Oracle is sticking to its promise of more regular Solaris updates with the release of Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU93. This release, like other SRU releases, is for paying Solaris customers, as the CBE releases for enthusiasts are on a different cadence. With Solaris’ focus being on enterprise server environments, it should come as no surprise that most of the changes and improvements are focused on things like enterprise networking and security, such as changes to how policy settings for the Kernel Crypto Framework (KCF) are stored, moving from using RPC over sockets instead of STREAMS, and more.
Of course, there’s also the long list of updated open source packages.
SRU 93.221.2 updates a broad set of platform, runtime, developer, networking, desktop, and open source components. Notable updates include Apache Tomcat to 9.0.116, bash to 5.3 patch 9, BIND to 9.20.18 and 9.20.21, Django 4.2 to 4.2.30, Django 5.2 to 5.2.13, Firefox to 140.8.0esr, Golang to 1.25.8, Node.js 20 to 20.20.2, Node.js 22 to 22.22.2, Node.js 24 to 24.14.1, NSS to 3.119.1, Perl to 5.42, Python 3.11 to 3.11.15, Python 3.13 to 3.13.12, RabbitMQ to 4.2.4, Thunderbird to 140.8.0esr, vim to 9.2.0340, and zlib to 1.3.2. Additional updates include development tools, Python modules, X11 utilities, printing components, libraries, cryptographic packages, networking tools, and desktop-related packages.
↫ Colin Kavanagh at the Oracle Solaris Blog
Existing Oracle Solaris customers can update to the new release through pkg update.
There seems to be zero enthusiasm around Solaris, which is sad.
And I don’t think it would be entirely fair to say Linux killed it. It was more of Sun killing it by losing their focus.
Or rather staying too focused on the yesteryear, but not their core competency. They built competitive servers in 2000s. If you were a startup or small business, you wanted SPARC. If you had a computer department, at least one lab had to be SPARC.
But their customers moved to lower cost Windows NT and Linux. Because, frankly they did not have the “dot com” money anymore. And Sun stayed in their older place, alone….
sukru,
I actually felt Sun brought us a lot technology: databases, programming languages, file systems, etc… stuff we still benefit from today. I was disheartened to loose them because they did so much for FOSS and linux took a lot of it too. Where they excelled at engineering, they lacked business ruthlessness. Look at what oracle did with Java after acquiring the assets. Immediately started patent lawsuits against google/android.. Those tactics weren’t in Sun’s DNA and unfortunately that’s what it takes to survive. 🙁
Alfman,
I would claim it was the opposite of what they should have done.
Oracle/Sun suing Google brought no fruits, other than making C# more popular for newer projects, and put Google in a path to ultimately replace Java with Dart (not fully done of course)
What they should have done instead would be aggressive co-operative licensing. Microsoft wants to do J++ with embrace, extend? Make sure they pay for it. Linux wants to have a runtime? Make it cheap but available.
Today they basically get nothing for Java compared to what could have been.
(And Sun in general had many other avenues to make money, but not with $50k entry level servers. You either go big like IBM, or go cheap. The middle always shrinks)