After what many took to be the software’s death knell, Sun has put Solaris for Intel processors on a stronger footing. Sun Microsystems plans broader backing for a version of its Solaris operating system geared for Intel processors, the server maker plans to announce on Friday. They also announced an update to its application server software along with plans to offer a free version of the product.
Sun to Restore Intel Support for Solaris
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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This is offtopic, but where can I get a cheap solaris license for a dual SS20 sparc machine ?
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http://islande.hirlimann.net
Just pull down Solaris ISO’s from Sun site for free: http://wwws.sun.com/software/solaris/binaries/get.html
if you have 4 cpus or less, Solaris is free
Is Solaris 9 Intel free (zero proce) as early verions ?
Sorry…
Buy a used Ultra on eBay. Solaris, unlike Windows, will run on older hardware – and on Sparc, as already noted, it’s free.
Plus, consider that Veritas volume manager does not run on Solarix x86m and there you have some compelling reasons to stick with Sparc.
Nonetheless, I did install Solaris 8 on my PC at home. Well, at least Solstice runs on x86.
Can someone help?
What would be the equivalent to a PIII 800Mhz Intel box? Ultra 20/60, Blade 100..?
The Blade 100 is barely equals to a P-233 (pentium-class in integer, mid-PII class for floating point, IIRC.
As a workstation, it’s painfull slow, as its X server is pure utter cr*p). To see how how a Sun cpu is equal to, go to SPEC.org and check out the benchmarks.
Sun hardware is an optimal combination of low-price per I/O power. Let’s not forget that these CPUs have 8 MB of cache (even the most expensive Xeons have only 3 MB) and that Sun has a particular eye for the backplane in their servers. And all this while still be half as cheap as the equivalent HP-UX computer.
And as for the Sun X server being crap, I must say that it has never crashed on me, not once, unlike Xfree. It’s slow, but it does what you expect from it: it runs the graphical admin tools. Which you don’t really have to do, because with Sun you have always choice: you can run the console-based version of these tools, or just use the command line.
If you want to run ogle or xine, get an x86. And install Win98+PowerDVD, while you’re at it, ‘couse Xfree+linux multimedia sucks compared to Windows.
(said all that, multimedia on a Sun workstation is not exactly hopeless, either: I listen to music I archived in MP3, using my Blade 100 at work, with mpeg123).
>And as for the Sun X server being crap, I must say that it has never crashed on me, not once, unlike Xfree.
Maybe. But that doesn’t mean that it is as fast as XFree or it supports AA (it doesn’t). My experience with it it wasn’t pleasant at all.
The Blade 100 is just slow when using it. You can talk as much as you want about “optimal combination of low-price per I/O power” but I am giving you hard numbers according to SPEC, plus my experience with that system: slow.
Actually, a sun Blade 100 is a very capable server. Just hook a JBOD to it, and voila’ a cheap an powerful server. I7O doesn’t mean user interface, and I think you know I didn’t mean that.
As for SPEC, there are many kinds of tests there, but from what I have seen, the ones that measure the disk subsys, backplane and inter-process capabilities are’t represented.
The best tests for computers to be used in an enterprise environment, I think, are the ones that measure a database transaction per second vs. system price vs. storage and DB size. This is where the Sun Fire series shines.
The only issue I have with the SUN Blade 100 is the shockingly slow harddisk they included in their ealier models, 5400rpm harddisksd and Solaris are like torture.
The SUN Blade 150 isn’t too bad. Give that ago, + ensure that you have DMA enabled and the speed isn’t too bad.
I have seen Windows XP running on machines perhaps older than the average Ultra on ebay 🙂 Won’t be fast… but hey, so would Solaris 9, yes?
I wrote a whole report for my company on this. I did various tests and Solaris x86 is drastically slower if you configure it to use UFS + Logging (a sane choice for any business with large amounts of data).
I still like Solaris a lot as an OS though. A very sane environment in general.
D
I use Solaris 8 x86 on a dual proc and it’s faster with UFS logging than without. Solaris is pretty much a waste on a single CPU, and not very speedy on just a few. By making it scalable to large numbers of processors, it suffers badly on low-end systems.
I don’t think that it’s an accident that it’s free for systems under 8 CPUs; it probably doesn’t shine with fewer than that number present.
>> The Blade 100 is barely equals to a P-233 (pentium-class in integer, mid-PII class for floating point, IIRC. As a workstation, it’s painfull slow, as its X server is pure utter cr*p).
Eugenia, you sound like a freaking half-witted gamer moron making all these this-sucks-and-that-sucks comments about hardware not destined to be part of your miserable desktop (i.e. Sun hardware,etc.) trying to convince everyone that your PC is faster/better/cheaper than high price tag hardware. In many cases your favorite integer, floating point, IIRC benchmarks barely mean anything at all since nowdays the gap between processor and I/O speeds is so wide that additional clock cycles don’t give anything in terms of real performance, especially if the application is I/O and/or memory bound. Sun Fire 100 is certainly not the fastest piece of hardware on the block, but it is definitely not as slow as P-233 and proves to be a great entry level workstation for CAD/CAM work with very memory intensive data sets.
To recap, I would expect opinions posted by the owner of the forum to be expressed in more intelligent and less ignorant way.
Best regards
I believe you meant Sun Blad 100, but you do confuse me here, because there is a Sun Fire 100 “pizzabox” server that is in the current Sun portfolio. I think it’s now rebranded as Sun X1, but it’s basically the Fire 100, and it’s a good entry level Sparc server.
But depends what you’re doing.
In postmark it’s very slow (I tested it on a single CPU).
For non-critical filesystems there is a fastfs command that can give you fully async data + metadata I/O and that works pretty well.
D