John Mahala writes “Over the weekend, Sun released Solaris 9 for x86. You can check it out here. The cost is $20 to download, and there is no offering (yet) to purchase a Media Kit.“
Solaris 9 for x86 Now Available
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Maybe I’m missing something, but I couldn’t find a single statement relating to x86.
It is there:
http://wwws.sun.com/software/solaris/binaries/get.html
we’ll be downloading it tomorrow
Thanks Eugenia! I think I could part with $20.00 to play around with Solaris 9 for a bit. 🙂
I’m quite happy Sun reverted its decision about Sol 9 on x86 , I think it is quite useful also if Sol on SPARC is another world…
Further, it’s an optimal way to learn Solaris cheaply.
…Little Solaris admins grows … ? 🙂
As a Solaris SysAdmin, I am very pleases with this news! I’ll load it as soon as posible on my second desktop at work… Cheerssss!!!
Will the likes of Oracle, BEA etc. be porting to Solaris x86 given that Sun has already killed this off once? Me I’m happy that Sun have changed their minds, but from a Corporate point of view not much help unless these types of apps are going to be ported??
A few drawbacks to the Solaris installation:
No NVIDIA Geforce 4 Drivers (havent tried the GF3 ones)
Cant install to any other hard drive than the first one in line (please someone help me with this
)
Other than that, Solaris looks promising.. I remember the days of spending HOURS trying to install Solaris 8 and waiting for the packages to install
jake
I don’t think corporate will trust Solaris on x86, I think the main goal of this is more a tool for SysAdmin and a platform for developers, nothing more. But still, I love it!
Hours to install Solaris 8 x86? I’ve done it more than a few times and while it seems to take forever compared to Linux or even FreeBSD, it’s not all that bad. The older Solaris releases were godawful slow, I’ll grant you that.
My curiousity is killing me to the point I might pay $20 to find out. I had a hell of a time trying to install Solaris 8 on a multi-boot system. I wonder if they fixed anything…
Here is my recollection of the problems I had installing Solaris 8.
-Solaris had to have two *primary* paritions – unlike FreeBSD that takes a single partition and divides it into it’s own slices, and unlike BeOS that will easily install on any partition on any drive.
-Solaris’ two primary paritions had to be installed on Master drive. That was a pain in the ass!
-Solaris Install program always saw prepared partitions as overlapping and refused to continue. Even paritions created by Ranish, which is absolutely dependable AFAIK
-Partitions created by Solaris’ Install program left gaps of unused space on the hard drive. How unprofessional…
-Linux would no longer boot because of Swap errors. I suspect this is because Solaris and Linux Swap are the same file types. Not really a fault of Solaris though.
Can anyone confirm that Solaris 9 has these same problems? Different problems? Installs perfectly?
-Bob
I too had trouble installing Solaris 8, it took forever for my 1.0 GHz AMD 512mb RAM to install the packages disks.
I don’t really expect that Solaris 9 (for x86) will out perform my same system running Linux or BSD, but as a developer and someone that likes to tinker with OS’s I am willing to pay $20 (this seem to be a fair price to me) to educate myself on how Sun puts together their OS.
I will let you guys know how the install goes tomorrow.
I hope to be plesantly suprised.
Seemes lost, do you know where it is?
Actually, the Solaris partition on x86 has the same ID as the Linux swap. So it’s not the Solaris swap but the actual partition.
Which you can then partition internally into slices using format (the Solaris format).
Still didn’t try to install Solaris 9 for x86. Solaris 9 for Sparc I have installed dozens of times, and for all intents and purposes, it resambles the Solaris 8 for Sparc installation – which is good.
I bought the Solaris 9 x86 beta a couple of months ago and did an 8-to-9 upgrade . Well, that took forever but it did work with the exception that Solaris 9 can’t boot from the disk – I have to insert the CD and chose the device to boot from.
The setup looks pretty much the same as Sol 8 – there are some minor changes to the install that allow you to choose settings in a more logical way and to change things at different or later times in the process.
I have some notes somewhere on what I did – I’ll dig them up and post them.
AFAIK, the HCL hasn’t changed from 8 to 9
They took too long and pissed off too many people in the process.
Charging $20 for it isn’t the brightest idea, either (won’t break the bank but that’s not the point).
D
The new Zeta BeOS distro is set to cost twice that much! And that’s only for a single disk’s worth of stuff. The Solaris 8 for intel was 3 CDs.
But Solaris 8 was free. I wonder if there’s really twenty-bucks worth of improvements. While $20 doesn’t seem like much, that’s two or three hours pay for many people.
Can’t wait to read some reviews.
-Bob
This is just me making notes as I go along.
Dual P2-266, MSI m’board, 256M SDRAM
4 Gig Seagate Medalist 4321, dedicated to Solaris
Solaris 9 x86 EA install
Webstart Installation
Start time: 22:33
Took almost 5 min to get to the ” Choose install language stage” – Solaris IDE cdrom handling has always sucked, IMO.
Another 2.5 min to get to Solaris install program / configure kdmconfig stage
It didn’t recognise the USB mouse on its own but there is a selection for it
at the bottom of the “change pointing device ” .
( Solaris probing, as usual, is SLOW!!!)
Found the existing Solaris 8 install and asked to used the swap slice to install
the mini-root. This took 3 minutes; another 2.5 minutes to copy platform specific
files and prepare for reboot.
My system takes 15 seconds to get to the boot interpreter ; which, after a minute,
hung with a WARNING: /pci/ata0 bus reset error. I was forced to reset the machine
which seems to have fixed the problem. This is similar to what I’d noticed after enabling
DMA – system needs an extra boot to startup.
The webstart desktop allows you to get a terminal or choose programs by right-clicking
Install got stuck after entering hostname and ( private) IP address. Chose not to enable
Kerberos during install.
In some parts of the graphical install, such as after entering hostname and IP address and
clicking “next”, it appears to freeze. Moving the pointer off the button to the desktop and
back causes it to proceed to the next step.
The Netscape kiosk install is the same as Solaris 8. Decided to try an upgrade install over
Solaris 8. Any existing locales cannot be deselected. Opted to include SunScreen 3.2 firewall.
Was told that my customizations created dependencies but clicking ” Resolve dependencies”
didn’t work so I was forced to choose ” Ignore dependencies”.
(Note: Deduct 5-8 min from install time for note-taking and checking software available to be installed)
Added Apache and Netscape Communicator 4.78 to the install. Removed Netscape 6.
The “testing upgrade profile” step took 3 min.
Software installation step ( for CD1) begun at 23:29; completed at 0:47
Software installation step ( for CD2) begun at 0:48; completed at 1:14
Skipped the Languages install
First boot after install gave error message
4.x 2 yQNX 4. ( What the fuck?)
Neither disabling the BIOS boot sector virus protection nor trying to boot the Solaris partition directly did any good. Hitting enter returned a “Boot Failure from previous device” message
And allowed me to boot from cdrom ( control was passed back to the BIOS) with restarting
The machine.
This still required doing a system scan before being able to select the boot device – not a
Big deal as it added only 10-15 seconds
( Refer to file:///webstart/kiosk/contents/whatsnew.html ( and other files in same directory))
As far as the install goes, the only thing that is new is there is now a Continue|Pause box that pops
up after each phase such as checking the upgrade profile, installing software from each CD.
NOTE: After establishing an ADSL connection using Solaris stock pppd ,the default route is added to the routing table as shown by netstat –rn but will spontaneously
disappear shortly after even though the connection stays up.
pppd call sympatico.ca
bash-2.05# netstat -rn
Routing Table: IPv4
Destination Gateway Flags Ref Use Interface
——————– ——————– —– —– —— ———
64.231.127.48 127.0.0.1 UH 1 0 lo0
64.231.127.1 64.231.127.48 UH 1 0 sppp0
192.168.0.0 192.168.0.1 U 1 1 iprb0
224.0.0.0 192.168.0.1 U 1 0 iprb0
default 64.231.127.1 UG 1 0
127.0.0.1 127.0.0.1 UH 2 6 lo0
bash-2.05# netstat -rn
Routing Table: IPv4
Destination Gateway Flags Ref Use Interface
——————– ——————– —– —– —— ———
64.231.127.48 127.0.0.1 UH 1 0 lo0
64.231.127.1 64.231.127.48 UH 1 0 sppp0
192.168.0.0 192.168.0.1 U 1 1 iprb0
224.0.0.0 192.168.0.1 U 1 0 iprb0
127.0.0.1 127.0.0.1 UH 2 8 lo0