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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)."
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.
Solaris is no longer available for "SPARC" systems, only UltraSPARC systems. It no longer supports sun4m or sun4d.
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
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.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
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.