Solaris 10 Released

AusG4 writes "Sun Microsystems has released Solaris 10 for both SPARC and Intel/Opteron. Downloading it is the usual 'register and get your free license' meandering; the Intel/Opteron version is 4 CDs and an optional language and companion disc (a bunch of pre-compiled GNU software in pkgadd format, I'm assuming, same as Solaris 8 and 9)."

Comments

Cheap Sun hardware

[Anonymous Coward]

and the best place to get your Sun hardware: Anysystem.com

Re:Cheap Sun hardware

[Anonymous Coward]

Anysystem.com has never been cheap, nor will it ever be. I wonder how that site stays alive.

Re:Cheap Sun hardware

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, they've always been good to me... don't shoot the messenger.

Re:Cheap Sun hardware

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would you? Solaris runs perfectly fine on x86 hardware these days.

Re:Cheap Sun hardware

[Darkon]

Why would you? Solaris runs perfectly fine on x86 hardware these days.

Oh come on, where's your sense of geekiness?! Sun hardware is cool! Give me my E250 over some boring beige box running Linux any day.

Re:Cheap Sun hardware

[Anonymous Coward]

US $600 for a refurbished Ultra 2 ain't a good deal. It costs less on eBay. The same way, 900 bucks for a Blade 100 is extortion.

Re:Cheap Sun hardware

[Anonymous Coward]

sorry but I get the same stuff for 1/10th their prices off ebay, auctions and ham swap meets.

Pc's go for insane prices at auctions, Sun hardware they cant give away.

I have a crapload of fully loaded 30's that I was able to snage WITH the 19 inch sun monitors for $25.00 each.

400 mhz and it kicks the crap out of any P4 Intel I see.

Re:Cheap Sun hardware

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh come on, where's your sense of geekiness?! Sun hardware is cool! Give me my E250 over some boring beige box running Linux any day.

Scott.... Is that you?

Re:Cheap Sun hardware

[)-(ellbilly]

Hes got the best deals on ebay. Look for his ebay specials. I nabbed an E4500 for 600 bux, yep 600 bux and that included shipping....insane. But if you keep yer eye out he will have those kind of specials on ebay. Been buy'n from him off ebay for years. Time to start unloading my older stuff.

Cheers,
}-{ellbilly

Re:Cheap Sun hardware

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahh, yes. Now I understand... for "hobby" / "home" buying, their prices may not be that great (will have to check out ebay, haven't really used it much in the past) I purchase from them on a corporate level for my company, which won't let us purchase from ebay for obvious reasons.

Re:Cheap Sun hardware

[thinkzinc]

I can't believe I fell for the plug! What a rip off. You can buy an ultra 2 on ebay for under $100. anysystem.con starts them off at the low price of $695.

Re:Cheap Sun hardware

[cayenne8]

" US $600 for a refurbished Ultra 2 ain't a good deal. It costs less on eBay. The same way, 900 bucks for a Blade 100 is extortion."

Speaking of...I got a couple of the Ultra2 boxes off eBay awhile back. Both had an old version of Solaris on there...I slicked them to put Gentoo Linux on. Both are dual 300 Mhz boxes...one with half Gig ram (regular Ultra2), the other with 1 Gig (Ultra2 creator), and dual 9G HD's.

The one with a 1/2 G ram came up fine, and is now chugging away happily as my email server. The 2nd one has been giving me fits. Whenever on the install I try to emerge sync...where it loads a ton of files..it just locks up dead. I've tried changing out RAM....changing out the HD's...nothing works.

I'd consider putting Solaris on it with the newer version..but, I'm liking Gentoo with its package management system...portage.

Is there anything comparable to this on Solaris? It sure is easy to emerge apache....and have all the dependencies taken care of....

Re:Cheap Sun hardware

[680x0]

I've had good luck with RetroBox.com. I've ordered a pair of Ultra 1 machines, at $75 each. They also have PC's of various vintages, and Macs and network equipment (routers, switches, etc.)

Re:Cheap Sun hardware

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a SunSparc 20 SMP, Sol10 won't work, not supported so I'm running Linux on it. :)

Re:Cheap Sun hardware

[680x0]

According to the Solaris 10 system requirements, all you need is some kind of UltraSparc (64-bit Sparc chip). So, an Ultra 1, or even Ultra 5 or 10 would be an inexpensive way to try out Solaris 10. (Ultra 1 and 2's are S-Bus based, Ultra 5 & 10's are PCI-based, and a bit faster).

Re:Cheap Sun hardware

[Z4rd0Z]

Last I heard, portage was being "ported" to Solaris. Also, NetBSD's pkgsrc is available for Solaris.

Re:Cheap Sun hardware

[jasonbowen]

My first purchase on eBay was 512 megs of 50ns EDO RAM for an Ultra 10. I got it for less than 1/4 of what standard PC EDO RAM costs today.

Re:Cheap Sun hardware

[Anonymous Coward]

I have said it before blastwave.org. Use pkg-get, it is the best way to install and keep open source software up to date. It really is toooo easy.

Re:Cheap Sun hardware

[cayenne8]

"I have said it before blastwave.org. Use pkg-get, it is the best way to install and keep open source software up to date. It really is toooo easy.

I looked at the site...and they only seem to have a DVD image of it...my old Ultra2 only had CD...any CD version of this?

Re:Cheap Sun hardware

[Anonymous Coward]

pkg-get works with wget over the internet. You just say pkg-get -i apache and it installs all of apache and all of its dependencies. I have worked on solaris for 4 years now and it is the best thing since sliced bread. Check all the free software availble http://www.blastwave.org/packages-static.html
all of the classics, kde, mozilla, gaim, gimp, ect.

I don't know about a CD though.

Re:Cheap Sun hardware

[aliquis]

Damn you where right.
Sun Blade 1000, single 750MHz/8MB cache, 1GB ram, 36GB hdd for $995. Dual with 2GB ram for $1395. To bad they take $300 for international orders. Way better value than those silly macminis :)

The hole in our Apple theories

[Dancin_Santa]

Everyone around here keeps saying that Apple should get out of the PPC business and get into licensing OSX for the Intel x86 procs. They argue that selling the software is more lucrative than selling the hardware.

I think that Sun is providing us with a very good example of the opposite being true. Even though they literally give their product away for free, they still make money on their hardware. Apple would be fools to give up the high-margin hardware market and try to compete toe to toe with Microsoft Windows.

Re:The hole in our Apple theories

[Anonymous Coward]

There are three kinds of people buying Apple computers. There are the OS interface junkies who love the "look and feel" of the interface. There are the media workers who buy Apple simply because it's still the industry standard in that field, in the same way that office workers invariably use MS Office. Finally, there are those who have been seduced by coloured, translucent plastic.

If OS X for x86 was available, I'd be willing to bet that a large proportion of the first two groups would immediately jump ship over to cheaper hardware. Mac OS hardware is nice (The G4 is a great chip) but being realistic, price is king.

The question, therefore, is whether the increased revenue in OS sales would compensate for the losses in hardware revenues. Personally, I'm not sure. Spoiler alert -- Charlie, the villain, is actually David's (Robert DeNiro's) split personality.

When it comes down to it, though, Apple won't listen to what we say. Pretty much every major decision will depend on what Steve thinks, and I don't think Steve likes the idea of open hardware - historically, he's shown himself to be very sensitive to physical appearance (the original mac classic, the iMac, the cube) and I suspect that he just doesn't want his lovely OS X running on ugly grey boxes. :)

Re:The hole in our Apple theories

[Anonymous Coward]

I disagree, I work at Apple. Here's the deal... even though we do sell to the business market our main focus is the home user. Yes, we make servers and Xsan, BUT our main market is home user and it always has been. Sun's market is purely business class IT infrastructure, always has been. So comparing the two is irrational. Now that's not to say that we should stop using power PC chips and making hardware; our hardware is beautiful. I think that if we released OS X on a intel /intel clone platform that our operating system being a user friendly unix, that is spyware free, adware free, virtually bug free, and virtually virus free would knock Microsoft's market share out of the water. The cool thing about OS X is it's feature rich enough that any coder, admin, or hacker can use it (BASH shell HELLO!) but easy enough that a 70 plus grandmother can use it. Just like our slogan says, "It just works". Now as you probably know OS X was based on NeXT's platform and it ran on Intel 486 (in addition to other processors) So it's not like "we" haven't done it before. What I think is keeping "us" out of the market is the little matter of 150 million Microsoft dollars that saved us back in '97. I think one of the terms of that hidden agreement was a non-compete clauses. I think we are bound to stay of Intel clone architecture. I mean why else? There's money in software; just ask Bill Gates.

Re:The hole in our Apple theories

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, other than giving a glimpse of what a fucked imagine you have of Apple, OS X, and the tens of millions of users out there, what was the point of all that stuff your wrote?

Re:The hole in our Apple theories

[tod_miller]

I agree and disagree, sun and apple should take a page out of each others books.

Sun should release some hardware, for sure, and some pretty decent and funky stuff soon. I want Sun to be at the forefront of Java enabled devices. They have manuf. facilities, and they need to move fast.

Solaris cannot compete against linux for home users (i.e. it doesn't differeantiate enough for home usage, just critical apps / support requirements / specialist software) so Sun realise that ensuring the market for it is good. I personally I sticking Solaris 10 as a server on my first available box.

Panther on the other hand can compete against winXP because of the software, the hype, and the interface (Konfabs etc, plus WinXP skinned is still CR@P! zyShadow is funky though).

So Mac *could* release intel software, but then would make less beneficial thier hardware platform (think apple-mac means wintel really).

So Sun needs some consumer based products, like an iPod (but I am thinking a gaming device... with PJava chips... hardware java bytecode profiling etc... opengl support... who knows?)

Apple need to keep on doing what they are doing, thier rise in the media has been fantastic. I want a mac mini (don't bother posting your free mac-mini BS links)

That is all

Re:The hole in our Apple theories

[immerrath]

Mod this guy down: he has a spoiler in his comment!

Re:The hole in our Apple theories

[Randy Wang]

Don't you think that the first and third of your categories should merged into one? That'd be the "Ooh, pretty" group, I suppose: the ones that care about appearance.

And you'd forgotten a third group, the ones that have used Macs in the past and are now used to them... to the point where it's simply easier to buy another one in the future when it's needed. This'd be something along the lines of, "I want a Buick cause that's what my daddy always bought", minus the Buick. It might not even be that extreme - it's just that, for them, there's no point switching to potentially cheaper hardware, because they're comfortable where they are (the reverse, of course, applies to people on x86 hardware and OSs).

So, your three groups become:

1) The Appearance Junkies
2) The Creative Crew
3) The Lifetime Users

Now, sure, if Apple were to sell it's OS then people would switch hardware. But what about the compatibility issues? You couldn't simply expect software bought for the Mac to just install and go on completely different hardware, could you? Aside from the infinitely more diverse selection of hardware, the challenges in getting *any* software to just move across hardware would be enormous.

So, you'd really have to buy new versions of the software. Would it be for Windows, or Max OS X86? Heh, who knows? Maybe we'd have something like the Classic Environment.

Or you'd have to download new updates to all your software, to make it actually run. I don't know about you, but that sounds like a whole barrel of fun to me. And this isn't mentioning the effort on the parts of the developers (both Apple's, and third-party) to convert their software to run at a decent pace on totally new hardware; and effort that could end up bombing out and losing millions in work.

In the end, even if Apple were to port OS X to x86 hardware, you couldn't really expect that many people to adopt it.

Re:The hole in our Apple theories

[Anonymous Coward]

Bastard I wanted to see that movie

Re:The hole in our Apple theories

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun does not make any money on x86 whatsoever and will also have a very hard time to make any money on x86 in the future.
They do make money on Sparc however.

Re:The hole in our Apple theories

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple also is starting to realise that the desktop PC as a platform is dead, and will in the next couple of years be replaced by a thinclient running on anything from a console, plasma tv, fridge, or some sort of LG Internet Toaster.

That's why they are starting to branch into servers, consumer electronics (ipod + airport express) and content distribution (itunes).

Re:The hole in our Apple theories

[Anonymous Coward]

You got your troll modded Insightful, congrats.

Re:The hole in our Apple theories

[DenDave]

I agree in the sense that apple should maintain its focus on developing products. However, their software is really amazing stuff. Just go figure what it would cost you to get the functionality that comes standard on a Imac/Ibook and you basically are getting the hardware for free!

However I see no reason to NOT port OS-X to the Intel platform.

Re:The hole in our Apple theories

[Anonymous Coward]

Barring a non-compete clause with Microsoft, I think a slick X86-based line with just a slightly different appearance (and lower cost) from the PPC Macs would be a success, provided Apple uses similar high-end components and a flawless port of OS X. Instead of a perly white iMac, you get a glossy black X86 version. I mean, why not "Think Different," at a fairly low financial risk to the company. If the PPC chips start to lag badly behind their X86 counterparts, Apple can just jump ship to the other architecture, keeping the key thing, which is the kick-ass operating system.

Of course, this horse is flogged ad nauseum, and so I post AC.

Re:The hole in our Apple theories

[Jugalator]

" virtually bug free,"

Hmm, but one would need to brace oneself for new bugs due to the much more varied PC hardware => having to rely on third party developers => having to accept they might break your stable OS. That's basically the major cause of instability for Windows XP that I can see today. Fortunately, there are WHQL certified drivers so it became less of an issue when those were introduced. Just saying that with Apple hardware, you're staying away from a heck of a lot of problems in the formula of giving drivers direct hardware acccess for decent perfomance while keeping the whole thing stable.

Re:The hole in our Apple theories

[Vollernurd]

I wondered how long it would take for someone to shoe-horn in a comment about Apple.

This reminds me of my time in 'Nam...

Re:The hole in our Apple theories

[Kentsusai]

I thinks there is more to it than that.

Ever heard of economic breach of contract? [Where it is more profitable to breach a contract than perform]. The worst that could happen to Apple is a disgorgement of profits [which would be HIGHLY unlikely for reasons below (antitrust laws)], but then they would have a footing in the OS market.

Plus if Apple were to breach their contract with Microsoft and there are some an anti-compete clauses in the contract, I think a few antitrust laws in the USA and EU would protect Apple's breach of the contract.

In addition to that, the time to litigate will be on Apple's side! Apple would be able to crush the Microsoft OS market and by the time litigation is over, Apple will have a healthy share of the market. Plus, they may have to pursue litigation in several jurisdictions (USA, EU, Asia, etc.)

I personally think legal reasons are not why Apple is not jumping into the Intel market. There must be something more.

Maybe the general Intel user has a hatred against Apple stuff. I know many Intel users which will not touch a Mac [don't ask me why, guess its a cult thing]

Maybe that's Apple's worm. There is no real market out there.

Re:The hole in our Apple theories

[Anonymous Coward]

There is only a small possibility that this poster is an Apple employee.

Re:The hole in our Apple theories

[Glock27]

Apple also is starting to realise that the desktop PC as a platform is dead, and will in the next couple of years be replaced by a thinclient running on anything from a console, plasma tv, fridge, or some sort of LG Internet Toaster.

Drinking some Kool-Aid are you?

While desktop PCs may lose some unit volume (not all that much though, since they are the most bang for the buck), that will be replaced by laptop volume. Apple makes very nice laptops.

General purpose computers will be around in volume for a long, long time. Longer than you and I, in fact. ;-)

Re:The hole in our Apple theories

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm, just guessing here, but based upon your lack of bitterness and anger in your posting, I'd have to say that you are not Steve Jobs?

Did I win?

Re:The hole in our Apple theories

[imroy]

The main problem with the x86 'PC' market is drivers. There's an aweful lot hardware out there and they all need drivers. If you're aiming at home users, then they're going to want to plug in their latest toy and expect it to work. Trust me, as a devoted Linux user of 9 years I know how hard it is to get things working on a non-Windows OS without the support of the manufacturer. The nice thing about Apple hardware is that they control the platform and a number of the gadgets that plug into it. Go to the x86 platform and you need drivers for every single IDE/ATA controller, USB host (ok only two or three), SCSI host, sound chip, graphics chip, etc on the motherboard and PCI/ISA cards. Just look at the number of drivers in the Linux kernel source tree. And that's nowhere near complete or perfect. Apple would have to put in a tremendous amount of work to get even half of the current PC's and their gadgets working with OS/X. And/or get the vendors to do a lot of work for them.

Sorry, OS/X on x86 hardware just isn't going to happen. It would be too risky. The PowerPC (and POWER) processors are more than adequate for Apple. Let them stick with what they're good at.

Re:The hole in our Apple theories

[cbrocious]

"However I see no reason to NOT port OS-X to the Intel platform." Money. Simple as that.

Re:The hole in our Apple theories

[viperblades]

Apple would lose their most valuable possession.
Mindshare.
They want people to think of well built quality systems, with emphasis on quality. This is the reason Rolls Royce doesn't make cars to compete with civics. If apple where to make OS X for x86 they'd lose the image they to try to project of having systems that just work (due to quality on lots of x86 hardware) . Apple may be a small fish, but it lives in a small pond where it IS the big fish. They keep that market and they'll live on just fine (and be happy with their products :) ) .

Re:The hole in our Apple theories

[jonadab]

Apple doesn't have the _infrastructure_ to compete with Microsoft. If they
were to suddenly get even 5% of Microsoft's market share in a year, it would
be more than a company Apple's size could handle -- it would *double* the
size of their business, and while that may sound attractive on the face of
it, it's the kind of thing that could destroy a company as easily as raise
it up.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying Apple doesn't want to grow. They do.
But they want to grow in a way that works for them as a company. The Mac
Mini could conceivably boost their market share considerably -- by as much
as 50% in three years, I guesstimate, which is huge (if it materializes,
which is hard to predict), and by then they'll have figured out where they
want to go next. The iPod isn't exactly hurting them either.

It's also noteworthy that Apple's growth pattern is healthier than
Microsoft's, in that it's more diverse. Microsoft is almost entirely in
software, and a little hardware. Apple's got a nice ballance of hardware
and software and has been moving into music. I've been wondering for
years why Microsoft doesn't diversify more -- at their size, they should
be in half a dozen industries. They should own a big movie studio and
a major restaurant chain, or something. When you're that big, you're
supposed to wonder, "What happens if a competitor comes along and forces
us to cut prices to compete until the profits in our entire industry are
razor thin?" Microsoft *knows* this can happen, and they're scared to
death of Linux in particular, but what are they doing about it? Nothing.
(Well, sure, they're doing plenty to try to *prevent* that from happening,
but they're doing nothing to ensure their survival and profitablity as a
company in the event it *does* happen.)

Long term, I like Apple's prospects better than Microsoft's, because
they're manifestly smarter about the way they conduct business.

But of the three, I'd worry most about Sun. They do have the ballance
of hardware and software (and support contracts), but they've always had
that, and they don't seem to have fundamentally improved their business
any time lately, unless I missed something. Solaris is a cool product,
but Solaris 10 is an incremental upgrade, and what *else* is Sun producing?
Incremental hardware upgrades to match, sure... but what else? And their
marketing just isn't up to the standards of Apple and Microsoft. HP has
carved out nice niches for itself in PC hardware and especially printers,
so if they lose a lot of big corporate support contracts to Microsoft or
someone else, it'll hurt, but it won't kill them. I'm less sure about Sun.

Sure, they could turn it around. They could potentially turn Java into
something, for example, but so far I don't see where they're making any
money on it. They're halfway on the Linux support bandwagon, but they're
going to have to compete there with the same players Solaris has been
competing with -- HP, IBM, and so forth. It doesn't differentiate them
at all, really. They need to carve out a niche for themselves in another
market, where they can differentiate themselves better.

Re:The hole in our Apple theories

[justins]

Apple would be fools to give up the high-margin hardware market and try to compete toe to toe with Microsoft Windows.

Apple aren't much of a player in the high-margin hardware market (servers), they're a player in the low-margin desktop computer market. They're in a pretty different situation.

Re:The hole in our Apple theories

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually the major cause of instability of WindowsXP is that it runs drivers at ring 0.

Other OS's (most notably OS2/Warp) used all the protection rings successfullly. Third party drivers could not bring down OS2/Warp's kernel.

Ultimately it's bad design, not bad drivers that brings down XP. Lets run unknown code on our flagship OS at ring 0 w00t!

Linux also runs drivers at ring 0 (IMO bad design as well), but linux drivers are open source so the have far fewer bugs.

Re:The hole in our Apple theories

[jsight]

> Other OS's (most notably OS2/Warp) used all the protection rings successfullly. Third party drivers could not bring down OS2/Warp's kernel.

That's a bunch of bunk. OS/2 could be crashed by bad drivers, just like any other OS.

Re:The hole in our Apple theories

[Anonymous Coward]

Who's to say apple would need to get every single piece of x86 hardware to work with OSX? all they need to do is offer a certified intel workstation config, only this mobo, this nic, this vid card, etc. will work w/ osx......... Its as simple as that, apples costs would go way down and the consumer would benefit, in addition users could build their own macs if they stuck w/ apple certified intel hardware.

Re:The hole in our Apple theories

[hackstraw]

Everyone around here keeps saying that Apple should get out of the PPC business and get into licensing OSX for the Intel x86 procs. They argue that selling the software is more lucrative than selling the hardware.

I think that Sun is providing us with a very good example of the opposite being true. Even though they literally give their product away for free, they still make money on their hardware. Apple would be fools to give up the high-margin hardware market and try to compete toe to toe with Microsoft Windows.

FWIW http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=SUNW&t=2y&l=on&z=m &q=l&c=aapl

Apple and Sun provide a complete product. Hardware and software that is supported and designed to work together. Microsoft sells software. In defense of MS, many of their problems over the years have been due to 3rd party drivers and whatnot. Driver issues are not that much of a problem with Sun and Apple products.

Its nice having one company responsible for both the hardware and software. It eliminates many variables.

Re:The hole in our Apple theories

[Surt]

I seriously doubt if the desktop form factor will be around longer than me. We're already quickly approaching the point where the desktop has no advantages over portable. I can't imagine that in 20 years we'll still have boxes with approximately a cubic foot of space in them. That's only currently really being used for heat disappation and expandability. Heat disappation would be better served by making one entire side of the box a radiative surface. Expandability has already become largely unnecessary, or external, and I would expect that trend to continue.

So in 20 years I should still be around, but I expect my computer will be pretty thin, with a much larger surface area to volume ratio than today. That's in the least inventive future I can imagine. I actually expect things will be even more different by then.

Re:The hole in our Apple theories

[cayenne8]

"But of the three, I'd worry most about Sun. They do have the ballance of hardware and software (and support contracts), but they've always had that, and they don't seem to have fundamentally improved their business any time lately, unless I missed something. Solaris is a cool product, but Solaris 10 is an incremental upgrade, and what *else* is Sun producing?"

I agree on virtually everything you said...but, I think Sun still has a pretty hard lock on the high end server market...that carries some weight. I know on major projects...many of them big $$ ones such as with US gov..if it involves a database, it is usually Oracle..and this will pretty much guarantee it is on a Sun box. We don't even consider a Wintel box for our back end servers. I'm sure we're not the only ones. But, I do agree...Sun does need to figure out something else to do to diversify...they can't hold onto this forever I'm guessing...

But, in all the places I've worked...Sun/Solaris is the only choice being made for hard core backend servers...

Re:The hole in our Apple theories

[fm6]

I can't come up with the specific figures, but I seem to recall reading that Mac hardware profit margins are actually quite low. Macs still cost more than PCs, but the difference is mostly made up by the more expensive proprietary technology that Macs use.

That being said, I don't think anybody would buy a OS X designed to run on a commodity PC. Sure, the total cost would be much lower than for a PPC Mac, but who would buy it? Not Windows and Linux people, who would have to adapt to a totally different GUI. And certainly not Mac people, who are willing to pay a little extra for a cool-looking system.

Re:The hole in our Apple theories

[nine-times]

I think that if we released OS X on a intel /intel clone platform that our operating system being a user friendly unix, that is spyware free, adware free, virtually bug free, and virtually virus free would knock Microsoft's market share out of the water.

I don't really think the issue is whether OSX would find users on the x86 platform-- it would. The question is, is that really a good move for Apple. Suddenly, they have to support a much greater variety of hardware, which means some of their "just working" will probably go away. At least *some* portion of the instability present on the x86 platform comes from cheap hardware and poorly-written drivers. Part of the reason things perform so smoothly for Apple is that they have some control over so much of the hardware that connects to their machines.

Second, though Apple's hardware is pretty slick, that's only half the appeal. OSX sells a lot of Apple hardware, and if OSX worked on Dell machines, Apple would probably sell *less* hardware. Would the increase in sales of OSX make up for the lost revenue from lacking sales in hardware? Maybe, maybe not. I don't know, but it's risky.

But why even take that risk? If they released OSX for x86, then the people who really wanted OSX could buy just OSX from Apple and computers from Dell. However, if they don't put in the extra work (spending extra money on development and QA) of porting OSX to x86, then the people who really want OSX will buy, not just OSX, but a shiny new Mac, too. That way, they win twice, and with the low price of the Mac mini, many people are starting to bite.

So what's Apple's incentive to port over to x86?

Re:The hole in our Apple theories

[duffbeer703]

Apple is a premium product, period. You can buy mustard for your sandwich at the grocery store for $0.50, but lots of people pay $2.99 for Grey Poupon dijon. Rustler jeans are $15.99, Levi's are $40.

People will pay a premium for what they percieve as a better or more prestigious product. Since computer specs are settling down and CPU speed doesn't really matter anymore, the Apple strategy of pushing style and usability is in the long run a better approach.

They keep the Apple product premium by treating the consumer PC market as a vertical market. They control the hardware, software and most accessories -- that's a powerful combination that will probaly change the PC industry, which is currently based on adapting business computers to consumer needs.

Sun has a similar business model, but they need to re-establish themselves as a premium product. Sun kept hardware prices way too high for way too long, and need to do alot of work to eliminate the "too expensive" stigma.

Re:The hole in our Apple theories

[vistic]

I think Apple knows it's making a fine profit now, the company's not in danger. They will wait to see how their game with hardware sales pans out... if things become much worse and Apple gets desperate to save itself, they can always drop hardware sales and become a software only company and probably be pretty successful. It's their back up plan for when things get rough. Back in the 90's they were porting MacOS (pre-OSX) to intel x86 architecture and I guess it was running fine, but in the end they never furthered development of it or released it. But clearly this is an option they know that they have, and they do consider it from time to time pretty seriously.

Re:The hole in our Apple theories

[brunogirin]

And the main cause of instability and/or complexity in Linux or *BSD. Solaris only works on x86 because it supports a very limited set of x86 hardware.

Re:The hole in our Apple theories

[Z4rd0Z]

Wow. At long last I believe we have a troll worthy to carry the title.

Re:The hole in our Apple theories

[Brandybuck]

You don't go far enough in your argument. Solaris gives away Solaris for both SPARC and x86. Yet one of them manages to sell Sun hardware while the other borders on an embarassment. Okay, it's not an embarassment, but neither is it in the same league as Solaris SPARC.

Re:The hole in our Apple theories

[Com2Kid]

• They should own a big movie studio and
• 
  a major restaurant chain, or something.

MSNBC, their entire (rather excellent!) hardware line (Keyboards and Mice and game controllers, a very small percent of their overall revenue but they excel in all three of those catagories), and don't forget the PDA market which they are year after year slowly leeching away from Palm.

Oh, don't forget various game studios MS has purchased as well.

Granted the vast majority of Microsoft's revenue comes from Windows and Word, but they are diversified into a number of different catagories.

Re:The hole in our Apple theories

[DebianDog]

Let's comapre Sun and Apple stock over the last year and decide who may have a better business plan...
Ummmm Yeah...

Re:The hole in our Apple theories

[DebianDog]

Dang you beat me to it!

Re:The hole in our Apple theories

[bnenning]

I think that if we released OS X on a intel /intel clone platform that our operating system being a user friendly unix, that is spyware free, adware free, virtually bug free, and virtually virus free would knock Microsoft's market share out of the water.

Maybe, but there are a few critical problems. First, how much do you charge for x86 OS X? Not $129, or else Mac hardware sales would fall to nearly zero, and Apple's profit margins would be destroyed. (The mini and iBook are cost-competitive with Wintel, but not much else is once OS X is no longer Mac-only). Charge $300 or so and legitimate sales will fall while piracy increases tremendously.

Second, it would take Microsoft about 4 seconds after the release of x86 OS X to announce the cancellation of Office for OS X, which would hurt a lot. Yes, there's Pages and Keynote, and I'm sure there's an Excel-killer in a Cupertino lab, but the inevitable problem is file compatibility which will never be 100%.

Third, it would take a *lot* of resources to support a reasonable percentage of all the wacky motherboards and devices in the x86 space. Microsoft gets a free ride on this because they can get the hardware manufacturers to pay the development costs; Apple can't.

My analysis is that Apple and Microsoft are locked in a probabilistic variant of mutually assured destruction. Apple could put OS X on x86, and Microsoft could drop all Mac support, and if either does one, the other will do the other quickly. As a wild-ass guess, there's a 75% chance that the resulting war would drive Apple out of business (or reduce it to a pure iPod/consumer electronics company), and a 25% chance that Apple would gain substantial market share and put a huge dent in Microsoft's monopoly, but neither company wants to take that risk.

Re:The hole in our Apple theories

[pgilman]

"What I think is keeping [Apple] out of the market is the little matter of 150 million Microsoft dollars that saved [them] back in '97."

I think different. (sorry 8-)

I think that what's really holding back OSX/x86 is that the instant it's released, no more MS Office for Apple.

Re:The hole in our Apple theories

[Zone5]

You obviously haven't drunk enough of the IBM OS/2 Kool-Aid, my friend.

OS/2 *NEVER* crashed. It just went away for very very very long times best compared with the half-life of uranium, or the death of stars.

But it didn't crash! :D

Re:The hole in our Apple theories

[Big Mark]

Yes, all the high-availability, high-demand servers here are Sun boxes. They're pricey but very reliable and extremely well supported.

Re:The hole in our Apple theories

[Anonymous Coward]

You too. Congrats, likewise.

Re:The hole in our Apple theories

[Anonymous Coward]

There is only a small possibility that this poster is an Apple employee.

And there is an even smaller possibility that this poster is insightful.

Re:The hole in our Apple theories

[bob beta]

Sun's market is purely business class IT infrastructure, always has been.

That's very, very untrue. 'Purely' is far too strong a term for you to use. Sun started out as a workstation vendor. I would bet that even at this late date the market for licensed engineering workstation software for Sun hardware significantly dwarfs the same class of software on Apple hardware, in dollar amount.

Do your bosses at Apple know you're recklessly speculating about the "$150M from Microsoft" thing? Be careful. Apple has been chasing down employees on blogs lately.

Re:The hole in our Apple theories

[bob beta]

No. Apple would sell an OS for a narrow segment of the x86 market. Probably only 'certified' to run on branded first or second-tier hardware. And they would probably stick to third-party peripheral support only on the same USB/fireware devices they already support on their PPC hardware.

The notion that Apple would feel the need to 'reach down' to all the detris and cheap-junk add-on stuff that Windows struggles to support is laughable.

Re:The hole in our Apple theories

[bob beta]

I'm scrolled about a third of the way down the whole thread and it's mostly been about Apple thus far.

And this isn't even apple.slashdot.org. Good gracious. Can't we have a Solaris topic without it turning into an Apple astroturf fest?

Re:The hole in our Apple theories

[bob beta]

That being said, I don't think anybody would buy a OS X designed to run on a commodity PC.

Hell, I would buy a sleek, lean OS X that would run well on my Beige G3. As it stands, though, I'm forced to run NetBSD or one of the Linux-based OSes. (or Darwin).

Why are we talking about Apple stuff in a Solaris topic, tho?

Re:The hole in our Apple theories

[DenDave]

Okay, under the caveat that every PC user buying OS-X will not buy a mac... I can see that.. However I am not sure that the caveat holds up for all pc users. I think that with the advent of low cost macs users exposed to the OSX interface and applciations would be more inclined to purchase a mac when upgrade time comes round.. But of course such a move might entice Redmond to compile their products to PPC platform.. and who would care?

Re:The hole in our Apple theories

[Glock27]

(Sorry I didn't respond until now, I didn't see your post until today...I hope you notice this one!)

I seriously doubt if the desktop form factor will be around longer than me. We're already quickly approaching the point where the desktop has no advantages over portable. I can't imagine that in 20 years we'll still have boxes with approximately a cubic foot of space in them. That's only currently really being used for heat disappation and expandability. Heat disappation would be better served by making one entire side of the box a radiative surface. Expandability has already become largely unnecessary, or external, and I would expect that trend to continue.

So in 20 years I should still be around, but I expect my computer will be pretty thin, with a much larger surface area to volume ratio than today. That's in the least inventive future I can imagine. I actually expect things will be even more different by then.

My main point was that the "general purpose computer" would survive, as opposed to the gp's point about thin client or appliance devices. I did acknowledge that notebook marketshare was likely to rise.

I do think desktop machines will be around for a long time, as you can't carry a 30" display around. A MiniMac style system is still a desktop even if you carry it around with you. Plus it's not clear how the trend will go with power requirements/dissipation. It may be that the desktop system of the future will have hundreds or thousands of processors with corresponding power requirements. Graphics cards have also trended towards dissipating more power, not less over the last few years. The electronics might be physically small, but require substantial cooling.

Time will tell though...I hope to see what happens at least through 2040 or so. :-)

Re:The hole in our Apple theories

[Surt]

I have replies to my posts marked as messages, so I tend to see them pretty quickly.

I actually expect the future will look something like this very shortly:

Our personal config will follow us around. Either by being easily moved around the internet, or by residing on a small storage device we carry (USB key for example).

We'll typically carry a pretty reasonable amount of computer power around with us (ever improving notebook, for example).

We'll carry around our preferred display, which will be a roll-up plastic sheet with a cheap replaceable snap-lock frame. Hence you _will_ be able to easily carry a 30" display around.

At work I expect we'll either plug in our preferred config, or use the company mandated one, but regardless, we'll be working for the most part on computational hardware not located particularly near our desks. We're already heading this direction where I work, and it's only getting easier to do.

Re:The hole in our Apple theories

[aliquis]

"I know many Intel users which will not touch a Mac"

That's probably because macs as in the hardware isn't that great and that the old MacOS wasn't either. MacOS X is another thing thought.

Solaris for Opteron? That's nice

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it fully 64-bit?

If it is, I think I'll try installing Solaris 10 today on my Opteron!

Re:Solaris for Opteron? That's nice

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, it's been fully 64-bit since time immemorial.

Re:Solaris for Opteron? That's nice

[avidday]

No it hasn't. Neither Solaris x86 8 or 9 supported EMT-64 / AMD x86-64 natively, only IA-32, and Sun's Solaris customers using Opterons have been running them in 32 bit compatibility mode. I presume that they now have a native 64 bit x86 kernel, but they certainly didn't with previous Solaris x86 releases.

Re:Solaris for Opteron? That's nice

[Wiz]

The initial release of Solaris 10 is 32-bit only on x86, so you'll have to wait for release of a later version.

Likewise Project Janus also isn't included yet. ZFS wasn't included in Solaris Express, I'm not sure if it is now either. May expect a release in a few months to cover all these bases.

Re:Solaris for Opteron? That's nice

[Paul Jakma]

The initial release of Solaris 10 is 32-bit only on x86, so you'll have to wait for release of a later version.

This isn't. AMD64 support was integrated into Solaris Express late last year. The same OS covers both IA32 and AMD64, just as how Solaris 9 on UltraSPARC supported both 32bit and 64bit machines. Solaris has been doing multi-ABI support transparently on UltraSPARC for quite a while now, and it transfers nicely to S10.

This is actually one area where Linux distributions lag behind Solaris. I dont know of any distributions which handle x86/x86-64 multi-ABI support cleanly. Debian is a pure x86-64 port, with chroot hacks to install and run x86 libs+binaries (apt doesnt do multi-abi very well yet). Fedora x86-64 tries to do multi-lib, but gets it wrong in places too, least FC2 hadnt fully split packages up for x86-64/noarch/x86 and it was far too easy to get conflicting installs of files from x86_64 and x86 packages.

Re:Solaris for Opteron? That's nice

[e40]

Before I spend a huge amount of time downloading, can you point to evidence from sun.com that the x86 download contains AMD64 support?

Re:Solaris for Opteron? That's nice

[Anonymous Coward]

"The initial release of Solaris 10 is 32-bit only on x86, so you'll have to wait for release of a later version."

Wrong. Full 64-bit support for AMD64 and EM64T is included.

"Likewise Project Janus also isn't included yet. ZFS wasn't included in Solaris Express, I'm not sure if it is now either."

Correct, neither are there. Since Solaris Express delivers development builds of Solaris, if something wasn't available via Solaris Express, it won't be in this initial release of Solaris 10 either.

"May expect a release in a few months to cover all these bases."

Solaris update releases come out a few times a year, so yes, expect an update in the next few months. Janus and ZFS will probably not be in the first update, tho.

Re:Solaris for Opteron? That's nice

[Wiz]

I agree with e40 - can you prove that it does?

I don't believe it you see. Whilst Sun can do that with SPARC, doing it was x86 is a totally different task. e.g. x86-64 has twice the number of registers as x86. Not exactly an ABI issue. This is something that is just going to require two copies of most things.

Solaris 8 does that with multiple copies of libraries, e.g. /usr/lib & /usr/lib/64

I can remember reading something saying it wasn't out yet, but I can't find it now. Both you and an AC have told me otherwise, so maybe I'm wrong though?!?

Re:Solaris for Opteron? That's nice

[Anonymous Coward]

This was posted on osnews.com

"
By Andrei Dorofeev (IP: ---.sun.com) - Posted on 2005-02-01 05:33:53
Solaris 10 has complete support for AMD64/x86-64. The kernel will automatically boot in a 64-bit mode if hardware supports it. And, of course, all 32-bit applications will continue to work on a 64-bit kernel. On the SPARC side, _only_ 64-bit kernel is delivered.
"

Re:Solaris for Opteron? That's nice

[Paul Jakma]

bash-2.05b# uname -a
SunOS xxxxxx 5.10 s10_72 i86pc i386 i86pc
bash-2.05b# ls /kernel/
amd64 dacf dtrace fs ipp mach sched sys
crypto drv exec genunix kmdb misc strmod
bash-2.05b# ls /kernel/amd64/
genunix

That's s10_72 on a non-AMD64 box (I'd login into an opteron S10 machine, but that box above happend to be to hand), which is the build used in Solaris Express in november. So the AMD64 support is there for a while now. As others have noted, the Solaris install is done with a 32bit kernel.

Re:Solaris for Opteron? That's nice

[Paul Jakma]

See my reply to e40. x86-64 can run both long mode 64bit apps and 32bit processes at same time, no problem. Solaris10 on x86-64 is just like on UltraSPARC - 64bit kernel (x86-64). I'm not 100% clear on the userspace, I'd have to poke around on an opteron box :), but I presume it's mostly x86 32bit, plus lib64's as it is on UltraSPARC. I'll try check this for you later and get exact first hand details (alternatively, just download S10 and install for yourself.)

Anyway, the kernel is *definitely* x86-64 on AMD64 by default, even if i'm not 100% certain of the userspace details (which i'm still reasonably certain runs both x86 and x86-64).

Re:Solaris for Opteron? That's nice

[e40]

What does it mean that the "solaris install is done with a 32bit kernel"? If I download the released Solaris 10 and install it on AMD64, I get a 32-bit kernel? That makes no sense.

Re:Solaris for Opteron? That's nice

[e40]

Nevermind, I saw your reply to someone else. Thanks for the info...

Re:Solaris for Opteron? That's nice

[LarryWake]

"Before I spend a huge amount of time downloading, can you point to evidence from sun.com that the x86 download contains AMD64 support?"

You can check the Solaris 10 release notes:

"...the Solaris 10 software introduces support for the 64-bit computing capabilities of the AMD Opteron processor"

The download site will be changed shortly to reflect that the "x86" download is actually an "x64/x86" download. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Re:Solaris for Opteron? That's nice

[illumin8]

What does it mean that the "solaris install is done with a 32bit kernel"? If I download the released Solaris 10 and install it on AMD64, I get a 32-bit kernel? That makes no sense.

Wow, it seems like no matter what evidence he gives you, you don't want to believe that it really is 64-bit on x86-64. What this means is that the install CD boots with a 32-bit kernel (so install works on both x86-32 and x86-64), but after the install CD is removed and the system reboots, it will come up in full 64-bit mode, provided you have hardware support for it.

Re:Solaris for Opteron? That's nice

[Anonymous Coward]

sorry, I was thinking SPARC. duh. that's what happens when replying to posts at 3:30am

Re:Solaris for Opteron? That's nice

[AusG4]

bash-2.05b$ uname -a
SunOS prime 5.10 s10_72 i86pc i386 i86pc

bash-2.05b$ isainfo -kv
64-bit amd64 kernel modules

bash-2.05b$ file /opt/csw/mysql/bin/mysql /opt/csw/mysql/bin/mysql: ELF 64-bit LSB executable AMD64 Version 1, dynamically linked, not stripped, no debugging information available

Regardless of what a nasty old troll tries to tell you, Solaris on Opteron has been fully 64-bit since B72 (11/04).

The release version even includes (in /usr/sfw) GCC 3.4.3 with the sol10 amd64 patches, so you get a 64-bit capable compiler out of the box.

Re:Solaris for Opteron? That's nice

[AusG4]

Solaris supports 64-bit on Opteron in exactly the same way it supports 64-bit on SPARC... 64-bit kernel with 64-bit drivers suporting either both 32-bit and 64-bit ABI's for applications and libraries. Libraries appear in the same /usr/lib and /usr/lib/64 folders as they do on SPARC, so of course, you need to build 32 AND 64 bit libraries if you want all applications to link against them.

Re:Solaris for Opteron? That's nice

[AusG4]

As many others have said, Solaris 10 is definately 64-bit capable on Opteron, with a full AMD64 kernel and AMD64 drivers. We have 3 B72 systems (Solaris beta from 10/04) running on dual opteron, all with 8GB of memory and all with 64-bit MySQL processes consuming well in excess of 4GB of memory...

Needless to say, definately 64-bit. This was true in the last express release and is true in the FCS.

As for Janus and ZFS... apparently Janus will be in the next release of Express. I'm much interested in ZFS... though obviously most /. readers will care less about it and Janus is the more important thing....

As a digression, I can't imagine why.... most /. readers are all about open source/free software and 99.9% of the free software builds on Solaris natively. Only thing I can see Janus being good for are the commercial apps, of course.

Cool.

[Anonymous Coward]

It must have been 8 years since I tried Solaris, but now that it's free I might give it another go. And if I like it, I'll keep it.

See, this is the best way to distribute an OS.

Give away the OS, sell apps instead. (You listening, Microsoft?)

Re:Cool.

[Dr.Opveter]

See, this is the best way to distribute an OS.

Give away the OS, sell apps instead. (You listening, Microsoft?)

Thing is, when you buy XP you get pretty much all a regular user wants already. You got Wordpad which is good enough to read/write docs, Internet Explorer, Outlook Express and MSN Messenger to do your stuff online, a nice picture viewer, media player..(i know you also get plenty of spyware/virus with the above programs but you can get free non-MS replacements anyway)

So how is Microsoft supposed to make money from selling apps to home users then?

Re:Cool.

[mboverload]

Microsoft would not be able to due to the amount of freeware around. I replace alot of things on my computer, even notepad with a more able program (metapad). Give me a bare Windows install without all the crap and I can make it into a highly customized, stable platform.

Re:Cool.

[Megaslow]

when you buy XP you get...Wordpad...Internet Explorer...Outlook Express...MSN Messenger...picture viewer...media player

Here's an idea -- stop bundling all that shit with the OS!

Re:Cool.

[skurk]

So how is Microsoft supposed to make money from selling apps to home users then?

Actually, the AC has a point.

I'd love a free version of Windows, since all I use Windows for is Counter-Strike. I don't use IE, I use FireFox and Opera. My Linux server provides me with mutt for email, and I never used Windows Movie Maker. OpenOffice takes care of all my office needs.

Give the OS away for free, and sell the apps. It's an excellent idea.

Re:Cool.

[che.kai-jei]

becayuse you cant play dvds. wordpad sucks. etc

Re:Cool.

[Anonymous Coward]

So... you're saying that it's a good idea, because you don't use those apps and you want free Windows.

Right. I'm sure the guys at Redmond will just jump on that opportunity.

Re:Cool.

[Anonymous Coward]

Onenote isnt bad. If they can keep coming up with a couple of innovative products (yeah, I know that they struggle with coming up with one a year now) then I'm sure people will be happy to put money into their coffers.

They could also go into consumer electronics. Apple seems to be making money out of ipods. With their design skills, maybe Microsoft could start with an Xpod for the oversized ghettoblaster market, and work down from there.

Re:Cool.

[pesc]

You got Wordpad which is good enough to read/write docs, Internet Explorer, Outlook Express and MSN Messenger to do your stuff online, a nice picture viewer, media player...

Now I remember why I left Windows a couple of years ago. All that bundled spyware-infested virus-inviting low-quality crap I couldn't get rid of.

Re:Cool.

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you miss the part about that they'd be more able to sell other applications than Windows in that case?

Re:Cool.

[basics]

"You listening, Microsoft?" ...

sounds kind of like "sell the hardware at a low price, reportably at a loss, and make money on the apps"

*cough* xbox *cough*

Re:Cool.

[Anonymous Coward]

Cedega should run CS.

Re:Cool.

[bob beta]

Indeed. All I want when I buy a Mandrake CD is the Linux kernel, a barebones userland, and the Tab Window Manager.

Free Software

[mirko]

a bunch of pre-compiled GNU software in pkgadd format, I'm assuming, same as Solaris 8 and 9

I rememebr that Solaris 9 used to come with both Gnome and KDE.
The problem though is that these were not quite stable on an Ultra60 3D WS, I hope this got better because there's nothing as unconfortable as their CDE GUI.

Re:Free Software

[zdzichu]

GNOME is now official Solaris GUI, so you don't have to tire your eyes with CDE.

Re:Free Software

[mirko]

What about KDE, did they fix it or dump it ?

Re:Free Software

[PygmySurfer]

What about KDE, did they fix it or dump it ?

I don't think KDE was ever included with Solaris. CDE, OpenWindows, and eventually GNOME are the only environments that have ever shipped with Solaris, AFAIK.

Re:Free Software

[oojah]

Fix it how?

I use the KDE packages from blastwave.org and haven't had any problems.

Cheers,

Roger

Re:Free Software

[lanc]

F/OSS software precompiled, and apt-like (with dependenices) installable from Blastwave

FYKI

Re:Free Software

[conteXXt]

When I used Solaris (few years back) the first thing I built on it (after adding gcc and tools) was WindowMaker.

Ultra60 with a GB of ram and WindowMaker makes a nice quick workstation

Re:Free Software

[mirko]

AFAYK... perhaps but I wrote that I installed it from the Sun CD.

Re:Free Software

[bob beta]

I think TWM is stuck in there, too, isn't it? (it's part of the core X binaries, after all...)

UNIX vs. LINUX?

[SauroNlord]

I am thinking about installing this version of solaris on my machine...what do you guys think?

Re:UNIX vs. LINUX?

[lachlan76]

Well if you don't know anything about it, put it on another machine or do it in VMWare, because you may not like it.

Re:UNIX vs. LINUX?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you should think for yourself instead of letting everyone else tell you what to do

Re:UNIX vs. LINUX?

[skurk]

I'm thinking "go ahead". I'll do the same thing tonight.

If you don't want to delete your Windows or Linux partitions, you can probably run Solaris inside a VM, like VMWare.

The main reason I'm installing Solaris is to test the cross-platform compability on the programs I develop. But who knows, maybe I'll fall in love with it.. :-)

Re:UNIX vs. LINUX?

[benrockwood]

Give it a shot! Bear in mind that driver support is driven toward servers on X86 and if you have a newish l337 workstation your probly going to be upset at the lack of driver support for all your l337 gear. This is why OpenSolaris is going to be really really kool, we'll finally be able to help Sun fill in a lot of missing driver support on X86 among other things (Portage on Solaris!).

What you'll lack in drivers you'll make up for with DTrace, Zones, and the new SMF (RC Init replacement, try the "svcs" command).

Re:UNIX vs. LINUX?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't listen to either of these guys. Listen to me.

Re:UNIX vs. LINUX?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you should stop asking stupid questions. Just do it!

Re:UNIX vs. LINUX?

[DNS-and-BIND]

Don't.

And if you really, seriously want to do it, for the love of God check the hardware compatibility list and save the rest of us a million questions about why Solaris won't work on your PC. Simple - if the hardware's not on the list, Solaris won't work with it! Really! Sun's not lying in their document.

Re:UNIX vs. LINUX?

[Anonymous Coward]

Portage on Solaris? NetBSD pkgsrc already provides 5,300 packages ready to build on Solaris.

-Install Solaris
-Install gcc
-Install pkgsrc
-'make install' your desired package
-Enjoy

Re:UNIX vs. LINUX?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah... why would i install linux if i get better recent hardware software and more software on windows?

Re:UNIX vs. LINUX?

[Anonymous Coward]

I like the one with the penguin whichever one that is. And the devil guy.

Re:UNIX vs. LINUX?

[Anonymous Coward]

-Install gcc

GCC 3 comes with Solaris 10. It was mentioned on one of the blogs by a Sun employee.

Re:UNIX vs. LINUX?

[davecb]

The compatability list is stuf they know works because they tested it. Other hardware may, but it's like older Linuxes:
- brand-new stuff won't work yet
- really old stuff probably won't
- and seriously wierd stuff definitely won't (;-))

--dave

Re:UNIX vs. LINUX?

[WSSA]

At least some of the HCL is user-contributed (perhaps most of it). I looked up MSI motherboards and found three entries, though none for my particular motherboard. Checking one entry showed it is 'reported to work' and was submitted by "MSI User".

Conclusion: I am going to download it and see if it works!

Re:UNIX vs. LINUX?

[justins]

"Their document" consists of lists of reports from random end users on which hardware seems to work. So really, what was your point again?

Nice HCL.

Re:UNIX vs. LINUX?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just Ask Slashdot then ! *sigh*

Re:UNIX vs. LINUX?

[Jason Hood]

I looked up MSI motherboards and found three entries, though none for my particular motherboard.


There is a big difference between it "working" and it having drivers... My linux laptop has to use the generic IDE support. It works but its slow as hell. Kinda like running X in VESA mode...

Ill let someone else be the canary in the coal mine =) Let me know when manufacturers start releasing drivers/source/docs and I might try it out.

vmware is always a good testbed =)

Re:UNIX vs. LINUX?

[Somegeek]

Did you really not see that it has 3 different segments?

1) Certified by Sun
2) Certified by 3rd party vendors
3) Reported by outsiders

YOU pick the level of certainty that you need.

Link to Sun's description of the 3 types of entries in the Solaris X86 HCL:

http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/tierHelp.html

Re:UNIX vs. LINUX?

[justins]

YOU pick the level of certainty that you need.

This pretty much makes the HCL utterly worthless to me and, from what I can tell, most end users. Hey look, Sun has certified six hardware configurations! And there's a few hundred more that seem to work!

Re:UNIX vs. LINUX?

[Anonymous Coward]

I use Solasis 9 on PC hardware all day every day on my desktop here at work. I have Linux at home, The home system also runs VMWare and I have both Windows 2000 and Solaris 10 running under VMWare. I really do use all this, 60 hours a week at least. I write (mostly) Solaris software for a living.

Solaris vs. Linux on X86 It's mostly a wash. They both can run the same software. Where Solaris REALLY has the advantage is on high-end hardware. I've yet to see Linux running a box with 128 CPUs and a dozen PCI busses. Also Solaris can do things like "boot around" failed hardware. But the differences between Solaris and Linux mostly disapear when you run on "standard" PC hardware.
I use the same Gnome desktop, the same nedit editor and the same gcc compiler and the same Netscape broswer.

Solaris has features needed by people setting up massivly large server farms but Linux can do things like run "VMware" and the film editing software I like "cinelerra" Both will run OpenOffice and Netscape just fine.

Re:UNIX vs. LINUX?

[DNS-and-BIND]

You're not most end users. Solaris is a serious system, for real work. It's not for tinkerers like linux is. If you want a Solaris/x86 box, you spec out the server before you ever get a copy of the operating system media. That way, you never have a moment of trouble, and you have a happy system. This is the way that real sysadmins do their work.

As opposed to the typical linux way of downloading a new OS on a whim and tossing it onto the nearest availible system, no matter what the hardware. And then whining about "it doesn't work" in mailing lists, bulletin boards, and newsgroups. A typical conclusion after the linux user goes through this experience is "Solaris sucks".

Re:UNIX vs. LINUX?

[justins]

If you want a Solaris/x86 box, you spec out the server before you ever get a copy of the operating system media.

Interesting wording there. As if Sun doesn't care about the desktop at all, and doesn't care about making it convenient for end users to actually try the operating system they are offering as a free download. Brilliant strategy.

Look, it's not Solaris I'm criticizing, it's the x86 HCL. It's a worthless piece of garbage. The notion that Sun can't be bothered to test a piece of hardware, quite popular hardware in many cases, and relies on the users to report whether it works or not is just embarassing. Come on guys, you got that $2bn settlement, hire a few freaking QA engineers.

As opposed to the typical linux way of downloading a new OS on a whim and tossing it onto the nearest availible system, no matter what the hardware. And then whining about "it doesn't work" in mailing lists, bulletin boards, and newsgroups.

Except that Windows and Linux are infinitely more likely to actually work on the nearest available system. It's pretty hard to see how that is a bad thing.

Re:UNIX vs. LINUX?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but AFAIK, Sun hasn't ported Solaris 10
to the PPC yet. That's what I'm waiting for...

Re:UNIX vs. LINUX?

[DNS-and-BIND]

Solaris is generally accepted to be a server platform. Every shop I knew that used Solaris/x86 never used them for desktops.

This is how it's worked for a long time, and it's worked well. Repeat to yourself: Solaris is not Linux, it has different goals, and people who build Solaris systems do not deal haphazardly with hardware.

Get a real job, kid, and realize how dumb you sound.

Re:UNIX vs. LINUX?

[neonmagic]

mmm my take on this? Don't. I have several reasons why (and yes i've actually installed Solaris 10 on my system). 1. The install took a freaking one and a half hours! I kid you not. Six or so disk swaps as well. Not good. The automated eject your CD and reboot your system didn't work. Well the reboot did... 2. 4 CDs to download, 1.2 gb or so. And you don't get a lot for it imho. Very poor software value. 3. No where during the install do you get prompted to create a normal user account, it's root and that's it. All post install. That's very bad security imho. 4. The hardware support is no where near as good as Windows or Linux, in fact i'd say hardware on Solaris 10 for x86 is worse than freebsd! 5. CDE blows. Majorly. Why Sun is even still trying to palm this off I don't know. Get rid of it guys! It's slow, old and harder to navigate than what it really should be. You can do it, but the UI isn't great imho. 6. Beware - it totally hogs your entire pc and fucks ANY other bootloader that you have installed. I mean it. I had to boot off a Linux CD with rescue root=/dev/hdx to boot up and then fuck with setting up grub again. I was not impressed. Sun did not probe for other operating systems, didn't mention a bootloader and then hijacks the PC! Not good - period. 7. Solaris cannot live with Linux on the same drive. It will detect the Linux partitions and wipe them. Clean. Not good. Talk about not like to share. 8. The license. Sorry, i'm a GPL guy, and RMS has it 100% right. That's my honest personal belief. Proprietary software needs to go the way of dinosaurs. 9. Performance. Sluggish to say the best. Needs at least 384mb for a GUI install and 12gb hdd space. What a joke. Even post install it's sluggish (and i'm talking a reasonably up to date Athlon 3ghz XP CPU here, 512 mb pc3200 400mhz ddr ram). I noticed a shitload of disk "thrashing"...RAM/CPU hogging as well. 10. Use the fucking bourne shell as the default for ffs. C'mon it's way past it. BASH shits on the bourne shell. If this is the best Sun can do they're fucked. Honestly. It's a proprietary Unix that they're trying to flog for free (and get the money back from support contracts) because they know that they couldn't sell the software as Linux shits on it in just about every area. Others have said "oh Sun can run on 128 CPUs, Linux can't do this, yada yada yada". Sure. I mean sure. Tell that to Google. I bet they don't buy it. We'll add to the list moral issues - Sun is being very dodgy with it's CDDL license, and it knows it. The open source community has already ripped it to shreds. Sun does dodgy deals with Microsoft - and then expects to remain the darling of the Open Source arena? Puh-lease! Sun are nothing but fence sitting, back stabbing corporates, they'd screw their mother to make a buck. And have no regrets/guilt. That's my honest appraisal of them as a company. At least Microsoft openly dislikes Linux, Sun tries to play act that it's Linux' best friend, whilst stabbing it in the back for all it's worth. My recommendation is not to even bother - for the average user, there's no need. If you really must, go for it, but I think you'll be very, very, very disappointed and going "what's the big deal". Sun is blandering on about dtrace and containers, sure they're cool, neat features. 2 years and Linux will have tools with similar functionality. Big deal. *yawn*. Dave

Re:UNIX vs. LINUX?

[justins]

Solaris is generally accepted to be a server platform.

That's a new phenomenon. Ever wonder why their stock ticker is SUNW? The phrase "Sun Workstations" was a valuable brand. It wasn't that long ago that workstations were their primary focus. They gave up making money on those because the PC ate their lunch.

Every shop I knew that used Solaris/x86 never used them for desktops.

Since I worked at a company that used Solaris/x86 PCs (very effectively) this is utterly uninteresting to me. I'm sure you're terribly experienced and know lots of "shops" though.

This is how it's worked for a long time

Riiiiight. How long have you been a Sun user? Seriously, if you're going to be an arrogant cock, at least know what you're talking about.

Solaris is not Linux, it has different goals, and people who build Solaris systems do not deal haphazardly with hardware.

Well, obviously, since they can't. Even Sun has acknowledged that this has to change and has taken steps, so I can't imagine why you're babbling.

Re:UNIX vs. LINUX?

[DNS-and-BIND]

How did they "effectively" use x86 PCs by building them without first consulting the HCL?

Re:UNIX vs. LINUX?

[justins]

I doubt the Solaris x86 HCL was much of a factor one way or another, since it is totally worthless. Solaris x86 seems to work with any Dell with onboard graphics, though. Nice machines, vastly better performance than you'd get spending an equal amount of money on SPARC hardware, decent X server with DPS and some other nice features. (which Sun were just crazy to add since it's a SERVER OS, right?)

Don't mislead people

[Anonymous Coward]

Solaris is no longer available for "SPARC" systems, only UltraSPARC systems. It no longer supports sun4m or sun4d.

Re:Don't mislead people

[Anonymous Coward]

Solaris is no longer available for "SPARC" systems, only UltraSPARC systems
It works just fine on Fujitsu Sparc64.

It no longer supports sun4m or sun4d
Windows XP doesn't work on an XT or a 286 either :)

Re:Don't mislead people

[Anonymous Coward]

It works just fine on Fujitsu Sparc64.

Eh.. It's still a sparcv9. You nitpick!

Re:Don't mislead people

[clymere]

good point. I have 3 sun4m machines. I considered downloading the sparc version of sol10 just to see if it would run, even if in an extremely stripped down install. Thanks for saving me the trouble ;)

Re:Don't mislead people

[Snotboble_]

Correction: It won't even work on an UltraSPARC machine.
I've got a dual-CPU Ultra 10. First message upon booting:
Your system is not supported by this operating system (or something similar).
So I guess it's supported for UltraSPARC 2+ based machines..

Re:Don't mislead people

[asaul]

The U10 is single CPU UltraSPARC-IIi machine, I have a co-worker who installed Solaris 10 on one today.

The machine you are refering to is an Ultra 2 and by the sounds of it has UltraSPARC-I CPUs, which if you check the release notes for Solaris 10 you will see that that the UltraSPARC-I (less than 200Mhz, 64-bit but not quite) is not supported, while the US-II is (200Mhz fully 64bit and above).

Re:Don't mislead people

[Snotboble_]

Correction part 2: The "10" was correct; only in binary - it was an Ultra 2 machine for mere mortals :o)

It has 1 or 2 CPU's of either UltraSPARC 1 167-200 MHz (which was the case here) or 1 or 2 UltraSPARC II 300-400 MHz CPU's.

The UltraSPARC 1 system I had available wouldn't boot Solaris 10.

Re:Don't mislead people

[SunFan]

You can still use Solaris 8 or Solaris 9. Besides, sun4m is already more than a decade old, and sun4u (UltraSPARC) is binary compatible with sun4m for applications.

Of course, there's always OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD, or Linux for your older SPARC systems.

Re:Don't mislead people

[Anonymous Coward]

"Solaris is no longer available for "SPARC" systems, only UltraSPARC systems. It no longer supports sun4m or sun4d."

If you want to be strictly accurate, Solaris 10 is available for SPARC v9 systems, including UltraSPARC and SPARC64, with the exception that the very oldest UltraSPARC I processors running at 200 MHz or below are not supported.

As someone else mentioned, Solaris is still available for SPARC v8 systems, including sun4m -- Solaris 9 and Solaris 8 are still shipping. Solaris 9 will continue to ship until Solaris-after-10 is released (say 2007), and it will be supported for another five years past that (say 2012).

That's quite a run for hardware introduced in the early '90s.

Re:Don't mislead people

[bob beta]

Does that mean it's 64-bit only? Will it run safely on my Ultra 1? (with an instruction exploit in it's firmware that means most people had the firmware that locked-out the capability to run 64-bit for security reasons)

Nightmare for MS

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the important point here is that MS now has TWO Open Source operating systems to fight instead of one.

Re:Nightmare for MS

[Anonymous Coward]

the road up and down is both one and the same. ms will just count everything open source as one enemy. makes it easier to think.

Re:Nightmare for MS

[PygmySurfer]

I think the important point here is that MS now has TWO Open Source operating systems to fight instead of one.

Two? What about the wonderful BSDs I've been using for years?

Re:Nightmare for MS

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the important point here is that MS now has TWO Open Source operating systems to fight instead of one.

Two? What about the wonderful BSDs I've been using for years?

I don't think MS was ever worried about BSD :)

Re:Nightmare for MS

[thakadu]

You may be right, but why then were they so keen to get Hotmail off FreeBSD when they aquired it?

Re:Nightmare for MS

[JeffTL]

The real threats are still Linux and OS X, with which people are more familiar, and besides, they're better with hardware: you don't need to worry so much about hardware compatability lists with GNU/Linux; it'll run on most any modern system, though if you have odd hardware it can be shaky. Au contraire, OS X on PowerPC is sort of like Solaris/SPARC, exccept that a Hell of a lot more people can afford it -- especially with the Mac mini now. Hardware done by software's manufacturer so you just buy a new computer done to get it, something people have to do from time to time anyhow. So Solaris on IA32 is not the answer to weakening the Microsoft near-monopoly -- unless you want the technically challenged to unwittingly replace Windows with it on their incompatible computers, leading to either a geeky friend installing Linux or the purchase of a computer that didn't come with Windows in the first place. And as has already been said, they've been fighting BSD -- when I spoke of OS X earlier in this post I was speaking of only the most accessible permutation of BSD; I understand that FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD are well used in the server market, and that they are also usable as a general desktop.

Re:Nightmare for MS

[Anonymous Coward]

Then why would they be more worried about the open source version of Solaris?

Solaris is obviously the main operating system for SPARC hardware, but on x86 (which is what Microsoft cares about), *BSD is probably an order of magnitude more popular than Solaris/x86.

Re:Nightmare for MS

[CapnGrunge]

MS can embrace and extend BSD anytime they want. Their real issue is Linux' GPL.

Something to play with

[Zinic]

Personally, I've been waiting for Solaris 10 to come out for quite a long time now. I'm looking to make it my main file server and such, replacing the current Linux system I'm running. Don't get me wrong, I love Linux but I'm dying to see what Solaris is like. If anything though it's something new to play with!

Re:Something to play with

[Darkon]

Maybe I missed something, or you guys are smoking something, because I downloaded Solaris 10 from the Sun site at the end of November.

You downloaded 'Solaris Express', which is a kind of rolling beta release they put out. What the article links to is the real deal release version.

Re:Something to play with

[justins]

The confusion is understandable, too, since they had the Solaris 10 "release party" about a month ago, which makes lots of sense. I never understood why nobody called them on that: having a release party without a product to release.

Re:Something to play with

[joshf]

I downloaded and installed Solaris 10 onto my sun4u Ultra 5 about a month and a half ago :)

Re:Something to play with

[justins]

I downloaded and installed Solaris 10 onto my sun4u Ultra 5 about a month and a half ago :)

No, you didn't. You downloaded "Solaris 10: Solaris Express", or what any normal company would call "Solaris 10 Beta".

License summary anyone?

[Vo0k]

I'm really curious what the license limitations are. That is - can I use it for commercial purposes? Can I modify / reverse engineer it? Can I redistribute it?

Re:License summary anyone?

[LeninZhiv]

Have a gander: (Basically I think the answers are "yes", "wait for the source code, this is a binary distribution", and "I don't think so".)

ENTITLEMENT for
SOLARIS 10 3/05 OPERATING SYSTEM

THIS ENTITLEMENT EVIDENCES YOUR AUTHORIZED SCOPE OF USE UNDER THE TERMS
OF THE SUN MICROSYSTEMS, INC. SOFTWARE LICENSE AGREEMENT FOR THE SUN SOFTWARE
INDICATED BELOW (THE SLA) UNLESS OTHERWISE AGREED IN WRITING BETWEEN YOU AND
SUN MICROSYSTEMS, INC. (SUN). Capitalized terms not defined in this document
have the meanings ascribed to them in the SLA. These terms will
supersede any inconsistent or conflicting terms in the SLA.

Licensee/Company: Entity in receipt of Software from an authorized source
Beginning Date of License Term: the date of receipt of this Entitlement
Software: Solaris 10 3/05
Permitted Use: Commercial Use
License Term: Perpetual (subject to termination under the SLA)
Licensed Unit: Registered Computer System
Licensed unit Count: Unlimited
Additional Terms:

1.0 License to Develop. You are authorized to develop software programs
utilizing Software. If you desire to develop software programs which
incorporate portions of Software ("Developed Programs"), the following
provisions apply: (i) you may not modify or add to application programming
interfaces associated with Software; (ii) you are not licensed to use fonts
within Software to develop printing applications unless you have secured valid
licenses from the appropriate font suppliers; (iii) incorporation of portions of
Motif in Developed Programs may require reporting of copies of Developed
Programs to Sun;
and (iv) you will indemnify and defend Sun and its licensors from any
claims, including attorneys' fees, which arise from or relate to distribution or
use of Developed Programs to the extent these claims arise from or relate to the
development performed by you. This Section 1.0 does not apply to the Sun Java
System Application Server Platform Edition 8, Sun Java System Message
Queue 3.5, Sun Java System Directory Server 5, and Java 2 Platform, Standard
Edition (J2SE) included in or bundled with the Software.
2.0 Sun Java Studio Enterprise for Evaluation Only. You may only use the Java
Studio Enterprise (Studio) bundled or embedded with the Sun Java System
Application Server Standard Edition portions of Software for Evaluation Use
unless you purchase a separate license from Sun. Studio may contain a time out
mechanism.

3.0 Sun Java System Directory Server 5. This Section 3.0 applies only
to the Sun Java System Directory Server 5 portion of the Software.
3.1. Definitions.
(a) "Directory Instance(s)" means an instance of the Sun Java System
Directory Server process, slapd, running on a server.
(b) "Entry(ies)" means a single Distinguished Name ("DN") and its
associated attributes.
(c) "Enterprise Wide" means your entire enterprise network.
3.2 License Grant. Sun grants you a non-exclusive and non-transferable
license
for the internal use only of Sun Java System Directory Server 5 (Directory
Server) (where you control, manage, configure and otherwise use the software)
for your internal business use and not for resale or redistribution in any
manner and only for the number of Entries for which the corresponding
fee has been paid. Subject to the limitations of the previous sentence, you may
provide services with Directory Server to users outside of your commercial legal
entity, if any; provided that you may not permit any such user to control, manage or
configure Directory Server.
3.3 Additional Use Conditions.
(a) Directory Server may contain, at no charge, up to an aggregate maximum of
200,000 Entries, across any and all Directory Instances running
Enterprise Wide.
For the purposes of this Section 3.3(a) only, Entries exclude Solaris 10
operating system entries that do not define users.
(b) You may install and run multiple instances of the Sun Java System
Directory Server Console client on multiple computers and platforms for remote
and distributed administration of servers and applications.

Re:License summary anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

License? I don't need no stinking license.

One HUGE kudos to SUN.

[Anonymous Coward]

They called it Solaris 10.
They didn't call it Solaris X.

(Actually, according to the old namespace, it's SunOS 2.10.1)

Re:One HUGE kudos to SUN.

[Zeddicus_Z]

Actually the namespace is 5.X (and thus Sol10 is 5.10)

2.x finished when Sun relegated "SunOS" to technical use and came out with the "Solaris" monkier for marketing purposes.

Re:One HUGE kudos to SUN.

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoops.
So this is 2.5.10?

I remember first solaris was like 2.5.1 or something?

Re:One HUGE kudos to SUN.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun? Forget them... Linux is clearly better. They're already up to 2.6.10!

Re:One HUGE kudos to SUN.

[Anonymous Coward]

monkier for marketing purposes.

Ook.

Re:One HUGE kudos to SUN.

[Temkin]

"uname -r" will return "5.10". Which can apparently confuse some poorly crafted shell scripts.

Re:One HUGE kudos to SUN.

[RupW]

Actually the namespace is 5.X (and thus Sol10 is 5.10)
2.x finished when Sun relegated "SunOS" to technical use and came out with the "Solaris" monkier for marketing purposes.

The way I heard it:

- SunOS 5.x is the kernel.
- Solaris 2.x is the OS distribution (the name 'Solaris' marked the first time they bundled X, IIRC).

So this is Solaris 2.10 but they dropped the leading digit in marketing back at 2.7 (c.f. Emacs - Emacs 21 is version 0.21)

Re:One HUGE kudos to SUN.

[Anonymous Coward]

As another comment says it's Solaris (2.)10 and SunOS 5.10. Solaris 1 was with SunOS 4, yet people seem to have forgotten.

Multiple OS support?

[RatRagout]

Can I install this version without killing my other operating systems?

Re:Multiple OS support?

[LeninZhiv]

Yes, but (unless things have changed since beta69; my download is still in progress), it's not as idiot-proof as installing Solaris 9 was. (Although the hardware support is much better, so the chances of this working on your machine are way higher than with Solaris 9).

It's also surprisingly easy to kill your other operating systems when you install though, so do your homework. (Google "dual-boot" "Solaris 10" etc. and keep reading till you're sure you've filled in all the gaps, and back up just in case). Also of course have a copy of Knoppix and your bootloader configuration around.

Re:Multiple OS support?

[sosume]

if I had mod points, the parent would be +5 Insightful!!!

I killed multiple Windows installations and a BSD installation a few years ago by installing Solaris on a spare partition!! This marked the immediate end of my adventures with Sun software.

Re:Multiple OS support?

[toofast]

If your PC has plenty of RAM, use something like VMWare to try it out first. Or if you have the spare time, setup a beater box in a similar way your computer is now, and test an upgrade or install on the beater box.

The experience you'll pull out of it will be worth it.

Re:Multiple OS support?

[bob beta]

I know people who've done the same in early Linux installs. I don't think all of them ran screaming with fury from Linux.

(why the Mac-ism for a nick? are you a mole for Steve?)

Re:Multiple OS support?

[Nalez]

I do not know if it made it in to the final version, but Sun had talked about intigrating grub in to Solaris 10 X86.

Solaris Zones vs User Mode Linux

[KidSock]

Currently I'm using a UML provider for my website / email / etc. I will be very interesting to see if Solaris 10 Zones perform better. If they do ISPs might provide more power per $.

Re:Solaris Zones vs User Mode Linux

[graf0z]

Currently I'm using a UML provider for my website / email / etc. I will be very interesting to see if Solaris 10 Zones perform better.

I am currently using UML for running multiple servers on one host, and a collegue runs multiple linuces with XEN (he runs it on his desktop, too!), and he says it performs near to native. He demonstrated it to me, very impressive. Easier to administrate than UML. I'll switch to xen. And ISPs will, too.

I'll check opensolaris when it's ported to the xen-arch like netbsd and -soon- freebsd.

/graf0z.

Re:Solaris Zones vs User Mode Linux

[gtoomey]

I'm using linode.com for the same thing. Solaris zones look to be better implemented than virtuozzo .

If Sun can provide a full-featured OS, the slickness of SUSE (easy package management/admin gui), good range of drivers (including nvidia/nforce) then ISPs may well run Solaris.

Re:Solaris Zones vs User Mode Linux

[darkcompanion]

Solaris 10 zones have much better performance than UML, more comparable to Xen or FreeBSD jails. However, Xen runs only on IA32, where Solaris also does AM64 and Sparc. Xen and UML also don't support multiprocessor machines, if I'm not mistaken, and FreeBSD jails do not support things like resource managers, in case of a jail process bringing the whole machine (and other jails) down. Sun has its Fair Share Scheduler, where you can bind a container to one or more processors.

Re:Solaris Zones vs User Mode Linux

[thogard]

However sun Zones require installing an complete OS in the subdir or telling LiveUpdate to do something unusual (which I haven't found any documents about). You can't just copy the tools you need to /home/jail/sbin and start up a new jail like you can with other OSs.

Re:Solaris Zones vs User Mode Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

From my expierence, Virtuozzo makes UML look like a joke.

Don't know why anyone would go with UML when there are tons of virtuozzo hosts out there.

Re:Solaris Zones vs User Mode Linux

[asaul]

Not quite, Zones do need to copy a fair whack of their own setup into the zone directory, but you can minimise the ammount of duplication with lofs mounts of common applications (like /opt or /apps or something).

You dont need to do anything with LiveUpdate, you install your Solaris 10 machine, then use zonecfg and zoneadm to create and boot/reboot/halt the zone.

Re:Solaris Zones vs User Mode Linux

[Temkin]

There's two different ways to install a zone. You can have a sparse filesystem or a full filesystem. Then you can play games with lofs to mount various shared bits. It's quite flexable.

Re:Solaris Zones vs User Mode Linux

[stm2]

Virtuozzo cost 4000$ and each VM cost around 20$. They don't publish their price in the SW-Soft page (guess why!).

Re:Solaris Zones vs User Mode Linux

[Blackknight]

It's well worth the money though. Virtuozzo makes managing virtual machines much easier, and it actually controls access to system resources, unlike projects such as linux-vserver.

Where I work we switched from linux-vserver to virtuozzo and it's a world of difference. No more users complaining about somebody overloading the machine, etc.

Re:Solaris Zones vs User Mode Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Xen and UML run on multiprocessor machines. The UML client processes may not use multiple processors, I'm not positive.

Xen will run on x8-64 and ia64 soon and PPC is coming.

Re:Solaris Zones vs User Mode Linux

[dabug]

Nitpick: XEN will run on multi-processor machines. Each guest domain has access to only one CPU however. This will be fixed in the next major release.

I believe the 64-bit support for x86 chips is in the works too for XEN.

Re:Solaris Zones vs User Mode Linux

[thogard]

zonecfg will not run unless it finds the liveupdate stuff and I couldn't find a way around that and I gave up on it and the box is now running bsd.

Re:Solaris Zones vs User Mode Linux

[jedi63]

You don't know what you are talking about when discussing Solaris Zones. You are specualting.

It is not a complete OS; only the necessities to make a zone work. Where directories can be read only they are simply linked to the original OS's directory. So, if you share /opt from the Global Zone to a zone you then can install something once and it will be there for the zone to use, as well. Or, similar to BSD Jails, if the zone must maitain it or change it, you copy it to the zone's file structure, for example, /export/rootzones/myzone1/usr/lib. However, Solaris Zones are more secure and take less overhead.

And, if you looked up Live Upgrade or lucreate instead of LiveUpdate you might find some docs at http://docs.sun.com.

i want to know

[harlemjoe]

I've never understood the significant advantages of branded *nixes over BSD and linux.

What are the advantages of Solaris over, say, SuSe?

My school runs Solaris, and I find it to be a solid *nix, but why would anyone pay (a large sum of) money for it?

Extend the argument for AIX and HPUX as well...

IMHO this is a good strategy by Sun to keep their OS alive...

Re:i want to know

[Anonymous Coward]

People who are paying large amounts of money for Solaris are doing so because they want hardware and software support from Sun. If something goes wrong, they can have a Sun technician on site in a day. Can you have a Linux kernel programmer on site in a day if your system is repeatedly crashing? Probably not, unless you write out checks directly to him :)

Re:i want to know

[Anonymous Coward]

I thinks it isn't so much a matter of Linux vs UNIX. What people need to realise is that MS has now got an even bigger Open Source fire to fight.

Sun provides a summary of the new features here:
http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/10/top1 0.jsp

My school runs Solaris, and I find it to be a solid *nix, but why would anyone pay (a large sum of) money for it?

You don't have to pay anything unless you want 24x7 support. You can use the free version for commercial purposes! SOLARIS 10 IS FREE (as in speech AND beer).

Bill Gates is going to be feeling very ill tonight. Windows Server 2003 just got dwarfed into the stone age.

Re:i want to know

[lachlan76]

AFAIK (I'm only in high school, and have 512k, so haven't any first hand experience with it) Solaris is a better kernel, and has better vendor support.

Re:i want to know

[deletedaccount]

What are the advantages of Solaris over, say, SuSe? One problem is that some apps only work properly on solaris. So we keep our db stuff on solaris and our services stuff on red hat.

Re:i want to know

[dbIII]

What are the advantages of Solaris over, say, SuSe?

NFS for one. Linux is orders of magnitude better than it was with the early 2.4 kernels with NFS, but still lags behind solaris.

Re:i want to know

[Anonymous Coward]

You pay someone for AIX/HP-UX/Tru64/etc, they will do their best to keep your stuff running in whatever way they can. DEC sent out parts by chopper to customers who were urgent enough. The support Redhat/Suse offers is a joke compared to the bigger unix vendors.

Also, all other unices have been running 64 bits for many years by now, which doesn't matter to your mozilla but it matters in "enterprise computing".

Re:i want to know

[Anonymous Coward]

The big one for me is the application vendor support. I've run Oracle on a couple Linux boxes, and it can be a massive pain in the ass to get all the parts working properly, because there is no "official" linux release. The Solaris versions just dropped right in and started working.

Re:i want to know

[grigori]

Why would you pay a large sum of money for Solaris when it's a free download? Just go get the bits. One difference between Solaris and AIX+HPUX: Solaris will run on your PC (most likely - really! I've seen it on Dells, Gateways, Toshibas, Fujitsu, Compaqs, Sony), while AIX or HPUX you gotta go buy an IBM or HP workstation for lotsa bucks.

Re:i want to know

[FireDoctor]

You would pay $$$ for support, but Solaris is provided free of charge.

Openvms is downloadable too. Most reliable OS.

[zymano]

http://www.openvms.org/

A new operating system every year but software that can't be ported is the still the main problem. Why don't you people realize this. It's the software that is the problem . The software vendors are targeting only a few distributions. Windows .

Well, so much for the warm fuzzies.

[Soko]

From the download page:

LEGAL NOTICE: To receive your free Solaris 10 license, you must register all machines upon which you are installing Solaris 10 and receive an Entitlement Document. Registration is performed in the download process, and the Entitlement Document is returned to you via email.

This is Free Software? OK, it's thier stuff, they can require me to do this, but I'm even less trusting of them than I was before.

Someone please corect me if it's a diffrence between OpenSolaris and Solaris proper.

Soko

Re:Well, so much for the warm fuzzies.

[LeninZhiv]

Do you trust Red Hat? You need to buy RHEL, and don't expect a free license like Sun is giving out here. Once all of OpenSolaris is out I think this will run parallel to Feodora/Red Hat and OpenOffice.org/StarOffice.

Re:Well, so much for the warm fuzzies.

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't be paranoid. They just wan't to get an idea of how many people are using it. It is free (as in speech AND beer after all).
The license the Mozilla license with extra patent protection.

Re:Well, so much for the warm fuzzies.

[Soko]

Trust RedHat? More than Sun. All of RedHat's products are published under the GPL. The license is Free, as in speech. I can even download the SRPMS if I wish, without paying them a dime.

Sure, I need to pay for support for each copy I run, but there's other distros out there that will run most anything RHEL does if they piss me off enough. Fedora is also a RedHat sponsored project, and for that they don't really care how many machines I, as an end user or developer, deploy. They appreciate the bug reports I send them though.

If the app I want is only certified on RedHat, it's a commercial app, and I might as well use Solaris if I'm going the proprietary route anyway.

Maybe I am being paranoid, but I can't shake the feeling that Sun is "playing the OSS game" - they don't want to participate in the community, they're playing games to see how much of the OSS community's strength they can steal.

When will I trust them? When they either GPL Open Solaris or make it plain as plain can be that they will not use thier patents against any OSS developer - even RedHat.

Soko

Re:Well, so much for the warm fuzzies.

[setantae]

All of RedHat's products are published under the GPL

Where can I download the source for RedHatEnterprise Linux then?

Don't base your life view on assumptions, people.

Re:Well, so much for the warm fuzzies.

[Anonymous Coward]

You can get them here: ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/enterprise/. Yes, it is only srpms, but that's what GPL requires. It is not all that challenging (just time consumig) to build a distro from them.

Re:Well, so much for the warm fuzzies.

[Tpenta]

And reply that is generated almost immediately is ...

Licensee/Company: Entity in receipt of Software from an authorized source
Beginning Date of License Term: the date of receipt of this Entitlement
Software: Solaris 10 3/05
Permitted Use: Commercial Use
License Term: Perpetual (subject to termination under the SLA)
Licensed Unit: Registered Computer System
Licensed unit Count: Unlimited

Now what exactly is the problem?

Also, Solaris is the Sun Branded Product. OpenSolaris is the Open source Solaris. Further down the track, Solaris (the Sun Branded Product) will be sourced from a snapshot of OpenSolaris.

Please don't fall victim to the conspiacy theories.

Tp.

Re:Well, so much for the warm fuzzies.

[Soko]

Yeah, OK, RedHat are slime for not directing people directly to the SRPMS. Thing is, they are only required to give those SRPMS to those they distribute RHEL AS 3 to. They are following what the GPL prescribes. BTW:

http://install.linux.ncsu.edu/pub/rhel/AS3/i386/

^^^ There you go. 5 minutes on google to find 'em, and not a "Take That Down!!!" letter in sight.

Soko

Re:Well, so much for the warm fuzzies.

[Ollierose]

Just one point - If you're not a licence holder on the software (In this case, RHEL) then you have no rights to ask for the sources in the first place.

I'm fairly sure theres nothing stopping them from asking for the reciept or invoice for your copy of the software before they are required to give source out.

*note* This is just my interpretation of the "gimme source" clause of the GPL.

Re:Well, so much for the warm fuzzies.

[Soko]

Also, Solaris is the Sun Branded Product. OpenSolaris is the Open source Solaris. Further down the track, Solaris (the Sun Branded Product) will be sourced from a snapshot of OpenSolaris.

Fair 'nuf. Thanks for clearing that up.

Please don't fall victim to the conspiacy (sic) theories.

I haven't yet. I know Sun is trying. When they've tried for a while and not attacked anyone in the FOSS community, I'll likley change my tune.

Soko

Re:Well, so much for the warm fuzzies.

[Anonymous Coward]

Who is this FOSS community?

Let me clear something up for you. There is no "community" no matter what kind of warm fuzzies it gives you.

Re:Well, so much for the warm fuzzies.

[drsmithy]

Where can I download the source for RedHatEnterprise Linux then?

The GPL does not require *you* be able to download the source, only that the people who have had binaries distributed to them be able to download the source.

That said, SRPMs are available from ftp.redhat.com and hundreds of mirror sites.

Re:Well, so much for the warm fuzzies.

[Anonymous Coward]

but I can't shake the feeling that Sun is "playing the OSS game" - they don't want to participate in the community

Not participating? Like releasing NFS and YP/NIS to the public? Releasing OpenOffice? Funding GNOME usability studies?

Sun has been part of the free software community for quite a while. Just because something isn't GPL and FSF doesn't mean it's not OSS.

Re:Well, so much for the warm fuzzies.

[illumin8]

This is Free Software? OK, it's thier stuff, they can require me to do this, but I'm even less trusting of them than I was before.

Dude, they're giving you a free license to run it on as many computers as you want. All you have to do is type in a number in the blank when it asks you how many licenses you want for Intel, how many for Sparc, and they email you back a "Right to Use". How is this not free? Last I checked, a lot of free (as in beer) software required a registration. Take off your tinfoil hat and step away from the keyboard. The Sun police are not going to round you up and send you to jail...

From the email I just received after downloading a copy:

ENTITLEMENT for
SOLARIS 10 3/05 OPERATING SYSTEM

THIS ENTITLEMENT EVIDENCES YOUR AUTHORIZED SCOPE OF USE UNDER THE TERMS OF THE SUN MICROSYSTEMS, INC. SOFTWARE LICENSE AGREEMENT FOR THE SUN SOFTWARE INDICATED BELOW (THE SLA) UNLESS OTHERWISE AGREED IN WRITING BETWEEN YOU AND SUN MICROSYSTEMS, INC. (SUN). Capitalized terms not defined in this document have the meanings ascribed to them in the SLA. These terms will
supersede any inconsistent or conflicting terms in the SLA.

Licensee/Company: Entity in receipt of Software from an authorized source
Beginning Date of License Term: the date of receipt of this Entitlement
Software: Solaris 10 3/05
Permitted Use: Commercial Use
License Term: Perpetual (subject to termination under the SLA)
Licensed Unit: Registered Computer System
Licensed unit Count: Unlimited

Re:Well, so much for the warm fuzzies.

[illumin8]

Trust RedHat? More than Sun. All of RedHat's products are published under the GPL. The license is Free, as in speech. I can even download the SRPMS if I wish, without paying them a dime.

My distro is so uber-leet... I can even download every package and compile it from source! Watching shit scroll by for hours makes me a Linux expert overnight!

Re:Well, so much for the warm fuzzies.

[Decaff]

Sun has been part of the free software community for quite a while. Just because something isn't GPL and FSF doesn't mean it's not OSS.

Well, there seems to be an attitude here that unless Sun does things exactly according to the GPL and FSF they are 'untrustworthy' and, of course, obviously doomed.

Re:Well, so much for the warm fuzzies.

[Anonymous Coward]

Or you can download WhiteBox Linux, where they've done this for you.

Re:Well, so much for the warm fuzzies.

[Anonymous Coward]

^^^ There you go. 5 minutes on google to find 'em, and not a "Take That Down!!!" letter in sight.

Not an ISO in sight either. Worthless.

Re:Well, so much for the warm fuzzies.

[nitehorse]

Where indeed.

I mean, it's not like we (I work for Red Hat) make the source freely available on our own FTP server, or put it in the same tree that gets rsync'd to every RH mirror on the planet.

Oh, wait. We do.

Re:Well, so much for the warm fuzzies.

[SunFan]

This is Free Software?

Sun released their binary only distribution of Solaris 10, today. OpenSolaris is coming later, under an OSI license.

And the "registration" is nothing, really. All you have to declare is the number of machines. Of course, read their Binary License Agreement, too.

This is all really no different than Sun did before with downloads for earlier versions of Solaris. Some details are different (it's cheaper, now), but the majority is the same.

Re:Well, so much for the warm fuzzies.

[Anonymous Coward]

The groupthink at Slashdot is worthy of an Orwellian novel. It's pretty unnerving.

Re:Well, so much for the warm fuzzies.

[SunFan]

"When will I trust them? When they either GPL Open Solaris or make it plain as plain can be that they will not use thier patents against any OSS developer - even RedHat."

Why is the GPL so important, when there are dozens of very popular OSS projects like Apache, Firefox, and X.org that do not use the GPL?

Groklaw.net has a new article about Sun clarifying their patents grant in the CDDL. They're working on it. The naysayers are going to feel foolish about all their recent FUD against Sun.

Re:Well, so much for the warm fuzzies.

[Anonymous Coward]

Registration is important for one reason... install base numbers. Sun can now come up with a number when asked what their install base is for Solaris 10. No registration? You only have dowloads and no connection with the user.

Now, if they were only smart enough to ship their x86 kit with Solaris installed they might even have more...

Re:Well, so much for the warm fuzzies.

[Anonymous Coward]

My distro is so uber-leet... I can even download every package and compile it from source!

Oh man.. thanks for the link.. that chuckle made my afternoon. ;)

Re:Well, so much for the warm fuzzies.

[Decaff]

The groupthink at Slashdot is worthy of an Orwellian novel. It's pretty unnerving.

I think its more like followers of a religion - there is more hatred against those who believe almost the same thing, but don't quite follow the true faith. If you open source something, but its not GPL, that seems to make you more evil than those who don't open source anything. I find the situation with Java particularly laughable. Its a zero-cost product that has been a one of the main factors in the use of Linux as a serious platform for commercial software, yet it is hated so much because Sun doesn't give away the source code under the right license. The fact that the open source 'community' can't seem to come up with a quality Java VM is conveniently ignored.

Re:Well, so much for the warm fuzzies.

[sparkz]

Hang on - are you really arguing for Free Software, or a Free Ride?

RedHat are complying, to that extent.

The problem with the SRPM's is not that they are source-code only, not binaries. The problem is that the binaries include "trademarked" (not copyrighted, therefore not covered by the GPL) images, so you have to rebuild the entire lot from SRPM's (v. easy) after removing their images.

That's a PITA; www.whiteboxlinux.org, and cents (or something similarly named; I forget off the top of my head) are projects which do this.

But then, what is RedHat support worth?! Shitty attitudes, bad manners, "works for me" attitude - I can get that from the F/OSS community, thanks :-)

Re:Well, so much for the warm fuzzies.

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason why those popular OSS projects continue to be popular is because they are GPL compatible. In fact, X.org was started because XFree86 decided to be jerk-offs and make their license GPL incompatible (yes, there was more to it, but that was what actually caused everybody to jump ship).

The CDDL, on the other hand, is not. And will never be. The impression I get from Sun is that they do not want that... they want to make their own little community.

Re:Well, so much for the warm fuzzies.

[sparkz]

Exactly - I love RMS normally, but his comments about the CDDL ("nobody else uses it", or words to that effect) - of course nobody elses uses it, Sun have only just got it approved by the OSI, and released OpenSolaris using it!

Let's see the code opened up, and see what happens.

Where's the source to AIX? (as if anybody would want it?) Where's the source to SCO? (oh, wait, that's at kernel.org ;-)

Re:Well, so much for the warm fuzzies.

[Anonymous Coward]

Where's the source to AIX? (as if anybody would want it?)

Apparently, SCO wants that one pretty bad. Dynix, too. Bot that's another kettle of fish.

Re:Well, so much for the warm fuzzies.

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally I was amazed by the extremely vicious reaction from the Linux community. I think SUN should watch their back 'cos I think the Linux guys just declared jihad http://sidart.blogspot.com/2005/01/linux-jihad-aga inst-sun.html#

Re:Well, so much for the warm fuzzies.

[Decaff]

Interesting!

I was astonished at the reaction of Bruce Perens - someone I used to have a lot of respect for.

Re:Well, so much for the warm fuzzies.

[Anonymous Coward]

Solaris 10 != Opensolaris

opensolaris is OSI-approved
solaris 10 express is 0$ but not 'free' in the same term as a GPL program is

Don't fall for the trap

[Anonymous Coward]

Ulrich Drepper posted this to the libc-alpha (Glibc) mailing list today. "Some people might have heard about Sun's release of the Solaris sources under their dubious license. This license is obviously intended to be incompatible with the GPL. Therefore:

Nobody who intends to contribute to glibc must look at anything but the public header files of the Solaris libc and related libraries.

(Emph. mine) Don't fall for the Solaris trap!

Re:Don't fall for the trap

[Anonymous Coward]

As opposed to falling into the GPL trap?

Sun is rightly protecting themselves from the GNU freaks stealing their work and relicensing Sun's code under the viral GPL.

Simple.

Re:Don't fall for the trap

[Anonymous Coward]

The license being used by Solaris 10 is just the Mozilla license modified to provide additional protection against patents.

In other words Solaris 10 is just as Open Source as FireFox. SO STOP TRYING TO MAKE AN ISSUE OUT OF SOMETHING TRIVIAL

Don't you hate it when people use bold print ;)
It's as if they think we can't read.

Re:Don't fall for the trap

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally I trust the FSF and OSI more on this than I trust someone on Slashdot, but I guess some people will take any old legal "advice" if it's free.

Re:Don't fall for the trap

[Donny Smith]

> Don't fall for the Solaris trap!

How is that informative? If anything, that is stupid. FUD the Red Hat way. Woo - I'm scared, my mouse hand is trembling as I'm clicking on that download link...

First, 99.9% percent of those who try will never see thieir libc contents (or, can't understand them).
Second, it's not that Drepper is some legal expert. Furthermore he has vested interest - the fewer folks look at Solaris the better for him and Red Hat stock price.

Those who can think with their own head should read the FAQ and licensing terms themselves rather than listen legal advice of a coder...

www.sun.com/software/communitysource/faq.xml

Re:Don't fall for the trap

[Anonymous Coward]

Good, I'm sure many talented people will be developing for Solaris because they don't want to be associated with GPL-loving scumbags like Stallman and the other FSF cult members.

As long as Solaris hurts Linux development I'm happy.

Re:Don't fall for the trap

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a great thing. That means that GPL lovers can't steal code from Solaris.

Our company, www.jbmelectronics.com will be switching to OpenSolaris in the near future and will be sponsoring a kernel developer.

We have decided that we don't want to be associated with the FSF politics.

Re:Don't fall for the trap

[illumin8]

Ulrich Drepper posted this to the libc-alpha (Glibc) mailing list today. "Some people might have heard about Sun's release of the Solaris sources under their dubious license. This license is obviously intended to be incompatible with the GPL. Therefore:

Nobody who intends to contribute to glibc must look at anything but the public header files of the Solaris libc and related libraries.

As usual I see the FUD trolls are out in full force this morning. I'll bite...

In case you aren't already aware, there is a difference between OpenSolaris (free as in speech) and Solaris 10 (free as in beer). The first OS, OpenSolaris, is an open-source based OS. While the CDDL prohibits you from directly lifting code and releasing it under a GPL license, I've read the license agreement and I don't see anything that would taint a glibc developer. Obviously you shouldn't have Solaris libc code open in one Window and try to recreate functionality in glibc by reformatting things... that would be wrong, but if someone studied OpenSolaris at University, then went on to contribute to Linux later in life, I don't see any problem with that.

Having said all that, Solaris 10 is Sun's commercial version of Unix. The source code is NOT publically available, but Sun has decided to give it away (free as in beer).

So, if you're an open-source enthusiast, and want to compile everything from source, and possibly tweak your system or modify code, wait for OpenSolaris to be released. If you're more of a practical "I just want a solid commercial Unix that doesn't cost anything" type of guy, then download a free copy of Solaris 10 and be happy that Sun has decided to give it away.

Re:Don't fall for the trap

[hacker]

www.sun.com/software/communitysource/faq.xml

You know, I love how companies are doing this, creating a file extension, and associating that as HTML 4.01 Transitional in their AddType directives. Gentoo did it (and in fact, I still checked, they're STILL doing it), and now Sun is doing it. This document is NOT a valid XML document, nor is it well-formed. In fact, it barely qualifies as HTML (and doesn't even validate against its declared doctype).

Now, for some examples of REAL XML in a browser, go to the Gutenberg XML pages and look at their works. True, valid, well-formed XML, rendered in the browser.

This pseudo "Look ma! I'm using XML" madness needs to end. Its getting tiresome.

Re:Don't fall for the trap

[Anonymous Coward]

How is that informative? If anything, that is stupid. FUD the Red Hat way.

WTF are you talking about? If people look at Solaris source, and then contribute to glibc, they open the glibc project up to being sued for copyright infringement. That's not FUD, that's fact.

First, 99.9% percent of those who try will never see thieir libc contents (or, can't understand them).

We're talking about glibc contributors, not random users.

Re:Don't fall for the trap

[ToLu the Happy Furby]

The license being used by Solaris 10 is just the Mozilla license modified to provide additional protection against patents.

Technically this is false; the differences between CDDL and MPL are either cosmetic-only (Sun's position), or could interact with Sun's patent swap with Microsoft in subtle ways that give third-party developers fewer rights than Sun (recent concerns at Groklaw, which have not been resolved). In any case, MPL contains at least as much protection against patents as CDDL.

More important, though, mozilla.org code is tri-licensed under the GPL and LGPL as well as the MPL. You can obtain it under whichever license you wish. That means the code can be combined with GPL code (obtain under GPL); combined with e.g. CDDL'd Solaris code under the MPL-compatible CDDL (obtain under MPL); or contained in a library linked to by code of any license, including proprietary licenses (obtain under LGPL).

Solaris 10, of course, is licensed under CDDL only.

In other words Solaris 10 is just as Open Source as FireFox.

Solaris 10 is just as Open Source as Firefox, because "Open Source" is a well-defined term that they both meet. However, Solaris 10 is nowhere near as useful to the F/OSS community as Firefox code or any mozilla.org code.

More to the point, the Mozilla Foundation's licensing policy is to make their code as open and available to reuse as possible without allowing it to be completely co-opted ala a BSD-style license. Sun's policy is just the opposite. On paper the MPL/CDDL is a great license, probably better than GPL in this patent-encumbered age. But in reality almost the entire ecosystem of quality F/OSS operating system code--both kernel and utilities--is GPL'd. Sun's choice of license was clearly motivated by a desire to remain license-incompatible with that huge body of code, seemingly in a quixotic attempt to draw resources from Linux and split the Open Source community in two.

Having said that, it was still a very positive thing to have open sourced Solaris, and an Open but GPL-incompatible license is about the best anyone could have expected from Sun given their precarious competitive position. (Lock-in and familiarity with Solaris are the only reasons anyone continues to buy their pathetically underpowered hardware.)

But the difference between Sun and Mozilla is anything but trivial.

Re:Don't fall for the trap

[Anonymous Coward]

associating that as HTML 4.01 Transitional in their AddType directives.

You can do no such thing. AddType associates a filename suffix with a media type, not an SGML document type.

This document is NOT a valid XML document

So? What Slashdot serves as 'comments.pl' isn't Perl. Did you ever consider the possibility that faq.xml is XML on the server? No, of course not, because you are one of those people who doesn't understand that there's no such thing as a filename suffix on the web. All that matters is the media type. It could be faq.avi and it wouldn't matter.

it barely qualifies as HTML (and doesn't even validate against its declared doctype).

No, it doesn't qualify as HTML at all. A document is either HTML or it isn't, it can't "barely qualify".

This pseudo "Look ma! I'm using XML" madness needs to end. Its getting tiresome.

Yet another irrational, ignorant XML flame on Slashdot. It's getting tiresome.

Re:Don't fall for the trap

[v01d]

(Lock-in and familiarity with Solaris are the only reasons anyone continues to buy their pathetically underpowered hardware.)

Well, when you grow up and become a CIO your company can buy whatever you think best. In the meantime, maybe you can tell me what you have that makes a Sun Fire 15k look pathetically underpowered?

Re:Don't fall for the trap

[ToLu the Happy Furby]

The fact that at similar processor counts (and even at similar socket counts for the USIV-based kit) they are outclassed on the order of 3:1 on industry standard benchmarks by Itanium 2 and Power5. Of course it's hard to make these sorts of comparisons across a wide range of enterprise workloads, because Sun is too embarrassed to submit scores to e.g. TPC-C, the most important enterprise benchmark there is.

Obviously a 15k isn't pathetically underpowered by any objective standard; only in comparison to other machines in its class and price range.

Re:Don't fall for the trap

[v01d]

Of course it's hard to make these sorts of comparisons across a wide range of enterprise workloads, because Sun is too embarrassed to submit scores to e.g. TPC-C, the most important enterprise benchmark there is.

Sorry, but your taste in benchmarks isn't worth much to anyone but you. Maybe some people value TPC-H and price, in which case Sun is very well represented; it's takes more than arrogance to be right.

Obviously a 15k isn't pathetically underpowered by any objective standard; only in comparison to other machines in its class and price range.

I don't know of many machines in the 15k's class. The big Itanium and Power5 machines I've seen have all been one-off machines or clusters. I'm not going to argue about the merits of large single machine vs cluster, but they are clearly not the same thing.

Re:Don't fall for the trap

[rhavyn]

I don't know of many machines in the 15k's class. The big Itanium and Power5 machines I've seen have all been one-off machines or clusters. I'm not going to argue about the merits of large single machine vs cluster, but they are clearly not the same thing.

Obviously you haven't been looking. The eServer 595 is a 64 way Power 5 based system that is a standard configuration on IBM's website. And the HP Integrity Superdome is a 128 way IA64 based system this is a standard configuration on HP's website. Neither of those are one offs or clusters and I would say that both of them are in the 15k's class.

Re:Don't fall for the trap

[ToLu the Happy Furby]

Sorry, but your taste in benchmarks isn't worth much to anyone but you.

TPC-C is the gold standard for discussion of high-level database workloads. When academics, system designers, EEs and Internet hangers-on discuss large enterprise servers, they talk TPC-C. Sorry, but brand new TPC-H results don't get breathlessly posted to the RWT forums or comp.arch.

Of course that does not mean that TPC-H is not more relevant to some workloads or that those whose needs match those workloads should not pay attention to TPC-H. It does mean, however, that TPC-C is considered by system designers to be a more interesting workload and that TPC-C gets considerably more attention from all vendors except (apparently) Sun.

I don't know of many machines in the 15k's class.

Um...HP Superdome, IBM p595 (and i595). SGI Altix 3700 is not (currently) positioned at the enterprise space due to marketing and software stack constraints, but the machines themselves much more than qualify. Of course, in their top-end configurations these machines aren't really in the 15k's class--they are far above it in both performance and accompanying price.

On the SPARC ISA, Fujitsu's Primepower 2500 is at least the equal of a 15k. If we don't mind including obsolete machines, the Alphaserver GS1280 would easily outperform a 15k, and a top-end PA-RISC Superdome could match it.

On a purely hardware level, the closest match to a 15k is probably an old SGI Origin (although these scaled higher when fully tricked-out)--a giant flock of in-order chickens. (Incidentally, the top-end Sun kit is now the E25k, which can accomodate a 72 socket/144 core USIV configuration, but the above still applies.)

Re:Don't fall for the trap

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason? There is something called patents. If I look at some code, and write my own version with some of those ideas (making sure to avoid copyright infringement by not copying any source code), I am infringing any patents of theirs that they have on those methods.

It's not FUD. It's what Sun wants. Think about it: Linux is cutting into their sales. They want to kill it. What better way then patents? Get people to look at their source, wait until our implementations are popular, and then sue us into oblivion. Which, unfortunately, is a perfectly legal use of patents.

Re:Don't fall for the trap

[Anonymous Coward]

Since the CDDL is based on the Mozilla license, you might as well argue the same against Mozilla for Konqueror developers.

See Bandwagon.
Jump on Bandwagon.
Wonder why people laugh.

Re:Don't fall for the trap

[sparkz]

This is /. where it's convenient to ignore words when it feels appropriate.
If it were called FreeSolaris, then whining about it not being GPL'd might be valid - it's called OpenSolaris, it's OpenSource, distributed under an OSI-Approved license.

But hey, this is slashdot. Nuff said.

Re:Don't fall for the trap

[Anonymous Coward]

Since the CDDL is based on the Mozilla license, you might as well argue the same against Mozilla for Konqueror developers.

Except for the fact that Mozilla is available under three different licenses, one or more of which is compatible with the GPL. But hey, don't let the facts get in the way of a flame, eh?

Re:Don't fall for the trap

[segfaultcoredump]

The IBM 594 is actually a 32 cpu system (64 "way" using the power5 dual core chips), and the HP is a 64 cpu system (128 "way" using dual core chips).

Sun's 15K has been replaced by the 25K, which sports the USIV. To make things fair you should be comparing Sun's '144 way' server to IBM's 64 way server and HP's 128 way server.

That said, sun's chips are not very good at raw performance, and everybody knows that.

How does Sun fix the performance? Two ways: 1) AMD 2) Fujitsu

As an interesting side note, it would not be too hard to swap those USIV chips w/ dual core opterons (yes, the opterons currently scale to 8 cpu's, but i know that AMD and sun are working together to fix that. Once the chip can address more than 7 other chips, it would be easy to drop it into the F25k's system architecture.

Another possible method is to use the FireLink to join multiple F25k's into one big unit (suppose to be possible w/ Solaris 10 in the "near" future). This would provide a system with characteristics similar to SGI's Altix systems (just with a 72/144 processor node vs SGI's 8/16). The USIII/IV was designed to address over 1024 other processors. It's not really possible to put that into one cabinet, so you'll need some sort of bridge unit like the FireLink unit to pull it off.

All of that said, I'm looking at ways of avoiding the big boxes and using horizontal scaling for our systems. Those systems will always provide better bang for the buck (Sun/HP/IBM/SGI dont sell many boxes over 8 cpu's, so you have got to spread that R&D cost over fewer units). The big systems are impressive, but not many folks really need them. (Yes, I could run the county i work for off of a single F15K, or 20 smaller boxes for 1/10th the cost and get better performance to boot)

Open Solaris?

[AnuradhaRatnaweera]

Wonder what the exact relationship of Solaris with Open Solaris going to be? Probably, it will be something like OpenOffice and StarOffice.

Re:Open Solaris?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't be surprised if Sun dumbs down the SMP and system domain capabilities on OpenSolaris.

Re:Open Solaris?

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed, and the proprietary Solaris will probably kill babies too!

All kidding aside, you're probably right. It's nice to have more options though. Currently I'm downloading Solaris 10 and once OpenSolaris is released I'll switch to that (in my eyes it has more potential). It would be cool if OpenSolaris adopted the BSD way of distributing the source - by cvs/cvsup, and have it dropped into /usr/src where you can do something like "make buildworld". Does anybody know if OpenSolaris will have it's own compiler or will it use gcc like everyone else?

slashdot ad has been up for days

[clymere]

Funny. I started downloading this yesterday, after being prompted to try Solaris10 by an ad at the top of slashdot.

That same ad is at the top of the page now.

In fact, I have seen it a LOT the last several days.

Re:slashdot ad has been up for days

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean you're not running Adblock with Firefox? :)

It works wonders...

Not good for Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

With Solaris 10 being free, and having a large corporation to back it up with legitimate and trustworthy support, the basement-dwellers Linux days are numbered.

Re:Not good for Linux

[randallpowell]

Basement dweller? Several corporations support Linux. I never tried their support so I can't say anything about. However, if Sun can outdo Linux, so be it. Same otherwise. I prefer choice in software but hey, it's captialism at work and may the best product and business model win.

And vice versa

[Anonymous Coward]

If you ever plan on working on ever working on any non-GPL software, be sure not to look at any GPL source code. Doing so contaminates you and may cause a legal issue later on if you end up implementing something similar down the road.

That's what he's saying, isn't it?

Re:And vice versa

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends on if your non-GPL code base requires a copyright assignment or not. Ulrichs warning applies to pretty much every single GNU project, but they're unique in requiring Copyright assignment to the FSF for contributions. Other projects E.g. Linux, have no such requirement. The Copyright on the work is retained by the original author.

This is a "cover your ass" move by the FSF. If they accept patches, and the Copyright on those patches from sources which may, possibly, even slightly be "contaminated" code they would be liable for the infringment not the original author.

Re:And vice versa

[Anonymous Coward]

Right. And the same can be said for a proprietary software project as well. If merely looking at some anti-GPL code is grounds for disqualifying a developer from ever working for a GPL project, then the opposite is also true. The GPL does not in any way permit the redistribution of the covered code in any proprietary form.

Therefore the "GPL developer" can never work on a proprietary software project that is in any way similar to a project he may have perused previously.

Frankly, this is a really dumb way to approach the issue of cross-contamination. As many here point out, there is very little under the computer sun that is new and original. If a similar concept from one project is used in another project, without direct copying of source code, then it ought to be fair game. It is merely a different manner of reverse engineering.

The glibc position on this is backwards and unnecessary.

Re:And vice versa

[Anonymous Coward]

And the same can be said for a proprietary software project as well. If merely looking at some anti-GPL code is grounds for disqualifying a developer from ever working for a GPL project, then the opposite is also true.

Right, and many companies have this as a requirement. I've had to sign a waiver for my employer to promise not to "compete" in the telecoms software business with any Open Source projects, GPL or otherwise, in order to get them to sign my FSF copyright waiver. I know of companies which require that their developers do not look at GPL software while they're on company time or working on a project.

Stuff like this isn't exactly a legal grey area. Go ask the FSF for advice if you don't believe me on this.

Re:And vice versa

[Anonymous Coward]

What I do not appreciate from the FSF is that they substitute legal opinion and facts with paranoia and claim that it is the same thing. (I guess this shouldn't be surprising considering how they bastardized the meaning of the word "Free".)

Paranoia is fine, it keeps the teams out of any trouble. However, the law permits the transfer of information that is learned, so long as that information only resides in the head of a person. Direct copying is wrong, of course, but no one is talking here about direct copying.

Re:And vice versa

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem the FSF have is that there is no way for them to know if what you have provided is similiar because it was learned, or if you copied it. So they err on the side of caution and blanket ban things like this. I think they're allowed a little paranioa personally.

Re:And vice versa

[mbanck]

What I do not appreciate from the FSF [...]

Ulrich Drepper is a RedHat employee and only affiliated with the FSF as much as he happens to be the GNU C library maintainer. However, he is known to have quite an anti-FSF stance and accused RMS of trying to steer glibc development according to his agenda before (see the second half of this announcement).

So this is not really the FSF who are taking this stance, but a concerned developer.

Michael

Sun who?

[spagetti_code]

flamebait on...
Sun is becoming increasingly irrelevant in the server and enterprise space. They have known that for a while - hence their desperate moves to 'out GPL' linux with an apparentl big s/w giveaway.

But I just dont see people giving up linux and moving to sun, instead I see the opposite. Small to mid sized accounts will increasingly see linux as the core to their infrastructure.

Sun will hold large enterprise accounts for a while until Redhat or IBM really nail the enterprise feature set. Sun will also hold on to its hardware business for a while - but as google has shown, throwing gobs of cheap h/w at a problem is way more effective than high end servers.

After that, its going to be bye bye sun.

In fact, I predict Sun will become another linux vendor, just like IBM, Novell.... Resistance is futile, all your base are belong to us.

Re:Sun who?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, you're a Linux/GPL fanboy?

Was there anything else you wanted to add?

Re:Sun who?

[spagetti_code]

Actually, I'm an MS fanboy :-)

I dont just bend over for anyone you know.

My reasoning is as follows...
I worked on a product where we supported 37 different variants of unix. What a nightmare, we had config scripts up the wazoo. And now linux is:
a) going down the same path
b) doing it a damn sight faster
c) adding the joy of kernel-version-hell to the joy of dll-hell and distro-hell.

For all we hate MS - there is only one MS. And one XP. And I can write s/w today that will work tomorrow, and probably for several years. And wont need 20 installers nor to be re-released for each kernel mod.

MS have their own problems - they are releasing dev tools and s/w faster than people can really deal with them. Hell, we still want to write code in MFC (or is that winforms, no wait. Thats obsolete already).

MS are just such a great marketing organisation that we may as well jump on for the (very expensive) ride. Because everyone else does. And *thats* what really matters, the customers.

Re:Sun who?

[burns210]

So you picked a platform based on marketing? No, you should pick a platform on what fits the project best, wether it be linux, unix, windows or other.

Just because dumb clients can be swooned by a BS ad about Windows doesn't mean you need to pander and encourage it.

Re:Sun who?

[Anonymous Coward]

Please tell that was a decent troll and not some baring of your true self.

Re:Sun who?

[Anonymous Coward]

All you've done here is make a bunch of predictions with no reasoning to back them up.

Why will people not give up on Linux and move to Sun ? Why will the opposite happen ? Why will small to mid sized accounts increasingly see linux as the core to their infrastructure ?

Your Googole example is irrelevant - Google have shown that their infrastructure does not need 5x9s reliability, if they have a hardware failure during a lookup then you might get 10,000 results returned instead of 12,000. Would you notice and would it really matter ? Now imagine your are a bank, a teleco provider or a pharmicutical company ... now it would REALLY matter.

Linux has it's place, Solaris has it's place, those places are starting to overlap.
But destroying the competition in a certain areas would end up with Micro$oft syndrome.

Why can't everybody play nice :p

Oh and Sun will NOT become another Linux vendor, been their, tried on the t-shirt, didn't fit ;)

Re:Sun who?

[Lumpy]

On the contrary I see lots of people downloading and installing it to mess with and learn from.

If I dink with it at work for the next year, It's another keyword I get to put on my resume. Solaris Administration, deployment and operation.

It also helps that I saved several UltraSparc 5's from the destruction truck 2 years ago...

Professional experience with Sun hardware for free :-) now I get to update the OS and get to list 8,9, and 10 on the resume!

It creates a way to get more people who are familiar with their OS out there for free.

Just like all the linux professionals.

Re:Sun who?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but as long as linux is associated with Stallman, the FSF, and other associated leftist fascists then many people will be turned off by linux.

Real professionals that don't have communist agendas like Stallman appreciate the professionalism of Solaris.

Re:Sun who?

[Anonymous Coward]

the server and enterprise space.

Not from where I'm working (telco).

Of course the other day I exchanged e-mail with a guy who's running a 4TB database on a SunFire 15K.

There are somethings Linux can't do (yet?). For that you have Solaris (or AIX or ...).

Re:Sun who?

[dbIII]

throwing gobs of cheap h/w at a problem is way more effective than high end servers

It depends entirely on the problem. In my case that mostly works, but I still have a reasonably old sun enterprise with solaris 8 that serves files over NFS faster than anything linux 2.6.10 can do yet - even if I had put linux on that same hardware.

Re:Sun who?

[Chanc_Gorkon]

Unless you are talking about Linux, IBM already had the enterprise. AIX is the enterprise OS and it's pretty darn good. Support for LPAR's, very good SMP support, HACMP, HAGEO, and 64 bit support. IBM can brign this all to Linux, but they have to fight the SCO monkey yet.

Re:Sun who?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea, I don't think so.

On one hand your touting Redhat which is coming from the bottom up, then saying Sun is irrelevent because it's coming from the top down.

Sun won't totaly leave the hardware business, and people have been predicting the death of servers since 1985, yet the market has grown 100X since then.

Truth is, whenever there has been an significant advance in hardware capacity, software utilization has quickly grown to suck it up, and some.

Re:Sun who?

[Anonymous Coward]

Great comeback, loser.

Re:Sun who?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Real professionals", haha, I always laugh when people use that term. If it doesn't fit your agenda, then the person is somehow not "real". Nothing but a label, and "real professionals" is a nebulus concept anyways.

My profession as a sysadmin has me dealing with hundreds of Sun servers from ancient Ultras to the latest gear. Sun is nothing special. Their support is good, the hardware is overpriced and underpowered (and is seriously lacking in quality control for the past few years), and the OS is struggling to keep up to the times.

Re:Sun who?

[Anonymous Coward]

Like what?

Oracle runs on Linux as well. Are you saying that Linux cannot handle a 4TB database?

Re:Sun who?

[releppes]

As long as the flamebait is on...

You're right....just the opposite. I'm a Linux user moving away from Linux. I like to hack, but I just want something that works all the time. I now use NetBSD because it's clean and it works. Plus I mostly avoid all the GPL zealots with their misinformed idea of what open and free mean. I'll take free beer thank you!

The demo

[digitalchinky]

I tried the 'demonstration' on their website, I got as far as the blue stripe with Sun logo and nothing else happened - I've been waiting for 5 minutes now.

Just a white screen. Does this mean solaris ten is... a box of nothing?

Re:The demo

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it means you don't know how to configure a web browser.

Re:The demo

[dabigpaybackski]

Just a white screen. Does this mean solaris ten is... a box of nothing?

You mean you didn't get the retail box with the fortune cookie?

Re:The demo

[digitalchinky]

How on earth am I trolling? As a matter of fact, yes I do know how to configure a web browser, not that that matters to someone so willing to immediately pounce with the inferred opinion that any odd failure implies stupidity on the users part.

Besides that, I hit refresh and away it went - worked fine, this does not detract from the utter crud that is present within the flash animation, hardly a demonstration of anything relevant to solaris. Market droid rubbish.

Just sorry yourself and the moderators missed the joke. Not that I really care. Life goes on.

Sun Fanboy perhaps?

Linux vs, branded *nix?

[Savage-Rabbit]

I've never understood the significant advantages of branded *nixes over BSD and linux.... My school runs Solaris, and I find it to be a solid *nix, but why would anyone pay (a large sum of) money for it?


Traditionally the branded *nixes have been more stable than Linux, performed better especially on large multipro systems, been guaranteed to work practically 100% of the time on certified hardware, been better tested and not on the OS using public like Linux still is to a large extent. Furthermore, with the big brands, if you have a mysterious bug or kernel panic you get a number to call and somebody works on it 16 hours a day till the bug is fixed. I can vouch for that last part, I used to do it for a living with a major Branded *nix. I will freely admit, however, that Linux is catching up with the branded *nixes. It has practically killed them off on most stand alone workstations and it is eating into the small to medium server market which is probably also why Sun is doing this.

Re:Linux vs, branded *nix?

[obender]

Furthermore, with the big brands, if you have a mysterious bug or kernel panic you get a number to call and somebody works on it 16 hours a day till the bug is fixed.

This is simply not true. Years ago when we upgraded HPUX the way memory pages were locked was changed. In the old version you could have more than one process read from a memory page, in the new one only one process could read. Our software ran much slower and we had serious problems. In spite of having an expensive support contract we got zero help. We were told this was a feature and not a bug. In the end we had to adjust our software and work around the OS bug by aligning all the shared memory buffers to page boundaries. How is that different from Windows?

Re:Linux vs, branded *nix?

[v01d]

This is simply not true. Years ago when we upgraded HPUX the way memory pages were locked was changed.

It doesn't sound like you found a bug. It sounds like you should have done more research prior to upgrading your OS. Is it a bug that Windows 2003 no longer allows writing to random spots in memory like DOS did?

I found a bug in HP-UX 11.0 support of NFS AUTH_NULL mounts at around 3:00p, and had a brand new patch emailed to me by the next morning. That's something that hasn't happened in the OSS world.

Re:Linux vs, branded *nix?

[Anonymous Coward]

1. I found a bug in HP-UX 11.0 support of NFS AUTH_NULL mounts at around 3:00p, and had a brand new patch emailed to me by the next morning. That's something that hasn't happened in the OSS world.

Maybe not for you, though Theodore Tso *PERSONALLY* sent me a patch years ago to fix a Linux kernel file system defect. I just posted what I found. Didn't ask for special treatment or demand a fix...and yet, there he was asking if I wanted to give his patch a try. I did and it worked. The response time was well within 24 hours and that was posting on Usenet.

Re:Linux vs, branded *nix?

[obender]

It doesn't sound like you found a bug.

If it is described in the manual it's a feature. If the opposite is described in the manual it's a bug. To make matters worse it took HP a week to reproduce it (they needed more than one physical disk to write to and they kept trying with two different logical volume on the same disk).

It sounds like you should have done more research prior to upgrading your OS.

Our test system did not have enough resources to make this bug obvious.

had a brand new patch emailed to me by the next morning

I suspect they already had the patch before you even reported the problem.

That's something that hasn't happened in the OSS world.

In open or closed source you're likely to get better support if you have a problem that is experienced by many other people. If you're the only one reporting it you're pretty much on your own. That's when OSS has an advantage. When I had trouble running Apache on AIX I just modified the source and moved on.

Re:Linux vs, branded *nix?

[HuguesT]

Hmm,

What tends to happen in the OSS world is that (in my experience)

(a) I will find an unusual bug with some functionality I haven't tried before, trace it down and find this is a kernel issue.

(b) hit google and the forums and find out that the bug had already been

1- reported
2- duplicated
3- fixed already.

(c) apply the solution.

(d) profit.

Once in the last 10 years I found a bug no one else had reported. I posted it on the Linux kernel mailing list, then someone responded with a methodology for narrowing the possibilities which implied applying a one-line patch, and gave a workaround immediately. The patch was in the next minor release of the kernel.

My experience with proprietary unices is opposite to yours. I would find a problem, narrow it down to a kernel issue, find it had been reported and then that unless it was for some reason a priority for the vendor it hadn't been fixed, with no workaround other than "disable the service". My experience is particularly bad with HP/Tru64 and SGI.

This is not universal. There have been long-standing problems with Linux like with USB or the VM subsystem at some point and FireWire now, that tend not to get fixed quickly because there is conflict as to how to go about it amongst the developers. Usually however you are not completely stuck. Some unofficial patch can make your hardware work, unless you are out of luck due to the hardware vendor not playing ball for example.

Piffle

[onyxruby]

Last I checked Microsoft made a fortune selling the OS instead of hardware. Hardware is cut throat with incredibly margins whereas with Operating Systems your margins are incredibly high. The only reason at all Sun or Apple can make decent margins on their hardware is because they are the sole providers of their proprietary systems.

Sun simply isn't making the money that you think it is.

Re:Piffle

[mstefanus]

Microsoft can make that much money from selling their OS is because their dominance in the market. They can pressure people to increase their dominance even more.

If Apple sells an x86 version of Mac OS X and want to increase their market share in the PC OS market, they won't be able to charge as much as Windows. The competition is also hard and rough in the PC world. Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, etc2. Another problem is that there are too many variations with PC hardwares. Apple are comfortable with the limited hardwares available for Macs. It is easier to ensure that devices work smoothly and integrated with the OS.

Re:Piffle

[onyxruby]

They make that much because they have a standardized consistent format. Linux does not have this, Solaris does but it is limited (largely) to their hardware and has never been oriented to the consumer market in the first place. The only other OS that has ever been aimed at the mass consumer market is Apple's.

They have the standardizataion, they have the name brand, they have a market of established consumer software. They have consumer oriend distribution channels and developers that know their products on a widespread basis. Linux, FreeBSD and umpteem flavors of Unix do not have this consumer base. They have commercial bases and programmer bases. They are not mass distribution consumer ready products (I've used Linux off and on for years in addition to a Linux firewall - not a basher)

PC hardware is largely the same as apple hardware anymore anyways. Apple uses USB and firewire, PCI, standard memory, hard drives, mice, keyboards etc. About all that is really proprietary is their motherboard, chipset and CPU. All of which is a moot point as they are a unix bases OS that was originally ported from X86 to begin with! Porting back to X86 isn't nearly anything like it would have before the current unix based OS. From what I understand Apple has had an internal Athlon 64 based beta build of 10.x for a while now anyways.

Re:Piffle

[rivimey]

The fact that it can be ported (which I dont disagree with) doesn't mean it would be good to port it for the average user.

Just think how many people now use XBox. It is basically a PC, and yet many gamers went to XBox because of all thr problems they had in getting their PC games to run on their particular hardware.

Platform stability is more important than some people believe.

Re:Piffle

[onyxruby]

Platform stability is very important. As someone who daily stuggles with various unstable platforms I agree completely. Unfortunately marketing decisions are rarely made bases on platform stability. After all just look at most software that is out there, it is very unstable with incredibly numbers of bugs. Let's face it as well, there have been some pretty unstable Mac OS's over the years as well.

Xbox is basicly a PC, I agree, it also moving over to the PowerPC architecture for the next version. Think about that for a moment.

The average user finds the Mac OS very easy to use. What they don't find so pallatable is the sky high price, a problem Jobs finally actually did something about with their new $500 mac that uses a three year old CPU. If they could start selling their OS, which is actually now fairly good, their are a good number of people who consider using it (heck even I would).

Apple has always wanted a wholely proprietary environment that they could own. This has cost them countless billions over the years, the future is open with their current OS though.

As far as drivers go (huge source of instability), simply put in the OS a requirement to have all drivers signed. WHQL already does this with Windows. All the manufacturer does is submit their driver for approval and get it ok'd. Since unapproved drivers couldn't be installed, the stability point on this matter becomes moot. Most hardware manufactures would be probably be willing to do this. Just look at how many linux drivers are out there, and Linux has a similiar market share to Mac.

Re:Piffle

[imroy]

...they have the name brand, they have a market of established consumer software.

I think you'll increasingly find that this is all that Microsoft really has going for Windows anymore. Apple is making a resurgence on the Desktop front. Linux and the BSD's are strong in many of the server roles. F/OSS in general is encroaching on MS's turf (e.g Mozilla/Firefox and OpenOffice). Attention is turning to small embedded devices (phones, PDA's) and media devices. MS is putting focus in these areas but hasn't been overly successful. Linux is showing up increasingly in small embedded devices. The fight isn't over yet but MS is definitely under pressure in this and other areas.

The biggest thing MS has going for it is momentum. People know Windows and Office. Once a cheaper and better product is available then it's just a matter of time before people switch over. That's why MS and their followers have been pumping out so much FUD of late. As time goes by, Linux and F/OSS in general gets better and more people learn about it. It's already "good enough" in many fields and is fast approaching MS's golden goose: the corporate desktop. Don't forget that Windows and Office are the only products out of MS that actually turn a profit for the company. Once those two pillars start crumbling, the whole company will come tumbling down. Mind you, $35B goes a long way to keeping a company afloat... :(

Re:Piffle

[MasterD]

Sun simply isn't making the money that you think it is.

Did you notice that the link you provided was a story from 2003 about the quarter ending June 2003? Hardly seems relevant today.

Re:Piffle

[Anonymous Coward]

They make that much because they have a standardized consistent format.

That's a major point. If Linus ever released a standard "Official" distribution of Linux like the FreeBSD group does or Sun does with Solaris then it would take off, but otherwise I'm afraid it'll always be relegated to hobbyists and corporations who can afford to take risks with their operating systems on a handful of workstations or servers. We use a lot of Linux and Windows boxes at work, but for the truly mission critical stuff we use Sun servers running Solaris. I can't afford to be woken up in the middle of the night because my server has a kernel panick because of some flaky Linux kernel module or Windows has a BSOD attack. Solaris just runs like a champ.

Re:Piffle

[)-(ellbilly]

Interesting you use an article from 2003 to talk about Suns earnings. How about something a little more current

..."Revenues for the second quarter were $2.843 billion, a decrease of 1.6 percent as compared with $2.888 billion for the second quarter of fiscal 2004."
sure its a slight decrease but 2.8 billion in sales for a 3month period aint exactly as you say...."not making money"
Earnings

Cheers,
]-[ellbilly

Re:Piffle

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you seriuosly think that for example IBM isn't making money by selling their bigger boxes that doesn't have Intel inside? Sure, they're selling services, but the hardware isn't exactly something they lose money on.

Re:Piffle

[joescrooge]

you quote an article that's almost 18 months old as news???

Re:Piffle

[duffbeer703]

Microsoft is more similar to Budweiser or Marlboro than Apple.

Budweiser is the #1 beer because they are everywhere. Budweiser is in the most prime areas of every supermarket, drug store, and deli in the US.

Microsoft's "secret" is OEM Licensing. They are the big kahuna of the PC industry, and have OEM licensing agreements with everyone, large and small.

A company like Apple or Sun cannot build that OEM network overnight, because they don't have established relationships with all of the vendors. If you were the Apple salesman trying to get Dell to put OS-X on Dell PCs, you'd have to give the product away to make them do it...

And why would they? Dell has a cozy agreement with Microsoft that makes both parties alot of easy money. Why confuse the customers and hurt the Dell-MS relationship for something that may (or may not) make Dell a dime?

Re:Piffle

[superpulpsicle]

Well Sun really only have 2 choices.

(1) Use their own hardware, and make no money off it.

(2) Don't use their own hardware, and hire more developers to support infinite combinations of non-proprietory hardware.

Re:Piffle

[Brandybuck]

Budweiser is in the most prime areas of every supermarket...

Actually, at the supermarket I frequent, the first beers I see when I enter the beer aisle are the microbrews. Budweiser is halfway down the aisle. I'm starting to see this in more and more places. IIRC, I actually have to walk past Millers to get there.

Of course, this is a grocery store. Bud is five cents cheaper around the corner at the liquor store, where the Budweiser is prominently displayed. If you're the type of beer drinker where five cents is more important than a beer that tastes like beer, then you'll go to the liquor store and buy Bud.

Re:Piffle

[Anonymous Coward]

Just think how many people now use XBox. It is basically a PC, and yet many gamers went to XBox because of all thr problems they had in getting their PC games to run on their particular hardware.

Rubbish. Most PC gamers simply don't have such problems. When was the last time you played a PC game, in the DOS days?

People buy the XBox because of games only available on the XBox, and for the ease of use. You can't take a PC game CD over to a friend's house, plop down on the couch, and play right off the bat, like you can with a console.

Re:Piffle

[HiThere]

But since Linux DOESN'T release a standard version, Red Hat releases a Red Hat standard version, and Novell releases a SuSE standard version, and Debian releases a Debian standard version...and they're all compatible at the source level...so Gentoo releases a Gentoo standard version. O, and Mandrake releases a Mandrake standard version.

And note that each one of those versions is aimed at a slightly different market. Which Linux certainly couldn't do.

It's true that Linux doesn't have a simple hierarchy of power. So? This is bad? Now I'll admit that many people find it uncomfortable, but others find it the only environment that they are comfortable in. And this means that most of those drift over to Linux. It's not like they have lots of other places to go. But if you like a strict hierarchy, then nearly ANY corporation will suit you. So Linux gets work contributed that others need to pay for. So Linux is seen as friendly (by those who like it), where corporation dominated software (even Apple) is seen as demanding. (Just yesterday I encountered someone complaining because Apple was insisting that he upgrade his iTunes. Yes, it was a free upgrade, but he didn't like being forced to upgrade it. With Debian, today, I was told that if I wanted to do a dist-upgrade it would remove gnome and gnome-desktop. I've done an upgrade, and it allowed me to do that without removing gnome. [Now I need to find out why it was going to remove gnome...perhaps there's a good reason. But I can put that off until I find it out.])

Re:Piffle

[Anonymous Coward]

With Debian, today, I was told that if I wanted to do a dist-upgrade it would remove gnome and gnome-desktop. I've done an upgrade, and it allowed me to do that without removing gnome. [Now I need to find out why it was going to remove gnome...perhaps there's a good reason. But I can put that off until I find it out.])

The reason is explained here. (Just kidding. I'm not into flamewars on either side. I use Debian with wmaker myself.)

Re:Piffle

[HiThere]

Turned out that if I wanted to do the upgrade, I needed to upgrade to an unstable version of gucharmap. Since that's only used for managing Unicode character translation, I decided it was safe enough, and now I've dist-upgraded after doing the install from unstable. And everything seems to be working fine. (Of course, I'm in KDE rather than Gnome... but presumably...)

where is x86_64 version? x86 is not x86_64!

[Anonymous Coward]

im only seeing x86 and spar version on suns download pages.

anyone care to point out where the actual opteron stuff is?

or what does sun mean by writing x86? or isnt there any x86 (i386/486/586/...) build any more? just opteron and they call that x86?

whut? i dont get their naming convention.....

Re:where is x86_64 version? x86 is not x86_64!

[Darkon]

The SPARC version used to include 32-bit and 64-bit packages on the same CDs, although I think they dropped the 32-bit SPARC stuff now. I'm guessing the x86 version does the same thing and will install 64-bit on processors that support it and 32-bit otherwise.

Re:where is x86_64 version? x86 is not x86_64!

[asaul]

The "x86" branding is because it covers the x86 instruction set i.e not just 80386,80486,Pentium, Intel Celeron or AMD Athlon or Cyrix or whatever else emulates it.

Solaris 10 x86 supports 64 bit in the same way that SPARC does, with architecture specific modules depending what kernel you boot. If you boot "kernel/unix" you get generic 32-bit x86 architecture kernel. If you boot "kernel/amd64/unix" you get 64 bit goodness on Opteron and EMT64.

I have been running it 64 bit on an Athlon 64 notebook for some weeks now.

Solaris 10 install hang at USB detection on VMware

[Thaidog]

My fellow coworkers and I at IBM ebiz operations were happy to see Solaris 10 come out about 2 months ago... so we tried to create a virtual machine with Vmware... on both the Linux version and windows version the install hangs at the USB hardware detection for some reason. I hope this has been resolved. (All done on different hardware for the host machine as well)

At last!

[Anonymous Coward]

At last that advertisment from the top of my /. page travelled to newsline!

Re:At last!

[Anonymous Coward]

You're lucky. For me they (the long, horizontal banners) travel to the right-side "advertisement" piece (for vertical ads) in the menu, screwing up whole layout.

Re:The hole in our Apple theories [winhat]

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple has always been about steve jobs. Imagination is more lucrative than selling the hardware.

The sun is the lowest portion of the opposite being true. The druids were ancient celtic priests. Their group still exists today in secret, despite the existence of charlatan groups claiming to be free. Scott simply wants to be free. He simply wants to be free. He simply wants to support microsoft anyways?

They argue that selling the hardware.

You are missing the point

[Anonymous Coward]

You are missing the whole point.
It isn't UNIX vs Linux. So you don't have to waste time spreading FUD about Sun. That's Microsoft's approach to dealing with competing Open Source products. The point is Sun isn't going away anytime soon and it has provided us with a second Open Source OS to counter MS.

High school kids fantasizing about the demise of Sun are quite amusing, but tedious.

Re:You are missing the point

[spagetti_code]

I do get it, but maybe from a different angle. Having another another OS OS (Open Source OS) doesn't improve the situation - it really messes it up.

Love em or hate em - there is only one MS. And you know just where to get software and who to turn to when there's a problem.

Consumers (the great unwashed, not the really squeeky clean like you and me who know what their doing) want a single choice. And linux doesn't give that to them. And without them (bless their hearts) there's going to be no epiphany of the gestault - no sudden greater understanding that Bills and bad boy and you should listen to Linus.

Re:You are missing the point

[Anonymous Coward]

We are not discussing consumers here. Solaris 10 is an advanced SERVER operating system. Idiot consumers choosing MS WinXP are not the target market. WinXP is a fine desktop OS but on the server it is living in the stone age.

there is only one MS. And you know just where to get software and who to turn to when there's a problem
Ther is only one Sun. An you know just where to get software and who to turn to where there is a problem.

Re:You are missing the point

[spagetti_code]

I think we agree there - WinXP is unlikely to run your telco and your bank/insurance backend for a while.

Linux, however, has the capability to replace solaris. It will take work by IBM (and maybe redhat, but I am not sure they get the Enterprise space you).

What I may need to restate is that MS is a great marketing company and, whether or not their technology stinks, truckloads of people buy it. So we (the dev community who sell their brains to the highest bidder) build software for it.

Re:Openvms is downloadable too. Most reliable OS.

[pchan-]

Sure, except that it runs on VAX, Alpha, and IA64 (Itanium), none of which is easy to come by for the layman.

from their faq

There are no plans to provide a native port of HP OpenVMS for any systems based on [IA32 or] AMD Opteron.

Additional infos

[lanc]

They have released sol10 with really nice features, cool.
They set it not hardcore-GPL, but at least Sun-defined opensource. Alright.
But what the hell is this about giving the 1600 patents only for CDDL projects?

They show supporting Linux, support the opensource-community, but they cannot/dont't want to move? Could someone explain pls?

I tried x86 Solaris 9.. didn't like it.

[ABeowulfCluster]

sucks if you don't have supported hardware Basically throw away the 'install instructions' and go browse user forums of how to actually do it. Using the defaults for partition sizes also didn't work under 9.0 when I tried it... again another case of 'read what other people have done' rather than follow the instructions. So I won't be trying out 10...

Re:I tried x86 Solaris 9.. didn't like it.

[Darkon]

sucks if you don't have supported hardware

Solaris is a server-class OS that was never intended to run on the kind of commodity hardware most people have in the box on their desk. That said, maybe now it's open source people will start writing and contributing drivers.

Re:I tried x86 Solaris 9.. didn't like it.

[ABeowulfCluster]

People don't like to write drivers for old hardware, so don't expect people to madly rush to write drivers to support last years chipsets when THIS years chipsets are shiny and cool.

Re:I tried x86 Solaris 9.. didn't like it.

[lanc]

Solaris is a server-class OS that was never intended to run on the kind of commodity hardware most people have in the box on their desk.

Hm. explain this to my notebook, with Gnome, firefox, gaim, etc (from blastwave.org). Was a bit of a fight to get the rtl8139 card and the sound to work - but worth it.

Re:I tried x86 Solaris 9.. didn't like it.

[thogard]

It doesn't support drives bigger than 128 gig on a sparc based x1 made by sun and less than 2 years old. It also doesn't support drives bigger than 128 gig on a v-100 which you can still buy new. The serial port drivers still have kernel thread dead locks that have been there since the 1st versions of solaris 2. There is still lots to be fixed in solaris.

Re:I tried x86 Solaris 9.. didn't like it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure they do, we have terabyte volumes attached to our smallish Sun machines. Maybe the IDE controller doesn't support it, but who cares?

Re:I tried x86 Solaris 9.. didn't like it.

[Anonymous Coward]

People have been writing device drivers for Solaris before as well. Get a decent book and hack away, I even have "Writing Open VMS Alpha Device Drivers in C" in my bookshelf, another proprietary OS which you can write device drivers for.

Re:I tried x86 Solaris 9.. didn't like it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, Solaris 10 has made dramatic improvements in hardware support over Solaris 9. Even the difference between internal builds has been very surprising. When I was testing it, I was having problems getting a network adapter working on build 55, but that was cleared up in build 56. I've seen similar improvements in video card support, but now with the switch to the x.org X server instead of the traditional Xsun server, video support is even more improved. So if you're basing your hardware compatibility against Solaris 9, it might not be a bad idea to check out Solaris 10.

Driver support

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently Sun has "dramatically" increased the number of programmers they have working on drivers for Solaris 10.

Re:Driver support

[ThaReetLad]

you mean they added ANOTHER one!?!?

Re:Openvms is downloadable too. Most reliable OS.

[Bert64]

I have OpenVMS media, and machines to run it on, i've just never been able to sign up for a license... Most of the user groups i had to join required a fee, the one i found that i could join wouldn't let me download the openvms license..

Forgive my ignorance..

[oldwolf13]

I'm just about done downloading the 5 pieces of the dvd..

So I decided to read the assembly directions. Turns out they're just an html page of the download center... have nothing about combining the parts into a dvd.

Now I've never had to do this before, so I figured I'd ask here, in case any other /.'ers were stumped.

Anyone know how to combine all the files together?

I can't seem to find any docs on this.. either googling, or on sun's site.

Re:Forgive my ignorance..

[hallucinator]

From sun's web page: For UNIX: Using the UNIX cat command, copy the files in the correct order, into a single file named: "sol-10-GA-x86-dvd.iso for x86", or "sol-10-GA-sp-dvd.iso for SPARC": Note: The correct syntax for the cat command is: "cat file1 file2 ... [ fileN] > file" where file1, file2, fileN are the download images and "file" is the .iso file you are creating. For Windows: To concatenate the files, type copy /b file1 + file2 [+ fileN] file at command prompt (file1 through fileN are the images that were downloaded. All files should be concatenated into a single file named: "sol-10-GA-x86-dvd.iso for x86", or "sol-10-GA-sp-dvd.iso for SPARC": Once the copy is complete, you should have one image ready to be burned to a DVD. Use the software that supports your DVD burner to create a DVD using this image file (e.g. Roxio Easy Media Creator on a Windows system or the cdrw utility on a Solaris system). Make sure you use the kind of media supported by your DVD burner. There are DVD-R/DVD-RW as well as DVD+R/DVD+RW recordable DVDs. Not all DVD burners support both. Do not use DVD+R DL (dual layer) discs. NOTE: Once you have downloaded an .ISO file, you should check if it has not been corrupted during the download before burning it to a DVD. For that, you need to do n "mdsum check", which compares your downloaded file against the file you would find on the server. There are various free, available utilities for all popular operating systems (i.e. Windows, Solaris, Linux) that enable this. You now have an image of the Solaris 10 DVD. Use the software that supports your DVD burner to create a DVD using this image file (e.g. Roxio Easy Media Creator on a Windows system or the cdrw utility on a Solaris system). Make sure you use the kind of media supported by your DVD burner. There are DVD-R/DVD-RW as well as DVD+R/DVD+RW recordable DVDs. Not all DVD burners support both. Do not use DVD+R DL (dual layer) discs.

Re:Forgive my ignorance..

[hallucinator]

From sun's web page:

For UNIX:
Using the UNIX cat command, copy the files in the correct order, into a single file named:
"sol-10-GA-x86-dvd.iso for x86", or
"sol-10-GA-sp-dvd.iso for SPARC":

Note: The correct syntax for the cat command is: "cat file1 file2 ... [ fileN] > file" where file1, file2, fileN are the download images and "file" is the .iso file you are creating.

For Windows:
To concatenate the files, type copy /b file1 + file2 [+ fileN] file at command prompt (file1 through fileN are the images that were downloaded. All files should be concatenated into a single file named:
"sol-10-GA-x86-dvd.iso for x86", or
"sol-10-GA-sp-dvd.iso for SPARC":

Once the copy is complete, you should have one image ready to be burned to a DVD.

Use the software that supports your DVD burner to create a DVD using this image file (e.g. Roxio Easy Media Creator on a Windows system or the cdrw utility on a Solaris system). Make sure you use the kind of media supported by your DVD burner. There are DVD-R/DVD-RW as well as DVD+R/DVD+RW recordable DVDs. Not all DVD burners support both. Do not use DVD+R DL (dual layer) discs.

NOTE: Once you have downloaded an .ISO file, you should check if it has not been corrupted during the download before burning it to a DVD. For that, you need to do n "mdsum check", which compares your downloaded file against the file you would find on the server. There are various free, available utilities for all popular operating systems (i.e. Windows, Solaris, Linux) that enable this.

You now have an image of the Solaris 10 DVD. Use the software that supports your DVD burner to create a DVD using this image file (e.g. Roxio Easy Media Creator on a Windows system or the cdrw utility on a Solaris system). Make sure you use the kind of media supported by your DVD burner. There are DVD-R/DVD-RW as well as DVD+R/DVD+RW recordable DVDs. Not all DVD burners support both. Do not use DVD+R DL (dual layer) discs.

Re:Forgive my ignorance..

[lachlan76]

I didn't have any problems getting the instructions...just unzip and concatenate with cat.

Don't trust it!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not digitally signed!

Solaris 10 on Sun Ultra 5/Ultra 10 questions

[ttys00]

I just bought an Ultra 5 (270Mhz, 128Mb RAM, new Seagate 120Gb disk) as a learning tool and fileserver, and I'm keen to give the new OS a go. Is anyone running Solaris 10 on an Ultra 5 or Ultra 10? Is it painfully slow? How much RAM does it _really_ need?

If anyone could give me some guidance as to whether or not I can upgrade and still have a usable box, it would be greatly appreciated (I'm sure I'm not the only one either).

Re:Solaris 10 on Sun Ultra 5/Ultra 10 questions

[Anonymous Coward]

I used solaris 9 on both and ultra 5 and ultra 10 I got for cheap to learn solaris on, i found them both slower than molasses, with 512mb memory on the ultra10, and 256mb ram on the ultra5, and 333mhz procs on both, I installed gentoo linux, and after waiting a week or so with them quietly chugging away, i had a pretty usable linux system, much faster than solaris imho. ymmv

Re:Solaris 10 on Sun Ultra 5/Ultra 10 questions

[Agent Green]

Solaris 10 is just beautiful on my Ultra 10. I've got a 20gig drive and 256mb of RAM, so I know that it suffers. Unfortunately, memory for the damn thing costs more than the system is worth. :(

That said, I think the OS is nice...but consider that the U5 and U10 boxes are over 6 years old at this point. Regardless, I find the performance acceptable for my needs.

Now, as soon as Sun's servers unclog, I might be able to download a copy.

Re:Solaris 10 on Sun Ultra 5/Ultra 10 questions

[Temkin]

It'll run, on a U5/10 but you really need 512mb of RAM. It will probably boot on 256mb, maybe, but I wouldn't expect much.

Re:Solaris 10 on Sun Ultra 5/Ultra 10 questions

[Anonymous Coward]

I just bought an Ultra 5 (270Mhz, 128Mb RAM, new Seagate 120Gb disk) as a learning tool and fileserver, and I'm keen to give the new OS a go. Is anyone running Solaris 10 on an Ultra 5 or Ultra 10? Is it painfully slow? How much RAM does it _really_ need?

With 128Mb RAM, you'll be sorry and regardless of how much RAM you might be willing to upgrade it to, the IDE controller in the 5/10 sucks, baddly, so file serving won't be fun either.

I bought a Sun Ultra 10 333 (from memory) with 128Mb with the intention of using it as a learning tool and it is slow with Solaris 9. It is also slow with OpenBSD (I have not tried NetBSD). I get less than half the transfer rate performance under either Solaris 9 or OpenBSD 3.4 from a particular disk in the U10, than the same disk on a PIII-550 under OpenBSD 3.4.

RAM upgrades for these boxes are expensive to say the least. Even if you do opt to upgrade the memory it will not be worth it. I would suggest selling it and putting that money and any upgrade money you may have been willing to spend, towards something more worthwhile. Start at Sun Ultra 30 and don't go below that, if you want to run Solaris as a desktop and for learning. A second hand U30 is typically going to have more than 128Mb RAM anyway.

A U5/U10 makes a fantastic firewall however. Or even a small web server for a home DSL connection with the added security which comes with the UltraSPARC CPU's page protection, etc. I use my U10 as an OpenBSD firewall which boots of a CF card in a CF-IDE adaptor.

I've come to the conclusion that, Sun has some awesome hardware and technologies at the very high end, but for the low to mid range, NetBSD is incredible (especially on something like AMD64). Sun makes a lot of nice hardware, but the Ultra 5 and 10 I would like put in that category. They are practically baddly performing PC's with UltraSPARC processors.

Re:Solaris 10 on Sun Ultra 5/Ultra 10 questions

[Crawlin' King Snake]

Oh you *definitely* need more RAM. I had an Ultra 10 that would choke on even 256MB. 512MB is the sweet spot. I used both Solaris 8 and 9 on that machine and with 512MB, the box just cruised along. That 270MHz CPU is also going to be a bottleneck, but I guess it's fine for a mere file-server. Also, the IDE controllers on the Ultra 5/10 are only ATA66, so you'll also have to deal with that little setback in speed. I added an Ultra 2 Wide SCSI controller to my Ultra 10 and got an 18GB SCSI HD and that really helped with the speed. You could also use a Solaris 10 compatible ATA100/133 controller from the likes of Promise (assuming you haven't already done that).

Re:Solaris 10 on Sun Ultra 5/Ultra 10 questions

[Anonymous Coward]

I've come to the conclusion that, Sun has some awesome hardware and technologies at the very high end, but for the low to mid range, NetBSD is incredible (especially on something like AMD64).

Sorry, I did not word that very well.

What I mean, is that for what you would spend on some Sun low to mid range solution, you can get much better performance buying some AMD64 gear and using NetBSD. I find NetBSD to be faster than most other OS' for server work and it kills Solaris 9 whenever I have compared them.

Re:Solaris 10 on Sun Ultra 5/Ultra 10 questions

[Anonymous Coward]

Solaris has become better and better with regards to memory requirements for every release that I can remember. With 2.5.1 it even became usable.

Re:Solaris 10 on Sun Ultra 5/Ultra 10 questions

[Paul Jakma]

It should run fine.

I used S10 on a 128MB Ultra10 for a few weeks and it was fine. S10's GNOME2 JDS actually seems to run ok on low memory machines. More RAM always helps though ;)

--paulj

Re:Solaris 10 on Sun Ultra 5/Ultra 10 questions

[AFCArchvile]

I have an Ultra 2 (2 x 300 MHz, 640MB RAM, 18GB 10K RPM Seagate HDD), and it ran Solaris 9 and Debian 3 well (considering how old it is). Of course the Ultra 2 has two CPUs and a SCSI controller, which help a lot. IIRC in one of the earlier enumerated system requirement lists, it said "200 MHz processor", and right now the required specs say "Memory: 128 MB minimum (for Solaris install only)", which is strange. So you'll definitely want to hunt down some RAM for this machine, which probably won't be easy or cheap unless you strike gold on eBay or go to a computer swapfest.

I consider myself lucky that I bought a used Ultra 2 with so much RAM in it; hopefully I'll be able to put it to good use.

Re:Solaris 10 on Sun Ultra 5/Ultra 10 questions

[kenh]

I've two Ultra 5 boxes, and two AXi rackmount boxes, and in my experience, the best way to buy RAM is inside a protective System Case.

I got an Ultra 5 with 1 Gig of RAM for around $100-120 (I can't recall now) - reasonable in my opinion (but then you have the spare box to contend with :^)...

There are physical constraints that limit the memory size in the Ultra 5 - the Sun 512 Meg DIMMs were too large for the Ultra 5 case, unless you removed the floppy drive. Third-party DIMMs may not have this same issue.

I am curious about Solaris 10 compatible IDE controllers - I'll have to go look at the HCL...

Re:Solaris 10 on Sun Ultra 5/Ultra 10 questions

[grigori]

I got it on 300Mhz Ulta 2 with almost a gig of RAM, works great. Ditto on Ultra 5 with 384MB RAM. No problem. Go buy cheap RAM on eBay - problem solved Or, put Solaris on a spare peecee Pentium III or later. Same rules: 256MB is okay, more is better.

Re:Solaris 10 on Sun Ultra 5/Ultra 10 questions

[koekie]

Does anyone know if and what kinds of 3rd party ram will work on an Ultra 5?

Re:Solaris 10 on Sun Ultra 5/Ultra 10 questions

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.crucial.com/

Follow the prompts in their memory wizard and you'll learn exactly what specs you need.

FYI: All "recent" Sun systems use standard PC133 or DDR RAM. Any high quality DIMMs will work. Some may need to be "registered" but it's not much more expensive. (If you don't know what "registered" means stick with a site like Crucial that selects the RAM for you.)

Re:Solaris 10 on Sun Ultra 5/Ultra 10 questions

[bob beta]

Can we run Sun's Free Solaris 10 license on multi-processor boxes. Previous versions of the free-download Solaris were restricted to single-processor boxes. Not that we cared much, I ran Solaris 8 on my dual-proc SS10SX for quite awhile...

Sun: Patent use OK beyond Solaris project

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun: Patent use OK beyond Solaris project
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9593_22-555765 8.html

Conflicted interests

[daithimacseoin]

To what extent is the type of story that slashdot publishes influenced by the amount of revenue that can be generated by banner advertising related to that story ?

(Just noticed the big sun.com advertisement at the top of the homepage)

Re:Conflicted interests

[Anonymous Coward]

eh? This is a major version release of an OS by one of the few players in the OS market, I could see your concern if this was some obscure product that happens to be a big advertiser on slashdot, but sun is an 800 pound gorilla (well mebbe more like a 300 pound gorilla, but still big nonetheless).

Every time a patch is made to Linux, there is a story, and practically every time Firefox gets another user, there is a "firefox is gaining marketshare" story, neither of which are producing any income for the site.
This is also ignoring the fact that MS does advertise on slashdot, despite the torrent of negative press it gets.

IMHO, as far as conspiracy theories goes, this one is up there with crop circles being created by aliens.

Why would ISPs....

[jotaeleemeese]

... be interested at all in having nvidia/nforce drivers?

Just curious....

Re:Why would ISPs....

[gtoomey]

You need nforce drivers to get the ethernet working for nforce motherboards. But I was thinking of the home market too with 3d graphics & sound.

Re:Why would ISPs....

[joel48]

forcedeth

Re:Why would ISPs....

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would an ISP run ANYTHING on such a commodity motherboard? Why would an ISP need to worry about 3D graphics?

whilst everyone is bashing Sun.....

[nighty5]

I'd like to comment on how the new Solaris 10 is actually quite a treat to use.

I installed it on VMware GSX 3.1 as a guest on Gentoo Linux Host OS with little trouble.

I gave the system 128 megs of ram to play with - I'm running 4 other VMs at the moment for development purposes so my development server needs a bit more RAM.

I got to say, the new Java desktop is dead sexy, uses a lot of Gnome applets and programs. They have borrowed a lot from that gear, and also some the GNU tools now come standardly installed.

A full install didnt seem to install SSH as a service, nor Telnet but that could be for my setup and selection process. I didnt select a fine tune, just install-all.

I couldnt get the GUI setup to work, although this could be for my setup, the GUI setup requires 96megs of ram or more, and I did provide 128 meg in the VM so not sure whats going on there. However, the text install works fine. I am exporting the Vmware Console over an X client running on my Windows workstation so maybe it doesnt like something there - not sure. My other VM's havent complained thus far.

Oh yeah I told a friend about Sol 10 is now ready so he downloaded it also, he was able to get the GUI install to work and said its awesome. Mentioned that you can browse the Internet whilst the OS is installing. Reminds me some Linux installs that let you play games whilst its chugging away.

I was a bit disappointed that cc compiler doesnt work straight out of the box with the 'full install', it needed some other program or library it was whinging about and I havent bothered to look it up.

The default shell is csh (?), but amazingly enough bash is installed by default.

For some reason I couldnt create a home directory under /home for a new user. Some weird error, I tried it as root. Don't have the error on me, but if anything ran into this and knows the fix I'd appreciate some feedback. ?

Well I only installed it 2 days and I havent really given it a run for its money. But do hope to start playing with it more soon.

Re:whilst everyone is bashing Sun.....

[asaul]

The graphical installer is pretty memory intensive now, mainly due to a poxy netscape that runs while you do things. 256M is pretty much what you need if you want to see it, but the text based (or jumpstart) is easy enought to drive.

It should install SSH and Telnet by default, but they may not be enabled - check svcs -a and look for a /network/ssh or /network/telnet service, if you need to start it run svcadm enable /network/ssh and it will be permantently enabled. /usr/ucb/cc is a stub link and useless, Solaris 10 should come with gcc in /usr/sfw/bin/gcc for your immediate compiling needs.

The /home problem is because /home is an automount point, not a real directory. You can create a home account in /export/home/user and then add them to /etc/auto_home to automount the home directory in /home. If you want the cheap way you can just add this entry and any /home/blah lookup will result in a mount attempt:

* localhost:/export/home/&

Good luck and have fun!

Re:whilst everyone is bashing Sun.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would anyone use Linux/BSD when XP is stable, has a better desktop, supports all hardware, and doesn't have the crap GPL associated with it.

Re:whilst everyone is bashing Sun.....

[Temkin]

A full install didnt seem to install SSH as a service

I had trouble with a late beta build failing to create the ssh keys for zones. I don't remember if the global zone had the same problem or not. I'd call it a bug, but it does force you to at least think about the sshd config before using it, which is a good thing.

Easy enough to fix:

foo# /lib/svc/method/sshd -c
Creating...
Creating...
foo# /lib/svc/method/sshd start

Re:whilst everyone is bashing Sun.....

[bill.hathaway]

I think you were installing the Solaris Express bits, not the general availability release which happened late yesterday. In the GA release, gcc 3.4.3 is bundled with the main distro and available as /usr/sfw/bin/gcc (along with a bunch of other things like ant, mysql, bison,flex, etc) As far as sshd goes, it was probably installed, but the service was not enabled. Use svcadm enable ssh to get it to work (although in the GA release, it is enabled by default) For home directories, /home is typically used for automounted home directories in Solaris, you probably wanted to create a physical home dir on /export/home on a machine, and then have it automounted onto /home everywhere.

Re:whilst everyone is bashing Sun.....

[brunogirin]

On solaris, /home is by default auto-mounted so that you can have home directories hosted on any machine: it mounts it via NFS when you log in and unmounts it when you log out. You can:

• create your home directories under /export/home which is exported via NFS and is where the auto mounter points to
• disable the auto mounter for /home: comment out the line that starts /home in /etc/auto_master
• change /etc/auto_home to specify where it should look for home directories

Re:whilst everyone is bashing Sun.....

[Kyusaku Natsume]

/home is a NFS mount (automount?) point, that's why you can't create a home directory inside it, try in /export/home/

Might not matter anymore

[tacocat]

Linux and BSD's are changing fast and becoming useful. They are also installed with many better options than CDE.

The installation that came with Solaris 9 had no documentation sufficient to actually perform an installation unless you where already a Sun expert. This is one of the key points in what made Linux so popular in the beginning. Available documentation and free support from internet resources.

If RedHat and SuSE decide to start really laming down their mailing lists, I would expect them to lose some share. SuSE mailing list isn't that impressive in terms of knowledgable users when compared to gentoo or debian. I have no knowledge of RedHat. But a lot of the generic Linux installation processes can be guessed at from other resources.

But the solaris install had virtually nothing useful. So they pretty much made the statement that they are giving away the software but only the most familiar Solaris users will be able to actually do anything with it. I don't know if Sun will ever figure out how to actually sell their software.

Re:Might not matter anymore

[Anonymous Coward]

Might not matter anymore

Might not matter to who? Your cat?

They are also installed with many better options than CDE.

Did you just wake up from your brain-damaged coma? Gnome has been the default desktop for Solaris for quite a while now.

I don't know if Sun will ever figure out how to actually sell their software.

I don't know how RedHat or Novell will ever figure out how to sell their software (rolls eyes). Sun sells complete solutions, not Mandrake CDs.

Have you been stranded on a deserted island for the past few years?

Re:Might not matter anymore

[tacocat]

Nope.

What I mean by the "figure out how to sell their software" means just that. As you pointed out, Sun has to sell "Solutions".

Their solutions are not cost effective for SOHO, small business, home users by any stretch.

And on the big server side of things, HP and IBM are still quite capable of spanking Sun whenever the challenge comes up.

Sun is in trouble. That's my point. They need to really change direction to stay alive. I don't think this is it.

Re:Might not matter anymore

[njcoder]

"Their solutions are not cost effective for SOHO, small business, home users by any stretch."

Hmm.. their OS is free.. You can get their Java Enterprise System for $99 per employee per year, and it may still be free if you have less than 100 employees. Their opteron servers give you a lot of bang for the buck and they have ultrasparc based servers for under 1k. I think you need to have a look at Sun's Online Store and check out their pricing again.

Re:Might not matter anymore

[bob beta]

I don't think this is it.

You don't know what 'it' even is. Remember, you're the guy who started out (apparently) not even knowing the GNOME desktop is bundled with Solaris these past few releases...

Support, scalability, integration with hardware.

[jotaeleemeese]

In general Linux lacks the above.

But this is changing fast.

I think Sun did not jump in the bandwagon early enough, IBM and perhaps even HP will eat their lunch for lacking the guts to become a Linux player earlier in the game.

You do realize.....

[jotaeleemeese]

... that such a way to check an OS is completely unfair. do you?

The emulation siftware could have problems as well...

And a fourth category

[59Bassman]

No offense, but I think you missed one as well.

There are folks out there buying Apple hardware because they are more comfortable with a UNIX-like operating system. They want a system capable of interfacing with all of their various Linux and Unix boxes with built-in ability to run X11 (or some variant thereof). They also realize that they work in a corporate environment where MS Office is King, and may have been burned in the past with OpenOffice not handling all MS documents properly.

Some folks may also value the XCode suite as a development environment.

There are some heretics that may even believe that the Apple is the current power tool for a person that has to live in both the Windows corporate environment and the Linux/Unix world of servers, clusters, and simulations.

These folks may be willing to pay a premium for hardware that works and works well without a lot of fuss. The attractive interface, sexy boxes, and secret-society appeal are just added bonuses.

Re:And a fourth category

[Glock27]

They also realize that they work in a corporate environment where MS Office is King, and may have been burned in the past with OpenOffice not handling all MS documents properly.

Not just Microsoft Office, but a ton of commercial software. Almost none of it is on Linux or other Unix systems. Macs also make terrific development systems.

Apple is looking more and more attractive, enough so to easily justify the higher prices. Good stuff!

This story is 3 months old

[Anonymous Coward]

What are /. editors feeding on these days? Solaris 10's release is "READ MY LIPS" 3 months old!!

See this slashdot story of November 15th

Re:This story is 3 months old

[Anonymous Coward]

Solaris 10's release is "READ MY LIPS" 3 months old!!

No, that was theat was the "express" release - a preview or release candidate. This is the full release.

Re:This story is 3 months old

[compass46]

Uhhhh, because this is the final release version of Solaris 10. Previously it was only available as a beta.

I read your lips and you were still wrong. ;)

Download speed

[Aggrajag]

I just started downloading the first CD and it's giving be a whopping 5 kilos per second. This is why bittorrent was invented, so hopefully some nice torrent site has Solaris 10.

Re:Download speed

[Chanc_Gorkon]

AMEN! Torrents are great on Zero Day to Day Seven. BAD every other time though because once the rush is over, the Torrent slows down.

Re:Download speed

[Anonymous Coward]

I just started downloading the first CD and it's giving be a whopping 5 kilos per second.

Man, Solaris 10 must be really bloated if it weighs that much!

("kilo" is a stupid abbreviation, especially when talking about download speeds. If you don't know why, hand in your geek badge now.)

Re:Download speed

[Anonymous Coward]

"kilo" is a stupid abbreviation, especially when talking about download speeds. If you don't know why, hand in your geek badge now.

No, you hand in your geek badge. Haven't you heard about the new geek-slang? We're not downloading kilobytes and megabytes anymore, it's bitties, kilos, and gigs we use now (The kilo-slang comes from Europe, obviously). So, step away from the keyboard and drop your pants!

=P

scalability and support

[Anonymous Coward]

What are the advantages of Solaris over, say, SuSe?

You can run Solaris on a much wider range of hardware, from a single CPU x86 box up to a fully populated F25K.

Also you can have the hardware and OS supported by the same company, which makes it harder for your OS vendor to blame your hardware and vice-versa.

While we're talking support, at the end of the day in business you choose from the list of platforms your application vendors support. I know we run several apps that don't support any linux distro (at the moment) so we run them on solaris.

Dupe story

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't this a duplicate story?

Didn't this release actually happen like 3 months back?

Re:Dupe story

[Anonymous Coward]

No, that was a preview release called Solaris Express.

PrintFu Link

[Anonymous Coward]

The printfu printed manual is 7 bucks for the user guide.

http://www.printfu.org/?mcAction=pdfURL&pdfURL=htt p://docs-pdf.sun.com/817-7305/817-7305.pdf&pppemai l=j2eegeek@yahoo.com

Oh I know...

[59Bassman]

I'm a Mac hater. Ever since I was a PC sysadmin in college I have loved x86 boxes and hated Macs. On my old 486 systems I could edit the .ini files to change features, make ramdrives to speed up logins for users, and use the command line to move files around which made it much faster than the eye-candy of a GUI. In fact I told one Mac loving friend that it would take a full-frontal lobotomy before I ever used a Mac of my own choice.

Now I'm using a Powerbook all of the time for development and trying to figure out how to justify a dual-CPU G5 at work. But I console myself with the knowledge that it's not me that had the brain surgery - it's the OS.

I've been running Unix and Linux for a few years, and I don't think I'll ever be without a SuSE or Fedora box somewhere. But for my day-to-day use and programming, the Macs are just too easy...

Blastwave.org

[asaul]

Blastwave.org is a collection of open source apps/tools/utilities built for Solaris x86 and SPARC.

You install the packages using a pkg-get utility that was modelled off apt-get in Debian I believe - it works great and the software is typcially more current and more integrated than the Sun freeware stuff.

Apple doesn't sell "Hardware" (was:The hole in...)

[Qbertino]

Apple doesn't sell Hardware in the classical sense of term. Neither do they sell "Software" in the classical sense of term. They sell a sum of both which adds up to something else (bigger) than the mere sum of both because each is designed ith the other in mind. That's why no one would compare Apple and Dell, even though they sell a combination of both hard- and software aswell.
It's only with this special combination of both that gives apple a severe edge over it's competition.

Re:The hole in our Apple theories - dagone hole!

[6800]

Sounds like another monopolistic move by MS to me! Where are the anti-trust watchers when they are needed?

Re:Solaris 10 install hang at USB detection on VMw

[Anonymous Coward]

What we need is a Solaris Live CD, similar to Knoppix. If Sun wants the maximum exposure for the OS they should make it convenient to try.

This might be new for Opteron support but...

[Anonymous Coward]

I downloaded the Intel (32bit x86) version a very many weeks ago and I had the option to download the SPARC version too.

10 was released, including for free download, weeks ago.

Re:This might be new for Opteron support but...

[Anonymous Coward]

10 was released, including for free download, weeks ago.

Are you sure that wasn't the preview Solaris Express version? The full Solaris 10 is new.

Re:Solaris 10 install hang at USB detection on VMw

[Temkin]

I have a beta build running on an iBook G4 under VPC 7, which is explicitly "not supported" by VPC. Took a while to install... :)

Sparc hardware list? Supports E450s?

[Spoing]

With each Solaris release, Sun stops supporting older hardware. Does anyone know where Sun has tucked the latest list?

Why the scare tactics?

[dbIII]

Sun's release of the Solaris sources under their dubious license

To translate, they are not using the GPL which RMS has set forth on tablets of gold, so it's heresy. Give up on the emotive language guys (eg. dubious, and RMS calling the thing treacherous), and point out what is actually wrong with the licence - although that would actually involve reading it.

Hey, Guys! OT.

[BrokenHalo]

Time out!

I've scrolled down over half of the posts on this thread, and so far it has been almost entirely dominated by Apple fanboys.

Just to remind ye with the attention span of a flea, this thread was supposed to be about Solaris.

Workaround for: Solaris 10 install hang on VMware

[potus98]

Notes for installing Solaris 10 on VMware Workstation

Please Note: This is not a hand-holding installation guide. These are my raw notes from a Solaris 10 install on VMware that worked for me. I had to be especially patient during boots and reboots. Many folks mentioned not being able to get "anywhere" with the Sol_10 installation. I think removing the VMware USB device (detailed below) made the difference for me. I've also read that removing the audio device can help as well.

Platform Used:
Toshiba Satellite A10-S169 Laptop Pentium_4 2.20-GHz, 240-MB RAM Windows XP Pro, Version 2002, Service Pack 2

Files Used:
VMware-workstation-4.5.2-8848.exe vmware_key.txt sol-10-b63-x86-v1.iso sol-10-b63-x86-v2.iso sol-10-b63-x86-v3.iso

Install VMware:
Disable autorun? Yes
Search for virtual disks or suspended state files? No

Configure VMware:
New Virtual Machine
Typical
Sun Solaris
10 (experimental)
Virtual Machine Name: Default
Location: Default
Use bridged networking
Disk size: 6-GB
Allocate all disk space now
(Be patient, creating the virtual disk takes a while and is resource intensive.)

Edit Virtual Machine Settings:
Hardware Tab
Highlight USB Controller
Click "Remove"

Edit virtual machine settings to mount the Solaris installation CD:
CD-ROM 1
Connection: Use ISO image: ~/sol-10-b63-x86-v1.iso

Boot Virtual host
NOTE: Probably best to switch to full-screen mode for Solaris installation

Type of installation: 3 Solaris Interactive Text-only installer
Should see:
SunOS Release 5.10 Version s10_63 32-bit
Copyright 1983-2004 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved
Use is subject to license terms

At the kdmconfig section, select "Change Video Device/Monitor"
Video Device: XF86-VMWARE VMware SVGA virtual video cards
Monitor Type: MultiFrequency 100kHz (up to 1600x1200 @ 80Hz)
Screen Size: 15-inch (38cm)
Resolution/Colors: 1024x768 - 256 colors @ 120Hz
Virtual Screen Resolution: 1024x768
Keyboard Type: Generic US-English
Pointing Device: Built-in PS/2 Mouse (2 Button+ 25ms 3 Button Emulation)

Test video settings. If they work, save and move on. If not, try different settings.

Proceed with typical Solaris installation... Eject CD/DVD Automatically? No, manually eject.

NOTE: After the auto-reboot, I received errors about an incorrect X configuration. I control-D'd past the message and the Solaris GUI installer seemed to come up fine.

When prompted to insert the next CD, leave the VM session (Ctrl+Alt) Edit virtual machine settings to mount next CD: CD-ROM 1
Connection: Use the next ISO image: ~/sol-10-b63-x86-v#.iso

HTH!

Yawn

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure about the rest of you but I downloaded the beta version of SunOS 5.10. Man that thing was toxic waste to install. Requires a LOT of baby-sitting. After it was done it was just like the same old stupid Solaris (requires me to edit files to get it to work right, things Linux distro's have done automatically for at least 5 years). NO wow factor with the desktop. The salesman was telling me it was the best thing since sliced bread. "Guys at the Pentagon think it is great!" Yea, I bet they do.... NOT!

Don't waste your time with this turkey! Stick it back in the oven, it isn't done yet. Too much blood coming out when you poke it.

Re:Sparc hardware list? Supports E450s?

[Anonymous Coward]

E450 gets a mention here:

SPARC: Older Firmware Might Need Boot Flash PROM Update

about a third of the way down the page.

A crude interpretation perhaps

[frodo from middle ea]

All your bases are belong to us....Scott

SLOWARIS

[Roliverio]

It's disspointing to download the iso images and then realizing that the OS's doesn't come with even a c compiler :(, and don't get me started with pkgadd .... SUCKS

And if you plan to get KDE, Keep waiting..

Gnome.... and even when i selected it from the install the solaris X Login manager doesn't list it

Re:SLOWARIS

[Anonymous Coward]

A complete install of Solaris10 will provide you with gcc in /opt/sfw/bin, along with gdb and other friends.

The only cc provided with the default install is in /usr/ucb, where it has been for years. This is really just a front end to their non-free development studio that uses different libraries and include files by default.

You'd be well advised to rename the "cc" in /usr/ucb to "ucbcc" or some such after installing any version of Solaris because unless you actually mean to use it, chances are nothing you attempt to compile with it will work the way you expect.

Re:SLOWARIS

[Anonymous Coward]

GCC and many other open source tools are included in /usr/sfw/bin. I'd recommend adding /usr/sfw/bin to your PATH. And if you install the companion CD, then add /opt/sfw/bin and /opt/sfw/kde/bin. If you use packages from blastwave then add /opt/csw/bin or /opt/csw/kde-gcc/bin (note: don't try to use both KDE from the companion CD and from blastwave -- I'd recommend the one from blastwave over the one on the companion because it is newer).

I agree that pkgadd is less full-featured than RPM, but it has improved since earlier releases of Solaris. And blastwave's pkg-get utility is very much like apt-get or emerge (except that it is for downloading binaries, not downloading and compiling source).

As I mentioned, KDE is available on the companion CD or from blastwave. I'm typing this now on a laptop running KDE from blastwave on Solaris 10 at 1680x1050 resolution.

Oh, and by the way Gnome is included, but it's called the Java Desktop System in the menu. It's pretty nice, and I did run it for a while, but I prefer KDE in general.

Re:SLOWARIS

[barleysqzr]

http://blastwave.org pk-get kde 3.3.1 you name it, it's there

Re:SLOWARIS

[Anonymous Coward]

Solaris 10 comes with gcc.

Re:Sparc hardware list? Supports E450s?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/specs.html has some information. Only problem will be if your machine isn't 64 bit capable.

Obligatory feeding of the troll

[Biff98]

Or perhaps you really don't know!

Obviously BSD "can't run on" Solaris. But BSD *can* run on either x86 or SPARC. Two years ago, none of the BSD's supported SMP on SPARC, but there were at least 2 projects at the time focusing on this support. Dunno what the current state of affairs is.

Gotta love open CPU architecture.

Re:Sparc hardware list? Supports E450s?

[Biff98]

E450 is Ultra2 - 64bit, it will be fine. Got a 4x400mhz & 16GB RAM to upgrade!

Hell yeah! I've been waiting

[Biff98]

I've got a bunch of nice V240's and some of the new dual-core V490's to deploy. I'll beta 10 for a little while. Not because I don't think it's ready for prime time. Lot's of vendors beta test on their users (COUGH Micros~1, COUGH IBM), but there are a lot of really cool additions to the Solaris OE this time around, and I want to get used to everything.

Specifically ZFS (Bad ass journaling FS, capable of multiple TB's), Grid Containers (think quasi-VMWare for resource partitioning), and of course the nice TCP/IP enhancements.

IF YOU'VE DOWNLOADED "SOLARIS 10" before late late last night, you got a RELEASE CANDIDATE, and not the full RELEASE. Go download the release.

I'm downloading the dtrace source from OpenSolaris and havin fun today.

Compilers

[altnuc]

I'm interested in installing Solaris 10, but can anybody tell me what compilers are included?

Are the Sun C, C++, Fortran compilers included, or do you have to use the GNU compilers?

If the Sun compilers are not included, does anybody know if they are avialable, and for how much?

Thanks for any help!

Re:Compilers

[Govno]

http://www.sun.com/software/products/studio/buy.xm l is the pricing structure for Sun's commercial compiler environment. There's also (from that page) a link to download a 60-day trial version.

Re:Compilers

[gilh]

blastwave.org is a good alternative to buying compilers -- they have gcc in pkg format

Re:Compilers

[bart_smaalders]

The Sun Studio 10 compilers are not part of the release of Solaris 10, despite the naming similarity.
That said, gcc version 3.4.3 is installed by default along with a LOT of other open source software in /usr/sfw/bin...

- Bart

Re:Openvms is downloadable too. Most reliable OS.

[WWWWolf]

I recently read an article which had pointers on how to get the license (and, more importantly, how to run OpenVMS in SIMH emulator, though as an UNIX-head myself, I found the said emulator far more interesting in purposes of trying out v7 UNIX - though my reaction was mostly "I give up, this ancient piece of junk doesn't have GNU tools". =)

zones are nice but no DHCP?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, Zones are VERY nicely implemented in terms of configuration and performance.

But there's a scalability issue -- why can I not configure a Zone to use DHCP for IP address assignment? For my application, with potentially hundreds of Zones, this becomes a mgmt nightmare.

Re:zones are nice but no DHCP?

[bano]

you use dhcp to assign ip addresses on servers?
hmm I've always considered that a "bad idea".

Re:zones are nice but no DHCP?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why? You can assign static IP address so machines with a specific MAC address which provides for a centralized administration of IP address. IMHO it's better then the alternative hardcoding IP address on each server, no?

torrent

[Anonymous Coward]

i do not understand where the problem is for a corp. like sun to set up a bt tracker?

i mean it was so obvious that there might be *some* people who wish to dl this and also maybe like to get a little more speed than 5kb/s.. :(

or do they just need the publicty in the next news.com or whattever article like "all of our servers were totally flooded with the overwhelming interest in solaris 10..we just couldn't have possibly seen it coming.. [blabla]"

bittorrent ppl! ffs!
b-i-t-...

*argh*

ZFS???

[mcdade]

Does this release have the ZFS included? we downloaded some pre-releases for sparc and no ZFS which is what we really want to eval so we can dump Veritas.

anyone, anyone.... bueller??

Re:ZFS???

[grigori]

Nope not in the initial release. Should come out in an update. Spring? Summer? Veritas is pricey alright - but some of its features already are in Solaris with UFS even before ZFS. Take a look and see if you really need it anymore

Too Bad ...

[Anonymous Coward]

you can't actually download it. We apologize. Due to exceptionally high demand for our most recent product offerings, our site is extremely busy right now. In order to provide you the best possible service, we ask that you please try again later. Be assured that we continue enhancing our systems to serve you better. We appreciate your patronage and patience.

solaris 10 "breaks" inetd!

[Anonymous Coward]

htf (how the "F") do you work with inetd on the new solaris 10?

its fugly! i mean my god, what kind of mind-twisting crack were they on this time around?

the services must be "registered" (ala windows registry format) and managed by a command-line cli!

whos stupid idea was this?!?

and how do you "register" your own into their registry?

fugly!

Endian issue, amonst others

[chip-analyst]

There are plenty of good reasons for Apple NOT to move to x86 (or AMD64) platform: Minor issue but Apple is a Big-endian plaform, PCs are Little-Endian. The translation would add some overhead. They couldn't get the higher margins for their own x86 platform. There's good money in that hardware. Should Apple have only sold iTunes, how exciting would that product be without the iPod? The PowerPC platform has more companies developing processors than there are for x86. I think you'll see more competition and higher performing PowerPCs. There may even be a secret weapon in the works--the Cell processor! It's PowerPC based and should be fast and will have tremendous processing power.

Yay for being whores!

[RomulusNR]

Wasn't the obnoxiously frantic banner ad at the top of every slashdot page over the past 3+ days enough to impress this fact upon us?

Pay-for-press in Slashdot, the same thing we get pissed off about anywhere else.

Re:Yay for being whores!

[Flower]

I see you don't have a /. subscription so why is it so bad to take advertising money from Sun?

And anyway, the release of Solaris 10 is a pretty big deal. I'd be going WTF if /. didn't cover it on the front page.

Finally, honestly, what banner ad? 99% of the time I ignore them. I keep up with /. on a regular basis and I didn't notice it. Even now as you mention it I barely recall seeing them. I'm not seeing what the big deal is here.

Re:Yay for being whores!

[RomulusNR]

In the news industry, writing a story to pump up an advertiser is lovingly referred to as a "blow job".

In the music industry, a similar situation is called payola, and there it's illegal.

Hysterical!

[PCM2]

Microsoft can make that much money from selling their OS is because their dominance in the market.

Whoah! So Microsoft gets rich by being the market leader in a huge product category, eh? Phone your local university immediately, I bet the economics professors will want to know about this...

vi still hopeless?

[gammelby]

Does it still ship with the hopeless 130 character max width vi from 198x? If so, why on earth don't they replace it with vim?

Ulrik

Re:vi still hopeless?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or even nvi. Perhaps preferably nvi, since it's more compatible with the original.

There's no way to get reasonable undo behavior in vim. Personally, I prefer the nvi way, which supports multiple undo by pressing 'u' and then '.' repeatedly; pressing 'u' repeatedly does undo-redo alternatingly. It's far less easy to accidentally screw up your undos in nvi than vim.

Re:vi still hopeless?

[Anonymous Coward]

Coming Soon from Oreilly Pub - [I]Solaris Annoyances[/I]. Chap I. vi - wtf?!

Re:vi still hopeless?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, I fixed this in build 73... there's still a max limit (hell, I'm not going to rewrite that swill) but it's not capable of handling anything you can practically read.

- Bart

"A Siren Lost"

[buckeyeguy]

anagram for Solaris Ten, eh... hmm. I'd prefer:

A loner sits

Alien sorts

A Tosser Nil

Its No Laser

Steals Iron (for those performance mavens)

Serial Snot

Latrines OS

And possibly a favorite: Realists, No.

Re:Sparc hardware list? Supports E450s?

[Anonymous Coward]

1. E450 gets a mention here:

   http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/817-0552/6mgbi4fg e?a=view

   about a third of the way down the page.

Much appreciated! Thanks!

Re:Openvms is downloadable too. Most reliable OS.

[Baki]

But *VMS gives me nightmares and bad memories of VMS system programming. I still get sick when I remember it.

Screenshots

[Anonymous Coward]

Solaris 10 screenshots here.

Re:Screenshots

[Anonymous Coward]

:)

It's part of the "Accessibility" features of Solaris 10; blind people don't care what the installer looks like.

Re:Sparc hardware list? Supports E450s?

[Squash]

I call bullshit. E450 supports a maximum of 4G ram.

But don't take my word for it.

SDLC Unavailable

[DivineHawk]

We apologize.

Due to exceptionally high demand for our most recent product offerings, our site is extremely busy right now. In order to provide you the best possible service, we ask that you please try again later.

Be assured that we continue enhancing our systems to serve you better.

We appreciate your patronage and patience.

Production examples of Solaris 10 in action?

[otisg]

Does anyone know of any Intel-based production servers using Solaris 10? I'd love to see some heavily loaded hardware and hear how they like Solaris 10, especially if they run Java (applications/servers) on it.

Anyone know any such stories/examples?
Thanks.

Re:Production examples of Solaris 10 in action?

[rsax]

Am I correct in assuming that they just released Solaris 10 x86 this week? If that's the case then who in their right mind would be using it in a production environment a day or two after release?

Re:Production examples of Solaris 10 in action?

[Tpenta]

Solaris Express has been available for the last year. Lot's of folks have been using to prove their environment. These are the folks who will be comfrtable going 10 into production at FCS.

By the way, Solaris 10 was FCS'd. That means SPARC, x86 and AMD/EMT.

Tp.

System Requirements?

[snuf23]

Hmmm, when I click on the "System Requirements" link I get a "page not found" error.
This does not bode well! :)

Re:Openvms is downloadable too. Most reliable OS.

[mnmn]

Ive been trying to get OpenVMS for a while. Apparently I have to sign up as an HP member or something that costs $$$$.. even for the hobbyist license. Where can I get the latest OpenVMS for free?

I'd also have to get a good scsi card for my lx533 Alpha system.. the last qlogic 1040 I got wasnt KZBCA or whatever the DEC code is.... it was a generic one. I have nothing to boot the lx533 with.

Am also looking for an ethernet card that works with it. I had a pile of ISA DIGITAL ethernet cards none of which worked with SRM... so I'm counting them not to work with OpenVMS.

Re:Openvms is downloadable too. Most reliable OS.

[mnmn]

If you do find a UNIX for older machiens, namely a minivax, lemme know. I have a minivax here gathering dust (minivax 2100), to which I'd REALLY like to port DOOM.

Or at least rip out the board, squeeze it into a 1U chassis to host my sites offsite, and have some serious bragging rights.

No, I don't need to buy RHEL

[Anonymous Coward]

The SRPMs are available on the net.

Readable version

[Anonymous Coward]

http://shit.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/01/0 345253

Re:Openvms is downloadable too. Most reliable OS.

[dohcvtec]

What the fsck are you talking about - OpenVMS is *not* downloadable. There is a VMS hobbyist program, where signing up and obtaining a license is free, but the actual OS (for VAX or Alpha) is only available on physical media for a mere $30. Still an incredible deal for a legendary operating system, and if I had any VAX or Alpha hardware I would plunk down my $30 without blinking.

Re:Sparc hardware list? Supports E450s?

[AusG4]

Actually, Sun hardware generally supports a lot more memory, Sun just lists on the ceritifed hardware lists what was available at the time they shipped the systems as new. Our E4000, for example, is "limited" to 14 CPU's and 14GB of memory according to the documentation. Of course, this didn't stop me from installing 24GB of memory in one and having it work reliably. Although I haven't bothered to look, am sure that there are at least 512MB SIMM (aka, 8GB) for the E450. We actually have a 420R here, so I could look... but I'm lazy. :P

Sun at SCALE 3x

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun's Marc Hamilton will be speaking about Sun's open source plans at SCALE 3x in Los Angeles, CA on Feb 12-13, 2005. For a free exhibit hall pass use the promotional code "FREE" or "NEWSP" for a discounted pass.

hope?

[torrents]

is there any hope for solaris at this point... they really missed the "windows alternative" marketing angle that linux vendors were using, and adoption of their products has slowed significantly now that linux is a viable alternative to expensive unix machines in the corporate environment

Re:Sparc hardware list? Supports E450s?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry. The E450 accpets 128M sticks of ram at maximum. Same with the E420. You are not going to get 1G sticks to work in it no matter what you do.

You can not put more than 4G of ram in an E450 or an E420.

I've even tried the 256M sticks for giggles, it doesn't work.

Don't confuse modular suns with non-modular.

what about letting other cos build PPC clones?

[godless dave]

Forget about Intel-based hardware. What about selling OS X to other hardware companies that want to build PPC-based hardware? Apple hardware is sweet, but I'm sure many business and some home users would like more options, more configureable towers, and an alternative to the current bleach-white ugliness. I know in the past this resulted in Apple losing market share to the clone makers, but I think things are different now. With the Mini, Apple has proved they can still innovate. There is a bigger server market to compete for, and OS X Server is a competitive product - it would be even more competitive if customers had a variety of server manufacturers to choose from. Of course, Apple would take a hit if it still insisted on an unreasonable profit margin per unit.

Re:Openvms is downloadable too. Most reliable OS.

[Cmdr TECO]

I might be losing my mind again, but I'm not aware of any VAX called 2100. There are little VAXlets numbered 2000 and 3100, but not 2100. There's a DECstation 2100, which is MIPS rather than VAX, and an Alpha (or AXP) 2100, which is, well, Alpha rather than VAX.

NetBSD runs on most if not all of the above.

Ran fine w/ only my audio on HCL

[Anonymous Coward]

I put Solaris Express 11/04 on my notebook that had nothing but my Intel audio on the HCL and it ran just fine. I don't think I had 3d acceleration working, but I can't remember. Suse 9.2 came out and that was all I cared about, and now that 3/05 is out and it's an official release (I don't know if it's any more official than the 11/04) I want to try the new flavor. Very exciting stuff to think I have commercial-grade Unix on my lappy. Maybe if I push things hard enough I can get wireless working, I mean I *did* eventually figure out this whole linux rave :)

Re:Openvms is downloadable too. Most reliable OS.

[Medievalist]

Well, as far as I can recall, there isn't anything called a miniVAX either. So we're clearly playing fast and loose with the nomenclature here, he's prolly talking about the AXP since he thinks it might fit in a flatter case.

Incidentally, dohcvtec is right - VMS hobbyist is free after media and handling charges, but you can't download it. I have a copy myself. I'm fond of VMS, it has an easily extensible and very easily taught OS for native english-speakers (which is apparently incomprehensible to swedish-speaking Finns ;^) ).