Sun on Friday will announce plans to release an unbundled version of the Solaris 9 operating environment for non-Sun x86 hardware for $99 for a single CPU system. After months of indecision, Sun will now ship Solaris 9 x86, unbundled, supporting both the Sun hardware platform, for both current and future products, as well as the same list of all hardware supported for Solaris 8, according to Sun officials in Palo Alto, Calif. Early access to the Solaris 9 bits will come in the next four to eight weeks, and the final product will ship in the January time-frame, they said.
Sun to Ship non-SMP x86 Solaris 9 for $99 USD
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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.. is how I read it. Linux == FREE. FreeBSD == FREE. Also, either of the Free OSs are much more refined on Intel/AMD HW. Why would anyone pay $99 bux for Solaris when it is not nearly as refined on x86??
Sun is just playing to their complainers and simultaneously killing off external distribution simultaneously, because now that they have internally made Intel HW, Solaris running on a box that isn’t their’s hurts their hw business.
This is not news, this was expected…
David
if you are going to support x86, SUPPORT x86. what else will we find has been left out? a journaling file system? support for more than 1GB memory?
who is going to buy this crippleware?
is this the ‘developer alienation’ release?
ah, the weight of all those dumb people they hired during the dotcom boom. so many people, so high a burn rate, so little brainpower, so small a share price.
#p
because it’s cheaper to have 20 developers working on a solaris product on a x86 based workstation then on an UltraSprac based workstation. Many solaris client do some developments so they can use el cheapo boxes for that and have one or two “real” Sun machine for QA.
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http://islande.hirlimann.net
solaris x86 is not for the same people as linux/freebsd/netbsd. solaris x86 9 is only aimed at its existing solaris corporate customers.
they dont want nor care about joe user with homebrew box trying to run it. you can tell they didnt even want to release solaris x86 at all. its only because of corporate customer pressure…
You would think that someone at Sun would have some brains.
One of the complaints I’d heard over the last few years about Solaris x86 aka Slowlaris was due to its multithreadedness that was geared towards multi-CPU machines.
Now they’ve managed to make a single-CPU version that’s going to sell for more than any desktop-class Linux distro and have far less hardware support, and undoubtedly run far slower.
Hats off to the genius who managed to come up with a solution that will please exactly noone.
Now they’ve managed to make a single-CPU version that’s going to sell for more than any desktop-class Linux distro and have far less hardware support, and undoubtedly run far slower.
Has said above Sun managment is not after linux users who want everything to be free (as in beer). Sun is trying to keep it’s corporate users, they are the one that count.
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http://islande.hirlimann.net
Why is there a processsor restriction? So corporate users won’t use Intel boxes to replace their SPARC boxes? So that the customer is stuck paying the extra high fees for a poor value 2-4 processor SPARC box?
If Sun doesn’t get it, after all these years, that their customers know they are being screwed by the high prices of SPARC iron, then Sun is stupider than we thought. It’s one thing to buy SPARC iron with dotcom VC money, another thing when the money matters.
Sun needs to come up with something better than crippleware as a convincing reason to buy into SPARC.
With AMD and Intel launching their 64 bit campaigns, Sun is going to face the toughest challenge in their history.
Since the dotcom boom went bust, Sun has not fieled any sort of comprehensive nor comprehensible strategy. This crippleware release of Solaris for Intel is just the latest insane act of a headless company.
#p
Now , on x86, oracle perfer the Redhat Linux Advance server 2.1, I really don’t know why sun make the solaris 9 x86. For what kind of customer?
Now , on x86, oracle perfer the Redhat Linux Advance server 2.1, I really don’t know why sun make the solaris 9 x86. For what kind of customer?
I was one of those mugs who signed up for a free copy of x86 Solaris only to receive an email from them saying the offer had been over subscribed (as reported by The Register). All they succeeded in doing was turning someone who had a mild interest into someone with an active hostility.
When the Linux effort finally settles on a “standard” distribution and sorts out the remaining gripes in developer and user space, such as having easy to use installers and slicked up desktop, Solaris won’t even appear on my radar.
If Sun doesn’t get it, after all these years, that their customers know they are being screwed by the high prices of SPARC iron, then Sun is stupider than we thought. It’s one thing to buy SPARC iron with dotcom VC money, another thing when the money matters.
well.. you dont buy x86 boxes to relpace sparc boxes. you wont see amazon runnnig a datawarehouse on x86 boxes.
sun is in a small market. its sun, ibm and who else? fujitsu/siemens is not a player. dell is not a player. compaq is not a player (and hp are not really a player in big server markets, but bigger than fuj/sie).
sun supplies to big companies, not ma n pa kettle selling whittling knives and has a turnover for 5k a year.
With AMD and Intel launching their 64 bit campaigns, Sun is going to face the toughest challenge in their history.
you think so? i dont. its all the toher hardware inside a sun box that makes it what it is. the only people with the same kind of chipset skill in x86 arena is serverworks/fuj+sie. i dont know what kind of chipset is in the fuj/sie big x86 boxes, but one supporting the x86-64 stuff, would be a challenge to sun _mabye_ on the lowend..
its not about the cpu. its about the architecture, the bandwidth of the backplanes, the failover and HA stuff, the scaleability. these things the bigiron boxes have in spades (rs/6000, sun boxes, parisc boxes, as/400’s, etc).
the sun workstation is pretty much dead. can balde100/1000/2000s compare to a highend x86 workstation? this segment sun is dead in. but for servers, its another story i think.
[i]its not about the cpu. its about the architecture, the bandwidth of the backplanes, the failover and HA stuff, the scaleability.[i]
It looks to me like the Playstation 3 architecture might end up slaughtering the PC world and the likes of Sun.
It looks to me like the Playstation 3 architecture might end up slaughtering the PC world and the likes of Sun.
How many times have we heard stuff like that? I’d say since about the N64 days, “it’ll be able to go on the net and…and….and so why would you need a PC?” I’ve never seen an N64 do anything but games. The same was said about dreamcast, and PS2, and gamecube (not sure about gamecube though) and the xbox. I only know of 1 person who actually puts his xbox online and listens to music with it. Consoles are consoles, they arent much threat to the PC market. Within a year of their release, you can buy hardware for your PC that is much more powerful, just look at the xbox, a P3 700? lol.
I think instead of putting effort in releasing Solaris for x86, Sun should have optimized their Solaris for IA-64.
IA-64 is coming big and is one of the worst news for Sun. And the only way they could make sth. out of this tide is to stick to it. What about x86? Will probably fade out by the end of the decade. AMD would pay dearly for their choice too.
I respect the Sparc architecture, but it’s nowhere comparable with EPIC architecture of Itanium, which seems to me by far the most promising architecture so far (To the previous post: Playstation 3 & The cell is hyped but we know nothing at the moment). Moreover Intel would be producing so many of these CPUs with the highest production technology. Therefore it’s impossible for Sun to compete in terms of R&D and production costs. They will be much cheaper and faster and will leave Sun no area except for the software to make profit on (if they don’t give up on Sparc). And HP, IBM would beat the hell out of Sun, as soon as their loyal customers realize Sparc is nowhere as strong as the Itaniums.
Sun should make Solaris 9 free.
Just my 2 cents.
Ya know, most of the talk that I heard about the death of Solaris x86 was from people mourning the ability for their testing, development, notebooks, small server, etc. to not be running the same system as their big iron.
It seems to be that in this domain, particularly for notebooks, that this $99 Solaris fits the bill pretty well.
For those who want to learn Solaris admin work, $99 isn’t a horrible price. For developers who may not want to work on a Blade, it should be more than adequate.
Most of the users have large SPARC installations already, the x86 version was a supplemental product used to fill gaps where the Sun hardware wasn’t as good of a fit, but where they still wanted the Solaris environment.
I think this is a good move. It brings the product back, targets it for what, apparently, most people were using it for before, and it comes at a reasonable price.
If you want a cheap UNIX, you can get FreeBSD or Linux, but if you want a cheap Solaris, then this is what you get.
This has been mentioned in previous comments, but I will say it again. This release is for developers who need to port to a more expensive Solaris machine.
The same reason I have Red Hat on my laptop to port my apps tp HPUX.
An interesting point is that Sun will have their own Linux coming out in a few months. I wonder if this is meant to replace Solaris x86 as the development platform.
I will run Solaris 9 before id ever run another distro of linux
Hi Eugenia,
Is there any chance that you’ll do a review of Solaris 9 x86? I’d love to read it, if only to hear your usability take on CDE as a windowing environment!
Yours truly,
Jeffrey Boulier
Mr. jacksonville-02rh16rt.fl.dial-access.att.net wrote:
Sun should make Solaris 9 free.
Just my 2 cents.
Sun should also sell the Sun Blade 2000 for $500, and give Star Office users on site, dedicated support engineers to mow their lawns.
Yours truly,
Jeffrey Boulier
First off, I’ve purchased every version of Solaris x86 starting with 2.6. Sun has continually changed what you got in each shipment so I was very glad when they made it possible to download Solaris 8 for free. Unfortunately, I’d already bought the Solaris 8 CD pack.
Well, I don’t remember exactly what I paid for each of those shipments but it was less than $99 bucks. At the time, I thought it was a so-so price for what I was getting but at least, it was full Solaris – I could do SMP on my dual PII.
To shell out $99 bucks for crippled Solaris 9 just doesn’t seem worth it to me. Believe me, if one of the other bigname Unices were available for x86 for a reasonable price, I’d melt the CDs I bought and make a buttplug for McNealy.
In order of preference, the ones I’d most like to see on x86 are Tru64, AIX, HP-UX.
as i known, Solaris 9 update release 4 will ships with GNOME 2.0 (CDE will still there, user can choose). love to hear that.
If you are tempted to make a further comment, please go back to;
Ludovic Hirlimann Comment #3
Will Comment #16
Chris Parker Comment #17
and save OSNews the bandwidth and disk space.
From a business standpoint this is the only reason Solaris x86 exists at all. Sure you can use it for other things, but why would you?
as i known, Solaris 9 update release 4 will ships with GNOME 2.0 (CDE will still there, user can choose). love to hear that.
Thank god for that, do you know if you can still get OpenWin for it, I like OpenWin it confuses most people 😉