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.

Comments

What advantages ?

[frodo from middle ea]

What advantages does solaris offer over linux/*BSD when running on x86 platforms ?

Any info against what least common denominator the binaries are compiled for ? 386 , 486, pentium ?

Re:What advantages ?

[PizzaFace]

Solaris is known for its efficient threading mechanism, and it's said to be an excellent platform for database servers. I don't know whether the x86 is as good this way as the Sparc version.

I paid $65 for the "free" x86 version of Solaris a couple years ago, when you had to buy media because Sun didn't offer a download, and it wouldn't run with the video card in my computer. Then sun dropped x86 Solaris, then my database vendor dropped support for x86 Solaris, so now I think Sun is coming around too late. Linux and even FreeBSD are making strides with their threading designs, so I don't see a compelling technical reason to use Solaris on Intel.

I can see a market for it among people who want Solaris experience for their resumes.

Sun gets enough from SPARC...

[Raynach]

I would think that Sun is giving away the x86 Solaris for free because they just want to draw more users from the open source and free-as-in-speech community to look at what it has to offer...

...although they are only offering the binary for download.

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.

Solaris will become a legacy OS..

[eamacnaghten]

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.

Re:Now I have a reason to switch...

[GridPoint]

For those of you who don't have access to a Solaris system, /usr/bin/clear is a shell script that contains the following: (notice that there are only 2 lines of code, but 13 lines of copyright information...)

#!/usr/bin/sh
# Copyright (c) 1984, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989 AT&T
# All Rights Reserved
# THIS IS UNPUBLISHED PROPRIETARY SOURCE CODE OF AT&T
# The copyright notice above does not evidence any
# actual or intended publication of such source code.
#ident "@(#)clear.sh 1.8 96/10/14 SMI" /* SVr4.0 1.3 */
# Copyright (c) 1987, 1988 Microsoft Corporation
# All Rights Reserved
# This Module contains Proprietary Information of Microsoft
# Corporation and should be treated as Confidential.
# clear the screen with terminfo.
# if an argument is given, print the clear string for that tty type

/usr/bin/tput ${1:+-T$1} clear 2> /dev/null
exit

AMD64 support coming soon, and maturely

[StandardDeviant]

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. ;)