Almost two years after it went on hiatus, Sun Microsystems’ Solaris x86 has come back in full form with free downloads of the operating system becoming available once again, The Register has discovered. Elsewhere, Sun’s Java Desktop System (review) is now available for purchase.
Sun sets Solaris x86 free; JDS Released
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after filling out all those wonderful forms when i get to the actual download page and click i randomly get “file not found” or “your browser sent a request that this server does not understand”
Download and use SUN’s download manager, the sun servers are severly overloaded right now so using the download manager will greatly simplify your downloading.
/D
I’m download it now. Just saw the article. Finally Solaris is back for free on x86. I am Sun Unix fan, lets hope Sun stays consistent with its decision to start supporting x86.
Yeah i had the same problem, nor konqueror, galeon or wget could manage to download the files… so i installed SDM and it worked like a charm.. the first useful java-app i’ve ever used..
Solaris finally come back. I have been waiting for it for so long.
check out the Java Desktop System discussion forum here
http://swforum.sun.com/jive/forum.jspa?forumID=118
Does Solaris x86 come in isos. when you dowload it.
I admit that I haven’t gone all the way through the downloading process, but when I hit the Sun Download Centre it said the downloadable version cost $20? Am I missing something really obvious?
Can i download a free copy, or must i buy one?
[Me – Try first, buy later.]
What does the cd for Java Enterprise System contain???
“Does Solaris x86 come in isos. when you dowload it.”
Solaris comes in ZIPed ISOs.
“I admit that I haven’t gone all the way through the downloading process, but when I hit the Sun Download Centre it said the downloadable version cost $20? Am I missing something really obvious?”
Yes, that for education and developers Solaris x86 is free.
“Can i download a free copy, or must i buy one?”
Yes, you can download a free copy.
Which OS will deliver fastest java performance – Windows XP, Linux or Solaris on a x86-computer? With java performance I mean, running java applications like the casetool Together and similar tools.
Oh I hope that I will JDS and Looking Glass for SPARC soon…..really really soon…i hope….please, please…
It didn’t work for Sol8 and Sol9 CDs I downloaded in the past.
My hardware is supported, but it would crash during the install where it is starting X, then it would restart,crash, then restart, crash, all night.
Does anyone know if this includes GNOME?
Does it say somewhere what kind of hardware is supported by Sol?
Then only thing left for Sun now is to go after software companies to support JDS. Eg. Alias compiling Maya for JDS (they specifically support RH7.3 and 8 I believe) as well as any other major workstation software company.
I don’t think so. I think thats what the big deal about Solaris 10 is (among others of course) that it includes GNOME and I think it is the same as the MadHatter one.
I don’t think so. I think thats what the big deal about Solaris 10 is (among others of course) that it includes GNOME and I think it is the same as the MadHatter one.
It is optional de, CDE being default
http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/data/
solaris have horrible java performance well atleast for grapichs a friend made a java demo rotating a bitmap and some other stuff it did run fine in linux an dwindows on a p3 500 class machine but it wass runing slow on the sparc machines we tried. ultra 10 blade 100 it was even slow on a blade 1000 witch should be alot faster than the pc
A lot of people have been asking how well Solaris performs on common x86 hardware. The thing to remember is this: Solaris is primarily a SPARC OS, and it was ported to x86 so that developers and admins could write code and test apps on their own systems, instead of needing the big SPARC box all the time.
Solaris is interesting to play around with, and is pretty solid on the whole, but if you’re expecting anything amazing you’ll be disappointed. Linux (and to a lesser extent FreeBSD) are focused on x86 hardware support and performance, so it’s unlikely you’ll want to run Solaris as your day-to-day OS.
Still worth a try though!
M
Some other maybe-helpful Solaris x86 sites:
http://developers.sun.com/solaris/developer/support/driver/tools/vi…
http://homepage2.nifty.com/mrym3/taiyodo/eng/
http://solaris-x86.org/software/drivers/
http://sun.drydog.com/
From what I understand, the GNOME desktop is available as of Solaris 9 8/03 and is 100% supported (i.e., technical support) by Sun. In previous versions of Solaris, GNOME was available as a separate install.
John
Um, is it just me or is CDE the butt ugliest DE of all time?
> Um, is it just me or is CDE the butt ugliest DE of all time?
Yes, second only (IMHO) to Sun’s theme in JDS. Come on Sun, you’ve got to come out with better artwork than that, default GNOME, KDE, or WindowsXP looks a lot better (IMHO)
Wrong, Solaris is meant to run on whatever CPU architectures Sun chooses to make it run. See, good designers design well. And ironically, Solaris is designed well. That is why there is a clear separation of the kernel/hardware layer and everything else in Solaris. So the only limitations to how well Solaris can perform is how much time Sun invests in writing the hardware layer of the kernel.
> solaris have horrible java performance well atleast for grapichs a friend made a java demo rotating a bitmap and some other stuff it did run fine in linux an dwindows on a p3 500 class machine but it wass runing slow on the sparc machines we tried. ultra 10 blade 100 it was even slow on a blade 1000 witch should be alot faster than the pc.
What frame buffers did you use in the Sun workstations for your benchmarks? That was probably lack 3D hardware acceleration on the framebuffers that made your benchmark so unfavorable to Sun boxes, it has nothing to do with Solaris and sparc hardware per se. If you have only a PGX style graphics even in the high end sparc workstation, average PC with a decent Nvidia card can probably beat it some graphics benchmarks. On the other hand a decent 3D hardware accellerated framebuffer like Expert3D can make a world of differance for your sparc boxen. Hell, my 5 year old Ultra 60 with an Elite3D-m6 frame buffer still seems to be a better 3D workstation than even the newest PC’s.
I was thinking the source to Solaris is proven and solid, and fast no matter what platform it is run on. This is my assumption. I have no idea how fast it is compared to Linux on the same workstation.
I would also think it is way better than the Linux kernel, but again I don’t know, it is an assumption.
I remember runing Solaris 5 and 6 on my Thinkpad. I coudln’t get X working at all. I’ve ended up replacing with Xfree86 Solaris version. Not sure if they maintain the version compatible with the latest Solaris, but if you are having problems with X, I recommend to check their site.
In general, as someone has mentioned, having sol x86 is kool when you write the solaris code, want to have solaris on your desktop/laptop as one of the OSs. A matter of convenience, but that’s about it. Probably Solaris for AMD64 will be completely different story.
CDE is not nearly are ugly as regular X with TWM. Vomit inducing really.
As for the JDS…
Strongbad quote: “Idunno, it look kinda cool…”
I have a feeling that you will very shortly see some major development by SUN for the x86 and AMD64 platforms. The Solaris SPARc, x86, and AMD64 versions of Solaris are going to be developed in tandem. In the future, all of the available SUN software should run on any noe of the three versions. However the Solaris for SPARC version has more/better cooperation with the hardware because they can control the design of SPARC processors.
Actually twm can be made to look ok with some tinkering. I’m using in preference to CDE on my SUN Blade 100
solaris have horrible java performance well atleast for grapichs a friend made a java demo rotating a bitmap and some other stuff it did run fine in linux an dwindows on a p3 500 class machine but it wass runing slow on the sparc machines we tried. ultra 10 blade 100 it was even slow on a blade 1000 witch should be alot faster than the pc
You’re actually just comparing the graphics capabilities of Java. On Windows, Java makes use of DirectX (in Java2D), and as such you get hardware acceleration and graphics tend to be really fast on Windows.
On X, Java doesn’t make use of hardware acceleration at all, which is why Java graphic demos on Linux don’t tend to be stellar. I’m guessing the same is happening on those Sparc machines you tested on.
burnt the install cd iso twice, but can’t boot from either cds. am i the only one?
using nero 5.5, track at once, finalize cd.
You have to be careful comparing Linux and Solaris.
– Solaris is designed to be easily ported, but that doesn’t mean it equally well-optimized for each architecture. The SPARC port has gotten a lot more time and optimization than the x86 port, and it really shows.
– Solaris was designed to scale to huge systems. That means extremely fine-grained locking to offer maximum throughput. However, this fine-grained locking has a lot of overhead. On single and dual processor systems, this overhead can become very significant. Performance on small machines earned Solaris the nickname Slowaris.
– This one is just a guess, but I’d wager that Solaris is tuned to maintain consistant performance on extremely high workloads. The “word on the street” seems to bear out the fact that Linux performs better on light and moderate loads on moderately-sized machines, even on SPARC. Its well known that Solaris performs much better when you’ve got insane loads on a 128 CPU machine. This gap, however is shrinking, largely thanks to companies like SGI doing scalability work because they use Linux on large servers like that. There is an interesting (though slightly dated — its from 2000) thread on the Linux-sparc mailing list:
http://www.geocrawler.com/archives/3/85/2000/10/50/4492857/
Larry McVoy (yes, the Bitkeeper guy) has an interesting post about Solaris vs Linux performance. I don’t know how much of that is true today, however. Also, there are some lmbenchmarks at the top of the page.
“This one is just a guess, but I’d wager that Solaris is tuned to maintain consistant performance on extremely high workloads. The “word on the street” seems to bear out the fact that Linux performs better on light and moderate loads on moderately-sized machines, even on SPARC. Its well known that Solaris performs much better when you’ve got insane loads on a 128 CPU machine. ”
I have worked extensively on big Sun machines (E10K with 64 processors) and I would characterize Sun performance as the pinnacle of consistency. No matter what workload you throw at the machine, it always goes the same speed. Unfortunately on the low-end it means that it is slow. On the high end, it is the same speed. Throw a huge load at the machine and it won’t even notice, just keep on chugging.
I’ve been on the E10K with nearly all CPUs at max utilization doing other work and didn’t even notice.
Check google or sun for HCL (hardware compatibility list). You might also gloss over the x86 faq. You can download software from one of the sunfreeware mirrors.
I have an average older box, 500 mhz celeron, pc 133 ram, linksys nic, ide drives. Worked well on my machine except for the nic. However I found third party drivers for the nic. Don’t know about USB, like my cdrw though.
Even some laptops are somewhat supported. There is a page linked from the faq i think, that has laptop info.
http://www.tools.de/solaris
Includes drivers, latest XFree86 driver porting kit and drivers for SoundBlaster Audigy and SoundBlaster Live!
burnt the install cd iso twice, but can’t boot from either cds. am i the only one?
using nero 5.5, track at once, finalize cd.
There should be three cd’s, Webstart Install, CD 1 and CD2. Check to ensure that you have unziped the file and you don’t have any weird setting enabled in Nero, oh, and verify the write after, sometimes on cheap shitty CD’s, the data can be balls’ed up for some reason; LG branded CD-Rs are the worst offenders.