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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."
No, you're only required to supply a state/province if you in USA or Canada.
>"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
---- There are 10 types of people in the world. Those that understand binary and those that don't
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).
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.
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.
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.
/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.
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
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.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
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.
There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.
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.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
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.
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
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
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.
Forget the coasters, I want the DVD case.
The opposite of progress is congress
First release of Ubuntu was October 20, 2004.
Sun was giving away solaris on DVD since at least May of 2002.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
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.
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo!
Now they are charging you for the patches. Try getting the
Solaris 10 recommended patches without a contract.
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!
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
- mritunjai