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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.
Any info against what least common denominator the binaries are compiled for ? 386 , 486, pentium ?
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
Sun makes enough from licensing Solaris to big SPARC machines (that it makes) and that Solaris is originally supposed to run on. It's kind of like baiting penguins with processed tuna fish... when the penguins already know that there's fresh fish a lot more readily accessible. Some of the penguins might play with it, but they won't eat it religiously.
That was an awesome analogy. I rule.
- A
This is hardware that people have reported to work. I'm sure that more hardware is supported than is actually listed. For example, they only list two modems, but I'm sure any Hayes-compatible hardware modem will work. They only list a few CD-ROM drives, but any ATAPI CD-ROM will work. I don't see any PS/2 mice listed, which may be a problem -- or it may not.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
Although Solaris is currently ahead of Linux for multi-processor/64 bit computing, it will not be when Linux 2.6 gets into propper production. Obviously SUN is trying to deploy Solaris as much as possible, and to make it as scaleable as possible, in an attempt to stay one ahead of Linux. It is destinned to fail here, there is just too much resource going into linux now. Solaris is destinned to become a legacy OS. A better stratergy for SUN would be to provide an upgrade path of Solaris to Linux, and to ride the wave, not fight it.
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The main point of amusement is that those two lines of code (one of which is exit) contain "Proprietary Information of Microsoft Corporation", presumably dating back to the work it did on Xenix in the 80s.
If the word on the street is to be believed, Solaris 10 x86 will include support for AMD64 (Opteron et. al.). This is rumored to be targeted at a Q1-Q2 '04 release date (i.e. reasonably soon). It is true that some of the linux vendors/distributions are working on amd64 ports, but Solaris has been running on 64 bit cpus for years and years, so there are far, FAR fewer little "oops, you mean an int isn't four bytes????" bugs laying around to get tripped up on (I speak mainly in reference to userland here, given that it will go through a commericial QA process from a large vendor I'm not that worried about issues with the kernel itself ;)).
;)
Not that your average web or file server will need to care about 64bit anything, but it'll be nice for those of us running big databases or scientific/engineering codes.
Overall, what's the difference in flavor between Linux and Solaris? Not a lot, really. Solaris does "feel" much more integrated (man pages that don't suck, for example.) Now, you can throw that straight out the window if you insist on things like GNU utilities and such, but it's hardly Sun's fault if you don't like the 1970s versions of tar or vi or want a C compiler for free.
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The Solaris kernel, in particular, is a technological marvel and is one of the leading development platforms for new ideas in OS and Kernel development.
The Solaris system, as well, is very well thought out.
So if by chance you wind up with an UltraSparc or x86 box setup with Solaris, and with all your hardware functional, then you have a superb system.
However, getting to that stage without resorting to disk imaging is hard. Solaris has probably one of the worst installation routines - its even less stable (and functionally useful) than Microsoft's windows setup, which already speaks volumes. The design is horrible - from the key binding, to the (or lack thereof of) menu option, to the very unflexible installation, to the stalls and crashes along the way. Mind you, even if you did successfully manage to "install" it, it certainly will require a lot of your attention to make all your hardware work - certainly not turnkey.
As a person who bought four x86 Solaris 9 licenses, along with CDs, DVDs (StarOffice too!!), I was sort of disappointed in my fruitless methods of installing SOlaris successfully. Hardware support is definitely a little scanty (but I can't blame that on Sun since they tailor their OS to UltraSparcs which they produce, not to PCs). Installing Solaris on a spare Ppro box is definitely one of my Christmas holidays projects.