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Sun Is Giving Away Solaris 10 DVDs

Posted by kdawson on from the what-is-this-free-you-speak-of dept.

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."

2 of 248 comments (clear)

  1. Re:General Information on Solaris 10? by swordgeek · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    --

    "People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
  2. Go straight to the source... by mritunjai · · Score: 5, Informative

    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