Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced the Solaris 9 8/03 Operating System for the SPARC and x86 platforms. The fourth update to the Solaris 9 Operating System, Solaris 9 8/03 features the integration of GNOME 2.0. Update: Sun releases Solaris 10 preview.Other major new additions of Solaris 9 Update 4 include:
– Multi-terabyte UFS: The ability to scale up to 16 TB for the first time, allowing users to have larger filesystems with more data
– Improvements to Live Upgrade: Reduces downtime and allows systems administrators to upgrade Solaris more quickly and easily on systems using Solaris Volume Manager and Veritas Volume Manager
i wanna thank Sun for this masterwork. linux is in technology view behind Solaris…. Windows ist crap
Gnome will have even more developers working on it? and even ones that get forced to fix bugs and correct code?!? sweet!
Woohoo.. Sun finally “gets it”.
Let me guess, this is GNOME 2.0.x, not 2.3.x, huh? Well, one step at a time. Baby steps.. here we go..
There are already lots of Sun employees working on Gnome, especially in the documentation, accessibility and usability teams.
Yeah, Solaris is good, but God I hated those Sun workstations with butt-ugly and next-to-zero-usability CDE. I did not have a root account on the one at work, so it was pain to install any alternative, and I hated the desktop environment so much that I did most work on my cheap Celeron 400 notebook running Linux/KDE.
Btw. now I have a Linux/Intel workstation at work. With root access
Solaris is running on beasts in server room, where it belongs 
Let me guess, this is GNOME 2.0.x, not 2.3.x, huh?
Brilliant guess, where did you come up with that?
Solaris 9 8/03 features the integration of GNOME 2.0.
Sun has a long development cycle. They’ve probably been tweaking 2.0 for a long time, now, so that they are certain it will run rock solid. Look for 2.3.x in Solaris 10.
It’s about time …
This is a big deal for Sun. Gnome2 is a good development environment. Apps should come over quickly from Linux.
I am running Solaris-9 on a 500mhz PIII workstation and it is fast enough to be a daily driver. Hopefully it won’t slow much. RH9 bluecurve on the same system is fine.
Downloading right now.
Has sun finally got stuff like render ported into their version of X, i know they were working on it, no doubt it would improve the performance of gnome-2 on solaris
I’m running Sun’s release of Gnome 2.0 on my Solaris 8 workstation, and it’s horrible. Well, better than OpenWindows (we never had CDE), but that’s saying nothing at all! Sun’s Gnome is S-l-o-w, clunky, incredibly flaky, and nothing like Gnome 2 under recent Linux distros.
Have they sorted it out with this integrated release? I certainly hope so, as we’re about to start testing Solaris 9 with a view to deployment later this year. The hopeless desktops supplied with Solaris thus far have contributed to a great clamour for Window$ in our organisation 🙁
>Sun’s Gnome is S-l-o-w, clunky, incredibly flaky, and nothing like Gnome 2 under recent Linux distros.
I tried it on a SPARC last November and indeed that was the case back then. It is really slow on a $3000+ workstation. I wrote about it here:
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=2299
I have an update there to install some libs that supposedly help gnome performance.
I am running it on Solaris 9 with good results. Same as RH9 on same machine. So maybe they didn’t tune it quite as much on the older releases. If I remember correctly it can out along with Solaris 9.
Almost done with the download, so should know soon.
Where, actually. is the announcement? I saw the updated docs on BigAdmin, but no trace of Solaris 9 8/03 anywhere on sun.com.
I used to really like and use Sun equiptment “back in the day”.
Lately, it looks like they’ve really taken advantage of the SCO situation to make Linux look bad, yet they are using the Gnome Desktop environment which is open source. It just doesn’t feel right.
I went in search of pain the other night. I found it in the form of Solaris 9 X86. Now this had to be real pain not just an ache. For a real good recipe for pain, install on a p2-400 with a slow a** WD 4.3 GB drive and make the machine a compaq for added random flakiness. Oh yeah baby, the pain was exquisite! Just waiting 2 minutes for the old bomb to boot was a show in itself. The dalai llama could have found true nirvana just waiting for it…..And for that added kick in the cojones, use CDE like others here have done. I figure in a couple more revisions they might be brave enough to include kde with it for true death camp style torture. I won’t blow $20 for this kind of DL again from Sun. bleeech!
I sense you’ve used this metaphor before. A lot.
Based on Sun’s track record with UI technology e.g.
NeWS
OpenSTEP
GNOME 1.x
Solaris will be back running CDE within the year.
haha, good one.
Woohoo.. Sun finally “gets it”.
Actually, I like to think of it as Gnome finally “gets it”. Sun has been helping gnome for a long time now and are directly responsible for much of the accessability features and general UI design. They did usability tests and gave out TONS of pointers to the gnome group a LONG time ago.
The open source movement rarely “gets it” when it comes to general polish and all the tweaks and features that make something professional.
No doubt this will stir up flames like an angel in hell, but coprorate involvment in open source projects is really good. Coprorations are much more clued in to real life aspects of software.
Based on Sun’s track record with UI technology e.g.
NeWS
OpenSTEP
GNOME 1.x
Umm, am I missing the joke? Sun did not design any of these UI’s.(maybe NeWS, don’t know what that is even).
Not to mention that a LOT of people swear by OpenSTEP and WindowsMaker.
I agree that CDE was terrible, but at the time it was introduced apparently it was pretty unique. Dunno, I could never stand it.
for those who using old version of Sun GNOME on Solaris and got da very slow responsiveness.
try to update your piece of GNOME, there’re few bugs in previous version that make it really slow. I used to use Sun GNOME (beta) on Solaris 9 at my office and it’s really s-l-o–w. But after the admin doing some patches, it’s a LOT faster.
Note: for those who using SunRay, if you’re kind enough, please do not use any fancy screensaver, just use the plain one or blank one. Because it takes lots of SHARED CPU power (at the SunRay server), remember that CPU power for SunRays is a shared resource — please do not waste it with screesaver
“Based on Sun’s track record with UI technology e.g.
NeWS
OpenSTEP
GNOME 1.x ”
Well, NeWS was a distributed windowing system, much like X. In fact it was part of their server up to very recently since Xsun (or whatever their window server is called) actually supports both X and NeWS sessions. It has nothing to do with the UI really as i believe motif and openwindows toolkits could be used on top of it (I believe it used postcript for windown drawing/interaction…)
OpenSTEP, I believe they were only interested in the actual API from NeXT over to Solaris.
GNOME 1.x hum, maybe you have a case here.
Anyhow, SUN offered openwindows as their default UI then they had to move over CDE as it was the standard for OSF, HPUX, AIX and Solaris. Anyways, workstations are supposed to be places where you get WORK done
, hence the lack of any need for sugarcoated blinking window managers really. CDE is also common among workstation vendors so that you can use it across several Unices. Gnome is just a bloated pig IMHO, and I particuarly do not see its place in a workstation (then again I am running twm 
).
Umm, am I missing the joke? Sun did not design any of these UI’s.(maybe NeWS, don’t know what that is even).
Well, NeWS was the work of James Gosling, no ?
and OpenStep set of APIs were the common work of NeXT and Sun (even if of course the roots were NeXTSTEP API). You could even find all the documentation on doc.sun.com
What happend is that Sun suddenly pushed Java over OpenStep, believing that “just in a few months” they will attain the same quality and the same Object Oriented Desktop. Ta-dam. Loosers.
But I still run OpenStep on my Ultra-60 workstation 😉
Off-topic:
In their process of going from OpenStep to Java, Sun bought Lighthouse Design (a company which programmed great NeXT softwares) for their OO skills. And Sun get in the same time the NeXTSTEP softwares programmed by Lighthouse, but they didn’t do anything with them. So please help us to let Sun release them by signing this petition : http://www.petitiononline.com/laafs/petition.html
Personally I think Sun can handle all their support problems. But I don’t think we should ever forget the actions any corporation makes, good or bad. I think we should judge them by their actions and hold them accountable.
Now if Sun lies about the SCO Linux thing then perhaps that’s a good reason to assume they might lie about other things like their stability, compatibility, etc. In that case I’d recommend alternative solutions from corporations that take more honorable actions and announcements. I’d rather work with a company that acts like a responsible adult than one that acts like a child.
>>I’d rather work with a company that acts like a responsible adult than one that acts like a child.<<
Amen. You have McNealy pegged perfectly. Furthermore, I would have to wonder about the stability of the company. Sunw trades at $3.75 a share, and lost $0.71 a share in the last 12 months. Sunw’s desperate scams to kill Linux, to steal AIX customers etc. are not working.
There are three companies that are primarily UNIX companies: SCOX, SUNW, and SGI. All three companies are failing. HP and IBM are very diversified companies, they are doing okay.
So, like, I go to the Sun web site, downloads, go through all the cr_p to get to the Solaris downloads page – and they have Solaris 4/03 available. Eh?
So I go to the press releases area and there is no mention of any new Solaris release…
Hmmm…