Sun Is Giving Away Solaris 10 DVDs

Tarmas writes "For a limited time only, just like Ubuntu's ShipIt service, Sun Microsystems lets you order Solaris 10 absolutely free of charge. The operating system comes on a single DVD supporting both the x86 and SPARC versions. Also included is Sun Studio 11."

Comments

I wonder

[rolfwind]

Is this a sign of desperation? (Not bashing Sun here, just heard that the company is going through a tough time.)

Re:I wonder

[bladesjester]

Actually, it's just a way to drum up interest in a new product. A lot of companies do it.

Microsoft does it with the functional betas of a lot of their software including Visual Studio and they aren't really hurting for customers

Re:I wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

This is very old news actually. I got my SPARC DVD a month ago. Of course you should run Solaris on real hardware, not that obsolete piece of shit Intel is still manufacturing.

Glass

Re:I wonder

[bigtomrodney]

Yeah I got mine about 6 weeks back. The upsetting thing is that it doesn't correctly boot on either my Siemens P4 or my Xeon Poweredge 2600. Not a good start, they're both corporation targetted boxes. Pity, I was looking forward to it too. If Nexenta and Belenix can do it with the Source and no funding, it would make you wonder about Sun!

Re:I wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

Like an Opteron machine that Sun sells?

Re:I wonder

[AchiIIe]

Canonical: Free Ubuntu cds shipped!
Community: Whoa, great innovative, breakthrough, sign that ubuntu is a serious contender

Sun: Free Solaris dvds shipped!
Community: Whoa, sign of desperation, they can't even give their os for free.

Re:I wonder

[RooT iO]

"we'll beat any advertised price or your mattress is freeeeeeeeee" ... your killing me larry!

Re:I wonder

[ceeam]

Oh, and if Sun wants to ship me an Acer Ferrari notebook with Solaris 10... where do I send them my postal address?

Re:I wonder

[222]

Microsoft also did something along the same lines with their Power Together program, although the end result of that was a fully functional copy of Office or Vista.
You actually had to watch a few webcasts (Hit play and go to sleep) but its essentially the same thing.
I'll be getting a free copy of Vista as well as Solaris, but more as a novelty than anything on both counts.

Re:I wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this Sun's site? I went to Sun.com and clicked to go to the German subsidiary. According to Sun.com it is located de.sun.com, not sun.de? The captcha is appropriate: paranoia

Re:I wonder

[QuantumG]

Canonical: Did it first.
Sun: Shouldn't need to.

Re:I wonder

[Fyre2012]

Canonical: Did it first.
What about AOL?

Re:I wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

I order this just before Christmas and the version that was shipped to me was Solaris 10 06/06. 11/06 was released in November, so I wonder if this is just a way of clearing out the old media they'd otherwise be disposing of?

It's perhaps worth noting that to upgrade from a previous release of Solaris 10 requires the full media if some of the features of 11/06 grab you (http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/817-0547/6mgbdbs mb?a=view)

Re:I wonder

[QuantumG]

Last time I checked, AOL doesn't have an OS, although it can feel that way. I know I didn't define "it" but I figured I was talking to fellow human beings that didn't need a definition of every preposition I used in my statement. Just for the robots out there: it == provide a free service for mailing operating system installation media to anyone who requests such service from a web site. Now back to cleaning the kitchen Robbie.

Re:I wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

The proprietary Pentium4 processor is a complete joke. Buy real hardware next time. Can your stupid PC default to serial console when no keyboard is connected?

Re:I wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

That would be AMD. But I'm sure that's not what you meant.

Re:I wonder

[Dirtside]

You mistyped:

Sun: Free Solaris dvds shipped!
One random guy on Slashdot: Whoa, sign of desperation, they can't even give their os for free.

Re:I wonder

[QuickFox]

Is this Sun's site? Interesting question.

Answered thus by whois:

Domain: sun.de
<snip/>
  [Holder]
  Type: ORG
  Name: Sun Microsystems GmbH
  Address: Sonnenallee 1
  Pcode: 85551
  City: Heimstetten
  Country: DE
  Changed: 2006-01-06T14: 03: 1001: 00
<snip/>
  [Tech-C]
  Type: PERSON
  Name: Sun Hostmaster
  Organisation: Sun Microsystems Inc.
  Address: 4150 Network Circle
  Pcode: 95054
  City: Santa Clara CA
  Country: US
  Phone: 1 01 3032727000
  Fax: 1 01 6503366623

Re:I wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

"and they aren't really hurting for customers"

Excuse me, Mr. bladesjester, but you seem to have inadvertantly typed "for" in part of your post. I was going to suggest you correct it but I'm afraid your post might still be incorrect. Oh dear, I really don't know what to say.

Yours truly,

AC

Re:I wonder

[bladesjester]

Wish I had known about that when they started it. I wouldn't have turned my nose up at a free copy of the new Office.

Re:I wonder

[Thomas the Doubter]

This is a sign that Sun is coming to terms with the economics of the Free/OpenSource movement. Get your OS out there and you will make more friends, sell more hardware and services. I think Sun has the right idea, whereas HP still does not know what to do.

Re:I wonder

[davmoo]

You're apparently new here. Let me explain the Rules of Slashdot.

1. We love Apple (especially when they do something just like Microsoft, and even more if their product is vaporware).
2. We hate Microsoft (especially when they do something just like Apple, and even more when their product is vaporware).
3. Steve Jobs can do no wrong (especially when he does the same as Bill Gates).
4. Bill Gates can do no right (especially when he does the same as Steve Jobs).
5. Any story that is positive about Bill Gates or Microsoft will get tagged "fud" or "troll".
6. Any story that is negative about Steve Jobs or Apple will get tagged "fud" or "troll".
7. "One Laptop Per Child" is the second coming of Christ.
8. Nicholas Negroponte is Christ.
9. We ignore Sun (especially when they dominate any specific industry).
10. We adore Java (even though it was developed by Sun).
11. It has been "The Year That Linux Takes Over the Desktop" for about 8 years.
12. It has been "The Year That Microsoft Dies" for about 15 years.
13. It has been "The Year That Apple Overtakes Microsoft" for about 10 years.
14. Ubuntu is God's chosen Linux distribution.
15. All other distributions of Linux are wannabes...especially the ones that have been around longer than Ubuntu.

I've got $5 US that says this reply gets moderated as "troll" or "flamebait" because it contains so much truth about the attitudes of the majority of the Slashdot community.

Re:I wonder

[binkzz]

I think it was only for businesses, and then only for the first 300 who applied.

Re:I wonder

[Master of Transhuman]

This post got score zero?

Wow, the Solaris geeks are out in force today.

Nothing to do at the data center?

Oh, right, that's because Solaris is SO reliable, I suppose. That's why you're sitting around the data center on Sunday...

And they call Linux geeks fanatical...

Read my lips:

SOLARIS IS A HAS=BEEN!

Re:I wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

That is exactly what I meant. They both use the same "obsolete" architecture. Yet, Sun seems to think that these boxes are hot stuff.

Care to revise your statements at this point?

Re:I wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes it can, actually.

Do you have anything else to add?

Re:I wonder

[thogard]

Is it desperation? I think so.
There are lots of Solaris shops that looked at Solaris 10 and told sun to come back when its done.
Solaris 9 wasn't impressive as a development environment but for a production system you could rip out all the bloat and have a very lean system that was rock solid. The core system rarely needed patches and if you kept careful track of what modules where needed and checked what got patched, you would find that most patches were for things that wouldn't even be loaded on a secured production machine.
You could get trusted solaris for earlier versions but not Solaris 10. Sun's attitude is simple that Solaris 10 is the most secure Solaris ever (which is total BS-- you can't even audit what its starting up)

I've been running Sun hardware and operating systems for 2 decades because I could lock it down and make sure it was locked down. I like the hardware stack on sparc which means off by one errors aren't going to end up in the execution engine and that alone is worth buying sun hardware for things that must be secure. Too bad they broke Solaris 10 so bad. For examples, if you poke data into the smf databases you can get the system to run commands at shutdown (with no way to detect it other than the full audit log). Every time someone fixes the very broken xml shared library you have to reboot the system since init is linked to it (why? init should not be dynamically linked). Init opens shared libs and then starts programs that mount things over the top. I'm not sure you can even properly patch a Solaris 10 system now and I know it can't be secured.

Re:I wonder

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Canonical: Did it first.
Sun: Shouldn't need to.

Oh, baloney.

First release of Ubuntu was October 20, 2004.
Sun was giving away solaris on DVD since at least May of 2002.

Re:I wonder

[Thalagyrt]

Well, whois can be faked, but the full proof is that the sun.com nameservers (ns1, ns2, ns7, and ns8.sun.com) handle DNS for sun.de, and also if you use nslookup to look it up from the sun nameservers, they show themselves as authoritative and resolve to the same IP. So as you said, yep, this is legit.

Re:I wonder

[joeljkp]

I did it, and I'm not a business. It expired pretty quickly, but it did last a couple days (long enough for me to get in there and register).

Re:I wonder

[sponga]

Actually almost everybody got their confirmation email stating that we will all be getting our copies of Vista 30 days from RTM release and same goes with Office; but you have to fill out a tax form for the Office part if you get both of them.

It wasn't 300 more like 3,000-30,000 people who are getting Vista and Office for free; this has been confirmed by Microsoft reps and on sites like Slickdeals.net where the deal originated and the deal lasted about a whole week. But of course Slasdhot didn't report about it and you guys missed out big time depending on your standards.

I also still enjoy my free sendout from Novell Suse(sorry said it) last year and continue to stay on my shelf for emergency use.

Re:I wonder

[Phoobarnvaz]

Is this a sign of desperation? (Not bashing Sun here, just heard that the company is going through a tough time.)

Not at all. Sun's been doing this for years. Several years ago...Sun sent me Solaris 7 on several CD's. Microsoft has also been doing this for "test drive" versions of their server OS's.

Just ordered my copy...so it is legit.

Re:I wonder

[pravuil]

no, not really. Just a data mining/marketing ploy.

Re:I wonder

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Last time I checked, QuantumG doesn't have a sense of humor, although it can feel that way. I know Fyre didn't define "funny" but he figured he was talking to fellow human beings that didn't need a definition of every joke he used in a statement. Just for the robots out there: funny == a joke. Now back to cleaning the kitchen Robbie.

Re:I wonder

[dotgain]

I've got $5 US that says this reply gets moderated as "troll" or "flamebait" because it contains so much truth about the attitudes of the majority of the Slashdot community.

Hmm, I usually use "Funny" for those, am I doing it right?

Re:I wonder

[J.R. Random]

No troll or flamebait points. So give me my $5.

Re:I wonder

[hdparm]

Let me know once you've finished testing and I'll send you my address. There will be a suggested option to return the thing if you wish. Ignore the address in that suggestion and use mine instead.

Re:I wonder

[corsec67]

16. Any post containing the disclaimer that it will be modded down will instead be modded up.

(This post will be modded down. But, by saying that, people will mod it up. Does claiming that it will be modded get people to mod it down?)

Re:I wonder

[davmoo]

Actually, and really not surprisingly either, the very first mod it got was "-1 overrated".

Re:I wonder

[davmoo]

Too late. It's very first moderation was "-1 overrated"...same thing...which I thought was amusing since how can it be overrated if no one had even rated it first :-)

Re:I wonder

[Skater]

Not really. Sun gave away (or sold cheaply, don't remember which) an earlier version of their operating system that ran on Intel machines. I don't remember whether it was SunOS, Solaris, or whatever, and I don't want to call it something because I'll probably pick the wrong name and version number, and I don't see my copy nearby.

As I recall, the deal was, you ordered it and paid for shipping, they waited 6 weeks, then sent it overnight. Yeah, thanks for charging me $50 for overnight shipping AFTER waiting 6 weeks. If I'd really needed the software, after 6 weeks of waiting, another few days wouldn't have mattered.

Oh, I just found the box, Solaris 2.6, May '98. I never did get around to installing it. Wonder if I could eBay it...

Re:I wonder

[asrail]

Any fold should use https and check the certificate validity before sending sensitive data over the web:
https://www2.sun.de/dc/forms/reg_us_2211_391.jsp

if you're running Firefox you will quickly see it's not a pishing.

Re:I wonder

[Kozar_The_Malignant]

I modded your post and then canceled the mod by posting this to tell you that I did it. I'll leave it to you to guess what mod points I gave you.

Re:I wonder

[jZnat]

Dude, I think you got Slashdot and digg mixed up again.

Re:I wonder

[Doctor Memory]

Sun seems to think that these boxes are hot stuff. They're gateway machines (as opposed to Gateway). Once you've got stuff running on Solaris on an 8-way Opteron box, and you find out you need more power, well, Sun will be happy to explain all about their new Niagra machines...

Re:I wonder

[rbanffy]

But Solaris 10 is not a new product...

About a year ago I was handed a Solaris 10 DVD, a Solaris 11 beta and a CD for Nexenta (Ubuntu on top of a Solaris kernel)

I like Solaris, but I would like a very cheap Niagara ATX motherboard much more than a pressed DVD. And it doesn't even need to be for free. I think that would drum up the interest on Niagara, Solaris and Sun in general.

They also need to re-hire Frog Design. We need something as cool as a Sparcstation 1 and a Sun monitor to match.

Re:I wonder

[Cooee]

I don't know. I registered on this site with my work email address and low and behold I got my first spam email ever. This is the first time I've ever registered anywhere using my work email (outside work anyhow). I really hope this site is legitimate, otherwise I hate to think what sorts of snail mail may end up on my desk. I know its possible my address may have been farmed on an infected friends PC or something, but the timing seems too perfect for that!?

Re:I wonder

[Cooee]

Sun.com links to de.sun.com off their main page as well for Germany, so why would this offer be coming from www2.sun.de? I think i've been conned.

Re:I wonder

[QuickFox]

When you filled in the form, are you sure you didn't select any of the checkboxes under "I would be interested in hearing more about..." or "Yes, I'd like to receive general communications..."? What did the spam look like, could it be from a legit subscription list?

I registered, but I used an e-mail address that already receives lots of spam, so I can't be sure if more was added.

Re:I wonder

[Cooee]

Yes I'm 100% sure. I triple checked it. And besides, I don't think Sun would advertise Viagra!

Re:I wonder

[QuickFox]

I don't think Sun would advertise Viagra! Indeed that seems extremely unlikely!

Re:I wonder

[Dabido]

Solaris 10 isn't exactly new. I've had a copy (along with StarOffice7) since July 2005. [Actually, it arrived in my snailmailbox in June, so technically I've had it since then]. It came free with Australian PC magazine. AFAIK, Sun Studio 11 has been available for free since Aug 2006.

Not that I disagree with your point in theory, as businesses do market their new products by giving samples away for free, just in practice for this case the product isn't new.

In this case they might be trying to get people to move towards them on x86 architecture in order to create a slice of the market. After all, as far as I remember they abandonded trying to get onto the x86 market a while ago, and then released Solaris 10 a few years after supposedly having given up.

It might also be a case of them trying to maintain their slice of the server market by getting Solaris 10 onto x86 servers, which are dominated by Windows and Linux at present. If they can get people used to using Solaris on x86, then it might open up a market to sell their hardware to people who become Sun fanatics.

Re:I wonder

[slack_prad]

OK grandpa! we will

Re:I wonder

[VGPowerlord]

You forgot two:

x. Any comment mentioning Firefox in a bad light will be modded Flamebait or Troll.
y. Any comment mentioning Internet Explorer in a good light will be modded Overrated or Troll.
z. Any comment mentioning Firefox in response to an IE or Opera article, but isn't subject to x above, will be modded Interesting or Insightful.

Re:I wonder

[VGPowerlord]

er... three. I apparently can't count today.

Re:I wonder

[Calinous]

Sun gave away free downloadable for the same Sun Studio and Solaris - giving away DVDs is not so much of a stretch.

Re:I wonder

[Askmum]

Well, the address in the whois, Sonnenallee 1 Heimstetten is in fact the address of Sun's office in Germany. So either some unknown entity has also invaded the premises of Sun or this is legit.

As to your spam: maybe Sun is a front for a spambusiness now. Maybe Sun distributes e-mail adresses to 3rd party contractors. Maybe Sun sends all the data to their shipping company which in turn does something fishy. Maybe it's just coincidence.
Who will tell.

Re:I wonder

[Decaff]

Is this a sign of desperation?

I doubt it; Sun server sales are doing very well right now.

Re:I wonder

[meiao]

I have to disagree to 10 and 14.

10. I hate Java (it sucks).

14. I'd rather use Debian, Gentoo or Slack.

The rest is fine by me.

Re:I wonder

[LWATCDR]

Have to say that you are wrong on a few.
10. I see more FUD about Java on slashdot than you can shake a stick at.
14. Well yea for noobs but Gentoo seems the be the blessed distro to me.

Source

[vga_init]

Is the source code included? It says only "Solaris," not "OpenSolaris," so I'm guessing that it's not. If it were, that would be cool.

Re:Source

[tjohns]

Is the source code included? It says only "Solaris," not "OpenSolaris," so I'm guessing that it's not. If it were, that would be cool.

Yes, but how often does somebody want do development from a DVD? Especially with open source software, by the time you receive the disk your tree is out of date. Plus, there's no easy way to merge in new changes when they inevitably happen.

In principle, including the source on disk is a nice idea. In practice, just check it out from RCS.

Re:Source

[thedarknite]

I downloaded the Solaris 10 iso a few months back and this appears to have the same content, so I'm fairly sure the source code won't be included.

Re:Source

[tjohns]

Sorry, I meant to say SCM, not RCS.

Re:Source

[Anonymous Coward]

They are calling it "free and open source" but I guess they mean free as in beer because the free software foundation does not give its stamp of approval for Solaris being GPL.

http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/

Re:Source

[BrainInAJar]

it's CDDL, a free software license which the FSF *does* give it's stamp of approval for, with the caveat that it's GPL incompatible so Stallman suggests you don't license your stuff with it.

Re:Source

[akohler]

No, Solaris 10 does not come with the source, although it is licensed under a Free/Open Source license that is approved by the FSF, but not GPL compatible.

Solaris 10 is the "official" Sun supported Solaris, whereas, according to the Wikipedia, "OpenSolaris is an open source project created by Sun Microsystems to build a developer community around the Solaris Operating System technology."

Re:Source

[Raenex]

No, Solaris 10 does not come with the source, although it is licensed under a Free/Open Source license that is approved by the FSF, but not GPL compatible.

This is wrong. Solaris 10 is not licensed under an open source license. The two relevant links are:

Licensing Information
Software License Agreement

It's confusing as all hell, and Sun is not very explicit on their webpages about the distinction between Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris. It seems like much of the commercial Solaris code has been transferred to the OpenSolaris project, but not all: "There remains some system code that is not open sourced, and is available only as binary files.". There is no free source you can build from that will give you an official Solaris 10 build. As an example, somebody in this thread posted that Sun was charging for patches (and of course some jerk modded him down for mentioning it).

I think the answer is if you want open source, stick with OpenSolaris, unless you want paid support.

Re:Source

[akohler]

Thanks for correcting my *big* mistake. I just read over the stuff quickly and I thought it was saying that Solaris 10 also had an open source license, which it doesn't. I'd agree with sticking with OpenSolaris unless you needed the "official" support. The Wikipedia is much clearer than Sun's site about the licensing differences.

I wonder if anyone else is confused about the Solaris 10 license?

Re:um...

[Virak]

It's 'news for nerds' because it's Solaris. It's 'stuff that matters' (at least, to said nerds) because they're giving away DVDs of it for free.

And if you only find it mildly interesting, you've probably got too much of a life. Try spending less time talking to people and going outside, and more time participating in OS flamewars, bashing Microsoft, and filling your multi-terabyte RAID (you *do* have a multi-terabyte RAID, right?) with porn.

It's the only way

[nxtr]

It's the only way I can keep my productivity up; I install an operating system on my computer that won't run any games.

Re:It's the only way

[RooT iO]

so thats why my productivity is down, good call man, good call

Re:It's the only way

[Chineseyes]

You run OSX?

Re:It's the only way

[mtec]

Cheap shot. Anyway, we have this this!

Re:It's the only way

[Anonymous Coward]

So I take it that you think that NetHack is a way of life, not a game!?

Re:It's the only way

[prosys]

Not true, you can download Doom 3 now and ruin it on Solaris 10... take alook around... So much for productivity then :-)

Re:It's the only way

[prosys]

Doh.. of course I meant RUN it on Solaris 10...gah.

Re:It's the only way

[VGPowerlord]

Nice Freudian slip. :D

Re:It's the only way

[ABoerma]

Wait, did you type 'ruin' on purpose there?

Re:It's the only way

[StikyPad]

you can download Doom 3 now and ruin it on Solaris 10

Tell us how you really feel...

Its been free for a while

[ArchieBunker]

At least in downloadable form. I remember getting Solaris 8 iso images from them almost 5 years ago. Theres plenty of hobbyists and admins that need or want to run it at home. Their attitude is much better than SGI, IRIX cds still cost plenty on ebay. O2 and Octane workstations are dirt cheap now.

Re:Its been free for a while

[modecx]

Their attitude is much better than SGI, IRIX cds still cost plenty on ebay

Gah, tell me about it. When I first got my O2 years back, I wanted to hack around with it, and most programs were a simple compile away, if you had GCC and IRIX 6.5, because it included libraries or something, and I obviously didn't want to afford their compiler because I was simply a poor CS student.

So I call up their number and talk to a rep. I ask about the OS, and ask if there are student discounts, etc. After a lot of hullabaloo, she says: $650. *cough* Holy shit. I ended up getting the iso images from some kind person on the net, and I later got the real deal off of eBay, and that went on the other SGI I pulled out of the trash.

I swear, they were/are a company who produced lots of cool stuff, but they are fucking backwards.

Re:Its been free for a while

[coredog64]

Last I checked (and this was pre-bankruptcy) you could download the m stream dists for (current release - 3) for nothing more than signing up for a free online account. I'd also add that back in the day SGI had a much more rational licensing policy for the OS -- a perpetual license for the OS version the machine shipped with. I still remember the day I called Sun to get the RTU licensing cost (i.e. didn't include media) for Solaris 8 for my then-ancient SS20. As it was capable of operating with 4 CPUs the RTU was $1200 for one year. That's not support. That's not media. That's right to use on a machine that even at the time was turning up in dumpsters.

Re:Its been free for a while

[the_shane_company]

True, but you can dupe the IRIX cd set with XCDRoast (and probably plain old dd as well). From the read you get an 'iso' file that is foreign to XCDRoast, but if you burn it as a raw image to a CD, you've got your copy. So you make your copy, back up all the CD images to a few DVD ROMS, then you sell the original set back to somebody else on eBay. Done right, you pay negative money for your IRIX. Done wrong, you pay a little bit for it.

None of this is recommended, since it would be illegal.

Re:Its been free for a while

[Siddly]

It's of minimal use to me if I can't have the Documentation CD which also means you can't get patches and have to wait for the next version to be put up for download. When surveyed via a phone call by Sun about Solaris 10, I told them I had no interest in Solaris x86 (last one I installed was Solaris 7) and I only run the 10 SPARC version. Both for myself and colleagues who use Linux, Solaris is cumbersome to admin. Now retired, my colleagues (ex-) tell me Solaris 10 is as buggy as hell, a daily pain when they have to support the great number of customers with top end SPARC hardware.

Profit!

[Anonymous Coward]

eBay, here I come! No really! People buy this free shit on eBay! Made over 100$ from Ubuntu CDs I ordered for FREE!

Re:Profit!

[Anonymous Coward]

People buy this free shit on eBay! Made over 100$ from Ubuntu CDs I ordered for FREE!

made 100$ free ?

of course minus your time to...

order CDs, deal with collection
fill in eBay form for each item
monitor auction for bids
collecting and processing payment
answer questions and corresponding with purchaser
postage stamps,envelopes, write/print addressing on items
walk/drive(gas+insurance+wear&tear) to postal depot, deal with posting (put in box or stand in line)
monitor purchasers reception

for 100$? seems like you are the one doing a lot for (near as) free

Re:Profit!

[jericho4.0]

Ok. So you sat on your ass all day and watched TV, and he made a hundred bucks.

Re:Profit!

[Guppy06]

That should help offset the loss you took with your PS3 plans.

Re:um...

[Realistic_Dragon]

Solaris beats Linux hands down for porn hunting because of that nifty app it comes with, ddtrace.

Re:um...

[NormalVisual]

Yeah, I'm not seeing the "news" angle since Solaris 10 and Sun Studio 11 have been available as free downloads for quite some time. Sure, it's nice to have them on pressed media instead of a writable CD/DVD, but I'm not sure why/how this is a big deal.

Re:Not "just like" ShipIt...

[Bob_Sheep]

No, read it again. It says that "State/Province" is only required if you are in the US or Canada.

Re:Not "just like" ShipIt...

[larien]

No, you're only required to supply a state/province if you in USA or Canada.

The bad news

[Anonymous Coward]

It's configured as an AOL signup package.

Re:Not "just like" ShipIt...

[zbaron]

That limitation is only for selecting a state or province from the drop down. There are plenty enough fields for filling in an international address.

YES, Just like ShipIt.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, if you could read correctly, "US & Canada Only" means: Only select your state from within that box IF you're a US or Canada resident.
If that wasn't obvious to you, then you do not apply to receive your free copy. You should be running Windows. :-)

By the way, I just received mine, and I'm not on US or Canada.

Re:Not "just like" ShipIt...

[shades66]

>"US & Canada only."

That is only on the address "State/Province" box only which is not needed for non-us addresses. The box below the state/province selection has most of the planet covered

Re:US & Canada only

[leonmergen]

What makes you say that ? I live in .nl and I just ordered myself a set.

Re:um...

[Tony Hoyle]

It's interesting because I'll finally have a decent copy.. never got around to burning the copies I downloaded months ago (we were going to port to solaris 10 for a customer but they balked at the cost & went with solaris 9 instead).

Last Gasp of Air for Solaris

[reporter]

The offer to ship Solaris DVDs for free is a last gasp of air for Solaris.

Five years ago, McNealy made a strategic error in refusing to open-source Solaris under a GNU license. He feared that Linux might simply absorb the best parts of Solaris and, thereby, eventually destroy Solaris.

Well, Linux still killed Solaris. The openness of Linux encouraged its proliferation and adoption by key computer giants: IBM, HP, and other companies specializing in commercial computers. IBM, in particular, drastically improved the reliability of Linux. It competed effectively against Solaris in important commercial accounts at telecommunications companies and banks.

Linux hurt Solaris and other commercial UNIXes much more than Linux hurt Windows. Today, there are only two dominant desktop/server operating systems: Linux and NT-based Windows.

Solaris is headed for burial, and McNealy jumped ship -- with millions of dollars in stock options.

Re:Last Gasp of Air for Solaris

[swordgeek]

You must live in a fascinating world.

Solaris is the dominant OS in the oil company datacentres of the world. Windows is the dominant desktop. Linux is making inroads on the desktop, and is a complete bit-player on the server side, in this industry. In commerce, AIX is still dominant, and Linux is unheard of. Telecom companies, admittedly, are getting more friendly with Linux.

Solaris is not only alive, but will remain that way for a while.

Re:Last Gasp of Air for Solaris

[Anonymous Coward]

How is this bullshit modded insightful? Solaris is still heavily used in industry, and still pounds Linux when it comes to *serious* reliability and backwards-compatibility. Linux has only really beaten it in webservers.

Today, there are only two dominant desktop/server operating systems: Linux and NT-based Windows.

Congratulations. You've won the stupidest comment of the week award. I'll let you work out why.

Re:Last Gasp of Air for Solaris

[backwardMechanic]

There seem to be lots of folks out there claiming Linux has killed Solaris. But if you talk to any admin managing machines with lots of users, shifting heavy data, they love Solaris. Better throughput, better reliability. And they keep buying Sun (even if Solaris is free). What was that quote Steve Jobs was using - if you're serious about software you have to develop your own hardware?

Re:Last Gasp of Air for Solaris

[linuxrocks123]

> In commerce, AIX is still dominant, and Linux is unheard of.

You're insane. NYSE runs its stock-trading network on Linux for one example. Merrill Lynch has a large-scale Linux deployment too. I don't know anything about what the oil industry in particular uses (nor do I care), but this at least is wrong.

> Solaris is not only alive, but will remain that way for a while.

Of course. Open source OSes can only die if no one cares, and many people care about Solaris. Its driver support is far less mature than Linux's, but it's only a matter of time before it catches up. There's some cool stuff in Solaris that will eventually find its way into Linux, too. They're both good OSes and neither is going to kill the other.

Re:Last Gasp of Air for Solaris

[An dochasac]

The comment about Scott and GPL is nonsense. But it's true that Scott et. al made some enormous mistakes during the peak of the last bubble. When Sun was golden, they started selling Ultra workstations with inadequate memory, a PCI bus and IDE drives. These low end machines introduced many a college student to Solaris and helped promote the "Slowaris" meme. Sun delayed X86 Solaris at precisely the right time to insure that GNU/Linux could take advantage of a steep part of the X86 moore curve and decades of opensource software development, some of which came from Sun. Sun made their development environment an expensive option, which surely turned away many talented but frugal developers.

Now that Sun is doing (most) everything right, opensourcing Java (GPL), opensourcing Solaris and contributing real innovations to Unix (Dtrace, ZFS...), their biggest problem is that they don't have the marketing budget of IBM (Linux's biggest corporate backer) or Microsoft and they Schwartz doesn't yet have yet have the reality distortion aura of Steve Jobs. Solaris 10 and more recent releases of Opensolaris are already freely available, as is Sun Studio. How much extra who it cost to put S10 on some DVDs and ship it to those who show enough interest? It's a no-brainer and miles away from a "cry of desparation."

Re:Last Gasp of Air for Solaris

[Anonymous Coward]

You must live in mondo bizarro. Nobody with a clue would let a Windows box inside a datacenter, nobody. Our Sun gear (SF25k) runs Solaris. Our HP iron runs HP-UX (Superdome) and our backup servers run AIX (RS-6000). We have a rack of HP Blades running Linux, but that's it. And zero Windows machines.

Re:Last Gasp of Air for Solaris

[Anonymous Coward]

Merrill Lynch has a large-scale Linux deployment too.

I'm calling FUD here... I used to be a developer ("Sr. Specialist in Debt Technology") at Merrill, and I can assure that Solaris is not only their strategic Unix platform, but that *all* of their fixed income traders have a Solaris box on their *desktop* as well. Head to 4 WFC sometime and look for yourself. Solaris is huge at Merrill, and is only going to get bigger.

Re:Last Gasp of Air for Solaris

[Anonymous Coward]

FUD != Wrong or Lie

Please stop using it that way. The meaning's aren't even similar.

Thx. The management.

Re:Last Gasp of Air for Solaris

[dbIII]

oil company datacentres of the world. Windows is the dominant desktop. Linux is making inroads on the desktop, and is a complete bit-player on the server side

You forgot about clusters - and a lot of them. I would think that most seismic data would be processed on linux clusters now since it is usually a CPU bound task that is easily split up into parallel tasks. The same software is also on solaris but it is cheaper in terms of the number and speed of processors to use amd or intel chips running linux (or solaris on x86 - but the driver situation lags at the moment). I'm not so sure about the dominnt desktop either - a lot of oil exploration software runs of X windows and the X servers on MS Windows are not paticularly good (although exceed works well most of the time) - so linux makes sense as a cheap way to get X windows with a fast implementation of X.

Re:Last Gasp of Air for Solaris

[aztracker1]

Given that many linux drivers are free/open-source, as long as the licenses are compatible (GPL drivers on Solaris' license) then they will probably be ported in time... Also, with Solaris having a more stable binary compatability, the drivers won't need to be updated/recompiled near as much.

Re:Last Gasp of Air for Solaris

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh look. Pedantry from someone who can't properly use apostrophes.

Re:Last Gasp of Air for Solaris

[htd2]

I work for a large infrastructure SW vendor, or products run on Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Linux and Windows. Nearly all the large financial services companies buy our SW. You impression of the Linux's place in financial services vs Solaris is far from reality. Most of our customers use large high end Sun's to power their back end settlement, STP, etc systems. Sun's problem was that they lost a lot of share in these companies in the mid tier/web/app server space. However this has changed in the last year or so for a number of reasons.

1. Solaris 10 came out and it is a very very capable OS particularly when compared with Linux.
2. Solaris on Intel has become a much more viable option and some of our customers are switching back from Linux to Solaris but in Intel.
3. The T1000/T2000 Coolthreads servers are very quick and very competitive with x86 based servers running Linux.
4. People are much more aware of the hidden costs of Linux which easily offset the cost benefits of moving to an x86 commodity platform.
We are seeing increased spending on Solaris in financial services with some of this being on Intel mainly at the expense of Linux on Intel. The reasons for the switch back to Solaris from Linux are Linux's cost and Solaris's capability.

Re:Last Gasp of Air for Solaris

[linuxrocks123]

> I used to be a developer ("Sr. Specialist in Debt Technology") at Merrill

How long ago? How do you know nothing has changed since you left?

I was basing my comment on stories such as this:

http://news.com.com/2100-1016_3-1014287.html

Are you saying these are just wrong?

Re:Last Gasp of Air for Solaris

[linuxrocks123]

> Most of our customers use large high end Sun's to power their back end settlement, STP, etc systems.

2/3 of Sun's servers shipped today run Linux, not Solaris. Are you sure they're not running Linux on those? You're probably wrong if you were just assuming.

As far as the rest of your comment, it's not really a response, in fact it supports my point. My parent was saying that "Linux is unheard of" in the financial space. Since you say that "some of our customers are switching back from Linux to Solaris", you prove my point that it is not unheard of. I don't particularly care if people are see-sawing back to Solaris at the moment. It's open-source too now and I don't have anything against it except that it doesn't fit my needs or personal tastes. I run Linux on my Ultra 10 mainly because I can't find a SPARC version of the Solaris zd1211 wireless driver.

Re:Last Gasp of Air for Solaris

[htd2]

No I am not assuming I know because our software licenses are for SPARC/Solaris and X86/Solaris not Linux on Sun HW. The reasons for the switch are the relatively high cost of ownership of Linux vs Solaris and numerous support issues associated with Linux which do not exist on Solaris. Sun's relaxed attitude to providing Solaris for free providing you don't want support has ment that we are seing Solaris x86 being used for development and testing with customers buying support from Sun for their production environments and larger dev/test systems. The Solaris route is simpler/cheaper and easier for them than going RedHat.

I am not refuting your point about Linux being unknown in Finance, in fact financial services companies were among the first commercial users of Linux as we know from our SW footprint in these customers. However what should be worrying to the Linux community is that the same companies which were the first commercial adopters of Linux ware now showing every sign of being the first commercial customers to drop Linux as a platform. The reasons for the move seem to be a perception that Solaris is a better OS (which is probably true), concerns about Linux support and the relatively high cost of Linux particularly when compared with Solaris x86. Something which is compounding this is that x86 servers no longer have a price performance advantage over low end Sun boxes for a whole class of workloads which consume 80% of these financial services companies low/mid tier server cycles.

Re:US & Canada only

[Anonymous Coward]

Post Title: "US & Canada only"
Excerpt: Don't hit their site if you don't live in the Continental USA.

I wonder how Canadians feel about you lumping "US & Canada" into "the Continental USA". :P

Re:US & Canada only

[andrewa]

Wrong. Interesting too that the site I got directed to when ordering mine was in Germany (.de)....

funny coincidence

[hildi]

im giving away my SUN stock as well.

Re:funny coincidence

[Anonymous Coward]

SUNW is up over 50% in the last 6 months. You just bought at the wrong time!

Re:funny coincidence

[edwardpickman]

Don't give them away. If you have enough certificates roll them up tight. They make a nice firelog.

Re:funny coincidence

[TheRaven64]

In that case, feel free to pass it in my direction.

Re:funny coincidence

[Anonymous Coward]

The SUNW stock price has gone up approximately $2 within the past year.

Do you enjoy throwing away money? Or do you identify yourself as a true Linux/FSF Communist and give back to the community?

VMware to avoid hardware compatibility problems

[ufnoise]

When I installed Solaris last year, there were no drivers to support my hardware. I was able to get it to work in VMware and it worked great. There was file which you had to tweak for the interface, but that was about it.

Re:VMware to avoid hardware compatibility problems

[evilviper]

When I installed Solaris last year, there were no drivers to support my hardware.

What hardware might that be?

There are 3rd parties developing drivers that work on Solaris, if you just look around.

For network cards, you can often find manufacturers officially supporting Solaris, and offering drivers for download. The BSD drivers are also commonly ported to Solaris, such as these: http://homepage2.nifty.com/mrym3/taiyodo/eng/

OSS offers soundcard drives for just about every popular card. It doesn't use the same API as Sun's native audio output, but most programs have no problem handling it (and some Linux-ported applications even _need_ OSS).

Sun offers a simple kit on their website to compile XFree86 drivers for Sun's commercial X11 server (with full display Postscript support). Or you can compile and use XFree/Xorg normally.

Re:VMware to avoid hardware compatibility problems

[Anonymous Coward]

I have just installed Solaris 10 (11/06) on a dell latitude D600 (old and crappy, I know), but pretty much everything worked ok. The need to add driver_aliases to get NICs working etc, seem to be a thing on the past. With the help of wificonfig and the ndis driver (both from opensolaris.org) I was even able to get the Dell wireless (broadcom) NIC to work.

Sweet.

Re:VMware to avoid hardware compatibility problems

[ufnoise]

        When I installed Solaris last year, there were no drivers to support my hardware.

What hardware might that be?


Unfortunately downloading the NIC driver is hard when your NIC is not working. I couldn't get either of my network cards working. Also not fun is getting the NVIDIA graphics card to work. The drivers I am using now in Linux for my Nforce 4 chipset are:

skge
forcedeth

I was able to download drivers and burn them to the CD. Unfortunately I was either unsuccessful comprehending how device drivers in Solaris work, or it had difficulty recognizing the hardware.

VMware seemed like an excellent solution since it was free (as in beer), and I don't like rebooting.

Re:VMware to avoid hardware compatibility problems

[rho]

Nobody has ever given me a compelling reason to install Solaris. I put the x86 version of Solaris--7 or 8, I forget which--on a machine, and then tried to set up netatalk for some Macs on the network. It was a pain in the ass. Solaris also likes to put shit all over the disk--in /opt, in /var, in /usr/local/etc/var/ in /ramalamadingdong. I understand why--they have to provide compatibility. But it's just a pain.

Unless you're running highly specialized Solaris hardware, what advantage will you get over CentOS or FreeBSD? As the parent states, it sure isn't hardware compatibility.

Re:VMware to avoid hardware compatibility problems

[twiddlingbits]

What you will get is 1)Containers 2) a kick ass fast TCP/IP stack 3) Mil-Spec Security and those are just off the top of mind. I used to work for Sun as an Architect so I used to get this question all the time.

Re:VMware to avoid hardware compatibility problems

[rho]

1) I didn't know what this is, but according to Wikipedia, it's virtualization. That's available everywhere. I assume Solaris has bigger and better tricks, but I bet it requires Sun hardware too.

2) Sounds good, but is it really that much faster? Almost certainly the wire will be the bottleneck, not the network stack.

3) Security is good, but security is very much implementation-specific.

I'm coming at this from the small-business standpoint. The Solaris wizards I knew when I was slumming it in a BigCorp. were very handy, very smart, and very expensive. I could never see a reason to run Solaris on my own servers as I really didn't have time to learn the Solaris-admin hacks. RedHat burned me, and I stuck with FreeBSD for a lot of years, but I'm back to RedHat (CentOS, really) 'cause it's proven itself to me. IMO Sun should stick with what they do best, which is big corporate-level stuff, not piddly GoDaddy-level stuff. Slugging it out at the low-end of the market will leave them bloodied and broke.

That said, a sysadmin pal is very complementary of the Opteron Fire servers, which are quite reasonably priced.

Re:VMware to avoid hardware compatibility problems

[twiddlingbits]

Yes, it's virtualization of a sort. It's not the same type of virtualization as say VMWare is though. Nope, Solaris 10 runs on SPARC and X86 hardware just fine and containers and ZFS are standard items not added "tricks". It's about 30% faster at a minimum in most scenarios. The wire is often blamed for what is really a router problem or poor network config. Security in Solaris is the best there is, and it's better at just the plain stuff (/etc/passwd shadowing, password encyption, strong password requirements) and the fancy multilevel stuff too. If you run a BSD server you can run a Solaris box with no problems. The drawback for you as a small biz will be the price of Sun servers is usually easy to bet with ones from HP & Dell that offer pretty much the same features and performance.

Re:VMware to avoid hardware compatibility problems

[RichZellich]

The benefit you get is compatibility with the OS you're running on your office's Sun iron. Since I run Solaris at work, I'd prefer to run Solaris on my own box at home, rather than BSD or one of the Linux flavors. I've spent quite a few years on Sun systems, and am familiar with the foibles of Solaris - why would I want to run something with a different set of bahaviors if I can get a personal copy of Solaris for free?

Re:VMware to avoid hardware compatibility problems

[rho]

That's a very compelling argument for you, but not so much for me.

Re:VMware to avoid hardware compatibility problems

[comay]

Actually, containers don't require Sun hardware to run on - they're available on any system that Solaris 10 runs on. From a networking performance standpoint, a server having multiple 1Gb or 10Gb network interfaces is going to need a highly multithreaded stack in order to drive those interfaces. Solaris 10's TCP/IP stack is optimized for those sorts of situations.

Solaris vs. Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Not that they have to be mutually exclusive, but Sun really needs to get with the program. Solaris is a total PITA compared to Linux. Linux has moved much closer in the direction of tight GUI and hardware integration. Solaris is like taking a step back to the stone age. The learning curve is just way too high for someone who hasn't been in that world and someone who doesn't want to become a professional sysadmin.

Full GUI configurability, excellent package installation, stupendous plug and play hardware support. Why in the world would anyone leave that behind? Maybe dtrace is amazing, but there isn't even a GUI for it.

Re:Solaris vs. Linux

[Yvanhoe]

Full GUI configurability, excellent package installation, stupendous plug and play hardware support. Why in the world would anyone leave that behind? Maybe dtrace is amazing, but there isn't even a GUI for it.

Funny that it sounds like a windows vs linux argument of a few years ago.

Re:Solaris vs. Linux

[dosius]

I actually like one major thing about Solaris... Free CDE.

Okay, so the CDE is ancient. It's still the official standard GUI for Unix. A pity it's binary-only, as I'd like to use it here (and NO, xfce isn't close enough - and no way in hell am I paying pumped-up prices for deXtop!)

-uso.

Re:Solaris vs. Linux

[grigori]

"Maybe dtrace is amazing, but there isn't even a GUI for it."

Sure there is, called Chime, and on opensolaris.org. harder? compare setting up logical volumes on Linux compared to much easier ZFS on Solaris

Re:Solaris vs. Linux

[evilviper]

A pity it's binary-only, as I'd like to use it here (and NO, xfce isn't close enough

You're right, XFce isn't close... It doesn't copy ANY of the worst parts of CDE at all.

Re:Solaris vs. Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

You might be interested in the Petition to Open Source CDE and Motif. I tried to submit it to /. but it was rejected. If we're lucky, The OpenGroup will listen.

Re:Solaris vs. Linux

[dosius]

Signed it already. #1112

-uso.

lolol

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun Studio software provides optimizing C, C++ and Fortan compilers

Re:lolol

[geniusj]

Sun Studio software provides optimizing C, C++ and Fortan compilers Aren't you hip? I guess you've never heard of g77?

Re:lolol

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I have heard of g77. And I wouldn't touch it with a 12" dick if I had one.

Sorry, but my code works way way better with Sun Fortran than g77.

Re:lolol

[geniusj]

I think my point was missed. The original post appeared to be laughing at Sun for having a Fortran compiler. I was pointing out that there's a GNU fortran compiler as well.

Re:lolol

[gardyloo]

I think all the posts missed the fact that they claim to have a "Fortan" compiler, which is a misspelling. It's just too bad it wasn't that funny.

Open The Floodgates

[kahanamoku]

Now that it's on /. you can basically not expect to receive your copy for the next 6 months with the flood of /.ers filling in the form!

Re:Open The Floodgates

[RLiegh]

Let 'em have it. Last month I downloaded Solaris Express build 53, which includes a much newer GNOME (2.16, as opposed to 2.8 or whatever in Solaris 10) and firefox 2.

General Information on Solaris 10?

[Venim]

Is there anything in particular that makes Solaris 10 stand out from say FreeBSD or various flavors of Linux?

Re:General Information on Solaris 10?

[Stonent1]

Slashdot is not google. :)

Re:General Information on Solaris 10?

[larien]

Vendor support - you'll get full support for things like Oracle, SAP, etc, etc on Solaris easier than Linux (yes, I know you can get Oracle on Linux, but only certain versions, mainly Redhat)

Support for huge boxes. The Solaris 10 you run on a single CPU sunblade 100 is the same OS as will run on a 144-core loaded 25K - there's also very little real difference in the OS between SPARC & x86 (main differences are boot loaders & X-windows).

Then there's feature set - zones, dtrace, ZFS, workload management & so on all come out of the box. Most linux software will run with a recompile.

Re:General Information on Solaris 10?

[flyingfsck]

Yes, it works on Sun machines in particular. Apart from that, it is very much like running RedHat Linux with Gnome desktop.

Re:General Information on Solaris 10?

[swordgeek]

I'll assume you've missed all of the Solaris 10 hype, and are genuinely curious. That said, there are a lot of interesting things in Solaris 10.

First of all, it is robust and reliable to a degree that Linux still doesn't achieve in a general-purpose environment. It's also immensely scaleable--dealing gracefully with as big of a machine as you want to throw at it. In terms of technology, Solaris 10 was a complete rewrite, and in many ways was a rethinking of Unix. It provides service-level fault tolerance (via SMF, which replaces the traditional /etc/init.d method of starting services). There's dtrace which can trace anything in the computer (massively, incredibly more powerful than strace or truss). Zones are an implementation of virtual machines, and allow for complete isolation of environments all under one kernel. Related to that is the scheduler, which allows a very granular means of resource allocation to a process or application. Also, Brandz will let you run Linux code under Solaris, within a zone. I know of developers who are using this, because it lets them run dtrace against their Linux code for debugging and optimisation.
Finally there's ZFS, which is truly a new filesystem--the first in a long time on any platform. It combines filesystem operations with volume management, and results in a filesystem that has been abstracted from the hardware it's running on.

These are just the highlights of the most robust Unix out there right now.

What Solaris 10 will NOT buy you though, is the same end-user experience of Linux. The graphics routines, multimedia applications, and audio support just aren't at the same level in Solaris yet. That's changing fast enough, but it hasn't caught up yet.

Re:General Information on Solaris 10?

[lanc]

Is there anything in particular that makes Solaris 10 stand out from say FreeBSD or various flavors of Linux?

see the feature list.

Re:General Information on Solaris 10?

[Yvanhoe]

That means you have to formulate your request differently when addressing to Slashdot or to Google : Don't say "What features of Sun OS can not be found in linux distributions ?" but say "Solaris is just a toy! Linux is far more superior!" and you may get a full detailed list of the said features

Re:General Information on Solaris 10?

[Anonymous Coward]

(yes, I know you can get Oracle on Linux, but only certain versions, mainly Redhat)

Which is why it's meaningless to compare Solaris to "Linux". If you want to make meaningful comparisons, pick a distro.

Re:General Information on Solaris 10?

[2ms]

Are they really working hard on these things? I'm curious. Those are more home or desktop only type user things. Just as an example, it's not as if Solaris will ever be used for pro music production or anything -- none of the industry standard apps are available for it. Who are they working on the multimedia, audio, etc support for exactly? I'm not doubting what you say, I'm just curious what their goal is.

Re:General Information on Solaris 10?

[swordgeek]

They are working quite hard at it. It was one of the major drives behind the OpenSolaris project, in fact. On the one hand, running Solaris10 on commodity hardware is good for the workstation world, where Solaris on Sparc has been falling behind as of late. On the other hand, getting Solaris into the hands of as many hobbyists as possible (through OpenSolaris, due to all the multimedia tools) is the best thing they can do.

So yes, they're workin on it.

Re:General Information on Solaris 10?

[aggressor-on]

Solaris is just a toy! Linux is far more superior!

Free Coasters!

[lorg]

Yay! Free coasters for everyone :)

Re:Free Coasters!

[baldass_newbie]

Forget the coasters, I want the DVD case.

Re:Free Coasters!

[VGPowerlord]

For a limited time only, order one coaster and get a DVD case absolutely free*!

* Offer not valid in countries whose names contain vowels.

Re:Not "just like" ShipIt...

[LurkerXXX]

As others have said, you only have to enter as state/province for the U.S. or Canada.

As for why you should have figured this out yourself...Huge hint for you... The website is .de

Re:um...

[2ms]

Haven't you heard, people who don't like MS are yesterday's MS? If you are one us, you are supposed to bash, by accusing them of bashing MS, people who dislike MS or its products. I can't believe you didn't know that. You must have a shitty karma level.

Nice

[flyingfsck]

I've used the Free version Open Solaris for a while on a 4 way box. Works very well and uses Gnome desktop. No serious bugs, except that dragging and dropping a file on the desktop can make Gnome lock up.

Re:Nice

[Anonymous Coward]

What about KDE?

Re:Nice

[BrainInAJar]

either it's in blastwave or you can get an admittedly older, but compiled with the fantastic Sun compiler from solaris.kde.org

Re:um...

[lanc]

I'm not seeing the "news" angle since Solaris 10 and Sun Studio 11 have been available as free downloads for quite some time.

as is Sun Cluster !

Yes, but who is their competition?

[Kenneth Stephen]

In the good old days, when Sun was making money, they had their guns trained on IBM. These days, there seems to be a tacit acknowledgment in their strategy that they are no longer in the same league as IBM. They seem to be aspiring to compete with HP, Dell and *shudder* Gateway. You dont see IBM giving away their AIX operating system for free, do you? And this is despite the fact that AIX soleley exists to exploit IBM hardware (it doesnt run on anything else) and therefore, could legitimately be given away, since IBM's objective is to sell hardware.

The bottom line is: yes, its a way to drum up interest in a new product, but they appear to be targetting the lower-end market segment with this gimmick.

Re:Yes, but who is their competition?

[bladesjester]

I'd say that they're probably going the support route with this one. They give away the software and then sell their support contracts kind of like Redhat does.

I've known a couple of people who worked for Sun going on-site to locations to do support and I would assume that they have phone based packages as well.

Personally, I have to say that, if I had the spare cash, this might make me want to buy a Sun box. I love their hardware, having worked on it in labs for several years. It's just that buying the new OS every upgrade would have been rather expensive.

Re:Yes, but who is their competition?

[TheRaven64]

You dont see IBM giving away their AIX operating system for free, do you? No, but then I don't really see IBM selling AIX, except to those people already using it. They seem to be doing everything they can to gut it and put everything that makes it worthwhile in to Linux. They are pushing the Linux brand hard, because Linux is cool at the moment. This could backfire for them, since people will start to wonder why they should by from IBM, rather than some other random Linux vendor.

Sun, on the other hand, is trying to position Solaris as a Linux competitor. Technically, it's superior in most regards (driver support being a big exception, but this is not a problem for servers, since they are certified for the OS or not sold). It already has the reputation. It has a license that the FSF call Free, although some people have problems with it. At the really high end, systems like OpenVMS and z/OS still rule. Solaris can't compete with these, and neither can Linux. Yet. At the bottom end, there is Windows or Linux (or the *BSDs, but even though I use them I realise they are a tiny percentage of the market). Solaris lives in the middle, where the volumes are small and the margins are high. The bottom is creeping up on the middle though, and so it is important for Sun that they focus on the bottom.

Personally, I wouldn't try to compete in the top end. IBM are there, and they are welcome to the market. SIG used to be there; remember then? There are some people who can't make do with commodity hardware, and there will be for a long time, but this segment grows smaller every year. Sun are focussing on the bottom, because as technology increases, more and more people are adequately served by the bottom. The trick is to have a differentiator. Sun sell Linux and Windows systems, but they also sell Solaris systems. Now, anyone can sell a Solaris system as cheaply as they can sell a Linux system. Why is this good for Sun? A few reasons:

1. They can say 'Look at all these other Solaris sellers[1]! No vendor lock-in here.'
2. They can say 'Look, Solaris is better than Linux, buy Solaris'
3. Most importantly, they can say 'sure, you could buy Solaris from those guys, but isn't it more sensible to buy it from us? After all, we wrote it. If you need support, we have people who know the source tree inside out who can quickly track down and fix any bug you find. Just sign here for our platinum support. In blood please...'

The hardware will be cheap. The software will be free. Having someone who can fix whatever problem you might encounter on call will be very expensive, and for a lot of people will be worth every penny. How much does ten minutes of downtime cost you?

[1] They already had Fujitsu as a second source, which has helped them a lot.

Re:Yes, but who is their competition?

[Bright Apollo]

I've wondered about the AIX/ Linux strategy for IBM, because I design systems using p-series machines from IBM. From what I can tell, IBM is making money better than anyone in services, which explains the SUSE Linux as well as Red Hat Linux work that they do. The top two Linux distros are those, and IBM wants to be your preferred service provider; they will happily settle for backup at a premium.

AIX exists, though, because it can utterly exploit power CPUs. What I can have my sysadmin do with a p595 and AIX puts any Linux or MS solution to shame, on any x86 platform. Buy any VM you want, I can get partitioning that blows it away, at finer levels, with more CPU left over for processing. And my benchmarks will make you blink.

All of this comes at a cost, of course, and I'm fortunate to have at least the money component of the classic tradeoff available: you can have it fast, cheap, or robust, but you can only pick two. AIX is for those who pick fast and robust.

-BA

Re:Yes, but who is their competition?

[Doctor Memory]

You dont see IBM giving away their AIX operating system for free, do you? Doesn't matter, nobody'd take it anyway... Seriously, AIX feels like System V was translated to Japanese, went through a generation or two of development, then was translated into English again. It's got some nice features (the first Unix I used with an LVM, lo these many years ago), but it's...I dunno, got an accent or something. It's just not right...

Re:Yes, but who is their competition?

[the_shane_company]

Sun hasn't charged for 'the new OS' since they started giving away Solaris 7 years ago. Now, I need to figure out if I can put a 'generic, cheap' DVD Rom drive in my Blade 100, since it only has a CD drive at present.

Re:Yes, but who is their competition?

[Nevyn]

Now, anyone can sell a Solaris system as cheaply as they can sell a Linux system.

So who is doing it, with their own support people? With Linux I can easily point to three different "for profit" distributors, and then there are lots of gratis ones CentOS/Debian/etc. ... AFAIK OpenSolaris and Solaris still aren't even close to bit compatible, and they are basically it ... both owned by Sun. No vendor lock-in, don't look behind the curtain.

Also, in my personal opinion, Sun can "position" Solaris as a better Linux all they want but that won't make it true.

Re:Yes, but who is their competition?

[bladesjester]

That's honestly news to me. The last time I had to worry about buying unix licenses was several years ago, and that was Digital on some older DEC's running a few legacy systems where I used to work.

I used Solaris a lot in the programming labs at my university and rather liked it. In fact, it's the reason that I started using linux because that let me do my programing without having to be in the labs or on the dialup connection that I had at the time.

Now, I just need to work Sun hardware into my budget at some point =]

Re:Yes, but who is their competition?

[the_shane_company]

I got my Blade 100 at a University Auction about 9 months ago for $60. Then, at the last similar auction (about two months ago) I saw someone wheeling out a whole skid of Sun boxes, which included a bunch of Blade 100's, that he'd probably paid about $100 for (that's about what the skid lots go for especially when they don't, duh, have boxes that duh, run windoze.) I have so much older Sun hardware here now that the big piles are getting in the way. About half of it is Ultrasparc.

Re:Yes, but who is their competition?

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft know they earn big money by building up their relations with the small guys. Some small guys becames big guys.

Solaris is getting good on the desktop this days. Solaris with a new gnome brings it closer to Linux on the desktop.

Re:Yes, but who is their competition?

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM for one. They announced Solaris support for some of their servers and blade servers.

Re:Yes, but who is their competition?

[Ilgaz]

You dont see IBM giving away their AIX operating system for free, do you? Doesn't matter, nobody'd take it anyway... Seriously, AIX feels like System V was translated to Japanese, went through a generation or two of development, then was translated into English again. It's got some nice features (the first Unix I used with an LVM, lo these many years ago), but it's...I dunno, got an accent or something. It's just not right... It is just not right for anything which isn't enterprise or big iron. AIX is a mainframe centric OS.

Just like, Solaris will be better for scientists rather than admin people.

Re:Yes, but who is their competition?

[goldsounds]

You dont see IBM giving away their AIX operating system for free, do you? And this is despite the fact that AIX soleley exists to exploit IBM hardware (it doesnt run on anything else) and therefore, could legitimately be given away, since IBM's objective is to sell hardware.

Wait, wait... you don't see IBM giving away AIX despite the fact that it only runs on their hardware? And this means it, therefore, could legitimately be given away? Why? So someone can say "Boy, this disk sure is shiny. I bet it'll do amazing things when I put it in a machine that can actually run it. Screw it - I'm buying an IBM mainframe!".

Did this post make sense to anyone? Am I an idiot?

Fruit Issues

[fm6]

Apples and oranges. Ubuntu was never a closed-source product, and the people who put it together were motivated by the desire to put together a better Linux bistro that they always knew they'd have to give away. Solaris/SunOS has been a closed-source product, and a significant revenue source for Sun, since 1982. (Let's not quibble about whether Solaris and SunOS are the "same OS".) Sun giving away Solaris, either by opening part of the source or by giving away free media and licenses, is a major shift for them. "Desperation" might be too strong a word, but Sun is certainly going through some collective soul searching.

It wasn't so long ago that, Sun had a religious devotion to their own hardware platform (SPARC), OS (Solaris), and application platform (Java). They weren't just infatuated with these technologies, they believed they had to control them. Hence the long battle over opening up Java, which is usually described as "open-sourcing" Java, but is actually more about opening up management of the Java platform spec. Key people in Sun resisted these changes for years, unwilling to share control over the future of these technologies. And if Sun weren't losing money hand over fist, these people would still be having their way.

Re:Fruit Issues

[SuiteSisterMary]

Sun giving away Solaris, either by opening part of the source or by giving away free media and licenses, is a major shift for them. "Desperation" might be too strong a word, but Sun is certainly going through some collective soul searching.

The Solaris 2.6 CDs that I got, free of charge, sometime around, oh, 1999, 2000, under exactly the same concept, disagree that this is new, or a "major shift." Or the Solaris 7 CDs, for that matter.

Re:Fruit Issues

[RobertLTux]

and just for fun lets see what you get in your happy dvd case

1 x64/x86 DVD ---- non sun hardware install set
2 sparc dvd ---- just in case you have a sparc handy
2 Developer Tools DVD
          A Sun Studio 11
          B java studio creator 2 update 1
          C Netbeans 5.0

Re:Fruit Issues

[fm6]

x64/x86 DVD ---- non sun hardware install set

Actually, Sun has long since stopped being a SPARC-only company. They officially admitted the stupidity of ignoring the x86/x64 marketplace a couple years ago, and brought back Andrew Bechtolsheim to design a line of x64 servers.

Re:Not "just like" ShipIt...

[QuickFox]

"US & Canada only." They included that in the form as an IQ test, so that only Real Geek Geniuses will get their CD. All the people who can't get past that question to the list of countries are non-geniuses who should stay with Windows.

Who needs it?

[targitai]

It looks pretty desperate. First, they made Solaris available to public. Now they are trying to ignite some interest for this OS by giving away free dvds. More and more choose Linux as preinstall option on Sun hardware leaving "native" Solaris aside.

Re:Who needs it?

[SuiteSisterMary]

Nah, they've been doing this for years and years and years. I have a copy of Solaris 2.6 kicking around somewhere, same deal; shipped for absolutely free, by request.

No different than any other tech company giving free for personal use or student copies of software.

It's true

[faragon]

I received the disks on december 8 '2006, postal box labeled as:

Sun Solaris 10 Media Kit Program
Fulfillment and Customer Service by:
BrandVia Alliance, Inc. - Fulfillment Center
2300 Zanker Road Suite E, San Jose, CA 95131, USA
Telephone: 408 955 1750 customerservice@brandvia.com
Reference: 23072-588

To *Your Name*
-reserved-
*Address*
Air Mail $5.05

Contents: Free Solaris 10 Software Media Kit. Commercial Value less than $10

Postal service used: UNITED STATES POSTAGE, from ZIP CODE 95131 to Barcelona (Spain)

The package include 3 DVD:

* 6/06 Solaris 10 Operating System (SPARC DVD)
* 6/06 Solaris 10 Operating System (x64/x86 DVD)
* Developer Tools (Sun Studio 11, Sun Java Studio Creator 2 Update 1, Sun Java Studio Enterprise 8, NetBeans 5.0)

The DVD box shows a photo of castellers, quite curious, as it is typical from where I live (human tower, representing that the union make you stronger, etc.).

Corollarious: I'm glad the DVDs crossed the ocean. Thank you Sun! If Solaris become GPL v3 licensed, I would consider to use it for homebrewed hacking. Although I love Linux, and I will not leave using it, I like the possibility of have a GPL v3 alternative... just in case!

Re:It's true

[Anonymous Coward]

Me too received this about a month ago (here in Spain :)

Re:It's true

[Anonymous Coward]

Contratulations, by the way, my taylor is rich.

Re:It's true

[Anonymous Coward]

When Sun gives away Solaris 10 Software, it has "Commercial Value less than $10". When MS gives away Vista plus Office 2007 (thru the recent PowerTogether program), the combo has a taxable value exceeding US$800. Which leads to all kinds of interesting questions about how you should value Promo, OEM, and Retail copies of software you receive--assuming they are clearly labelled as such so that you can tell the difference.

Oracles Knifes Solaris to Death

[Anonymous Coward]

According to the latest news, Oracle has abandoned Solaris in favor of Linux. Oracle programmers do their development first and foremost on Linux. Then, if there is customer demand, the programmers port their code to Solaris.

Re:Oracles Knifes Solaris to Death

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the second time you've posted that. Most people can scroll websites up and down, so I'll assume you're 'reporter' or some similar idiot desperate to convince us that Linux is going to conquer all other UNIX-based OSs.

Oracle is still available on Solaris, because yes, there still are people using it. It's not going to go away anytime soon. Hey, maybe you can cherry-pick another news story and scrape the barrel some more?

Re:Not "just like" ShipIt...

[Anonymous Coward]

...why the hell is that modded "troll"?

You might want to try something that my ex- did. A few years ago, she came across the same problem. We live in New Zealand, and it wasn't listed in the country she wanted to ship her stuff to, so she typed in

> Anna What's_Her_Name
> xx Something Street
> Dunedin, New Zealand

and then chose "Australia" as her home. When the box arrived, a few weeks later, it was labeled

> Anna What's_Her_Name
> xx Something Street
> Dunedin, New Zealand
> Australia

with a big red line through the Australia part, and the person had written underneath

> Try New Zealand!

So give it a try. (My Solaris discs will be arriving within "10 working days".)

Oracles Knifes Solaris to Death

[Anonymous Coward]

According to the latest news, Oracle has abandoned Solaris in favor of Linux. Oracle programmers do their development first and foremost on Linux. Then, if there is customer demand, the programmers port their code to Solaris.

In other news..

[postmortem]

AOL exec works for SUN now.

Shades of OS/2

[Nanoda]

Not to say it's exactly the same thing, but IBM did this with OS/2 about 10 years ago. It didn't really do a whole lot for them back then, and my CD seems to have been shipped to the same place as my Guinness bar towel.

Re:Shades of OS/2

[the_shane_company]

Sun also did this with Solaris (7) about 8 years ago.

Re:Shades of OS/2

[multipartmixed]

8 years ago, Sun expected you to pick up the tab for the shipping (10 bucks IIRC). And they called it a "Developer License".

I still have a box running that was installed from that CD.

Damned if it has YET to require ANY maintenance... Mind you, all it does is provide a samba-to-nfs gateway, DNS (root of tree for entire enterprise) and DHCP.

The only problem I have with that box is that every now and then I have to push "y" during fsck boot -- logging is turned off by default in 7 (for good reason), and I've been meaning to put that machine on a UPS....

free Solaris????

[Danzigism]

done and done ;D

Obsolete.

[Anonymous Coward]

Solaris beats Linux hands down for porn hunting because of that nifty app it comes with, ddtrace. If you kept up to date on Linux development you would know that the next major version Linux will include the awesome new XXXFree69® automated p0rn hunting, media management and virtual reality display system.

Re:um...

[cp.tar]

Is that a program for filtering out pics of girls with boobs smaller than DD?

If it is, I think I can convert several hundred people to Solaris and leave the thinking up imaginative reasons for the conversion to them.

Re:US/Canada only! Why not just allow ISO download

[ratbag]

As a UK resident who has just successfully ordered the set (using the handy Country drop-down) I think the first part of your "subj" sez "ivi didn't read the form".

Rob.

Problem with SUN

[AnnuitCoeptis]

Is that they never really cooperated with the Asia hardware makers. And it seams that the hardware layer issues are the core of all the problems they have. Everyone who has some brains switched over to PC already where the latest GPU upgrade for example cost less, is way more powerful and at the end of the day is also more fun. That show the real smarts of Microsoft what even has that annual event for driver and hardware developers, just to cheer them up give a hug and make some money together..

Re:Problem with SUN

[ratboy666]

Sorry, I can't make out what you are trying to say. "Cooperated"?

Sure SUN did. What processor was the Standard (published)? Yes, that would have been SUNs. Why didn't the "Asia hardware makers" build something? Right, because Intel was more cooperative and gave proper designs -- not.

Because Microsoft was willing to give source code to those devs -- not.

Because Microsoft is smart -- ok, I'll grant that one. And, because of WinHEC... Why would you think such a thing is good? Given a choice between reasonable documentation, and souce availability, vs. WinHEC, most devs would take the former.

Now, SUN is giving you access to binaries where they are mailed to you without charge, and downloadable source code, and access to the standard dev kit, and you are saying... what; the people who take SUN up on this offer have less brains, and will have less fun (quoted from your message),

Are you serious? Can't you give up on the fanboi attitude for just a wee bit?

Re:um...

[jmorris42]

> .. and filling your multi-terabyte RAID (you *do* have a multi-terabyte RAID, right?) with porn.

I'm too poor for that, and besides I built my RAID5 a couple of years ago... so mine is only .6TB. And it doesn't have much porn, too full of linux distro stuff, a bit of video and a fair number of mp3s and flacs. So do I qualify?

Re:US/Canada only! Why not just allow ISO download

[Tirs]

That's not correct. I ordered the DVD at the beginning of last December and got it a couple of weeks later. I live near Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain, Europe. So it looks like they send it worldwide (well, maybe except to the Axis of Evil... including Redmond, WA? hehehe).

By the way: the picture on the DVD cover features the "castellers" (castle makers), a very traditional Catalan (that is, from my homeland) show/sport/activity. The place appears to be Barcelona, in front of the City Council building. I guess the guys at Sun want to emphasize the importance of teamwork.

English article about castellers: http://www.castellersdebarcelona.org/eng/

Could be good

[digitalgimpus]

I ordered it.

Figure can't hurt to load it on VMWare, or VirtualPC and take a look, perhaps learn a thing or two. Knowing a little bit about yet another OS can't be harmful (unless it's Win ME).

I guess they figure if enough people do like me, they may win some people over. Couldn't hurt.

Sun To Attend SCALE 5x

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun will be exhibting and speaking at SCALE 5x this February in Los Angeles.

math

[Anonymous Coward]

* Intro.3m - introduction to mathematical library func tions and constants
* List.3m - introduction to mathematical library func tions and constants
* acosd.3m - more trigonometric functions
* acosp.3m - more trigonometric functions
* acospi.3m - more trigonometric functions
* addrans.3m - additive pseudo-random number generators
* aint.3m - round to integral value in floating-point or integer format
* anint.3m - round to integral value in floating-point or integer format
* annuity.3m - exponential, loga rithm, financial
* asind.3m - more trigonometric functions
* asinp.3m - more trigonometric functions
* asinpi.3m - more trigonometric functions
* atan2d.3m - more trigonometric functions
* atan2pi.3m - more trigonometric functions
* atand.3m - more trigonometric functions
* atanp.3m - more trigonometric functions
* atanpi.3m - more trigonometric functions
* clibmvec.3m - vector versions of some complex mathematical functions
* compound.3m - exponential, loga rithm, financial
* convert_external.3m - convert external binary data formats
* cosd.3m - more trigonometric functions
* cosp.3m - more trigonometric functions
* cospi.3m - more trigonometric functions
* exp10.3m - exponential, loga rithm, financial
* exp2.3m - exponential, loga rithm, financial
* feclearexcept.3m - access floating point exception flags
* fegetenv.3m - manage the floating point environment
* fegetexceptflag.3m - access floating point exception flags
* fegetprec.3m - control floating point rounding pre cision modes
* fegetround.3m - control floating point rounding direction modes
* feholdexcept.3m - manage the floating point environment
* feraiseexcept.3m - access floating point exception flags
* fesetenv.3m - manage the floating point environment
* fesetexceptflag.3m - access floating point exception flags
* fesetprec.3m - control floating point rounding pre cision modes
* fesetround.3m - control floating point rounding direction modes
* fetestexcept.3m - access floating point exception flags
* feupdateenv.3m - manage the floating point environment
* fex_get_handling.3m - control floating point exception han dling modes
* fex_get_log.3m - log retrospective diag nostics for floating point exceptions
* fex_get_log_depth.3m - log retrospective diag nostics for floating point exceptions
* fex_getexcepthandler.3m - control floating point exception han dling modes
* fex_log_entry.3m - log retrospective diag nostics for floating point exceptions
* fex_merge_flags.3m - manage the floating point environment
* fex_set_handling.3m - control floating point exception han dling modes
* fex_set_log.3m - log retrospective diag nostics for floating p

Re:US/Canada only! Why not just allow ISO download

[Anonymous Coward]

Other than the fact they have allowed ISO downloads for a very long time now?
This is just a convenience for those on slow connections or people who'd like official media.

Yeah but

[thomasa]

Now they are charging you for the patches. Try getting the
Solaris 10 recommended patches without a contract.

Re:Yeah but

[ilikejam]

Security and driver updates are still free.

Re:Yeah but

[Builder]

Yeah, but that's exactly the same as with Red Hat. Except at least Sun will give you the OS to play with and charge you for the patches.

Red Hat won't give you anything other than a Beta version of the OS to play with. Even if you do buy a license from them, if you don't pay them the same amount of money next year, they STOP giving you security patches.

Sun don't seem too bad in this light. Hell, Microsoft seems pretty damn good when compared to this!

troll with bad karma gets +4, film at +11

[hildi]

the slashdroids have forgotten by true identity. blinded by silly jokes, they allow me to slowly gain points. soon i will have their confidence, and become a moderator... whereupon i will unleash the wrath of innocents imprisoned by bad karma in the past. 'bitchslap' away, rob malda and you other man children. the people who you have insulted will not cease until a system of justice prevails on the slashroid!

DVD ?

[o517375]

Am I the only person who thinks the DVD media delivery is a waste? How many server boxes do you have with DVD capabilty? Almost none of mine have it. And definitely none of my test boxes do. To me this is bloat.

Re:DVD ?

[mungtor]

All of them if they're newer than about 3 years old. Most of the older ones have been retired or upgraded.

Also, I hacked together a DVD drive in an external drive bay (SCSI) which works fine one anything that gives you a SCSI connection (like most Sun hardware).

Re:DVD ?

[Loconut1389]

Most of the Sun enterprise level or better servers have been including DVD drives for a long time, and even the workstations. Sun Blade, Sun Enterprise 220R, Sun Fire, etc.

Sun Ultra 5, 10, 20, 30, 60, did not- so I think anything newer than those generally does.

Re:DVD ?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is clearly not intended for server use. If you wanted to put Solaris on your server, you'd probably already have a copy. This is for people to evaluate the system and to get people interested in running it.

That said, you can always grab a dvd capable box, setup solaris on that from this disk and do a network install to your server. If you can't figure out how to do that, then your server business is probably not going to be missed.

Re:DVD ?

[o517375]

Sometimes I think it won't be missed. I have no DVD anything. I'll have to go out and buy one.

I want Sun to take a serious shot at the desktop.

[hasbeard]

Ok, I know the answer. They make there money on hardware--not software. But I still wish they would give a serious attempt toward giving Microsoft some competition on home and business desktops. I like Linux. The software is fine. But the GPL seems to cause a lot of complications. You can't ship this codec with that player, and you can't link this library with that program. If you use this driver you violate this rule.... I would like to see Sun and the Open Source community they are trying to build really make a decent desktop system out of Solaris. Give people another alternative to Microsoft, Apple, and yes, even Linux. My pragmatic (at least where it involves software) would like to see a free (as in price) with freely available source code that allows one to use proprietary drivers and codecs without a lot of legal uncertainty. And if you don't want to use them, you wouldn't have to. As to whether it will happen or not, I don't know. But I hope it will.

Re:US/Canada only! Why not just allow ISO download

[Pop69]

You only have to tell them what state you're in if you live in the US or Canada.

I think perhaps you shouldn't order a DVD, you seem to have problems with basic comprehension, Solaris would just confuse you.

just wait until you go to patch it...

[Yonder Way]

...and find that many patches are not available to people without a paid support contract with Sun.

I've got a rack full of Sun hardware in my master bedroom at home (yes, my wife is a saint) and reloaded them with Linux and OpenBSD primarily due to the way in which Sun handles their patches for hobbyists.

May Be Slightly Older Than Current Rev

[JusticeISaid]

I'm fairly certain Sun is still shipping the Solaris 10 06/06 release if you request media. However, the current rev is Solaris 10 11/06, and is downloadable at http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/get.jsp. This is a minor update and, once all the regression testing is completed, there will be patches (for a price, except for security patches and driver updates) to bring an 06/06 release up to 11/06. But if you want the latest version now, download the ISO image(s) for free and burn your own DVD/CDs.

(I'm referring here to the current release of the supported Solaris 10 product. As others have noted, there's also OpenSolaris, which available from http://www.opensolaris.org/os, is well ahead of the mainstream release and provides source code, but is a somewhat less complete product bundle. Also, Solaris Express, which is a snapshot of what will become the Solaris 11 release, which like the supported product can be downloaded from Sun's website.)

Go straight to the source...

[mritunjai]

Folks

The Solaris 10 DVD program looks aimed at pro users primarily.

If you want to start on SunOS (kernel) and Solaris (the OS from SUN = SunOS + userland) and you are primarily an enthusiast, may I recommend you OpenSolaris and its distributions.

OpenSolaris - It is the opensourced core OS + networking components of the Solaris OS. Solaris 10 and all future Solaris releases shall be based off it.

There are a number of distributions of OpenSolaris-

1. Solaris 10 - The official distribution from SUN and officially supported. (ROCK SOLID)

2. Solaris Express - Stable builds of development code. Supported by SUN.

3. Solaris Express Community Release (SXCR) - Bi-monthly development builds. Reasonably stabled (haven't seen it crash on the machine I have here in 3 months... 24x7 up, development server). [THIS is what you probably should be running if you want a SUN release to play with!]

4. NexentaOS - [This is what Linux folks should try] This is built off same code base but with GNU userland. It is based on Ubuntu with OpenSolaris kernel (SunOS).

5. BeleniX - A crazy fun distro of OpenSolaris. Also available as LiveCD

For more info please look at http://www.opensolaris.org/

Thank you

- A Solaris Fan

Vmware

[nurb432]

Sort of takes the effect away if you dont run it on the hardware..

Quit Whinging!

[Kozar_The_Malignant]

Christ on a crutch. Sun is giving away a current/recent version of their OS and you lot are going on and on about pissing on them for it. It works. It's rock steady. Besides which, it's the first *nix version I learned.

Re:um...

[no1nose]

I want to know why they are only giving out 10 DVDs. If their software is popular, they will need to give out thousands - not 10. Someone messed up in their PR dept.

big deal...

[quickgold192]

big deal, i've been getting my free aol cd's for years now

Re:um...

[Anonymous Coward]

OMG, I hope you are joking....

Sweet!

[Grinin]

Thanks for the link!

I have an old server thats just collecting dust that would love to try out Solaris 10... and the Developer kit!

Thanks again!
Grinin

Will it work in my hardware?

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought the CDs for Solaris 7 and 8 and downloaded the ISO images for Solaris 9. The only hardware I got it working on was an AMD K5. Never got it running on newer systems. The HWCL was incredible short at that time. Has the hardware support in Solaris X increased?

Bullshit.

[jotaeleemeese]

Banks and oil industry. Sun/Solaris strongholds.

Enough said.

I'm going to wait till

[Nybble's Byte]

Scott McNealy comes bundled with it.

Re:US/Canada only! Why not just allow ISO download

[tehcyder]

So it looks like they send it worldwide (well, maybe except to the Axis of Evil... including Redmond, WA? hehehe).

Amusingly, Iraq is not one of the available options, but Afghanistan is.

My computer wants Solaris on it!

[withears]

I've got a nice 133Mhz P2 with 256MB at memory just DYING to get a little Solaris love put on it.

Re:um...

[Anomalyst]

>> Someone messed up in their PR dept.
>OMG, I hope you are joking....

Why? What possible reason would slashdotters have to be concerned about a PR department?

Xen domU yet?

[Sloppy]

Has OpenSolaris been xenified yet? That might get me to try it.

Re:I want Sun to take a serious shot at the deskto

[Anonymous Coward]

"They make there money on hardware"

They used to, that cash cow is now gone, and Sun is competing with and in the x86 space where profits are slim.
One of the reasons Sun have a hard time to recover from its glory days...