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Solaris 10 Released, Updated & Free (Like Speech)
Sivar writes "Ace's Hardware and news.com.com.com report Solaris that 10 has been released. Improvements include a performance-enhanced TCP-IP stack to shed the "Slowaris" moniker and their much-vaunted ZFS (Z File System). Solaris will initially be "free" (as in beer with an annual subscription fee for bug fixes and support), and will reportedly be released under an open-source license later." As well,
KingSkippus writes "MSNBC reports, "After investing roughly $500 million and spending years of development time on its next-generation operating system, Sun Microsystems Inc. on Monday will announce an aggressive price for the software -- free. Sun also has promised make the underlying code of Solaris available under an open-source license, though the details have not been released." An article at Computerworld also has the story from Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's president and chief operating officer."
Previous versions of Solaris were quite expensive...
Solaris 9
Solaris 8
Before the Dawn of Time
JDS (version 3) is present in the current Solaris Express builds, so should be in the final product.
SunOS was in the mainstream before Linus began working on the Linux kernel, dude.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
I really don't see where the poster got the idea that the release would be free as in speech. Except maybe free speech in America.
Sun has made no indication that this would be released under a real Free/Open source license. Sun's past history with this sort of thing has been, shall we say... dismal.
Oh, they'll let us see the source. Sure as shit. Probably a clause that makes you "dirty" if you compile it, and sure as all hell it won't allow you to redistribute it, or patches to it. (like Sun's other "child" -- Java)
Heck according to the article I don't see any evidence that the license will be even "open".
Good Job Sun. Your work in promoting linux is amazing.
feh: To damn dull for a Monday.
"...In your answer, ignore facts. Just go with what feels true..."
Solaris isn't being released until later on today. According to the Solaris 10 Countup Page: While the secrets of Easter Island in the South Pacific remain a mystery, Sun Microsystems is planning to reveal new details regarding Solaris 10 on November 15 at its Network Computing '04 Q4 launch in San Jose.
:)
And according to Sun's NC04Q4 page: NC04Q4 opens at 12:30p.m. PDT on November 15, 2004.
Now, premature announcements are nothing new for Slashdot, but it's hard to discuss much about Solaris 10 before it's officially released; each Solaris Express release has shown continuing strides for Solaris 10, but the Express (Beta) builds have not included ZFS or Project Janus, (a Linux emulation layer.) These are two of the biggest features of Solaris 10, but nobody outside of Sun has much information on them, so we'll just have to wait until later today
-- Never hit a man with glasses. Hit him with a baseball bat.
That is a link to Download Solaris Express (Solaris 10 Beta), not Solaris 10. Sun has been releasing (mostly) monthly builds of Solaris Express, and there have been quite a few advancements and improvements over Solaris 9. I think Solaris 10 is going to be a big release, but we'll all have to wait until later to download it: the announcement of Solaris 10 isn't until 12:30 PDT today, and the actual release of Solaris 10 probably won't be available until a later date. The most recent beta build (b69) says SunOS 5.10 December 2004 from either a uname or in /etc/release :(
-- Never hit a man with glasses. Hit him with a baseball bat.
without a doubt, solaris has been the biggest pain to set up out of ANY unix i've installed
/me ducks
I agree. I spent a week fighting with Solaris 10 preview for all the wrong reasons. It was basically an experiment to see how much GNU software I could pack into it. To my horror, once I finally got the thing installed I learned that it doesn't even come with a compiler. Sure you can add GCC to it, but there must be some art to making GNU's tools work properly with Sun's libc that is beyond me. The biggest problem I had was libtool seems to be completely broken with respect to shared libraries on Solaris.
The good news is there are lots of repositories for Solaris binaries:
Sun Freeware (Sun sponsored - mostly GNU in Solaris package manager form, can be installed with pkgadd)
OpenPKG RPM OpenPKG Solaris 10 RPM's (Lots missing from here and needs to be compiled via the SRPMS)
OpenPKG SRPMSAlmost everything I use, I found here and compiled without problems
IbiblioThere's a bunch of binary packages here for x86 and SPARC Solaris, I didn't use any of them
Anyone else looking to venture down this road, you should be warned that Solaris is really no fun to try to use as a desktop. Out of the box, Gnome is at version 2.2 or something, and has many many bugs (like Nautilus crashes when you try to drag desktop icons for example).
Summary: Solaris is not ready for the desktop.
To my horror, once I finally got the thing installed I learned that it doesn't even come with a compiler.
True, but to be fair, no other enterprise UNIX comes bundled with the corresponding proprietary compiler, either.
Sure you can add GCC to it, but there must be some art to making GNU's tools work properly with Sun's libc that is beyond me.
This is a known "issue": AFAIU, the headers included in the GCC package you installed were meant for Solaris 9. Since Solaris 10 is still in beta, this ought to be forgivable, and the blame should go to the mainatiners of the GCC package you used, not Sun. However, Blastwave, the excellent Solaris package repository you missed, has GCC packages that work for Solaris 10/Express.
-- Never hit a man with glasses. Hit him with a baseball bat.
I honestly don't know what you're talking about. Perhaps if you came to Solaris from the linux world and expected things to behave the same...
I used to maintain a huge pile of Sun boxes, and rather liked it. I was supporting FreeBSD boxes at the same time, and ditto. I started cursing a lot more after adding Linux to the mix, until I got used to it.
It you take the time to set up your environment, Solaris is no worse than anyone else. Of course, I _do_ really like apt, and wish everyone would use it, now that I'm used to it. But dealing with patchclusters is actually quite a lot more straightforward than the where-the-hell-is-libsuxx0r-3.1.25.6r.rpm,-and-now -I-have-to-upgrade-glibc game, IMHO.
And porting Solaris code to the non-Solaris world is often quite difficult.
Maybe so, if you don't write portable software... all of mine compiles on Solaris, fBSD, and the various Linuxen without a tweak.
That said, I'm glad I'm no longer a professional admin... I got really sick of it. But that's a different story.
I forget what 8 was for.
DOS did not sneak in and start replacing UNIX. If anything, DOS snuck in and started replacing CP/M.
Much later, NT4 server started replaced Netware, and maybe some UNIX.
I guess "Antique" is right. If by "oddness they did to X" you mean the old Open Windows "Xnews" stuff, that got ripped out ages ago in favor of a stock X11 server, and Sun has gone with x.org for Solaris 10. Gzip has been part of Solaris since 2000. And I'm really curious about what you mean about porting Solaris code to the non-Solaris world; Solaris is pretty much the de facto coding standard of commercial UNIX, and since it's based on the UNIX98 standard, de jure as well.
:-) -- no problem, we'll just start working on moving our AIX version over. IBM's response was that it'd be a lot easier and faster if the vendor happened to have a Solaris version they could start with instead... .
Anecdotal evidence: I know of a vendor who was approached by IBM to port their product to Linux; vendor said sure (especially since IBM was paying them