Sun is expected to unveil a collection of new products and services at its quarterly systems release event in New York. Sun executives will take the stage in New York this week to display Solaris 10, the next version of that operating environment; clarify the vision for the product; and define the rationale for moving it to open source. Elsewhere: “I get confused by a lot of Sun’s technology advertising and marketing,” writes Roger Strukhoff. But there are numerous reasons not to give up on Sun, he argues.
Solaris 10 Shines in Early Testing
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I’m looking at a new SMP Opteron colocation server, and am currently torn between FreeBSD 5.3 and Solaris 10 for the OS. I’m looking for lightweight, OS integrated virtualization servers, which FreeBSD supports through its jail system and Solaris 10 supports through containers (although a bit heavier solution). While FreeBSD would provide easier administration (given the ports system and the current lack of prepackaged OSS applications for Solaris 10/AMD64, considering it hasn’t been released), Solaris looks to provide better stability and performance.
not to mention solaris is way mroe advanced….though freebsd is a great os solaris gives you more features and is usualy increadibly stable…
I wish Solaris would make their product free for home users, not just academics and developers. Perhaps I should write some F/OSS for Solaris and become a developer.
Does learning about the Solaris OS not qualify as academic? I should read the license some day. I’m a university student, but I don’t use Solaris for my classes. Sun comes out ahead anyway because I wouldn’t buy Solaris x86, but some day I might buy Sun hardware.
Currently I’m trying to determine if ZFS would be good for my dual PII fileserver with SCSI OS drives and two large ATA drives for striped storage. Now I’m running FreeBSD 4.10 with vinum because I can go to freebsd.org and read all about how to set it up. When I go to sun.com I get mostly buzzwords, so I’m testing a scaled-down version on VMWare first.
I wish Solaris would make their product free for home users, not just academics and developers. Perhaps I should write some F/OSS for Solaris and become a developer.
Well, you can download and install it for free. You’re a home user/non-commercial user, you’re quite entitled to run off, download and install either Solaris 9 08/04 or the latest Solaris 10 Express.
Supposedly Solaris has poor support for x86-64.. not sure about FreeBSD but Linux seems to have the most advanced support for it. I hope Sun releases Solaris under GPL later this year.. but unfortunately it sounds like they’ll have a fork-prevention clause either way. This is important because when you have an open system like BSD or free system like Linux you know support will be there in the future (support as in hardware, software, or company). Nevertheless, making portable applications that can run on Linux, BSD, Solaris is of course the best choice. Solaris is a good teaser at how good an enterprise level UNIX kernel and system libraries can be, and you can take advantage of a good deal of its features while still keeping your code portable.
Supposedly Solaris has poor support for x86-64
Based on what evidence? buy a system from SUN all your hardware will be supported, anything that isn’t supported is clearly listed in the documentation. With that being said, wait till Solaris 10 is released, run it on a SUN x86-64, and if it is crappy, then moan and groan about it.
Solaris 10 will outperform FreeBSD on dual opteron systems anyday.
FreeBSD 5.x isn’t even a stable release and they have ALOT more smp support to work with, with that said FreeBSD retains the giant MP-lock until next year which is when they will do heavy coding in threading, ofcourse when all of this is complete 5.x will become stable.
So, FreeBSD 5.x is good when it’s a stable release. Solaris is actually my choice IF it becomes open source. I talked with sun software engineers and I’m under the impression that it’s FAST on it.
They also said Solaris x86 is a half-assed product that sucked and nobody should’ve bought it—however Solaris 10 for x86 will be cool, supposedly.
I’ve suspended development of HawkinsOS actually until I see what will happen since FreeBSD 5.x isn’t stable yet.. Darwin is an extremely good OS and Solaris is too.
Also, that ZFS will kill any default redhat FS.
– tim hawkins of rack64.com/tjhawking
Giant Lock was present in 4.x … they are working to get rid of it in the 5.x releases…. sorry for any other mistakes.
is it me, or does ZFS sound a lot like IBM’s AS400? I do not know enough about either, though I do know AS400 is used by DB2.
AS400 and ZFS are competely two different things. ZFS is a filesystem which is completely different from everything else. The excitement within the Sun community and sun engineering is really brewing about the potentials of this new filesystem.
See: http://www.sun.com/2004-0914/feature/
And that’s not it… Checkout: http://tinyurl.com/5y52v
Wanna see how it works with your system (ZFS hasn’t been release just yet)? Download a free iso for Solaris Express here: http://wwws.sun.com/software/solaris/solaris-express/get.html
They also said Solaris x86 is a half-assed product that sucked and nobody should’ve bought it—however Solaris 10 for x86 will be cool, supposedly.
Oh, come on, Solaris 9 x86 wasn’t that bad 😉 sure, the hardware support was crappy, but once running on a fast hard disk (min 7200rpm) with a decent amount of memory (512MB) with a supported card with acceleration (Matrox G550 using the XFree86 porting kit), it wasn’t that bad as a workstation or a server.
With that being said, I understand what you mean, and apparently Solaris 10 has really pulled itself forward, IIRC, there is a benchmark already on SUN’s site of Solaris 10 on an Opteron box vs. one loaded with Red Hat Enterprise.
I’m tempted to, however, next year purchase one of those sexy new Opteron boxes loaded with Solaris 10 for x86-64; with the awesome software available on blastwave.org, Solaris is lining up to be a very good workstation class operating system, and better yet, for those who are home users, developers and non-commercial users, you can use it for free! can’t get better than that, a rock solid, commercial UNIX for the unwashed masses.
Anybody know which apps will be bundled with Solaris 10 and if it will be using the JDS or something like CDE?
For Bascule: Have you ever looked at
http://www.blastwave.org and their collection of packages for Solaris/x86?
It’s as easy to install as ports on FreeBSD (just run pkg-get -i) and you’re done.
Given the 30% performance increase afforded by the extra registers of AMD64, I’d prefer AMD64 builds over IA32
JDS3 was integrated into build 66 for both x86 and SPARC. I’m currently running it on my notebook. It should be available the next time we do a Solaris Express drop.
“Oh, come on, Solaris 9 x86 wasn’t that bad 😉 sure”
Your right it wasn’t that bad but it also wasn’t nearly as good as the sparc edition. Solaris engineers have said they had to strip alot of the goodies out of it to port it to x86… but apparently solaris 10 for x86 will be great.
hehe your right it wasn’t THAT bad.. but it still hurt solaris’ reputation
Your right it wasn’t that bad but it also wasn’t nearly as good as the sparc edition. Solaris engineers have said they had to strip alot of the goodies out of it to port it to x86… but apparently solaris 10 for x86 will be great.
True, my biggest axe to grind was the lack of OpenGL on the x86 version. As I said on the Solaris Intel mailing list, the operating system is great, too bad the support both hardware and feature wise is shitty 🙁
I’m praying that Solaris 10 proves me wrong; lets hope that when JDS 3 is merged as mentioned by a previous poster, that everything will run nicely on their Opteron systems.