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Solaris 8 & 9 Free for x86 Once Again
REBloomfield writes "The Register is reporting
that after nearly two years, Solaris x86 8 & 9 is once again Free (as in beer) to download for x86 users." You can download it if you desire. Gives me college flashbacks.
Worth reading the hardware compatibility list before installing
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
Depends on what is it you are using it for.
We have Solaris here at GTech GVU on both Sparc and IA. But we use Sparc here for a lot of graphics because while the SPARC and the Intel architecture have roughly the same performance on most integer operations, SPARC is better at floating point operations (don't remember the numbers - 30% I think).
I guess the overall performance would really depend on other things like your intent.
There's not really any good metrics given the differences in platforms. IIRC though, Solaris runs much better on sparc, but x86 hardware is *MUCH* faster than any sparc you can get these days, and is still cheaper.
That said, sun hardware is generally rock solid, and getting solaris x86 working is a PITA.
re: performance between solaris x86 and other free alternatives:
The performance gains [which IIRC there aren't any for most circumstances] aren't worth the compatability losses. For most people, solaris x86 is just a good way to learn the differences between BSD/linux and Solaris for when you get to a job with larger SPARC machines.
You must have:
Free disk space: 4.0 GBytes to Install Solaris 9 OS; 5.0 GBytes to Install Java Enterprise System Software
Recordable CD-ROM drive: To create CDs using the downloaded zipped files
Recordable CDs: Blank 750 recordable or rewriteable CDs, one needed for each CD image downloaded
CD labels: Required under license agreement
CD writing application: Use cdrecord for Solaris or Easy CD Creator for Windows is recommended
Download Manager: Sun Download Manager (Free version) runs on most platforms (see System Requirements for details)
Unzip application: WinZip recommended for Microsoft Windows (or use Sun Download Manager's automatic unzip feature)
you also need to "register" on sun's website. so it's as free as the NY times articles online. too bad there isn't a google cache of solaris 9
Yes and they would be right to; Sun doesn't own the full rights to all the Solaris code (cat /usr/bin/clear for one example) and doesn't have the legal right to release it under the GPL.
that's sort of like saying, isn't bash a faily early shell (just Bourne, again). actually, korn is part of the POSIX standard. Development is still active on it. It was open sourced in 2000. I'm not familiar with the capabilties of bash. I stopped at Korn when I found out it had vi editing mode, i.e. use vi motion commands to go forward/back, replace words, all on the command line, ESC-k to go up to last historical command, ESC-j to go down to next historical command, etc. Plus, associative arrays are handy, too.
I've run across several free Sparcs, including an Ultra 2 that a friend's company was throwing away. It looks as though I can download Solaris for it for free now too! I thought about running Linux on it, but I'm not sure what the point would be since it would be slower than the x86s I've got around.
link
Those prices are outdated. Sun nowadays (is forced to) have cheaper models. Compared to brand-name x86-based servers they are not much more expensive any more. V440 (4 CPUs, 8GB RAM, 4 36GB SCSI disks, redundant PSU) list price US$16000.
No, it's not cheap and it certainly cannot compete with an off-the-shelf dual-CPU Xeon, but 4 CPUs are more expensive then 2 times 2. A Dell PowerEdge 6650 with 4 Xeon 2MHz and similar specs is available at US$17500.
And once you go beyond 4 CPUs, everything is pretty expensive. Sun is no exception here.
Sun is the "mystery licencee" who recently gave SCO a huge pile of cash last July. SCO is therefore leaving Sun alone.
Solaris x86 is pretty limited wrt hardware support, especially when you're used to Linux, Windows or *BSD. Also the installer is very very nasty indeed. I just spent 2 days to get this to run on an AMD system for all sorts of reasons, and couldn't get it to run on a Dell Precision 410 at all.
Worse yet, I paid $20 for the download about 2 weeks ago 8-(((
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
Let me guess, when your iPod battery died, you made a movie and put up a website about how horrible Apple was, right?
One bad experience with a clueless tech support guy does not a sucky company make. How many times have you gotten a bad tech when calling Microsoft? Or Dell? HP? Gateway? Basically any other company? Every company has at least one idiot on their tech lines. They're usually the ones not bright enough to get promoted.
What? Working on amd64 ports???I downloaded the amd64 beta of RHES (gingin) the same month Opterons went on sale! I've been working on a dual Opteron box with SLES 8 for about 3 months now: everything (including DB2, and even _mplayer_) is running full 64-bit.
You've been out of the loop! It's Sun that's dragging their feet. Even Microsoft will probably beat them to the punch. (You can get betas of 2003 if you ask the right person)
The amd64 tree has been in the kernel for ages, ever since AMD started giving away developer manuals. As for the 32-bit-isms, most of those were hammered out ever since it was ported to the Alpha 6 years ago (and later improvements by IBM to s390). Most of those 32-bit oops are in abandoned user apps written by Joe-college-student, and device drivers for consumer grade hardware.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Yeah it basically crashes the system. I mention it because seeing things like killall httpd in shell scripts on linux.
Any info against what least common denominator the binaries are compiled for ? 386 , 486, pentium ?
I don't know what the binaries are compiled for, but I can tell you that Solaris 9 doesn't support 486 at all (i.e. it will not let you install.)
-- Never hit a man with glasses. Hit him with a baseball bat.
$150k? That's an exaggeration.
Sun Fire V440 Server 4 1.28-GHz UltraSPARC IIIi Processors 1-MB Internal Cache 16-GB Memory 4 36-GB Ultra320 SCSI 10000RPM Disk Drives 1 DVD-ROM Drive 2 10/100/1000 Mb/s Ethernet Ports 1 DB9 (ttyb), 1 RJ45 (Console) Serial Ports 4 USB Ports 2 (1+1) Power Supplies Solaris 8 HW 07/03 Operating System Server License Ships Within: 10 business days List Price: $25,995.00
Looks pretty nice to me.
From this.
Winter 2010: With Glowing Hearts
yes, Sparc is considered a RISC architecture.
:(
the x86 has a FP register stack of 8 registers (things are access in a stack-way: ex: pop f1, pop f2, add them push result).
In general, RISC architecture tends to perform better at floating point than intel.
Don't know about about Sparc. But PowerPC has 32 double precision FP regs. MIPS has 32 regs also, but for double precision 2 are used.
So it may be easier to implement a faster FPU on RISC CPUs. Yes, intel has only 8 integer regs, but they probably worked on it a lot to make int ops very efficient.
Interesting thing about Sparc arch is its register window. The CPU have maybe over 200 (I'm guessing) int registers and provides a subset of 32. When you call a function you get new regs. It's kind of cool but I never got a chance of playing with it, don't have a Sparc
gnome for Solaris is here ...
http://wwws.sun.com/software/star/gnome/
I dunno... I have several busy mod_perl based websites running on an Ultra 1 (167 MHz UltraSPARC in 32-bit mode). Even under heavy loads of thousands of dynamic requests a minute and using the same machine as an NFS server for my small LAN, it keeps chugging away without slowing down. Granted I have spent some time tweaking and tuning, have 768 MB of RAM, and used Sun's compilers to build the Apache + mod_perl environment. But still... it's a really old box that seems to have plenty of pep.
First of all, why was the parent modded up funny? Maybe I'm just humor impaired, but I didn't get the joke.
Second, the reason you think Solaris on sparc is slow is that you've never used a new powerful sun machine. You probably have experience on Ultra5's or something. I've done some work on these and they are by no means slow. Horribly expensive, but not slow. Also note, that these are included in Sun's "entry-level server" section.
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Check Solaris Freeware, they have GNU binaries for Solaris SPARC/Intel 8 and 9.
Apache, wget, gcc, nmap, openssh, samba, tcpdump, you name it:
Solaris Freeware
You can also install Gnome 2.0 under Solaris!
GNOME 2.0 Desktop for the Solaris Operating Environment
Ricardo
In general, RISC architecture tends to perform better at floating point than intel.
That's the opposite of true. Traditionally, CISC (like Intel) tries to create many powerful instructions, and for example has opcodes which multiply or divide a floating point number in one step.
But RISC was designed with the realization that floating point math isn't very important- most computer programs can get by fine with integers alone. So the original RISC systems were worse at fp (forcing compiler developers to emulate multiplication in their own code), concentrating on integer speed instead.
I have very rarely failed to install any unix/linux application that is distributed as source code on solaris so I wouldn't suggest development of applications is a problem.
If you are referring to development of the actual OS, Solaris is mainly developed with Sun's own hardware in mind where reliability is one of the key factors. You'll notice how much Sun value reliabilty when you compare how "cutting-edge" there hardware is to say a mix 'n' match intel box. They will never sell hardware that hasn't been tested to death ensuring a reliable end solution although it may sometimes appear to be behind the times. A question I used to be asked quite a bit while working for Sun was "Why can't I get bigger HDDs for my server" back when 9GB was getting 'small' - this highlights the mentality of the company.
Also, I believe that security is thought about more conciously in a product like Solaris where Sun is partly accountable for any security problems affecting a customer. If you compare this to linux where each distribution wouldn't have this accountability it stands to reason why this should be true.
For this reason I would suggest that Solaris is more reliable and secure than Linux, although I must admit to being a huge Solaris fan so I may be very biased in my opinions.