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

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

[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.

UNIX vs. LINUX?

[SauroNlord]

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

Re:Free Software

[zdzichu]

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

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?

Multiple OS support?

[RatRagout]

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

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.

[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

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: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: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.

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: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..

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: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.

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)

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: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: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: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... :)

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.

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.