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Solaris 9 x86 Review
ValourX writes "Here is a review of Solaris 9 x86, 08/03 edition. Now that the single-CPU edition is free to download for non-commercial use, people will be compelled to write a Solaris CD and try it out. Read this first -- there are a lot of things you should know before you begin. You might want to check out the documentation or explore other resources like the hardware compatibility list as well."
If you have a few bucks you might want to get an older sparc to try Solaris on. Sol x86 is a security nightmare, and its not the same as using sol under sun's arch. e.g. I run most of my sites on sun boxes, and love it, using x86 sol... Hate it. Definitely not the same if you ask me
MoFscker
That said, Linux or BSD with olvwm or XFce can be made to look so much like Solaris that most users won't care, and the hardware compatibility won't be a problem. I guess it depends on what is more important in a given context, really.
It takes time for you to get the system the way you like. Right now Solaris 9 is the absolute lowest "TCO" unix/linux for enterprise to servers and down to workstations. Redhat workstation costs hundreds more and has less true application support (certified vendor support) then Solaris9 X86.
And your lying through your teeth if you say there is no support.
Software: http://www.sunfreeware.com
Help/Guides: http://www.sunhelp.org
Patches: http://sunsolve.sun.com
Solaris9 X86 is a good stepping stone, a good resource to learn from and if accepted by the industry a very stable platform.
Sun DOES provide security updates, sun DOES provide software updates and there is already a ton of Gnome/KDE/Enlightenment stuff ported to solaris.
Give it a try, i'm sure you may like to see what an industrial strength workstation feels like to run. Honestly.
The biggest one is a consistent OS across the board.
We've got a group of geophysicists who use high-end sparc desktops (just receieved eight loaded Blade 2500s this week). Now having the rest of the group using the same computing platform would help substantially, and Intel hardware is still substantially cheaper than the Blade 150.
Really, I suspect that Sun releasing this is a way of seeing what the maximum prospective customer base might be. They're pushing their "X86 Java desktop" hard right now, and before they get too far into that I think they want to gauge how much development to put into Solaris/x86 as a desktop OS. (i.e. fancy apps, user friendly stuff)
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Agreed, that is a good reason, but it gets down to the availability of apps to go with it. In the Oil and Gas world, the big players, like SLB, Paradigm and Landmark (to name but a few) have suites that run on SPARC/Solaris, IRIX and Linux. It would nice to have those apps on Sol x86, but the market probably isn't there.
Those Blade2500's are pretty nice machines though, we have a couple internally.
OK, this is all just a guess, but I believe it's an educated one.
Solaris/Sparc will continue to be their preferred high-end server platform, and the place that they put most of their R&D money. It will never be pushed as a desktop environment, except for those environments which require it (data analysts, geophysicists, etc.)
Linux/Sparc they won't touch.
Linux/x86, they're pushing on the desktop now with their "Java Desktop." I think that they'll push this _heavily_, even trying to sell to random people off the street. (witness their dealing with Office Despot, last week.)
Solaris/x86. With their recent ties to AMD, I suspect that they're going to encourage people to use Solaris/x86 on their cheap server lines (esp. the blades), and possibly push the application companies to port their Sparc versions over. Ideally they'd be running Landmark apps and such on Solaris/Sparc machines, but right now many of them are pushing Linux/x86, which is much cheaper for a given performance level right now.
The biggest reason for Sun having Solaris/x86 at all is to keep people who can't justify the hardware costs of Sparc gear right now, to keep (or in some cases, start) running Solaris (ideally on Sun boxes), rather than going to ye randome Linux platform. Now if Sun can differentiate between their own Linux/x86 offering (end-user desktop) and Solaris/x86 (workstation and low-end server) while maintaining their REAL product (Solaris/Sparc), then they might have a good plan.
I think that this latest action is mostly to run the x86 product up a flagpole, just to see if anyone cares.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
I'm genuinely interested as a bit of a *ix geek (netbsd, osx, linux, across x86, ppc and 68k platforms) - what does solaris offer? Whether on sparc or x86 I'm not fussed, but what's it's focus?
:)
Always been curious, but never found a Sun person sit still long enough to grab them and get a good layman's answer
thanks
You are trolling, aren't you? Or you completely do not know what are you talking about. Or you just work for Sun. There is no other explanation why would you post here such a bullshit.
The only company that still insist that Solaris has lower than Linux TCO is Sun. Another company that is saying the same about Unix vs Linux is SCO. All others, including IBM, HP, and even SGI, agree that Linux has lower TCO, despite the fact they sell own Unix distros.
By the way, it becomes suspicious, all three companies are saying the same about Linux: Sun, SCO and Microsoft. Something is common for them behind the scene.
Less is more !
It helps Sun by letting them get their foot in your door by letting you get your feet wet.
Sun needs an entry level system to get users that may graduate to enterprise SPARC systems to get started with Sun.
Sun's situation without Solaris x86 would be much like Apple's situation before the introduction of the I-Macs. All of Apple's systems were quite good and quite expensive. All of Sun's systems are quite good and quite expensive. Apple did and Sun does have a fiercly loyal and satisfied customer base being erroded thru attrition. Few new customers translates into slow death. Introduction of the I-Mac gave apple a shot in the arm. A viable Solaris x86 could help Sun the same way.
Unfortunatly I don't think Solaris x86 is quite enough like Solaris SPARC to fill this role for Sun. I also think it isn't a good enough product to encourage users that do try it to consider graduating to the SPARC product.
Where I work we have a handfull of smart people tearing their hair out trying to migrate some of our systems from Linux to Solaris x86 to satisfy our management. Our own applications seem to run (so far as we can tell) but the OS install for our production hardware environment (Proliant servers with Qlogic fiberchannel connection to a SAN the only disk on the system) has so far been impossible.
Sun machines are not different from PCs in any significant way besides the processor (which is slower than modern PC processors at most tasks in spite of being 64 bit and having boatloads of cache) unless you have a multiprocessor machine. The days when every Sun machine was superior to every PC are long, long gone. The days when Solaris was superior to Linux for single-processor machines, likewise, have receded past the horizon and are well out of sight. Solaris' only real advantage today is on systems with many processors, especially when you get out of the realm of what Linux will actually run on.
As for your lowest TCO, I don't believe Sun when they say it, and I don't believe you. Where's the figures?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
On the other hand, Solaris scores a big fat negative with patching. Their patching options seriously suck badly. In the Linux world you have great tools like up2date, urpmi, apt-get, etc. In Solaris you have... PatchPro... a horrible piece of crap java based patch management installer that simply does not work. At least, that's been my opinion of trying to use it with Solaris 8. In the end I always end up going back to just downloading the recommended patch cluster every few months, unzipped it, and running install_cluster to keep up to date on patches. Solaris desperately calls for better patch management without requiring you to install some bloated thing like SMC.
The license starts at $99 for a single cpu commercial license...
Another great option to make installing lots of free software packages painless on Solaris (disregarding the obviously superior strategy of LARTing all those l33t L1nux c0d3rz who think that "portable" means "compiles on both Red Hat and Debian" until they beg for a set of Coherent floppies to test their buggy code on it) is the NetBSD pkgsrc tree (what the other BSDs call ports), which happens to be actually platform independent. Not every package works, and it is completely non-integrated with the native Solaris package management, using its own package database, file format and utilities, but it's still great that it's there.
With these tools package management on Solaris can become nearly as comfortable as on a community-developed free OS; I'd say you reach about the same convenience level as with a commercial freenix distribution.
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
My install went a lot more smoothly than Jem's, the only issue was not getting more than 8 bits of color. The network came up with no problem when installing Solaris x86 - was even able to browse the web during installation.
My experience is that Linux beats Solaris in device support, SMB support and eye candy. Solaris comes across as more polished, header files are in standard locations, IPsec is supported semi-natively and has better PostScript support built into the OS.
I haven't found anything as nice to do simple photo editing (cropping, resizing, printing) as sdtimage - though it would be nice to have png and JPEG2000 support.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
The author starts out by writing that Solaris was formerly SunOS and was derived from, among other things, 4.4BSD-Lite. How can we take the rest of the article seriously?
SunOS and Solaris pre-date 4.4BSD-Lite by over ten years.
SunOS describes the kernel and operating system services. Solaris describes the "operating environment".
Solaris was not "designed for SPARC and UltraSPARC." It was written originally to run on SPARC derivates as well as the x86 platform, specifically the AT&T NCR platform which preceded Sun's short-lived x86 SunOS machines, though, technically, the AT&T NCR and Sun x86 boxes predate Solaris. The x86 port of Solaris is by no means a new product.
The author complains quite a bit, but that should be expected in the Compatibility and the Installation sections of the article. Long-time Solaris users are familiar with all these problems.
I would have liked some facts to back-up the throwaway comments like "not all that restrictive", "rinky-dink", and "not very impressive".
Kris
Kriston