Solaris Express 4/2005 (a.k.a. Nevada Build 10) was posted today, providing improved performance, X.org 6.8.2 final, and a host of bug fixes. You can obtain a free download. An overview of new features is available.
Solaris Express 4/2005 (a.k.a. Nevada Build 10) was posted today, providing improved performance, X.org 6.8.2 final, and a host of bug fixes. You can obtain a free download. An overview of new features is available.
Solaris Express consists of builds _in_between_ Sun’s major releases (Solaris 9, Solaris 10, Solaris 11, etc.). This release is _not_ Solaris 10, but has stuff in it leading towards Solaris 11. The Solaris Express releases last year were beyond Solaris 9 with stuff leading to Solaris 10.
Also, this is not OpenSolaris, which is due this summer. I am guessing that OpenSolaris will somehow be tied into the Express releases, as they are supposed to represent the same evolving codebase.
I don’t work for Sun, so anyone there can feel free to chime in.
Solaris Express is also _not_ Sun’s quarterly maintenance for their major stable Solaris releases. I.e., this is not equivalent to Solaris 10 3/05, Solaris 10 6/05, Solaris 10 9/05, however they split up the maintencance releases. Instead, this Express is merely development towards Solaris 11.
I feel that, for OpenSolaris to really take off, development needs to be just a little less Sun-centric. Now, I know that OpenSolaris hasn’t been released yet and I love reading about the little updates that Sun people are making, but these releases sound a lot more like a company touting its accomplishments than, well, I don’t know.
Hopefully, OpenSolaris will get a community around it while still having a lot of Sun involvment (think OpenOffice.org). Until then, I’m glad that Sun is putting continuing effort into their codebase.
“Hopefully, OpenSolaris will get a community around it while still having a lot of Sun involvment (think OpenOffice.org). Until then, I’m glad that Sun is putting continuing effort into their codebase.”
One huge advantage that OpenSolaris will have over OO.org is that the documentation for Solaris is mature and widely available. All the external interfaces are documented, and an overview of the kernel is already available in a book “Solaris Internals” ( http://www.solarisinternals.com ). There’s also http://docs.sun.com and http://sunsolve.sun.com as resources, and Solaris _is_ UNIX, with three decades of users behind it.
Another plus is that Sun specifically included non-Sun members in their OpenSolaris Community Advisory Board (the “CAB”). Their patent grant extends to _all_ users of OpenSolaris. They are establishing and refining the OpenSolaris modus operandi in their months-long pilot program. And, apparently, the OpenSolaris codebase will be buildable with GCC.
This may sound like a stupid question, so just bear with me. But… is SOLARIS at all interesting to the hobbiest? Like… does it generally share similar levels of support for hardware? Would solaris make a good workstation OS?
. does it generally share similar levels of support for hardware? ….. in comparison to Linux, i mean.
Sorry about that.
This may sound like a stupid question, so just bear with me. But… is SOLARIS at all interesting to the hobbiest? Like… does it generally share similar levels of support for hardware? Would solaris make a good workstation OS?
It lacks the desktop hardware support of Linux. It’s better supported as a server OS, but mostly with “name brand” components.
However, the x86 community has managed to do a lot in this regard, it just takes some hunting around. It’s more difficult to get running on a parts bin PC, but if you follow the HCL, you’ll be fine, and then you’ll be able to easier leverage the works of the community.
That said, many folks do use it for their daily workstation OS, but I think Linux is better suited to the generic “hobbiest” that likes to dabble with all sorts of diverse things.
Both Linux and Solaris work well on workstations. I do have a _preference_ for Solaris, because it is internally more consistent than most Linux distributions, the documentation is much better, compatibility across major revisions is better, and it’s also the environment I’m most familiar with (but I’ve used Linux a lot, too).
If you follow the HCLs (hardware compatibility lists) Solaris will work well on a PC. I’m actually using a Sun SPARC workstation, which is nice, because everything generally plugs together and just works (e.g, Creator3D graphics–>good OpenGL support).
Show us the code or quit mentioning it.
This is OS News, not OSS News. Every OS is welcome here.
I’m sorry, if Opensolaris is going to resemble anything like Openoffice.org’s development style, it’s going to be a failure. Weren’t the OOo developers begging for community contributions the other day? Point is, no free software developer is going to contribute if the development process is not truly open(i.e run by SUN).
OO is having trouble because the thing is huge, in some respects, poorly written. Its a _huge_ task to learn OO internals enough to be productive. It has nothing to do with the dev style.
And Opensolaris isn’t huge?
the thought of solaris 11 and java 6.0 makes me all warm and fuzzy inside
“And Opensolaris isn’t huge?”
heh, and GNU/Linux isn’t huge?
Solaris and all Unix-like OS’s are split up into multiple apps and libs. This makes it much easier to work on. Also, Solaris IMO is quite a bit better designed then OO. You ignored the “poorly written” part of my statement. Just think about contemplating fixing an error in OO, then consider fixing an error in, lets say printf, in Solaris. Dunno about you, but I know where to find the code for printf in solaris…finding _anything_ in OO is difficult as hell.
What’s the point behind not releasing the Patches and releasing a new build every 2 months. If they are trying to copy Linux they are so wrong. For the obvious reasons that it takes 30 minutes to install Linux compared to 4 hours for Solaris. And after the setup the customization takes extra time. I was playing with pkg-get from bolthole.com and I applaud the guys for getting GNU progs. However why can’t Sun send their patches over to bolthole and get things updated on the fly.
Couldn’t that be because you are more familiar with Solaris than with OO?
Solaris Express is more like Fedora Core, in where Sun tests features they plan to add to mainstream Solaris through Maintenance Updates (MU).
If it takes you four hours to install Solaris, then you need to look at some better hardware. I installed Solaris Express on my two Intel machines (dual PIII and single PIV) in under two hours.
Why are you downloading software from Bolthole when most of what Solaris users want (GCC, etc.) is installed in /usr/sfw?
For patches man smpatch, by the way there are no patches available for this release (I have already checked).
What’s the point behind not releasing the Patches and releasing a new build every 2 months.
Read the first two posts. The point is patches are released for shipping OSes. Solaris Express is a sneak peak at the underdevelopment version of the next Solaris release. Pre-pre-pre alpha software, sort of like mozilla nightly and trunk releases.
I would understand the development model first before jumping the gun and call names.
“Couldn’t that be because you are more familiar with Solaris than with OO?”
That I know where to find printf right off? Yep. However, thats not exactly what I was talking about. The OO tree is immense and is not split up well. You should check out a cvs copy and look at it..its not pretty. The other problem is that if there was a printf in OO, it would be defined and coded in about 5 different places and then there might be different versions in another 5 different places.
Look, I am not a Solaris guy, I am a BSD guy. However, OO != Solaris.
> And Opensolaris isn’t huge?
The point is, OpenSolaris doesn’t exist.
“What’s the point behind not releasing the Patches and releasing a new build every 2 months. If they are trying to copy Linux they are so wrong.”
Solaris Express has nothing to do with Linux, competing with Linux, emulating Linux, or any of that. It is simply a preview release of what Sun is working on for future Solaris releases. In a way it is Sun’s public beta testing program.
“For the obvious reasons that it takes 30 minutes to install Linux compared to 4 hours for Solaris.”
What, did you run into the DMA issue on CD-ROMs? That’s been covered a dozen times already.
“And after the setup the customization takes extra time.”
That is true of every OS ever created. I go the extra step and hand-tune the boot process on Solaris (SMF doesn’t need so much, anymore), but not everyone needs to do that.
“I was playing with pkg-get from bolthole.com and I applaud the guys for getting GNU progs”
Do you mean http://www.blastwave.org ? Pkg-get is an awesome tool as a complement to the Companion CD and the default stuff under /usr/sfw/.
“However why can’t Sun send their patches over to bolthole and get things updated on the fly.”
Er, uh, why does bolthole.com matter? Up until today, I hadn’t heard of it. I’ve gotten by on SunSolve, Blastwave, SunFreeware, and docs.sun.com quite well. Ah, I just noticed that Bolthole is one of the guys behind Blastwave. Well, there you go.
As far as the patches go, do you understand that Blastwave doesn’t have any Sun-provided software? It’s all pre-packaged OSS software from elsehwere, made as a convenience like Apt or RPM.
@Shaman
The point is, OpenSolaris doesn’t exist.
Wrong. It does exist. Saying something doesn’t exist just because *you* can’t use it, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. OpenSolaris exists very much so, over 30 some different pilot members have access to it right now and it’s completely buildable from the sources they have as well. Stop trolling.
Actually, Shawn, that’s exactly what it means. If only about 30 people supposedly have access to it, that’s far from Open, now is it? Where does that leave the other estimated 6,200,000,000 of us?
Let’s recap:
30 – apparently have seen OpenSolaris
6,200,000,000 haven’t seen one line of it
Sun’s the one trolling.
The question here is…
When OpenSolaris is released to the GP later this year, will you be around to offer your public apology, or will you just quietly slip back under the bridge with the rest of the trolls? Integrity is a rare thing among Internet trolls, so I will not be holding my breath waiting for your apology.
Sigh,
This has been hashed over repeatedly, it takes some time to get an OS ready to be opensourced, last time I checked no one has ever tried to opensource something the size or complexity of Solaris.
There is code available already, DTrace was released and is downloadable from http://www.opensolaris.org, and it is one of the most advanced, if not the most advanced system for diagnosing performance problems on live systems ever developed [1]
People are working feverishly on OpenSolaris at the moment, trying to make sure everything is right – that means a lot of reviews to ensure we release unemcumbered code. We have no intentions of throwing a bunch of code over a wall with no due dilligence and forgetting about it, OpenSolaris is about further expanding an already large community, and letting everyone see what is in Solaris. You can choose to participate if you wish [2].
It has been repeatedly stated that we are aiming towards Q2CY05, please look at the roadmap http://www.opensolaris.org/roadmap/
If you wish to choose not to belive that we are going to opensource Solaris please feel free, its your choice – we look forward to proving you wrong (and belive me knowing that we are going to prove you, and all of the other naysayers, wrong is a nice feeling).
On the other hand we are very grateful for the patience that most people are showing while we make sure we do this right.
[1] Please review all of the rebuttals about what on Linux can replace DTrace at http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/fintanr/20050306 before telling us about LTT, KProbes and OProfile.
[2] http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jonathan/20050417
Thank you, I could not have said it better myself!
>When OpenSolaris is released to the GP later this year, will
>you be around to offer your public apology, or will you just
>quietly slip back under the bridge with the rest of the
>trolls? Integrity is a rare thing among Internet trolls, so I
>will not be holding my breath waiting for your apology.
Why the hell would I apologize? They’d just be finally making good on their promises. I’ve heard about OpenSolaris forever it seems, like it already existed in many cases, and there’s been nothing.
They owe US an apology, the way I see it.
I could give two shits about what people write about it in blogs or what a few gimps on OSNews think about it, the fact is OpenSolaris is vapourware at the moment. A few tiny pieces of it do not an OS make. Right now, OpenSolaris DOES NOT EXIST FOR ALL PRACTICAL PURPOSES EXCEPT P.R. AND/OR MARKETING REASONS. Stop telling me… or arguing with me, for that matter… and release the code.
Sun lost my respect (and business) years ago. Always having something that’s “going to be great any day now” is a big part of the reason, and the concept of OpenSolaris (since it isn’t a tangible thing) is just another paragraph in a long story of disappointments from Sun. Take a look at the stock and Sun’s market share, it didn’t happen by accident.
If Sun really is paying attention… STOP TELLING US ABOUT ALL THE GREAT THINGS SUN IS ABOUT AND EFFING SHOW US ALREADY! I’ve waited about seven years for Sun to make good on its promises.
“…I’ve waited about seven years for Sun to make good on its promises.”
Surely you haven’t been waiting for OpenSolaris for seven years, have you? Please expound or go away.
Since when did Sun (or anyone else) have to do things your way based on your schedule? Why should Sun apoligize to you (or anyone else)? You don’t like Sun products, fine, don’t waste our time with your worthless drivel! Either post something intelligent or simply don’t post at all!
“Sun lost my respect (and business) years ago. Always having something that’s “going to be great any day now” is a big part of the reason, and the concept of OpenSolaris (since it isn’t a tangible thing) is just another paragraph in a long story of disappointments from Sun. Take a look at the stock and Sun’s market share, it didn’t happen by accident. ”
No, Sun lost your respect the day you became an idiot and started demanding everything for free with no strings attached–who cares if it cost Sun billions of dollars and over 20 years to develop? If you can’t get it RIGHT NOW for NOTHING, you don’t want it.
They have an expression for people like you. SPOILED LITTLE BABIES.
Grow up, and go away, you troll.
It seems everyone but you is anticipating OpenSolaris in Q2. It seems everyone but you can see Sun is actually being quite forward about OpenSolaris and the pilot progam. By saying OpenSolaris doesn’t exist as anything more than a PR vehicle is calling several Sun executives, several OSS leaders, and many other big names in the software community liars to their faces, basically. Just because the world doesn’t operate on your schedule doesn’t invalidate it, and don’t be suprised if the loss of respect is reciprocal when you need it most.
I normally don’t feed trolls, but this is really irritating.
> I could give two ***** about what people write about
> it in blogs or what a few gimps on OSNews think
To add to what Anonymouser has said, you are basically insinuating that Sun execs, OSS leaders and Sun employees are all lying. Do you realise how insulting, and down right slanderous, this is?
Like many of the other people posting about OpenSolaris I am an engineer, bottom end of the corporate ladder – I have two things to trade on in terms of my livelihood, my technical knowledge and my reputation. I ask you would I, or Dan who submitted this article, or Alan and James who post here pretty reguarly, stake our public reputations on something that doesn’t exist? I think not. And I know that no other Sun employee would either, honesty and integrity are core values in Sun. When you claim Sun is lying about OpenSolaris you are actually saying that over thirty one thousand of my colleagues and I are lying.
Now I’m back to work after my lunch break. Annoyed, but mainly disappointed and insulted by your insinuations. And the most amusing part – if you ever do come asking for help with an OpenSolaris issue, I, or one of my colleagues will give that help, time permitting, because its the right and professional thing to do.
I started writing a reply and it was getting a bit long for here. Please see my comments at http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/tpenta/20050425#opensolaris_is_not…
Alan.
“And I know that no other Sun employee would either, honesty and integrity are core values in Sun”
Ask Jonathan why he lied about Red Hat being a proprietary distribution and not LSB compliant. Why did he lie that Red Hat and Linux are one and the same?
I sure hope OpenSolaris gives users a better deal than Solaris Express.
Software Right-to-use: 6-months
Support: No
Access to Community Web Site: No
Commercial Use: No
Bug Reports: No
Bug Submission: No
Roadmap: No
Those are some nasty restrictions you guys like to place on people who you supposedly see as your potential community. All the while telling us how its just around the corner. Any day now you’ll change your tune, right? Any day now. Yeah, excuse me for saying this, but I’ll believe it when I see it.
Or will us poor dirty hippies have to pay for same full open access we get to almost all Linux distributions from OpenSolaris?
Redhat is not Linux, as stated by Jonathan –
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jonathan/20040901#innovation_is_no…
The LSB compliance was in regards to LSB 2.0, which is what Jonathan was discussing in his blog, indeed Michael Tiemann of Redhat stated that Redhat was not LSB 2.0 compliant at http://www.pcworldmalta.com/specials/redhat/
I quote from that article
“The Linux Standard Base 2.0 (LSB 2.0) of the Free Standards Group attempts to get some standardization into various distributions of Linux. When will Red Hat start shipping LSB 2.0 compliant products?
MT: We are really looking towards LSB 3.0 because the 2.0 compromise is not compatible with prior decisions we have made with respect to C++. We have been very successful to certify against LSB version 1.0, and we will continue to stay compatible with that. We think 2.0 over-reached in what it was trying to do. We have it from the LSB people that there will be a 3.0 out in less than six months, and we are quite confident that that version will be adequate for our needs and everybody else’s. “
Belive it or not you can’t just pick and choose which version of the standards you are going to abide by Raoul.
As for proprietary – I’ll let others rehash the numerous answers that have been given for this.
Your competition, Linux, is already better than you. They are benevolent. They write this code to give to people, to help them. They want to give this code away. Nobody is forcing them.
This whole move by Sun smells of their customers forcing them to open their source code just so Sun can to compete with offers they’re getting from RedHat, Novell/SuSE, IBM, Linux and OSS. Sun needs this barganing chip in their negotiations, just like Microsoft. They need people to believe Solaris will be open like Linux. Just like Microsoft needs people to believe Longhorn will be more secure. Without that cloud of perception they might lose sales or the value of their stock.
If Sun was doing this for the love of it, if it was doing it for the community it wouldn’t put the restrictions I wrote in my previous post on end users.
Why do they care if we contribute Bug reports? Why do they care what my email address is? Why do they care if I use their software for commercial use or not? Why treat us like outsiders? Aren’t we all insiders here? Linux seems to think so.
“As for proprietary – I’ll let others rehash the numerous answers that have been given for this.”
which means you cant explain your way out?
“And Red Hat is not linux”
switching over back and forth is called inconsistency
”
Belive it or not you can’t just pick and choose which version of the standards you are going to abide by Raoul.
”
oh yes. are you even aware of the timing and c++ issue?
http://lwn.net/Articles/96347/
@anonymous (IP: unused) wrote:
which means you cant explain your way out?
No, it means that you are recognised as a troll.
Most people try to avoid feeding trolls.
“And Red Hat is not linux”…switching over back and forth is called inconsistency
Actually, Sun has been very consistent: Sun, the company listed on NASDAQ competes against RedHat, the company listed on NASDAQ. Somehow you and a lot of other people seem to find it easier to ignore that and instead assume that Sun wants to kill linux. “linux” is a software (social) movement, “Linux” is a product which companies like SuSE and RedHat sell. Sun has to be exact the nomenclature because the two are different trademarks. They are most assuredly not the same thing. You might not have to worry about a trademark but Sun and other companies do.
Note the difference of capitalisation. Every time you say “Sun/Schwartz/… lie about Linux being proprietary” you are talking about the product, not the software/social movement, thus you are incorrect.
If you could step back for a moment and read the public statements from Schwartz and McNealy (and all the other Sun people) with the benefit of knowing why “linux” != “Linux” then you might find it easier to understand.
If you’ve ever been in a meeting with a Sun sales rep (and I have), they want to sell you hardware, software and services . They will quite happily sell you RedHat Linux (at whatever level you want), and sell you a support contract for RedHat Linux as well. Does that sound like a company that wants to kill linux? Not to me it doesn’t.
Finally, regarding standards compliance: there are dozens of examples of companies which implement support for a “standard” (fibrechannel is a case in point) before that standard is fully ready for use. So if you are early to market you run the very real risk of tripping up customers who are early adopters when you re-implement to be truly compliant with the published standard, and you also end up wasting a lot of money re-writing/designing your [widget].
Right now I personally don’t care either way whether a linux distribution is LSB v X.y compliant or not. What matters to me is whether my application-vendor-of-choice supports the distribution I’ve chosen, and whether patching that distribution will render my business- or mission-critical app “unsupported” – a very real concern.
Bitter are we. If you don’t like Solaris, then don’t use it. Geeze, you’d think that someone is holding a gun to these peoples heads. Solaris doesn’t suite my needs, so I chose something else an kept quiet – is it necessary for others to scream and whine when things don’t work out for them?
As a novice user i take my chance of the presence of Sun engrs.What’s on the companion CD?Does gcc and perl,python come with it?
It seems to have been hijacked.
There are some things mentioned by yawn that I can’t let pass as you are either completely misinformed as to what Solaris Express is or you are deliberately trolling. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.
You talk about the “limitations” on Solaris Express.
You do realise that Solaris Express is simply a snapshot of the current Solaris under development don’t you? We are still very early on with the next release of Solaris and things are changing at a rapid pace.
The idea is that you use this to evaluate what is going on in Solaris. Not to run in prodcution.
You can do that for $0 with Solaris 10.
Support costs more, but you have to expect that. It’s not even like basic support costs a lot either. We certainly come in under many of our competitors.
While there is no bug logging mechanism for the Free download of Solaris Express, many bugs do get logged as a lot of Sun engineers watch the various mailing lists and newsgroups.
On that topic, there is the option to pay a token charge (Last time I looked, it was about US$99) to get access to a mechanism to log bugs and have an RTU for commercial use.
As to the release date of Open Solaris, we have been saying during Q2 for some time now. You say you’ll believe it when you see it? Fine, I’ll expect to see an “ok, I guess I misjudged you guys and you actually did deliver” from you some time this quarter when we do deliver.
One other thing, please stop confusing the open solaris community with Solaris Express. They are two completely different things.
You will of course have noted that the Community Advisory Board for Open Solaris has a minority repesentation of Sun on it (2 Sun employees, two non-Sun community members and Roy Fielding).
alan.
Isn’t it a shame that we spend more time fighting off the trolls than to extoll the benefits of Solaris and help those who have questions!
”
No, it means that you are recognised as a troll.
Most people try to avoid feeding trolls.”
Name calling from a SUN fan. why am I not suprised?
”
Actually, Sun has been very consistent: Sun, the company listed on NASDAQ competes against RedHat, the company listed on NASDAQ. Somehow you and a lot of other people seem to find it easier to ignore that and instead assume that Sun wants to kill linux. “linux” is a software (social) movement, “Linux” is a product which companies like SuSE and RedHat sell.”
Linux is a kernel. Red Hat is one of the most popular means to get the a Linux based system. If SUN attacks Red Hat, SUN is attacking Linux. simple
”
If you could step back for a moment and read the public statements from Schwartz and McNealy (and all the other Sun people) with the benefit of knowing why “linux” != “Linux” then you might find it easier to understand. ”
Ok. now Linux!=linux.? stop coming up with weird definitions to justify your obviously false stands
”
If you’ve ever been in a meeting with a Sun sales rep (and I have), they want to sell you hardware, software and services . They will quite happily sell you RedHat Linux (at whatever level you want), and sell you a support contract for RedHat Linux as well. Does that sound like a company that wants to kill linux? Not to me it doesn’t. ”
Thats yet another failure in integrity. If you call them Red Hat Linux a proprietary distribution falsely and then support the system then it means you dont have a problem with it. why not tell the media that?
”
Right now I personally don’t care either way whether a linux distribution is LSB v X.y compliant or not. What matters to me is whether my application-vendor-of-choice supports the distribution I’ve chosen, and whether patching that distribution will render my business- or mission-critical app “unsupported” – a very real concern.
”
Point is Jonathan made a blanket statement that Red Hat doesnt support LSB while not pretending to understand that the timing was not coordinated ( Red Hat was already doing its beta releases and would have to retest everything to support LSB 2.0) and LSB 2.0 had specific issues in the C++ mentioned in the LWN.net article earlier
GCC is part of the Full Distribution installation of either Solaris 10 or Express, perl is an integral part of Solaris. Python may be part of the Companion CD (I am not sure because I don’t use Python).
Just downloaded the companion CD and installed.Saw python and gcc passing by.I guess i have to set the RBAC rights first in order to be able to use them.
You Sun people are pathetic. You’re deliberately sidestepping the issues regarding Sun’s behaviour and its rapid decline. I was a Sun booster… I still have eight of them, most of which are no longer working and some of which are still in production. I had (and still have one) Solaris x86 boxes.
Example:
— cut
SunOS morpheus 5.9 Generic_118558-05 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-250
— cut
Note I haven’t bothered to update it to S10. And won’t. Sun’s days are over, their processors are sadly outclassed by nearly every other chip out there, and their architecture hasn’t progressed much in years.
For all intents and purposes, Sun’s only interesting products, for most of us, are their Opteron machines. And then only because Sun has always made solid (if not current) hardware.
Off the top of my head I can think of so many failures at Sun to deliver that for me, it’s completely pathetic to see someone saying how wonderful Sun and its engineers are.
Example failures:
– Javastations
– Sun’s firewall (manually configure ARP, anyone?!)
– Netra systems, too slow to be actually useful
– Netscape server products, outgunned by everyone
– SMB/Novell connectivity, outgunned by Samba, buggy and out of date
– IPX<>IP Netra for providing Internet to Novell systems, too buggy to use
– RAQ, great early product and company, which Sun killed
I have many bad memories of selling these products with the “support” of Sun’s engineers and then walking away after months of busting my ass trying to make these solutions work for the customer after Sun dropped the ball – every time.
So don’t give me your holier-than-thou B.S. If you actually know Sun you know I’m relating facts here… perhaps you’d care to show me where any of these products exist on Sun’s product portfolio today… but you can’t, because they’ve all been discontinued, because none of them were ever made into real products that performed.
Only Java and Solaris have survived, because both of them got some of the attention they deserved.
If you’re going to tell lies about Sun’s shining past, tell them to someone who hasn’t been there to see Sun fall apart trying to be all things to all people, and succeeding at almost nothing.
Solaris 2.6 randomly picking an IP address off a multi-addressed ethernet port to use as the outgoing NFS address. Note I didn’t say bind to… it randomly picked one and changed over time. This made NFS more or less unusable on a machine with multiple IP addresses on an ethernet port used for NFS.
Filed as a bug when 2.6 was in beta (yeah, that’s right, I’ve been a Solaris beta tester) and fixed many months later (18 months seems to me) when Solaris 7 was in its pre-release cycle. My e-mail box still had updates regarding issues for the bug report years after.
Off the top of my head I can think of so many failures at Sun to deliver that for me, it’s completely pathetic to see someone saying how wonderful Sun and its engineers are.
Let’s see no other company has ever failed to deliver anything or has failed products other than Sun, right?
A lot of good companies with very good engineers and products have faded away. Just because they did doesn’t mean they didn’t have good products or engineers.
The thing with Sun is they are doing many things right and have always turned around to face new challenges the market has brought. That is the differentiator. Look at IBM, which failed miserably to market and sell an OS for thier PC, now they have failed to do that with AIX and have embraced linux. What should IBM customers think about the track record of IBM? Take HP they are a mess to say the least. They have given up on al thier core IP and are now trying to manage a mess of architectures with no proper roadmap for any of them.
Let’s take linux, The accelerate kernel development for 2.6 took two and half years to complete. They keep changing thier development model constantly.
It is easy to bitch about things on forums but very hard to manage large companies in real life. You are customer and you have the right to your opinions but the grass is always greener on the otherside.
Good you filed one bug, hoorah, but People like Rich Teer have been involved with Sun longer and have tried to effect a change. pardon me if I don’t have empathy for you.
So, do you really think Intel, Microsoft, RedHat, IBM, HP, Novell, etc. have a better list of failed products? If you do, you’re seriously deluded. Every new product is a risk, and apparently you didn’t have the intuition to work with them properly. BTW, not everything you listed was failed–Sun still sells Netras, RAQ rolled into their x86 systems. The other things you listed are ancient history! Talk about the troll from hell!
How would you feel if you were an adopter of OS/2? How would you feel if you had adopted Itanium? How would you feel if you deployed any of Microsoft’s APIs that get replaced every two years? How would you feel if you deployed on an earlier version of Linux and newer revisions broke your programs?
Get a grip, really.
Well I’m alittle confused,
“…Sun’s only interesting products, for most of us, are their Opteron machines. And then only because Sun has always made solid (if not current) hardware.”
and
“Only Java and Solaris have survived, because both of them got some of the attention they deserved.”
So I guess Sun does have some redeeming qualities in your opinion, well glad you half-heartedly conceeded that part. (And got alittle bit back on topic by mentioning Solaris, which is what this thread is really about.)
As for your mentioned failures, it appears your mixing product “lines” with product “implementations”. Some of the product “lines” you mentioned are “not quite dead yet”, but are the lineage of current products, i.e. Sun Rays, Java Enterprise Server. Some are dead and rightfully or unrightfully so, that’s what a product life cycle is about. In my past experience with Sun, product “implementation” failures occured when a product was being used for something it originally wasn’t designed or incorrectly configured. If you try to “sell” a product instead of “design a solution”, that frequently occcurs. YMMV, but I have never been left alone to support a Sun “solution” that was implemented using the best practices outlined by the Sun engineering (read–don’t just read the marketing material–that goes for all companies, not just Sun). But if you wanna be a cowboy, well you’re gonna eat alot of beans.
’nuff said…Now back to Solaris Express…good job Team Solaris!
Is /usr/sfw/bin in your PATH? Within a few minutes I was compiling iozone on my machines.
…is that everything *except* Solaris and Java has been a failure for Sun. I include the UltraSPARC systems in that, because frankly they haven’t progressed nearly fast enough in terms of computing power. Nobody’s interested anymore.
Well that says a lot for a guy who is using 7+ year old hardware! And what do you base this “failure” on? I just look in our server room and I see racks of Sun hardware from V100’s to SunFire 4800’s and just about everything in between (including 10 V20z’s). And as somebody who has worked with IBM’s products (pSeries and AIX), I prefer Sun hardware running Solaris.
Maybe you are not interested, but a lot of other people are. And for all of your whining, maybe why the “solutions” didn’t work for had nothing to do with Sun, maybe it was you!
You’re right…
“Nobody’s interested anymore.”
In your seven year old project that went awry. Or your blanket statements of pending doom for the entire Sun product line (except Solaris and Java). Hope you find that IPX to IP gateway though and a firewall you don’t have to manually configure.
What we’re interested in is…
“Solaris Express 4/2005 Released”
“Solaris Express 4/2005 Released”
Funny, I’m not interested anymore.
Whoever deleted my last post… well… what do you expect with all the disengenuity in this thread?