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

Now I have a reason to switch...

[trp642]

Wow that's cheaper than buying a Linux license from SCO! I'm switching to Solaris right away!

Now if only they would GPL the code to Solaris...

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# THIS IS UNPUBLISHED PROPRIETARY SOURCE CODE OF AT&T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

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Think that's bad? How about /usr/bin/true:

#!/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# THIS IS UNPUBLISHED PROPRIETARY SOURCE CODE OF AT&T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 "@(#)true.sh 1.6 93/01/11 SMI" /* SVr4.0 1.4 */

The entire script is just a copyright notice

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

[greed]

Also note:

- It consumes an extra process slot by doing command followed by exit (rather than exec command). This also prevents a program from finding abnormal termination status from the command (i.e., signalled instead of exited).
- It hides any error messages from the user.
- It does not handle an argument with spaces or other Weird Characters in them.

Pretty bad, 3 errors for 2 lines of code. No wonder they want to keep it confidential.

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

[fractaloon]

Wait a second! They own the copyrights to nothing? Does that mean if I'm sitting at my cube doing nothing I'm infringing on their work?

I'm sure there must be prior art to this. Someone somewhere must have done nothing before 1984 and documented it.

Re:Somewhat related query

[Telastyn]

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.

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.

requirements

[musikit]

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

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.

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. ;)