A cruel but true point. Solaris is quite behind the times in the desktop arena. However, its X server and GNOME desktop are minimalist but functional and extremely stable. As far as the server is concearned, I think N1 Grid Containers will keep Solaris just far enough ahead of other high-end server OSs to prevent most of it’s current users from switching elsewhere.
Ok. I admit, I didn’t know anything about the turns Sun took why it has come to this. And I’m sorry for being ignorant of Solaris all this time because I thought it wasn’t free . I used to administer a server once with it’s old version circa 1995 (maybe) and I liked it too. So…, is this free now? Has nothing changed so much from it’s old versions (style)?
That would be a violation of Sun’s licence agreement. Just go to Sun’s web site and download it yourself. You can get Solaris 9 and the current beta of Solaris 10 for free from there.
Will Sun drop sparc anytime soon and move to an amd or intel 64-bit line? I noticed they are now using AMD 64-bit cpus for some of their desktop machines but their high-end stuff is still sparc only.
it seems like a waste of r&d to have all those people developing cpus that will never catch up with intel/amd in terms of speed. at least it looks like SGI has pretty much dropped MIPS.
136 (free) downloads in the first two days. A major victory for Sun…
Jonathan Schwartz just announced: “Solaris is a really disruptive technology ™ that has come to stay. Our development of a wheel mouse driver shows Sun is committed to the development of disruptive technologies ™. Users can really look forward to more disruptive technologies ™ being introduced in Solaris 10 someday. We just won’t say when but Sun users can guess.”
Will Sun drop sparc anytime soon and move to an amd or intel 64-bit line? I noticed they are now using AMD 64-bit cpus for some of their desktop machines but their high-end stuff is still sparc only.
it seems like a waste of r&d to have all those people developing cpus that will never catch up with intel/amd in terms of speed. at least it looks like SGI has pretty much dropped MIPS.
How is it a waste considering that they’re going to start offering SPARC64 servers soon, the SPARC CPU being developed by Fujitsu. Just wait and see; before you know it, Fujitsu and SUN will be scraping their individual R&D facilities and working together on a single SPARC line. Both companies have already mentioned that they see the new pocket rocket in development, ROCK which has 8 cores and can run 32 threads simultaneously, both have said they will be using it in future products.
> it seems like a waste of r&d to have all those people developing cpus that will never catch up with intel/amd in terms of speed.
In the 2+ processor space UltraSparcIII/IV can still more that hold up itself against the competition especially on enterprise type of loads and can give run for the money to pretty much any CPU architecture out there. With the upcoming refresh from Fujitsu the SPARC systems will look even brighter. AMD Opteron is still an uproven architecture as far scalability of systems in concerned, Intel Itanic is a no-goer (even Intel started developing a backup plan for its miserable failure), PA-RISC and Alpha are EOL’ed, which leaves SPARC with only one real competitor — IBM Power. Bottom line is there isn’t much to worry about as far as viability of SPARC product line is concerned — SPARC is here to stay and prosper for a long time.
>it seems like a waste of r&d to have all those people >developing cpus that will never catch up with intel/amd in >terms of speed. at least it looks like SGI has pretty much >dropped MIPS.
Hmmm. Well, if you look at spec you are right. If you look
at spec when buying a system to process a workload then you
are dumb. Sun build systems not just processors. Sun systems
do well on real world application performance. Sun will even
work with customers/ISV’s to do custom benchmarks which have
Anonymous (IP: —.5.240.220.rns01-kent-syd.dsl.comindico.com.au) – Posted on 2004-08-17 08:10:38
> it seems like a waste of r&d to have all those people developing cpus that will never catch up with intel/amd in terms of speed.
In the 2+ processor space UltraSparcIII/IV can still more that hold up itself against the competition especially on enterprise type of loads and can give run for the money to pretty much any CPU architecture out there. With the upcoming refresh from Fujitsu the SPARC systems will look even brighter. AMD Opteron is still an uproven architecture as far scalability of systems in concerned, Intel Itanic is a no-goer (even Intel started developing a backup plan for its miserable failure), PA-RISC and Alpha are EOL’ed, which leaves SPARC with only one real competitor — IBM Power. Bottom line is there isn’t much to worry about as far as viability of SPARC product line is concerned — SPARC is here to stay and prosper for a long time.
“it seems like a waste of r&d to have all those people developing cpus that will never catch up with intel/amd in terms of speed.”
In the 2+ processor space UltraSparcIII/IV can still more that hold up itself against the competition especially on enterprise type of loads and can give run for the money to pretty much any CPU architecture out there. With the upcoming refresh from Fujitsu the SPARC systems will look even brighter.
I’ve had a couple of looks at the benchmarks for the SPARC64, and its funny, take that POS of a database called Oracle off the damn machine, throw on SybaseSQL and watch that baby fly! the benchmarks go from a under powered over price machine to a nicely priced pocket rocket.
Interesting how much difference changing the database makes; If it were me, the best thing SUN could ever do would be to purchase Sybase, make it part of the Java Enterprise System, imagine the pain it would cause for Oracle and Microsoft with SUN offering a complete out of the box solution for a piddly $100 per employee, or even cheaper if you have a massive number of users.
AMD Opteron is still an uproven architecture as far scalability of systems in concerned, Intel Itanic is a no-goer (even Intel started developing a backup plan for its miserable failure), PA-RISC and Alpha are EOL’ed, which leaves SPARC with only one real competitor — IBM Power. Bottom line is there isn’t much to worry about as far as viability of SPARC product line is concerned — SPARC is here to stay and prosper for a long time.
And if SUN is actually doing what they say, in other words, making Solaris available on POWER along with the whole Java Enterprise System, we’ll soon possibly be seeing POWER servers being sold by SUN or better still, we’ll see SUN taking over IBM contracts, moving customers over to Solaris + JES and supplying services.
“And if SUN is actually doing what they say, in other words, making Solaris available on POWER along with the whole Java Enterprise System, we’ll soon possibly be seeing POWER servers being sold by SUN or better still, we’ll see SUN taking over IBM contracts, moving customers over to Solaris + JES and supplying services.”
Surely world domination will follow in due course?
All that because Sun just implemented a wheel mouse driver, who would have thought…
“And if SUN is actually doing what they say, in other words, making Solaris available on POWER along with the whole Java Enterprise System, we’ll soon possibly be seeing POWER servers being sold by SUN or better still, we’ll see SUN taking over IBM contracts, moving customers over to Solaris + JES and supplying services.”
Surely world domination will follow in due course?
Of course, but that would require a CEO who doesn’t umm and ahhh, and stumble when he annouces a product – a bit of enthusiasm wouldn’t kill anyone – possibly a smile from Scott McNealy? wouldn’t that be nice. A positive, cheerful, and enthusiastic Scott McNealy.
He’s been a missery guts back during the dot-coms, and he is still a missery guts! what is it with him? has his gold swing fallen to pieces?
All that because Sun just implemented a wheel mouse driver, who would have thought…
No! we need to get those keyboards with nobs, buttons and other pointless crap working before we take over the world!
This is mainly from hobbyists not from customers. The majority of hobbyists are downloading Solaris express
anyway so what exactly is your point?
—–
point. you should havent mentioned bothered to respond. anyway since you did respond you might want to know 400,000 isnt that big. couple of days of mozilla downloads override that.
solaris isnt capturing the x86 market anytime soon. solaris lives and thrives on sparc machines like OS X on imacs. anywhere else they both are bound to fail
Should I write SUN all capitalized as kaiwai does, or is it just Sun?
Also: I have read somewhere that Sun is going to “get rid of” (i.e. fire) 3000 employees until the end of the year. Can you confirm this information? How come Jonathan Schwartz never mentions the “downsizing” of Sun in his blog?
This version of Solaris is still 32-bit only on Opterons.Also I haven’t seen the “NX bit” feature mentioned anywhere, so I assume it’s not implemented?
Sun has been working on a native port of Solaris 10 on AMD64 which has only recently become usable. Rest assured we will see an AMD64 native release of Solaris 10 alongside the SPARC and IA32 versions… perhaps a few months afterward however, depending on how quickly development progresses.
Solaris already implements a non-executable user stack and mprotect() on sparcv9 per default, and I assume we’ll see the same security on AMD64 with the NX bit as well.
Also: I have read somewhere that Sun is going to “get rid of” (i.e. fire) 3000 employees until the end of the year. Can you confirm this information? How come Jonathan Schwartz never mentions the “downsizing” of Sun in his blog?
If you had any realworld experience and a job you would know how corporations work and are expected to work.
So, tell me nice Raptor, how is it that corporations work and are expected to work and how does that apply to my remark about Sun’s “downsizing”?
I suppose J. Schwartz won’t mention the thousands of honest workers getting fired at Sun in his blog because it’s not “cool”?
So now you feel sorry for them? how about buying a SUN product! better yet, why don’t I deduct 50% of your pay and re-allocate it to SUN so that SUN can continue running in the red for ever more! great idea.
Did you go to the GWB college of business? the deficits don’t matter business college?
Perhaps in this age of cynicism I shouldn’t, though.
Perhaps I should just say “Cool!” at whatever press release quoting J. Schwartz’s insipid blog gets posted here at OSNews, and go on as if nothing was wrong with Sun management…
Both SPARC and x86 editions are available for download.
Details of new features are in the release notes at
http://docs.sun.com/db/doc/817-5770/6ml72d6kb?a=view#epfnr
Also I haven’t seen the “NX bit” feature mentioned anywhere, so I assume it’s not implemented?
On the other hand, Solaris 9 9/04 now seems to support wheel mice. Solaris users, rejoice!
Bahh… I’m too lazy to fill out the registration to download the ISO. I’ll stick to OS’s whose images I can pull at a whim from anonymous FTP.
“On the other hand, Solaris 9 9/04 now seems to support wheel mice. Solaris users, rejoice!”
Welcome to 1998!
Does Solaris x86 support ATI Radeon 9600?
> Welcome to 1998!
A cruel but true point. Solaris is quite behind the times in the desktop arena. However, its X server and GNOME desktop are minimalist but functional and extremely stable. As far as the server is concearned, I think N1 Grid Containers will keep Solaris just far enough ahead of other high-end server OSs to prevent most of it’s current users from switching elsewhere.
Yes, it does support the Radeon 9600. More info is available at the Solarix x86 HCL – http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/data/9/components/views/video_adapt…
“Bahh… I’m too lazy to fill out the registration to download the ISO. I’ll stick to OS’s whose images I can pull at a whim from anonymous FTP.”
Such a minor inconvenience for such a great OS. Once you register you don’t ever have to do it again.
Ok. I admit, I didn’t know anything about the turns Sun took why it has come to this. And I’m sorry for being ignorant of Solaris all this time because I thought it wasn’t free . I used to administer a server once with it’s old version circa 1995 (maybe) and I liked it too. So…, is this free now? Has nothing changed so much from it’s old versions (style)?
Does anyone have a bittorrent?
That would be a violation of Sun’s licence agreement. Just go to Sun’s web site and download it yourself. You can get Solaris 9 and the current beta of Solaris 10 for free from there.
Will Sun drop sparc anytime soon and move to an amd or intel 64-bit line? I noticed they are now using AMD 64-bit cpus for some of their desktop machines but their high-end stuff is still sparc only.
it seems like a waste of r&d to have all those people developing cpus that will never catch up with intel/amd in terms of speed. at least it looks like SGI has pretty much dropped MIPS.
136 (free) downloads in the first two days. A major victory for Sun…
Jonathan Schwartz just announced: “Solaris is a really disruptive technology ™ that has come to stay. Our development of a wheel mouse driver shows Sun is committed to the development of disruptive technologies ™. Users can really look forward to more disruptive technologies ™ being introduced in Solaris 10 someday. We just won’t say when but Sun users can guess.”
Will Sun drop sparc anytime soon and move to an amd or intel 64-bit line?
Like this?:
http://www.sun.com/amd/
(I do not speak for Sun).
Will Sun drop sparc anytime soon and move to an amd or intel 64-bit line? I noticed they are now using AMD 64-bit cpus for some of their desktop machines but their high-end stuff is still sparc only.
it seems like a waste of r&d to have all those people developing cpus that will never catch up with intel/amd in terms of speed. at least it looks like SGI has pretty much dropped MIPS.
How is it a waste considering that they’re going to start offering SPARC64 servers soon, the SPARC CPU being developed by Fujitsu. Just wait and see; before you know it, Fujitsu and SUN will be scraping their individual R&D facilities and working together on a single SPARC line. Both companies have already mentioned that they see the new pocket rocket in development, ROCK which has 8 cores and can run 32 threads simultaneously, both have said they will be using it in future products.
> it seems like a waste of r&d to have all those people developing cpus that will never catch up with intel/amd in terms of speed.
In the 2+ processor space UltraSparcIII/IV can still more that hold up itself against the competition especially on enterprise type of loads and can give run for the money to pretty much any CPU architecture out there. With the upcoming refresh from Fujitsu the SPARC systems will look even brighter. AMD Opteron is still an uproven architecture as far scalability of systems in concerned, Intel Itanic is a no-goer (even Intel started developing a backup plan for its miserable failure), PA-RISC and Alpha are EOL’ed, which leaves SPARC with only one real competitor — IBM Power. Bottom line is there isn’t much to worry about as far as viability of SPARC product line is concerned — SPARC is here to stay and prosper for a long time.
>it seems like a waste of r&d to have all those people >developing cpus that will never catch up with intel/amd in >terms of speed. at least it looks like SGI has pretty much >dropped MIPS.
Hmmm. Well, if you look at spec you are right. If you look
at spec when buying a system to process a workload then you
are dumb. Sun build systems not just processors. Sun systems
do well on real world application performance. Sun will even
work with customers/ISV’s to do custom benchmarks which have
more basis in reality than spec etc.
http://www.sun.com/visitors-info/benchmarks/
>136 (free) downloads in the first two days. A major victory for Sun…
This is mainly from hobbyists not from customers. The majority of hobbyists are downloading Solaris express
anyway so what exactly is your point?
Totally agree with you. Excellent!
Anonymous (IP: —.5.240.220.rns01-kent-syd.dsl.comindico.com.au) – Posted on 2004-08-17 08:10:38
> it seems like a waste of r&d to have all those people developing cpus that will never catch up with intel/amd in terms of speed.
In the 2+ processor space UltraSparcIII/IV can still more that hold up itself against the competition especially on enterprise type of loads and can give run for the money to pretty much any CPU architecture out there. With the upcoming refresh from Fujitsu the SPARC systems will look even brighter. AMD Opteron is still an uproven architecture as far scalability of systems in concerned, Intel Itanic is a no-goer (even Intel started developing a backup plan for its miserable failure), PA-RISC and Alpha are EOL’ed, which leaves SPARC with only one real competitor — IBM Power. Bottom line is there isn’t much to worry about as far as viability of SPARC product line is concerned — SPARC is here to stay and prosper for a long time.
“it seems like a waste of r&d to have all those people developing cpus that will never catch up with intel/amd in terms of speed.”
In the 2+ processor space UltraSparcIII/IV can still more that hold up itself against the competition especially on enterprise type of loads and can give run for the money to pretty much any CPU architecture out there. With the upcoming refresh from Fujitsu the SPARC systems will look even brighter.
I’ve had a couple of looks at the benchmarks for the SPARC64, and its funny, take that POS of a database called Oracle off the damn machine, throw on SybaseSQL and watch that baby fly! the benchmarks go from a under powered over price machine to a nicely priced pocket rocket.
Interesting how much difference changing the database makes; If it were me, the best thing SUN could ever do would be to purchase Sybase, make it part of the Java Enterprise System, imagine the pain it would cause for Oracle and Microsoft with SUN offering a complete out of the box solution for a piddly $100 per employee, or even cheaper if you have a massive number of users.
AMD Opteron is still an uproven architecture as far scalability of systems in concerned, Intel Itanic is a no-goer (even Intel started developing a backup plan for its miserable failure), PA-RISC and Alpha are EOL’ed, which leaves SPARC with only one real competitor — IBM Power. Bottom line is there isn’t much to worry about as far as viability of SPARC product line is concerned — SPARC is here to stay and prosper for a long time.
And if SUN is actually doing what they say, in other words, making Solaris available on POWER along with the whole Java Enterprise System, we’ll soon possibly be seeing POWER servers being sold by SUN or better still, we’ll see SUN taking over IBM contracts, moving customers over to Solaris + JES and supplying services.
“And if SUN is actually doing what they say, in other words, making Solaris available on POWER along with the whole Java Enterprise System, we’ll soon possibly be seeing POWER servers being sold by SUN or better still, we’ll see SUN taking over IBM contracts, moving customers over to Solaris + JES and supplying services.”
Surely world domination will follow in due course?
All that because Sun just implemented a wheel mouse driver, who would have thought…
Do you actually have anything to add or are you simply content
with posting vacuous remarks?
& touchy Sun employees who lack any sense of humor…
It’s a bit presumptious to say I lack a sense of humour. I
just don’t share your sense of humour. Nothing wrong with
that. If you are not prepared to justify or explain a posting
then maybe it’s better not to post at all?
If you have something worthwhile to add then please do so
but leave the ‘humour’ out of it. People who like a product
and can see beyond benchmarketing (which everyone does, including Sun) are not necessarily ass kissers…..
(btw Solaris express has over 400,00 downloads)
“And if SUN is actually doing what they say, in other words, making Solaris available on POWER along with the whole Java Enterprise System, we’ll soon possibly be seeing POWER servers being sold by SUN or better still, we’ll see SUN taking over IBM contracts, moving customers over to Solaris + JES and supplying services.”
Surely world domination will follow in due course?
Of course, but that would require a CEO who doesn’t umm and ahhh, and stumble when he annouces a product – a bit of enthusiasm wouldn’t kill anyone – possibly a smile from Scott McNealy? wouldn’t that be nice. A positive, cheerful, and enthusiastic Scott McNealy.
He’s been a missery guts back during the dot-coms, and he is still a missery guts! what is it with him? has his gold swing fallen to pieces?
All that because Sun just implemented a wheel mouse driver, who would have thought…
No! we need to get those keyboards with nobs, buttons and other pointless crap working before we take over the world!
This is mainly from hobbyists not from customers. The majority of hobbyists are downloading Solaris express
anyway so what exactly is your point?
—–
point. you should havent mentioned bothered to respond. anyway since you did respond you might want to know 400,000 isnt that big. couple of days of mozilla downloads override that.
solaris isnt capturing the x86 market anytime soon. solaris lives and thrives on sparc machines like OS X on imacs. anywhere else they both are bound to fail
Should I write SUN all capitalized as kaiwai does, or is it just Sun?
Also: I have read somewhere that Sun is going to “get rid of” (i.e. fire) 3000 employees until the end of the year. Can you confirm this information? How come Jonathan Schwartz never mentions the “downsizing” of Sun in his blog?
This version of Solaris is still 32-bit only on Opterons.Also I haven’t seen the “NX bit” feature mentioned anywhere, so I assume it’s not implemented?
Sun has been working on a native port of Solaris 10 on AMD64 which has only recently become usable. Rest assured we will see an AMD64 native release of Solaris 10 alongside the SPARC and IA32 versions… perhaps a few months afterward however, depending on how quickly development progresses.
Solaris already implements a non-executable user stack and mprotect() on sparcv9 per default, and I assume we’ll see the same security on AMD64 with the NX bit as well.
Read about it here:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/07/15/sun_solarislives_opteron/
Also: I have read somewhere that Sun is going to “get rid of” (i.e. fire) 3000 employees until the end of the year. Can you confirm this information? How come Jonathan Schwartz never mentions the “downsizing” of Sun in his blog?
If you had any realworld experience and a job you would know how corporations work and are expected to work.
As usual, the ever so nice Raptor has spoken…
So, tell me nice Raptor, how is it that corporations work and are expected to work and how does that apply to my remark about Sun’s “downsizing”?
I suppose J. Schwartz won’t mention the thousands of honest workers getting fired at Sun in his blog because it’s not “cool”?
>>point. you should havent mentioned bothered to respond.
>>anyway since you did respond you might want to know 400,000
>>isnt that big. couple of days of mozilla downloads override
>>that.
Well, I think 400,000+ downloads for an OS (which isn’t really
even Beta yet) IS significant. You can hardly compare an
OS download to Mozilla.
> I suppose J. Schwartz won’t mention the thousands of honest workers getting fired at Sun in his blog because it’s not “cool”?
What does this have to do with this discussion? How does this apply to the new release of Solaris?
As usual, the ever so nice Raptor has spoken…
So, tell me nice Raptor, how is it that corporations work and are expected to work and how does that apply to my remark about Sun’s “downsizing”?
I suppose J. Schwartz won’t mention the thousands of honest workers getting fired at Sun in his blog because it’s not “cool”?
So now you feel sorry for them? how about buying a SUN product! better yet, why don’t I deduct 50% of your pay and re-allocate it to SUN so that SUN can continue running in the red for ever more! great idea.
Did you go to the GWB college of business? the deficits don’t matter business college?
Perhaps in this age of cynicism I shouldn’t, though.
Perhaps I should just say “Cool!” at whatever press release quoting J. Schwartz’s insipid blog gets posted here at OSNews, and go on as if nothing was wrong with Sun management…