Solaris Express 3/2005 (a.k.a. Nevada Build 9) should arrive later today providing improved hardware support, performance, the Network Layer 7 Cache, and new developer APIs. You can obtain a free download. An overview of new features is available.
Solaris Express 3/2005 available today
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Eugenia Loli
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“Improved Hardware Support” – question is, doesn’t that sound an awful lot like, “how long is a piece of string”?
Its rather annoying that SUN doesn’t actually have a *REAL* HCL, one actually written BY SUN. Oh well, maybe the company that ends up buying up SUNs assets, when they go under, will do a better job with Solaris.
I thought solaris express was solaris 10 ?? and if it is ?? its already out isnt it ?
I thought solaris express was solaris 10 ?? and if it is ?? its already out isnt it ?
Solaris Express is Solaris + Bleeding edge features, once those features are stable, they’re back ported to the stable quarterly update. See it as a sneek preview of what is coming soon on Solaris.
Solaris 10 is the GA release meaning “General Availability” which would be the equivelant of a boxed product or “stable” release. The Solaris Express program is a bit like testing is to Debian, it is a relatively stable sytem but not yet fit for production systems. Run it on your desktops, not your servers.
I am beginning to find the trolling comments like the one posted above a bit boring, sure it was kind of entertaining that there are such moronic people for a little while but it seems to have lost its novelty for me. The armchair CTO from New Zealand has once again enlightened us with his/her insightful and perceptive marketplace analysis, call Gartner and ask for a job, I am absolutely sure they will be delighted to take you on.
kaiwai, Ché Kristo, for you help. I didnt know that, im off to check out
happy to be of assistance
I am beginning to find the trolling comments like the one posted above a bit boring, sure it was kind of entertaining that there are such moronic people for a little while but it seems to have lost its novelty for me. The armchair CTO from New Zealand has once again enlightened us with his/her insightful and perceptive marketplace analysis, call Gartner and ask for a job, I am absolutely sure they will be delighted to take you on.
Interesting, SUN has “committed” itself to he x86 platform for 2 years, and they *STILL* can’t get an AGP or Nvidia driver out on time? they scream they need “more time” and yet, in the same breath, they get rid of engineers? am I the only person who sees a problem of SUN cutting their nose to spite their face?
If they want to save money, get rid of the mountain of paper shufflers who justify their existance shuffling papers around the office.
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=sun.com&probe=1
Seems like Sun.com and sun.nl are down. (Sunsolve is still up)
> Oh well, maybe the company that ends up buying up SUNs assets, when they go under, will do a better job with Solaris.
Oh, please lay off your stupid brainfarts with Sun going out of business. You’re about three years late to the party with your stupid commentaries. Sun has already fixed pretty much all of the shortcomings that raised some questions before. Sun is very competitive right now and I don’t see a reason why Sun whouldn’t succeed. Sun has got extremely good product lines now accross the board from OS to servers to middleware to storage; and what is most interestring is that Sun is now one of the most (if not the most) price competitive vendor on the market — Sun is the low cost vendor now with practically every product being generally better and cheaper than the competition.
Sun does have a HCL. I made a suggestion something like 6-8 months ago about adding chipsets for motherboards. I hadn’t seen or heard anything from Sun. About a month ago, I check out their HCL and lo and behold, they have chipsets for everthing.
Now, that is why I am impressed.
I have to say Solaris Xpress is a great thing for any Solaris hobbyist or professional that wants to get his hands on the the latest and the greatest stuff. I can’t wait for WiFi support to be fully integrated into Solaris (I heard it is already in the pipeline and should be coming soon) to have Solaris on my laptop instead of Windows or Linux.
Kawai: “Interesting, SUN has “committed” itself to he x86 platform for 2 years, and they *STILL* can’t get an AGP or Nvidia driver out on time? they scream they need “more time” and yet, in the same breath, they get rid of engineers? am I the only person who sees a problem of SUN cutting their nose to spite their face?”
I have to agree with “Anonymous (IP: —.dyn.iinet.net.au)”
I find it a real shame that your nVidia driver wasn’t out on time for you, forgive me if i’m wrong but the majority of Solaris use is not desktop oriented. I would much prefer that Sun focus on the needs of their market than fiddle around adding support for video cards and webcams, i’m not saying the support wouldn’t be good but not at the expense of the customer base.
Saying that Sun has become a company of paper shufflers shows just how disconnected you are from reality. Take a look at the technologies coming out of Sun; JXTA, Grid Engine, UltraSparc IV, DTrace, Java, etc. Not to mention the countless open source projects they contribute to, see http://www.sunsource.net . Sure, much like any other tech company they are starting to accomodate the reality that exists following the the dot com boom and will have to lay of staff. There are very few companies who have not had to do so.
“Interesting, SUN has “committed” itself to he x86 platform for 2 years, and they *STILL* can’t get an AGP or Nvidia driver out on time?”
Interesting… http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl
They list all sorts of AGP cards. Sun’s own Java Workstations ship with all sorts of NVIDIA Quadro cards and Solaris or Linux. If you send me a Sun W2100z with an Opteron 252 and a Quadro FX4000 card, I’ll be sure to test it and let you know if it works
They list all sorts of AGP cards. Sun’s own Java Workstations ship with all sorts of NVIDIA Quadro cards and Solaris or Linux. If you send me a Sun W2100z with an Opteron 252 and a Quadro FX4000 card, I’ll be sure to test it and let you know if it works
Yes, but the catch is that there is currently no 3D support on the Solaris x86 platform. Only when running Linux or Windows on those SUN boxen. The NVidia 3D driver is under development internally and is supposedly almost ready to be released.
1) Solaris still treats the AGP slot as nothing more than a mutated PCI slot, meaning, any of the advanced feaures of the AGP bus are not utilised, meaning, major performance hit.
2)) Solaris is a workstation AND server operating system – why else would they be pushing its use on their x86 workstations?
3) The nVidia driver used today is the standard, no accelerated version that comes with Xorg, nothing particular exciting – coupled with the lack of an AGP, performance is crappolla.
4) The HCL is still maintained by end users with “reported to have worked” or “kinda works” – sorry, I want to have an HCL where by EVERY piece of hardware has been tested and verified by SUN – until then, its nothing more than a relliance on hear-say as to whether something is supported.
If you’re a potentially new customer, does it give you much confidence that possibly your new hardware purchase could be a game of Russian roulette as to whether Solaris properly supports the hardware?
5) The nVidia driver under development is only promised to support the video cads that come with the Java Workstation. On one side of their mouth, SUN screams that they’re willing to support as many hardware devices as possible, and yet on the other hand, they’re the same old proprietary company, with one exception, they offer x86 servers and only support the servers they sell.
Could SUN *PLEASE* stop lying and simply admit that they have absolutely NO intention on supporting any other hardware apart from what they sell, I mean, if they did that, then atleast I can know what the real intention of SUN is rather than sitting around hoping that SUN wants to become more of a software company with a willingness to provide a broad spectrum of hardware support, not only to their own machines, but to machines assembled by other vendors.
6) Paper shufflers are still of plenty – you could easily replace 100 sales critters with one damn glorified online ordering site, like Dell has. Most businesses don’t want the all the crap of ringing up, they know what they want, give them the interface for them to order the necessary hardware and let them make the decision – if they want consultancy services, suprisingly SUN, they’ll come to YOU and actually request that particular service.
7) Solaris is a hosting platform for the SUN Ray thin client, so therefore, Solaris IS a desktop operating system, so in actual fact, comments relating to the quality of Solaris as a desktop is still relevant.
8) Someone raised “more competitive”, interesting, over 75% of x86 servers/workstations shipped are still preloaded with Linux by customer request – obviously SUN isn’t doing something right, otherwise, there would be a greater number willing to give Solaris a go with in their organisation.
Do you get Staroffice 7 with JDS if you buy the DVD install from Sun?
It comes with the downloaded version as well, or at least the SPARC and x86 copies I downloaded did.
A SunRay client/server system is not a desktop. The hardware support is possibly a reason why Sun is moving on OpenSolaris, to enable the markets they can’t address to help themselves. I find your attitude very lame though, you cant have what you want straight away, what you want is not what everyone else wants too and having a tantrum about it isn’t going to fix much. I wish I had 3D support on my nVidia card on the computer I’m using right now too, give it time, find a second hobby or something. Moving from a single vendor hardware and software platform to the mass market of x86 is a big move. Sun however do not want to leave their existing customer base in the cold with a focus shift. As any old BeOS user would most definitely understand.
This alone is worth the download over SOL10-GA for people wanting to try SOL10:
“CD-ROM/DVD DMA is now always enabled; this had in the past caused problems with some CDROM and DVD drives. However, the performance benefit is significant. CD/DVD DMA can still be switched off via the configuration assistant. This is also known to cause problems with encrypted DVDs; to fix, disable DMA; this should be fixed when snv_11 comes out. “
Wow. I don’t care much about sound drivers on Solaris, but it sure is nice to have. The Blade 150 here is my main mp3 player.
However, I think netcard drivers are much more important than sound or graphics. I find the number of supported ethernet (expecially 100 Mbit/s ones) to be somewhat lacking, still.
Thanks for all of your comments folks. We are listening. In fact, the core kernel group is in the middle of a two day meeting to work out what our priorities are now that Solaris 10 is out the door.
To reflect on some of what Kawai has said: yes, we need to improve AGP; the agpgart driver project is in the works and I understand it to be close to being finished. The first revision of the driver focuses on the Intel 82845/82865G and AMD 8151 AGP chipsets and a limited set of embedded video devices including i845/i855/i865.
Yes, the Nvidia driver which is in the works will initially support the cards we sell, and AFAIK will not officially support other Nvidia cards, for now. I believe it is being authored by Nvidia, so we can hope to expand support going forward. I have personally seen it run flightgear at 1920×1400 at 60 smooth fps. It also still has some problems. Yes, we need to get better on the desktop. And as others mentioned: yes, we need to have better driver support for NICs, video cards, and adapters of all sorts.
However, in response to the aggressive tone of your comments I will only say: please do not conflate incremental improvement which does not proceed at the pace you desire with ill or malicious intent on Sun’s part. We are doing the best we can to deliver the highest quality product with the resources available to us, and Brooks’ law frequently applies. I hope that when we officially open the doors on http://www.opensolaris.org , optimists who share your frustration will join us in improving the product further. For those who continue to be our champions, constructive critics, and allies, we really appreciate your involvement.
-dp
Nothing like a broken installer to start your morning. All it does is pop up a terminal window and sits there after entering the networking stuff in and confirming. This happens in the Interactive Install.
People can’t even get all the new stuff tested for Sun when the installer doesn’t work on their ‘beta’ release.. <sigh>
Well, it’s not a bug everyone is seeing; we don’t ship express releases (which are *not* considered to be of fully Beta quality, by the way) without trying hard to make sure they work well. If you can help us by gathering information, that would really help. Even a ‘ptree’ of what is going on on the system might help. pstack(1) the relevant processes. Check the log files. Check the release notes. We’ll try to fix the issue if you help us by collecting information. Thanks,
-dp
I forgot: please also describe the system config: RAM, disks, CPU, networking, etc. and how you are installing: upgrade? from net? from DVD? from CD?
Dan,
I would love to help and supply everything needed but have no idea who to contact. If I remember, only registered people who purchased the support for $100 is allowed to submit bug reports and such?
Which brings up a good question… Why charge for the right to submit bugs and feedback for people who want to volunteer some time and testing? Seems like the opposite of what is expected of a software company. For example I have really become a Solaris Fan as of late just from trying out the final Release and decided I like it enough to be onteh leading edge with the Express releases on my workstation to help with testing. But I am not going to pay $100 for ME to help SUN. This needs to be changed. I can totally see charging for updates and patches, but feedback and bugs needs to be free.
Why not just post it here, there seem to be loads of Sun engineers posting here now – they seem to want to help.