats why every company linux users like always go out of business, they don't pay for anything.

bithc bitch bitch

[pizza_milkshake]

plenty of people are bitching about spending $20 ... which is about the cost of going to see a movie (non-matinee) + popcorn + soda.

i, for one, plunked down a hard-earned $20 bill and am downloading it right now. i've got an extra p2-450 kicking around and will throw it on there. $20 seems like a good deal to familiarize ones's self with an official, popular unix operating system. hey, the The Unix Administrator's Handbook (a.k.a. the purple book) covers Solaris (8, but hey...).

if you're a fan of computing and have the means, this is certainly a good deal. hell, if Microsoft put up a non-commercial version of XP for $20 i'd get that too. one can never have too many operating systems to play with.

..and if you don't think it's a good deal, don't pay for it. i love linux, but i think linux has spoiled some folks. not that that's a bad thing ;)

Solaris 9_x86

[mknewman]

I've been using Solaris X86 since 2.4, and in my business since 2.5.1 (about '97), and it's great! Total source compatability, very few problems over 7+ years using it. Performance is acceptatble. Price is right, and support is excellent.

MOD PARENT UP!!!

[fmaxwell]

You Free people need to go get a real fucking job and move out of your parent's basements and see what the rest of the world is doing.

I could not have said it better myself. "I'm part of the free software movement" is often just code for "I've never written a line of code in my life and don't contribute in any way to any free software projects. But when they are done, I'll be there to download them."

Good Idea != sense of entitlement

[siskbc]

The easier it is for one of us to put up a proof of concept system, the more likely it is that Solaris x86 will trickle into corps and bring expensive Sun boxes along for a ride.

It's as if you were asleep for the last 10 years of Linux market penetration.

I didn't say it might not be a good idea for sun - obviously, as you mention, the reason they give away Solaris x86 is for sysadmins to play with. And no, I haven't been asleep. In fact, linux is used at my workplace for the same reasons you mention - a few of us were playing around with it, and then...

But while it might be a good idea for them to give away Solaris x86, that isn't to say that all these Stallman Jr.'s on here have any grounds to claim that Sun is EVIL for not giving away everything they own for free, all the time, to any jackass that wants it. For a lot of people on here, it's not about Sun's business practice, OSS has become their freaking religion.

In fact, I doubt very much that Sun gives a rat's ass about the $20/download they will make - I doubt they could fund an office picnic with it. It's likely to separate people into two camps - those who want to dl it because they saw it on /., and those, like sysadmins, who actually are serious about it. Kind of like country club fees in that way - keep out the riffraff.

Quite frankly, you should be glad - that nominal fee will keep your download faster by keeping their bandwidth clear.

Re:Good Idea != sense of entitlement

[Anonymous Coward]

Quite frankly, you should be glad - that nominal fee will keep your download faster by keeping their bandwidth clear.

Definately. I consistently get about 300k/s downloading from Sun. I'm scared to think how much their pipe costs...

The new Minix

[WindBourne]

It is free for personal use, but costs for commercial. Just like Minx, SCO, Dr-dos, and so many other OS's. Hummmmm..

Read the Fine Print...

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't be so sure about the free part. If you read the fine print, it's only free for single processor systems.

If you have a multiprocessor system, or even a board with one CPU but two sockets, then you have to pay.

x86 doesn't default to Intel

[snatcheroo]

Intel isn't the only x86 platform

Solaris 9 released for Intel?
Leather protectant spray has been released for Nike shoes.

rules of acquisition

[bluethundr]

1. Install Sunx86
2. ???
3. 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.

available at no charge

[ezekieldas]

The press release of Feb 6, 2003 states:

Non-commercial usage is available at no charge

This does a bit more than just imply that I can acquire and use the OS without the request of monetary exchange. Yet I'm sure with a careful review of the license we'd find this statement means something else entirely: you can use it freely on your system once you've paid us to get it.

If I had a stack of Jacksons to hand over one by one to develop my technical knowledge, this might not be an issue. Yet $20 right now *is* significant and I'm not willing to pay for an experiment in installation.

This press release intrigued me to revisit Solaris which I've not dealt with for a few years now. Many job postings I've encountered recently are asking for recent versions of Solaris and it'd be helpful careerwise to work on this OS.

But I'm reluctant. As mentioned above $20 is a significant sum right now, there's the principle of the contradicting press release, I don't know if this will even install on my system, and I picked up somewhere running on a dual CPU required commercial licensing.

Re:Would any /. reader care to answer this ? - Tha

[Anonymous Coward]

$149.99 is for the Professional version. Just
get the $39.99 Personal version.

Why use Solaris?

[Anonymous Coward]

I really don't understand wht anyone would want to use Solaris when there are better alternatives such as Linux, *BSD, ...

I work at an ISP as system engineer and I must say Linux beats Solaris in almost every area.
- the filesystem in Solaris is so slooooow, if you have more than 1000 files in a directory, simply forget it!
- tcp/ip stack sucks too: connection establishment takes much more time than in Linux
- impossible to make Solaris switch threads between several cpus!
- so many GNU tools missing

In every area where we moved from Solaris to Linux, we offered a better service to our customers, be it mail, news, web, mysql, ... and ten times cheaper!

We also compared Solaris to Debian sparc and saw a large performance increase.

Sun have some interesting (very expensive) pieces of hardware such as the T3, the SunFire, ... but Solaris really plain sucks for most apps imho

I want to believe Solaris must be better at something... it makes good printing server!

Please, someone show me a real-life benchmark where Solaris beats Linux!

What would really take the cake...

[johnMG]

Oh my! Last night I awoke from a delicious dream where Sun had approached RMS to see if he would accept the newly GPL'd Solaris kernel as the official GNU kernel. Of course, the FSF had to change the name from GNU to GIU...

Bitness != instruction size

[yerricde]

sparcv9 is 64 bit

Doesn't "64-bit" refer only to the size of the registers (that is, hardware support for long long) and pointers (that is, hardware support for far pointer arithmetic)? Last time I checked, the 64-bit architectures didn't have 64-bit instruction words unless they were VLIW architectures such as Crusoe's backend or TI TMS320C6K. The "bitness" of a processor has nothing to do with its instruction size; witness the 16-bit Thumb instructions of the 32-bit ARM architecture.

Thanks, Sun.

[WORLOK]

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?

First post?? (not a troll)

[00_NOP]

The Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS) is the premiere OS for the enterprise

Do they mean premier? They need a new PR company.

Re:First post?? (not a troll)

[christophersaul]

Maybe you need to spend $20 on a dictionary.

Dreaming...

[pmz]

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.

Who's using this?

[Glass of Water]

OK, Here's my question to the /. community:

Who's using this, and on what hardware? I know about google. I want to know what /.ers are doing.

mirrors?

[viperone]

So if the EULA says we can copy and distribute (for non-commercial uses) Does anyone know where this is being mirrored yet?

Considering that Sun INVENTED Java

[Gothmolly]

I'd guess that Java support is pretty good.

Something struck me...

[Anonymous Coward]

Could it be that they are charging $20 just to be able to see how many out there acctually cares about Solaris on x86?

Management: Lets discontinue Solaris on x86.
Techie who want to keep his job: Oh, no! Please no!
Management: No one want to buy it.
Techie: Eh... Well, lets give it away for free then?
Management: But what good will that do if noone uses it?
Techie: Hm. We can charge like $20 so we can count how many that cares.
Management: Mmmm, money. Good.
Techie: Phew.

Solaris is the BOMB

[killmeplease]

I think most people do not understand why Solaris is so damn cool. So many peices of the puzzle where Linux says, "when we tackle the [insert issue here] as was shown in [insert publication here]we will be ahead of Microsoft like all the big UNIX players." Solaris is the big Iron solution. We did tests @ sun with a machine that would scale from 1-128 processors and they had them lined up. Image your server just taking processors like they were quarters going into a gum ball machine. That is cool. You get the same basic OS that they run the SUN Sun Fire 15K, that sells for a couple Million Dollars for free off of the Sun website. This is a bullet proof OS. Now if it only had the hardware support we could rule the world.

I studied the kernel threading system and it is really great how they have mixed user-level (M to N) and kernel-level threading (N to N) into a hybrid system. Your programs can control blocking systems, so user level threads can give up their time slice as easy as kernel level threads. That makes Java threading make more sense than with Native threads in Linux, where you have to use IPC for processes to talk between bytecode interpreted programs.

Give us hardware support and games and ease of cross-compiling source level Linux programs and you have a winner.

$20

[Blikbok]

I agree. The x86 version is a) $20 to download and b) not freely distributable. How is this "Non- commercial usage is available at no charge"?

Has anyone tried this on AMD hardware ?

[xiana]

Like the subject says... I just forked over the $20, and have almost finished downloading the files.

I have an old 1GHZ AMD kicking around that I was going to try installing this on, and wondering if anyone has had any luck with it before I begin.

Is this even supported ?

Cheers,

-Xian

Not free for evaluation

[BestNicksRTaken]

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.

already have it on DVD

[Anonymous Coward]

I already have a copy of slaris 9 for intel. I got my copy for Free from linux world New York. They were handing them out on DVD at the sun booth. Sorry to those who were there and didnt get their copy

As to the compiler bit...

[tkrotchko]

I haven't worked on Solairs since 2.5, but back then, the "gcc" compiler was essentially the default compiler that you needed for most packages.

What a piss poor attitude

[Anonymous Coward]

Any takers? According to Sun, it extends the 'enterprise class OS to the X86 market'. How nice of them

You know, it's exactly this attitude that prompted sun to STOP development of x86 v9 in the first place. Considering they let you have it for nothing, I can't see what there is to bitch about.

Mod Parent -1, Incorrect Quotation

[Incon]

Minus five geek points to you sir, it is "Do or do not, there is no try".

F*ck them and the horse they rode in on!

[Zathras11]

Last year when Sun offered a free copy
of, I believe, v8 on DVD for Intel/AMD
systems. I gave them all my personal
information, and was told to watch
for my copy to arrive in the mail.
Then some weeks later, they sent me an
e-mail saying I would NOT be getting a
copy. Then they proceeded to begin
sending me SPAM (uhm, marketing). Of
course I used the Remove From List
option, but they proved to me what
type of operation they run. I thought
it would be nice to try it, but I can
always download various GNU/Linux
distro's for free (or buy them for
cheap), so not interested. No soup
for you today. NEXT!

Food prices are not market driven

[DrSkwid]

I agreee with your post but feel compelled to point out that there is no free market when it comes to food esp. in Europe.

Food has it's price subsidised under the Common Agricultural Policy in order to stablise the European food economies. Food is grown and destroyed or land is made "set-aside" [farmers get paid to *not* grow food!]

The price is fixed at source and the cost passed on to the consumer. This all sounds well and good to protect the little farmers that work hard for little return in order to fill our bellies, and that's the way it is pitched via the region Farmers Unions.

Truth is, most of our farmland is owned by big companies and as such they are milking us. We live in a place where the laws have been accumlated through a set of parliaments created by the landowners and most people don't even know it's happened.

We've only got what they've let us have to keep us docile.

Re:Food prices are not market driven

[jazman_777]

Truth is, most of our farmland is owned by big companies and as such they are milking us. We live in a place where the laws have been accumlated through a set of parliaments created by the landowners and most people don't even know it's happened.

We've only got what they've let us have to keep us docile.

A mad cow? Or Bessie the discontented cow?

Mandrake ...

[ilikehardhouse]

But even ignoring my uncalled-for snide remark, keeping the "free software" kiddies from sucking up all of the bandwidth is worth $20. Having downloads stall or crawl down at a glacially slow pace is a much worse impediment than paying $20. Amazingly, the $20 fee actually dissuades many of the "ISO collectors" that prowl the net.

I can't help thinking how things might have gone if Mandrake charged a token download fee rather than have the MandrakeClub with it's constantly updating mirror list.

Anyway, I am glad to see that Solaris x86 is out there and getting exposure on slash. I still think it's a bloody good operating system once you get some gnu software onto it.

GNU/Solaris, anyone? :)

Anyone want a sparc 5?

[Anonymous Coward]

see lots of folks mumbling bout how they like solaris cause they dont have a sparc at home....If anyone wants to get a copy of solaris 9 for x86......I'll trade you one of the Secret Decoder Ring Magazines old Sparc 5's......Its in detroit and I'm not shipping it...but if you want a free as in beer SUN Workstation....email at sdr-mag@moscowmail.com

ciao

Let us know if it works department

[ClosedSource]

From Sun's website: "Please note: A new, community-based Solaris[tm] 9 x86 hardware compatibility list (HCL) is under development. Please check back here later for more details."

They could have at least listed the X86 hardware they tested on. Unless ...

$20 free download

[Anonymous Coward]

This is business right? Let's weigh the options. I'm only going to get it to see what it's all about, no enterprise here. So I can either

1. Pay $20 for the "free" download, or

2. Get it off P2P and risk installing a hacked/backdoored version on my old non-networked pentium.

I think I just saved myself $20.

this is old news

[Anonymous Coward]

it's been available for the $20 fee for at least a week or two, regardless of the date of the press release. I know because I was about to do it last week, but instead went for the free SPARC version first (previously, the SPARC version was available to *me* only on DVD, and my Ultra's don't have DVD drives).

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Two weeks ago!

[kriston]

I ordered and downloaded Solaris 9 for x86 over two weeks ago. How did this become news on Feb 7?

Kris

Solaris is better than linux

[superpulpsicle]

I am tired of people saying linux is fueling the unix world. Stop this madness.

Linux is fueling the unix world in your basement, but in the "real" server world where machines serve a "real" purpose... Linux is still second to Solaris.

Solaris 9 x86 almost didn't make it to the market, because even sun knows.... there is no real *nix market for x86 in people's basement.

flawed studies?

[karlm]

These studues often assume one OS per machine. This is increasingly not the case. The studies may not be intentionally flawed. MS might also be seeing more sales due to reduced piracy percentages.

Hmm...

[_Splat]

This is great, but apparently I can't use it to operate my nuclear power plant's aircraft control tower. Damn.

Solaris 9 Mirror

[Anonymous Coward]

I paid the US$20 (AU$33) and thought i would mirror the files for the masses.

http://mirror.ausgamers.com/solaris9/

If sun want me to take it down, they can contact me at mirror at ausgamers dot com.

--Trent

Re:Solaris 9 Mirror

[Anonymous Coward]

shibby :)

The government defines small-F free

[yerricde]

I didn't think that the FSF or the OSI dictates what is free and what isn't Free.

I mentioned this in my comment, making a careful distinction between "free" and "Free". The USA's advertising laws dictate what can be considered "gratis", that is, free as in "free lunch". I'd assume that nobody can deceptively sell you a "free car" and then reveal a $20,000 "shipping and handling fee". If it's really small-f free, and the $20 covers replication, shipping, and handling of the copy, then it should be at least freely copyable and redistributable, which means there needs to be an exception to the Sun Binary Code License Agreement analogous to the exception provided with the Java 1.4 JRE.

Definitions...

[fmaxwell]

What do you not understand about the word free?

What do you not understand about the word "license"? Sun's web page says that they are offering a free license and that you have to pay for media or download costs. What's so damned confusing or misleading about that?

I will just wait for someone to put it on P2P to download for free (Actual)

There's always some jackass that has to try to fsck things up for everyone. Thousands of man-hours that have gone into the development of Solaris and you felt the need to announce your intent to pirate it rather than pay a $20 download fee?

Sun is being incredibly generous in giving you a free license to such a robust, professional OS. Why don't you just pay the $20 and download it from them instead of being an ass about it?

Last Post!

[alpg]

A biologist, a statistician, a mathematician and a computer scientist are on
a photo-safari in Africa. As they're driving along the savannah in their
jeep, they stop and scout the horizon with their binoculars.

The biologist: "Look! A herd of zebras! And there's a white zebra!
Fantastic! We'll be famous!"
The statistician: "Hey, calm down, it's not significant. We only know
there's one white zebra."
The mathematician: "Actually, we only know there exists a zebra, which is
white on one side."
The computer scientist : "Oh, no! A special case!"

- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...