Today Solaris Express 11/04 shipped. New in this release are the AMD64 kernel and userland (supporting Athlon64, Nocona and Opteron) and many other enhancements. A more complete listing is available here.
Solaris Express 11/04, AMD64 port, now available
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Eugenia Loli
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Hi,
Is it just me, or are the express builds getting later and later…
Still, I suppose it’s better that the coders and engineers determine the release date (i.e., when it’s ready), rather than marketing, or some manager.
Also – does anybody have *any* word of when Janus/ZFS will be in?
Thanks,
victor
Solaris 10 seems to be very appealing. Anyone who have used Solaris/AIX on one of the expensive workstations/servers would observe how coherent and serious these OS’es are. OSX or Windows feels like Minix when you get used to them. Now it’ll be possible to install and run Solaris on a relatively more affordable Opteron system.
This is beautiful. I’ve long been following the development of the BSDs as only serious UNIX alternatives on desktop but now there’s Solaris. It looks like an engineering feat in terms of its kernel technology (in cs terms). And surely it is extremely stable and reliable considering Sun’s reputation of engineering. Solaris have long reputed to have unmatched scalability. I am eagerly awaiting the arrival.
BTW Does anyone know if Solaris have scheduler activations?
Sun is delivering a very high quality operating system and one must commend them for the vast change in corporate culture just to make their core software available to people at a reasonable price point.
However, while the Solaris operating system may be now affordable to developers, not many of the non-Java tools are. So it will be interesting to see how much traction Solaris ultimately gets in the developer community. And application/server software is usually much more affordable on Linux vs. Solaris.
There is also very little accessible knowledge on Solaris vs. Linux and FreeBSD. So support will be a bottleneck, especially on the hardware side as Solaris 10 has a very small hardware compatibilty list compared to Linux or FreeBSD. Perhaps Sun is banking on the fact that Solaris has never really run 100% on non-Sun hardware, so they are putting out this free version hoping people like it and then upgrade to Sun hardware to run the OS without strange problems.
Wise choice. Sun and Microsoft deciding to utilize the same chip makes a lot of sense. This will save untold amounts of cash by using common hardware.
Not sure how tightly they really are tied together, but this is not going to do either of them any harm.
Ok, you said that Solaris is an alternative OS for desktop and that MacosX feels like minix… Mouhahahahaha!
If MacosX looks like minix, I’m afraid of what Solaris looks like …
Geforce 4 or some other nice GF card would be supported…
BTW I hope they fixed the bug for pentium III 🙂
If engineers determined the release dates, nothing would EVER be released. You know… feature creep hell.
which specific pentium III bug are you referring to?
There is also very little accessible knowledge on Solaris vs. Linux and FreeBSD. So support will be a bottleneck, especially on the hardware side as Solaris 10 has a very small hardware compatibilty list compared to Linux or FreeBSD. Perhaps Sun is banking on the fact that Solaris has never really run 100% on non-Sun hardware, so they are putting out this free version hoping people like it and then upgrade to Sun hardware to run the OS without strange problems.
Hyperthreaded teddybear, you need to do some research!
As has frequently been posted here and on slashdot,
you can get information from
http://www.sun.com
http://docs.sun.com
http://www.sun.com/bigadmin
http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl (hardware compatibility)
http://developers.sun.com
http://java.sun.com
where have you been looking instead?
And if you read what the Sun bloggers actually
write rather than the speculation from slashdot, Sun’s
aim with opensourcing Solaris 10 is to get people to
use Solaris 10. If that leads to hardware sales for Sun
then that’s a neat, useful and handy-for-the-bottom-line
side-effect.
Re your last sentence — do you honestly think that Sun
is going to put its reputation on the line by releasing
an OS for the x86/amd64 platform which has such specific
hooks in it that you can’t run it properly on generic pc
hardware? You’ve got to have rocks in your head if you do!
Is it just me, or are the express builds getting later and later…
Still, I suppose it’s better that the coders and engineers determine the release date (i.e., when it’s ready), rather than marketing, or some manager.
Some months have seen an express build skipped for public
release because the targetted builds were not good enough.
That’s what you see on blogs.sun.com at any rate.
Re release date — at some point in the chain, because Sun
is an engineering company rather than a marketing company,
there will definitely be a manager involved. My friends
who work at Sun hold their engineering processes in high
regard, so I think release date slippage is more likely
to come from drawing a line in the sand and saying “no new
features allowed from date X onwards” and then focusing on
the showstopper bugs instead.
I very rarely see feeping creaturism with Sun’s software.
(I’ve got 15 years experience with it in one form or another
btw).
In the Solaris build 69,JDS can’t run on Pentium III without some “hacks” because the system “identify” the processor as a Pentium IV and try to use instructions like SSE2 that are not present on Pentium III.
It is a known bug by SUN.
Also, am I the only that can’t install all the packages of Solaris 10 ?
When I try a full installation, some errors occurs during the installation and prevent some package to be installed.
Duffman, I think that bug is fixed, but I’m not sure. Do you have a bugid? I could check on it for you. Otherwise, I’ll ask around tomorrow.
Thanks for all of the positive comments guys– I’m sure the AMD64 team– which pulled off this work in record time– will be appreciative.
Dan Price
http://blogs.sun.com/dp
Yes, I have found the bud ID, it is the bug 6176989.
On an amd64 machnine after installer try to set root passwd (failed) installer stopped:
“unable to get pty”
Suck.
Quote
“would i be correect in making the bold assumption that even the 11/04 pre-release is more suited to live servers than common linux distributions in terms of stability on x86? ”
NOPE
Solaris x86 in the old days has been an old busted pile of shit. And customers were not happy with it. I believe some of them even threatened to sue Sun for hiding problems in old-busted-Solaris-x86 as well as with it-works-on-our-machine-Solaris-SPARC.
Solaris X is Sun’s chance to redeem their crappy support of the x86 platform. The core OS may be “godlike” but they need to come through with rock solid hardware support for all the x86 hardware out there.
BTW, Gentoo is open source in a way that Solaris X will likely never be — i.e. a source distro vs. binary distro “with source”.
Lastly… there is simply nothing on “Solaris X” out there compared to all the documentation on Linux. It will take years — if it ever happens — for Sun to catch up.
I do hope Sun does very well with Solaris X as Linux could use some competition!
I see they’re including that now with the build. That’s pretty nifty, more and more Solaris is looking as a real alternative even for the desktop, never mind as a server.
What I’m wondering is what the status of 3D on the x86 platform with Solaris is going to be, ie. I know in the new Opteron workstations for instance they’re shipping with nvidia quadros, any plans to have nvidia 3D drivers to work with x.org on Solaris?
“Geforce 4 or some other nice GF card would be supported…”
Sun’s w1100z and w2100z workstations (Opteron-based) ship with NVIDIA’s Quadro cards, up to the FX3000 pro card.
http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/data/sx/
There is essentially nothing on the HCL list compared to Linux or Windows, especially if you don’t count the Sun systems.
Thus Solaris X is Sun’s way of putting out a “free trial” … or “mostly free trial” and then seeing if they can sell hardware that will run the software “100%”.
Nothing new from Solaris x86, just better marketing. Sun is doing a great job beating the buzz word “open source” into the ground on Solaris X before they’ve open sourced 1 line of it… not a good showing so far.
6176989 is marked as being fixed in build 70, so it should be available in SX 11/04.
Thus Solaris X is Sun’s way of putting out a “free trial” … or “mostly free trial” and then seeing if they can sell hardware that will run the software “100%”.
Solaris 10 is free. Period. SX is not a “free trial”. Rather, it’s an opportunity for those interested to take part in Beta testing and early adoption. Solaris 10 runs on a wide variety of hardware without issue. I was able to install it onto my laptop without any issues whatsoever. Sun is not engaged in a strategy to offer limited hardware support to force customers onto their products. Such an assertion is a poorly motivated conspiracy theory. As a particular example, Sun has recently set-up a large x86 engineering group in China. They spend almost all of their time working on drivers and x86 specific support issues for Solaris.
Nothing new from Solaris x86, just better marketing.
This suggests to me that you’ve spent absolutely no time learning anything about Solaris 10. It has a wide variety of features not present in any other OS.
So how does one go around to making a decision as to what OS to run? For the longest time, it was very difficult to find a good *nix OS to run. Solaris was too restrictive (you had to go with SPARC basically) and too expensive, BSD’s failed to scale well on multi-cpu systems, and there wasn’t a single Linux distribution that I could be happy with.
Fast forward to today, in the BSD camp, we have FreeBSD 5 going stable and getting better and better at scaling. In two years time, FreeBSD will be very good at scaling and will be comparible to both Linux and Solaris. In 5 years time, scalability will be a nonissue. Everything else in BSD (ports, package, userland, documentation) is as good as it can get.
In the Linux camp, we have Debian Sarge coming out. In my opinion, Debian is the only distro that has enough features (nice clean interface, long life time, lots of packages, ease -of-administration) so that it can be used in the server room. The only problem it sufferred was scalability, documentation, a good, clean installer, and autodetection. With Sarge being released in a month or two, all these will be fixed.
Finally, on the Sun Solaris side, we had an awesome OS that was designed to run on Sparc and that costed too much. With Solaris 10, both of these problems will be fixed. In addition, we will be getting a much better, cleaner interface, and a whole bunch of other cool features.
So how do you decide which to use? I don’t know myself. I think they are all great systems and wish the best of luck to all of them. I’d hate to see anyone of them go away. As an OS hobbyist, I think they share enough similarities, so that you can be really good at using all three.
The only time I will be certain of my choice would be when a company wants support for the OS. Then I will always choose Solaris over RedHat. Not a big fan of RedHat, and I think Solaris will now be a much cheaper solution and Sun has a lot more employee’s for support than RedHat.
Solaris 10 is free. Period.
—-
Not really. you dont bug fixes. there is no source code under a Free license
“. It has a wide variety of features not present in any other OS.”
Ya. sure. Jonathan also says Redhat is proprietary OS and that its not LSB compliant. how many lies can you take?
just go with whichever you like best
Excuse my ignorance, but, for some reason, I still see the old 10/04 at http://wwws.sun.com/software/solaris/solaris-express/get.html . Where should I go to get the 11/04 (if I am not in a beta program)?
kind regards,
bsl45
Did you read the link I posted? Did you take a look at the HCL? If you read the link, you could see Sun’s HCL for Solaris X is totally pathetic. The word that comes to mind is “hardware desert”… and the list is a third-party system or two from being a round-off error from “zero”.
I don’t know what all those engineers in China are doing, but they are sure not updating the website.
Maybe they are busy copying the code from “Solaris X” (the king of operating systems… sounds like a dead French monarch) to “Red Flag 5.0” (the operating system of the people)…
I love solaris and have used is exclusively on Blades and EXX00’s. However, for the love of me, I can’t get Solaris x86 working on my system! I’ve reported this to comp.unix.solaris, searched the wild wild web and nothing, nada!! Not even a comment on what could be done:
http://tinyurl.com/6twa9
http://tinyurl.com/3zldv
Seems like it’s been reported before and I can’t any solution to this problem. Solaris (7,8,9 and 10 (up to 11/04 beta)) all fail on Asus P4S533-X. During the CD/floppy/PXE boot, right before the Device Configuration Assistant, the system just hangs. The word SunOS on the top left corner changes to AunOS.
With the argument of getting supported hardware (link #2) would detail that there are other systems out there with this problem. What would be the best way to get around this?
-Bruno
Did you read this:
http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/data/9/
In my experience (using Solaris x86 since Solaris 7) what works with 9, will work with 10.
Using a Sis chipset motherboard might not be the best idea and may not be supported. I have used Solaris x86 with Intel and VIA 266 chipset motherboards with no problems.
> Maybe they are busy copying the code from “Solaris X” (the
> king of operating systems… sounds like a dead French
> monarch) to “Red Flag 5.0” (the operating system of the
> people)…
Just to clarify: It’s not “Solaris X”. It’s “Solaris 10”. Someone here called it Solaris X, but that’s not, and will not be the product name. A quick look at http://www.sun.com/solaris/10 should be convincing in that regard.
It seems mean spirited to suggest that Sun’s employees in China are operating in an unethical fashion. Have you met any of them or have reason to believe this to true?
just go with whichever you like best
Or in my case, use ’em all! 🙂
> Solaris 10 is free. Period.
Not really. you dont bug fixes. there is no source code under a Free license
No, really it is. You’re pretty misinformed. Solaris 10 updates, which will include bugfixes will also be free. What Sun is charging for are binary patches to a particular version of Solaris 10 that customers may want to apply instead of upgrading. Further, when OpenSolaris is released, all Solaris bugfixes will be available there in source form. To be clear, OpenSolaris will be available shortly after the GA of Solaris 10.
> It has a wide variety of features not present in any other OS
Ya. sure. Jonathan also says Redhat is proprietary OS and that its not LSB compliant. how many lies can you take?
I’m not Jonathan Schwartz, so calling me a liar just because you happen to think Schwartz is one, is a definite stretch. Perhaps you ought to go find out about the features in Solaris 10 before writing them off so quickly. I happen to know that no other OS has DTrace, Zones (Solaris Containers), SMF & FMA (Self-Healing), ZFS, etc.
For all the time Solaris x86 has been out, the HCL for even Solaris 9 is very very thin. It is well known in the industry that Sun does not support hardware other than their own with much beyond “lip service”. Sometimes this “lip service” takes the form of a forum where you can engage in endless verbal ping-pong with other fellow incompatibility sufferers or perhaps the occasional Sun representative that will assure you that your complaint has been dutifully scribed onto the great list of priorities.
Note that for the Solaris 9 x86 HCL, there are a whole two (yes, “2”) non-Sun computers that are certified by Sun to run Solaris 9. Hmmmm. Oh, there are a few more that passed a test suite, but in reality the only machines that are “certified” to run Solaris are made by Sun.
So if “all” the machines that are on the Solaris 9 HCL are moved over to the Solaris X HCL (w/o testing… I guess this is what the ‘preview’ is for, eh?)… the list is still tiny to the point of being laughable.
And what do you know… it even further proves my original point. Funny how those darn people called customers know the truth beyond the official marketing mantras!
I suppose Sun people cannot read either. What is the URL I posted? Here is it again:
http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/data/sx/
That reads “SX” to me — i.e. “Solaris X”.
Lastly… it is also well known that the Chinese culture views intellectual property quite differently than USA. What is “unlawful” in USA is not “unethical” in other parts of the world, including China.
As Solaris X will soon be fully open source — according to Sun executives — I cannot even see what the big deal is about….
If you actually read the HCL for Solaris x86, a 2 means the vendor can apply a “Solaris Ready” logo on their machines (if they choose to):
http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/tierHelp.html
The vendor can run the test suite and get Sun to certify the results. Just like people used to with the “Cool, it runs on Linux” campaign back in the day.
And I do not work for Sun (directly), I just admin Sun systems and test software.
As far as the amount of “supported hardware” goes, the same argument could be made about Apple, but I don’t see anybody whining about their hardware support.
Robert,
When we look at the Solaris IX list and the Solaris X list, we can see the overall number of components, systems, parts, etc., is very very small by any measure.
While a vendor can obtain some test suites for a fee, there is no way that I could see to be “certified” by Sun to run Solaris without paying a lot of money to Sun. This is why there are only two computers that are “certified” by Sun I presume.
Anyhow, the real test will come after people download this latest Solaris X and then start “whining” about lack of hardware support. Just like they do for every platform, including Linux, except for Windows, the monopoly.
I would like Solaris to become more popular. But I have never been a big fan of Sun’s endless lies.
This is why I was furious when Sun announced they were going to stop producing Solaris x86! I am sure a number of hardware vendors decided to pull driver development support just after that announcement (just as Oracle stopped Solaris x86 development). I think it is going to take some time for vendors to “warm up” to the idea of writing device drivers for Solaris x86 again.
The reason why I moved to Sparc hardware for my home lab is because of Sun’s decision to pull Solaris x86 (which was a costly proposition). Hopefully Sun will listen to the user community more in the future.
anyone know where we can download extra CD for Solaris like Documentation CD, companion CD,… ?
For those who have not been bothered do look it up, the sx referred to in http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/data/sx/ is “Solaris Express”.
” > Solaris 10 is free. Period.
Not really. you dont bug fixes. there is no source code under a Free license”
Actually, you do get bug fixes. You also get security fixes. You get everything except the abilitiy to call Sun and get someone working on your problem 24×7. If you hose your system or run into some strange bug noone else has, you can’t call Sun up and report the incident. You can’t get Sun to assign an engineer to study your problem and fix it. You can’t get Sun to come over and do everything for you.
If you actually worked in an enterprise level business, it would make perfect sense to you. The support you would pay Sun for is the same support you pay Cisco, Avaya, EMC, Veritas, IBM, Juniper and every other major company for.
If you are running a business, you have to pay for support because if something doesn’t work, you don’t have the luxury to let it keep crashing until it get’s resolved. And although it’s every open source advocate’s wet dream that they can open any program’s code, look at it for 30 second, and apply the patch in an hour, this thinking is completely unrealistic. You will need to have a specialist fix the bug for you if you want it to be resolved within a year.
” I happen to know that no other OS has DTrace, Zones (Solaris Containers), SMF & FMA (Self-Healing), ZFS, etc.”
however Linux has UML, reiserfs, kprobes and so on. so dont try to thrown in random names here
“however Linux has UML, reiserfs, kprobes and so on. so dont try to thrown in random names here”
I really don’t care about this discussion..but I find this amusing. “Don’t throw in random names”…oh and here are some random names.
Btw:
UML != Zones (your pretty close here..but zones doesn’t load another kernel)
reiserfs != zfs (reiser4 might..but its not ready yet and won’t be mainstream for quite awhile IMO)
kprobes != dtrace (this isn’t even close..kprobes might grow into something like dtrace..but right now….no)
Can we all face it here? Solaris 10 has some very compelling features that Linux/BSD does not have. We have to wait and see what license its put out under.
Solaris 10 has some very compelling features that Linux/BSD does not have. We have to wait and see what license its put out under.
Just for the sake of clarity, SOlaris 10 will be released under a free but Sun-owned license. OpenSolaris, the open-source version of Solaris, is going to be released under an OSI compliant license. To be clear, these are branded as different products, but will eventually be built from a common source-base.
“OpenSolaris, the open-source version of Solaris, is going to be released under an OSI compliant license. To be clear, these are branded as different products, but will eventually be built from a common source-base.”
Has there been any disclosure about what might be missing from OpenSolaris? I recall that people at Sun are pretty tight-lipped about things like drivers for Sun-branded graphics cards, for example, perhaps due to trade secrets or license issues. Is it planned that there will be enough drivers in the source code, such that a working complete Solaris system can be built and installed from source?
Will Sun provide their compiler suite for OpenSolaris? I’d love to get back to working with dbx instead of gdb.
With Solaris 10 near plus Opteron and Niagara gaining momentum, my stock is actually going up now! Many thanks!
Pentium III should not be supported anyway, no sense in keeping a powerful OS on old hardware. With OpenSolaris you may fix the bugs on your own though.
> Pentium III should not be supported anyway, no sense in
> keeping a powerful OS on old hardware. With OpenSolaris you
> may fix the bugs on your own though.
To clarify, as someone (me?) stated, this was a bug related to medialib, which is used to take advantage of whatever processor features you have to make graphical stuff go fast. The bug was fixed pretty rapidly after it was discovered.
The Pentium III CPU is fully supported by Solaris 10. For example, the LX-50 is a box from Sun which contains an P3.
Yes, and JDS runs fine now 🙂
Has there been any disclosure about what might be missing from OpenSolaris? I recall that people at Sun are pretty tight-lipped about things like drivers for Sun-branded graphics cards, for example, perhaps due to trade secrets or license issues. Is it planned that there will be enough drivers in the source code, such that a working complete Solaris system can be built and installed from source?
Will Sun provide their compiler suite for OpenSolaris? I’d love to get back to working with dbx instead of gdb.
There has been a lot of disclosure about what is going
to be in OpenSolaris: everything. There will not
be stuff left out — unless it’s a third-party driver
where the third-party vendor absolutely refused to allow
its being opensourced. My friends who work at Sun tell
me that the 3rd-party vendors are actually quite happy
(in general) with the concept and reality of OpenSolaris
so I don’t think that’ll be a problem.
What has been publicly stated (and I include blog entries
here) is that yes, it will be a fully buildable source tree.
Sun’s compilers work with {Open}Solaris and with linux.
Why do you think that there will be a difference in what
they work with and don’t work with? It’s not like the
ancient AT&T c compiler which recognised the passwd
command and compiled back in the famous backdoor, and
recognised its own source so it could put the backdoor-
generation code back in if it had been taken out…..
the P3 is a very powerful architecture, which was actually kind of unfortunate for Intel (since they wanted to push the P4 instead and, clock-for-clock, it sucks in comparison to the P3, it just scales better). If you go out and buy the fastest P3 you can find, it’s still a rather competitive machine.
“There has been a lot of disclosure about what is going
to be in OpenSolaris: everything.”
For SPARC _and_ x86 or just x86?
“Sun’s compilers work with {Open}Solaris and with linux.
Why do you think that there will be a difference in what
they work with and don’t work with?”
My original question was whether Sun will bundle their compiler rather than make it a separate purchase. Sun’s compiler suite is very nice, dbx is superior to gdb, and the documentation is thorough.
Hi,
Is it really? (Just wondering, since I’m thinking if it would be worthwhile me getting an old one second hand as a second computer.
bye,
Victor
“UML != Zones (your pretty close here..but zones doesn’t load another kernel)
reiserfs != zfs (reiser4 might..but its not ready yet and won’t be mainstream for quite awhile IMO)
kprobes != dtrace (this isn’t even close..kprobes might grow into something like dtrace..but right now….no)
Can we all face it here? Solaris 10 has some very compelling features that Linux/BSD does not have. We have to wait and see what license its put out under.”
You dont get it do you. if UML != zones, then solaris lacks UML, if reiserfs!= zfs, solaris lacks reisfers and so on
featurism isnt a bright idea to argue about. if the only thing Solaris has over linux/bsd is a bunch of these features you guys keep throwing about its doomed to failure..
see how firefox with *less* features than mozilla suite is MUCH MUCH better and popular for a example of how this can backfire
“You dont get it do you. if UML != zones, then solaris lacks UML, if reiserfs!= zfs, solaris lacks reisfers and so on”
…..wow…that is the stupidest thing I have ever heard.. Well done. Try reading what I said again…or even better..go to google and actually learn something.
“featurism isnt a bright idea to argue about. if the only thing Solaris has over linux/bsd is a bunch of these features you guys keep throwing about its doomed to failure..”
uhm…what? What exactly do you think people are looking at in an OS…whether the box is pink?
“see how firefox with *less* features than mozilla suite is MUCH MUCH better and popular for a example of how this can backfire”
If it had many features and was still as fast, nobody would care.
“You dont get it do you. if UML != zones, then solaris lacks UML, if reiserfs!= zfs, solaris lacks reisfers and so on”
Does reiserfs have end-to-end checksums for the data allowing RAID arrays to detect and fix data errors in addition to hardware errors? ZFS is some pretty cool stuff, and I’ll probably upgrade to Solaris 10 as soon as it is available.
Also, does UML even ship with default kernels, anywhere?