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Sun will sell Redhat 6.1 Sparc version
Sun has announced that it will sell Redhat 6.1 Sparc version in it online store. This is due to the customers interest in RH 6.1 for Sparc. I wish I had one of those UltraSparc machines.. (Credit for the news goes to Linux Weekly news)
...although it might have been smarter for Sun to include more GNU productivity tools with Solaris ... things like GNU compilers and desktops, for example...
The Kulturwehrmacht
Finding God in a Dog
Wake up, Ultra5 and Ultra10 come with IDE (not SCSI!) drives. And the kinds of IDE they use is even slower than PCs (usually ATA/66 7200 disks).
Plus, the ultra5/10 have 4meg video memory this is rediculous. Their processors aren't that great either. How much would you pay for PC with this much hardware? Less than $1000 probably.
But SUN wants you to pay $2000 for a lemmon with no monitor, no cd rom and only 64mb of ram.
Sun backing Linux is very important. Not only is it a good move on Sun's part, but it will GREATLY help with the consolodation of the Unix market. It will encourage Sun to develop and promote compatibility between Linux and Solaris. Sun is still the biggest commercial Unix vendor, so this is just amazing.
Now all we have to do is ensure compatibility between Linux and BSD. Bill Gates loves to try and drive a wedge between different Unix development teams and claim that the Unix market is fragmented.
I think he can shut up now
I don't think Sun was terribly pleased when they realised that they would no longer be able to make huge profits from Solaris licensing. Now they're just desperate to sell anything to keep the stock price up. From their perspective, selling hardware without software is better than selling nothing at all.
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
Well gi did it, so it figures that sun would do it too...
The ditro is the RedHat deluxe version @ $79.95 (RedHat's price, not sun's. I checked it against redhat's store)
Here's the link.
Here's the features list from redhat's store page:
Support & Services
180 day FREE priority FTP access- fast, easy
access to security updates and more!
30 day telephone support and 90 day Web-based
installation support
Software
Red Hat Linux CD
Red Hat Linux source code CD
Linux Application CD - access to over 40 of the most
popular 3rd party applications for the workstation
Powertools - over 300 packages of applications that
run on Linux
StarOffice 5.1a CD
Documentation
Comprehensive documentation - Installation,
Reference, and Getting Started Guides
Sig:
Barbeque is a noun. Not a verb.
Well, I'm probably going to get shot at for this, but I'll say it anyway...
Solaris is not a bad O.S. In fact, on a high performance Sun, Solaris probably is far better than Linux.
Of course, any blanket statement like that has to be qualified or it's useless. On lower end Suns (sparc 2 through sparc 20, Ultra 5's, etc), linux will probably run faster, and perhaps more stablely. However, on higher end Sun boxes, the Solaris multiproc code, the volume management software (extra package), and the years of experience Sun has with it's own hardware give it a distinct advantage over current day SparcLinux.
SparcLinux is relatively new, and from what I've seen, doesn't have some of the more robust features of Solaris. The day will come when Linux beats Solaris on it's own turf - the Linux kernel development team has already proven themselves as masters of performance tweaking, and the more mature features are in development now. However, for the time being, when I install a Sun Ultra Enterprise box, I install Solaris on it. And until SparcLinux has proven itself (as Linux x86 has, and is doing), I will continue to use Sun Solaris on my Sun machines.
All operating systems suck. Some just suck less than others. (and some are virtual black holes)
that's a great idea. Already, when I am called upon to admin a Solaris box out of the... er... box, I always set it up using RPMs (Redhat's package management system).
http://www.rpm.org/ has everything you'll need. You'll probably have to learn how to rebuild source RPMs which you've thus far avoided, but it's worth it, because suddenly a vast wealth of software becomes available and very easy to install, and very easy to deploy to a number of servers.
Sun's earlyAccess JDK for Linux only runs on i386 machines. According to Kevin Hendricks, Sun spokesman only said that Sparc might eventually get supported
- Sam Ruby
The last good version of SunOS was in the 4.x series, they when with SysV for sunOS 5.x and byond.
Linux is okay, but it isn't BSD, and us old school people still demand the idiocrancies of BSD. (Linux isn't really SysV)
I suppose most /. readers these days won't have any idea what I'm talking about since the BSD vs SysV was ages ago.
If Linux is so important then why is Sun still playing cute with Java on Linux? Lets see some real comittment: put the Linux Java source tree under GPL, forget about that stupid communittee license thingy. Scott, you will win big by doing that.
Come on guys, really show us how you "get it".
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
My experience with using Sparc 5s for Matlab based Scientific Computing is that they aren't very fast at that either. At least not if if matlab's "bench" is anything to go by. I very much wish my institution were buying Athlons with Linux instead of Sparcs with Solaris...
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
This is a very good thing that Sun are doing, at least as far as customers are concerned, because it allows people to squeeze much more out of the Sparc than is possible under Solaris.
Three years ago, we grabbed a surplus SparcServer 20, junked Solaris and installed RedHat Linux for Sparc, just for the fun of it. Although we were expecting good things, we were astounded at the magnitude of the improvement: under Linux, most O/S-limited operations ran at about four times their speed under Solaris. Since then, both Sparc Linux and Solaris will have improved considerably I expect, but I bet that there is still an efficiency advantage with Linux, and this ought to translate into older Sun kit being given a new lease of life.
And of course, anything that promotes the use of Sun hardware has to be to the company's advantage.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Over the summer, I had an oppurtunity to work with some very nice Sun boxes. In actuality, I was working as an intern for Sun in Europe. I got to work with a number of boxes, including 4-processor AxMPs, CP1500s, and an AXi. One of my tasks over the summer was evaluating how RedHat 5.1 (UltraPenguin 1.1) ran on the AXi. I have to say that installing it was a joy; it was as easy as it is on an x86 machine. In fact, everything was as easy as it was on x86. There were a few differences, mainly in the bootloader (SPARC boxes use SILO which I managed to only slightly figure out over the course of the summer, only enough to get new kernels running), but on the whole everything was the same as it was on an x86. Which, I believe, is one of the major selling points of Linux - having seen how transparent the hardware is to it is quite amazing.
After a while of setting it up to perform various tasks that I didn't know how to do using Solaris (such as a RARP server, which turned out to be VERY easy, and UFS works beautifully; I had not one problem setting up NFS to read/write from the UFS partitions), I started using it as a desktop machine. I had a higher resolution on that machine, and so I preferred it for viewing web pages over the others. I ran X with enlightenment 15 for a long time, and I found it to be fairly stable, although I had many more problems with X unexpectedly crashing (happened about 10 times in six weeks) than the kernel itself having an error (which happened not once).
Speaking of kernels, the kernels were a cinch to configure. There were a few options that I had never seen before, but other than that, compiling and running a new kernel was easily as easy as it was on an x86 box.
Nontheless, I'm very happy to see RedHat come out with an updated version for SPARC boxes. Maybe when I return to Sun to work this coming summer I'll be able to test it out on my AXi...
If anyone has any questions about running Linux on a SPARC system, I'd be happy to answer them (from what I remember).
-- K
I am not a programmer, but it was my understanding that the problem is with Solaris on low-end systems. There are so many locks in the kernel which work wonders on SMP machines but make a single processor sit idle a portion of the time as it waits to see if another CPU wants to help it.
Hence the reason that Solaris x86 typically scores 50% of what Linux gets on 1-cpu benchmarks
Good to know sun is coming to its senses.
Well, Sun have always been in the market of selling hardware rather than software - it's the same model as Apple.
This is, by the way, why the Java floating-point spec is designed to match the Sparc chipset, rather than following IEEE specs (IIRC). The idea being that to match the spec exactly, you have to emulate the Sparc results on machines with other types of FPU, and so Sun gets an instant perf increase on their hardware for that class of tests.
Of course, most people don't bother with that side of it, and just implement it using native floating point.
It's also why they give away Solaris for free.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
An Ultra5 gathering dust?
How much do you want for it?
U5s are pretty sweet boxes, once you slap a proper SCSI board and enough RAM in there... And it'll fit much more nicely on a rack than a clunky (but cooler in other ways) U10...
Still, if I had it all over to do again, I'd probably go for an AXi clone and a desktop rack from blackbox...
Your Working Boy,
Be realistic though. There's no reason that a 'standard workstation' install package on Sol shouldn't contain GCC (or, gasp, a free compiler like they used to include, dare I dream?), Perl5, traceroute, tripwire, satan, tcpwrappers, ssh and other tools..
;)
Sol2.7 goes some distance on this from what I hear (apparently, they got traceroute in.. took long enough!) but they are certainly not the easiest OS to start from scratch with. Still, I guess that's why us Sol admins get paid the big buxx
(and as an aside, learn more about pkgproto, pkgtrans, and the other pkg-creating programs. I have a Sol2.6 CDROM that includes pretty much all pkgs Sun left out, either swiped from sunsite/sunfreeware or in about 6 cases built myself...)
Your Working Boy,
don't judge a Sun server by CDE login or dtlogin in general. CDE was, is, and probably always will be a resource pig.
If you want to compare, run the same window manager as you're used to under Linux and start comparing from there, as opposed to evaulating CDE performance.
Unfortunately for Sun, their customer base demands eternal binary compatibility, so they're more limited in what they can fundamentally fix in the OS and how fast they can allow an os version to be obsoleted.
Linux can break binary compatibility whenver someone finds a bug in glibc
ex: try to find a jdk2 for linux glibc2.0 or libc5 -- they don't exist. Now try finding jdk2 for Solaris 2.6 or 2.5.1 - they exist.
Linux distros are going to start facing the same corporate pressures for eternal binary compatibility. I hope that it doesn't slow down innovation (but it probably will!)
if I had my choice of supporting 1000 Sun ultra2's running solaris or linux, I'd still choose Solaris.
... and I can script the entire install with pre and post-processing so that I don't need to do anything.
One of the main reasons is jumpstart. I can install or re-image systems to a number of different OS versions from a single server.
Try that with linux. Every version from every vendor has changed the nfs/http/ftp install rules somehow, and some of the cd's can't be mounted and nfs installed because of an improper directory structure ON THE CD for network installs (hello, redhat 6.1!). or lack of support for non-cdrom based installs (hello, Corel!)
This is a CRITICAL WEAKNESS OF LINUX. How freaking difficult is it for someone to fix this?
Maybe I'm jumping the gun... maybe only X86 linux can't support something like jumpstart becuase the X86 hardware carries around so much legacy baggage like the BIOS. Honestly, there are so many things about x86 hardware that really SUCK! It's too bad that it won't go away.
How can you change the bios settings on an x86 server when you're connected to a console server on the serial port?
How can you see any BIOS hardware error messages from a serial port connection during boot up?
have you ever heard of sun's jumpstart? it's a great way to easily install the os and needed software on multiple machines. it easily automates the process of installing patches, setting up partitions, messing with things like /etc/defaultrouter (as per your example above), plus it's really easy to install other applications too (sybase, your favorite shell, or gcc).
:)
honestly i'd rather have a base instalation like solaris has and build up from there, and i can't stand cde which can really bog down any non ultra system. from what i keep hearing solaris 8 will have a lot of gnu items with it like perl and ssh.
but seriously doing 500 + boxes with jumpstart is easy (even if you have multiple needs that the systems have to be deployed for), and i would know because thats what i did for my first few months and my present job
-justen
Try that with linux. Every version from every vendor has changed the nfs/http/ftp install rules somehow, and some of the cd's can't be mounted and nfs installed because of an improper directory structure ON THE CD for network installs, or lack of support for non-cdrom based installs.
While I don't doubt that Sun's JumpStart is a cool thing, you're really comparing apples to oranges here. Or rather, one kind of apple to all the kinds of fruit in the world. You complain that each Linux VAR does things differently, and claim that proves Linux is harder to install then single-vendor Solaris.
Well, duh. Of course a multiple-vendor Linux solution is going to be harder to manage then a single-vendor Solaris solution. Consider how hard installing all the different UNIXes from companies like Sun, DEC, HP, IBM would be! Linux is easy by comparison.
If, on the other hand, you compare installing Solaris with JumpStart on 100 machines to installing Red Hat Linux 6.1 with Kickstart on 100 (similar) machines, I think you will get a better picture of what things are like. I don't doubt that JumpStart would still win, but the comparison would be fair.
How can you change the bios settings on an x86 server when you're connected to a console server on the serial port?
You need special hardware to do that on x86. No different from Sun, really, it is just that all Suns include said hardware out of the box.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
I administrate high-end production Sun servers for a living. While I like Linux, I can safely say that it has a very long ways to go to catch up to the high-end features of Solaris. Heck, I'd be surprised to see Linux support Dynamic Reconfiguration. (Dynamic reconfiguration is the magical ability to add hardware to a system while it is running, or remove it, or make changes. Like replacing memory that has ECC errors, or adding CPUs and such.)
That's just a sample, though. Solaris is very robust and feature filled. And the support behind it is excellent. The only thing that really stands out as not-so-hot are the prices. WHEW! They are HIGH when you get to the big servers (E3000-Starfire).
Running a Starfire on Linux? Forget it. Might as well throw away a half a million dollars in additional hardware features.
Linux as a desktop on Sparc hardware? Yeah. The kernel for Solaris 7 and below is really geared more towards high-end hardware. Linux is lean and mean and up for the task here. Not a lot of complex stuff to deal with.
Would I install Linux on my Sparc desktop? Not a chance. I've got a dual-processor ultra-60 with a Creator3D graphics card, SCSI drives, solid-state drive, and the high-end wide-screen monitor which is driven at 1920x1200 resolution. A power-user configuration. Needless to say, Linux doesn't have the drivers for it. And there isn't a chance in hell I'm going to give up my screen's real estate to run Linux. [As to an earlier comment, YES, I once wondered if it was what was making my eyes BLEED. No, it wasn't.]
Sun has some awesome hardware, and having gone through a non-disclosure presentation of future Sun hardware down the road, I can say that they've got one hell of a roadmap. It is a shame that SPARC Linux just can't hold a candle to the support of Solaris. Heck, if SPARC Linux was on the ball, they could even provide features that Sun has held back on (like multiple domains inside an E4500).
This move was done to done to satisfy their ISP customers. The kind that run the low-end sparcs in banks as web servers (or even those cool 1 RU jobs that they started selling earlier this year). It isn't for the mainstream datacenter customer. Justifying Linux vs. Solaris for any project would be suicide in a large production environment. Linux just isn't there... YET.
Is anyone pushing Linux on the high end -- datacenter features?
The problem with the TurobSparc goes beyond the bootloader. The mmu is slightly different to all other 32bit SPARC processors, and none of the SparcLinux developers have acces to one.
If Sun or anyone else could donate a SS5 170Mhz - or if RedHat could buy David Miller one - then there might be some movement on theis issue. I for one would like to upgrade my SS5 110Mhz to a TurboSparc chip, but I haven't even looked into the possibility of doing this thanks to the inability to use Linux on it.
I do recall that NetBSD runs on the Turbo, so perhaps you want to look into installing it, and then adding RPM to give it that RedHat feel.
Chris Wareham