Solaris Archive

Wow! With Solaris 10, Sun Microsystems has done a marvelous job of bringing Solaris fully into the x86 world. Gone are the days when Solaris only runs on Sun hardware or when it only runs well on Sun hardware. Solaris 10 comes with greatly expanded off-the-shelf x86 hardware compatibility and a license that is hard to beat. It's a binary right to use and Open Solaris, the open source version is soon to come. IT Managers that have been wanting to bring a stable, scalable Operating Environment into their network infrastructures, but who have been unwilling to commit to the Sun hardware platform, for various reasons, are now free, pun intended, to bring Solaris on board and to run it on the hardware of their choice.

Solaris Express 4/2005 (a.k.a. Nevada Build 10) was posted today, providing improved performance, X.org 6.8.2 final, and a host of bug fixes. You can obtain a free download. An overview of new features is available.

A new feature of the Sun Solaris 10 Operating System lets you run Linux applications, unchanged, on their own or side by side with Solaris applications.

Some Sun Engineers have started blogging about how Sun does performance work on Solaris during development. They mention that they felt they should start talking about it after Linus Torvalds said more regular performance testing of Linux would be usefull. The posts are here and here.

Sun today announced that it has distributed more than one million registered licenses for the Solaris 10 OS since Jan. 31, when the software became available on Sun's Web site. Sun also announced that the Solaris 10 OS has set fourteen world-record benchmarks in this same timeframe and demonstrated application performance improvements greater than 50 times that of previous versions of Solaris.

Sun is gunning for some of Linux's rising popularity in the enterprise with the newest release of its Unix derivative, Solaris (screenshots). In this Clear Choice Test, they found that Solaris 10 has been torn from its SPARC-only roots now runs very quickly and very easily on generic 32-bit x86 Intel- and 64-bit Advanced Micro Devices-based servers. It also has new security features and supports a range of Linux applications. And it's free.

DTrace developers Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal have posted presentations covering Advanced DTrace Tips and Tricks and The DTrace pid provider on their blogs over the last few days. Update: RHEL benchmarks against Solaris.

The vast majority of operating system reviews are the result of a user spending a few days or weeks using a particular operating system and writing about their observations. This review is the result of my continued use of Solaris 10 (previously Solaris Express) from August 2003 to February 2005.

Sun has recently released Solaris 10. It is currently free, as in beer, and most of it is promised to be released under an OSI approved license in the second quarter of 2005. Most everyone reading this probably knows all of that. The release and subsequent open sourcing of Solaris 10 has caused quite an uproar in the Open Source community and the IT industry as a whole. Read the review here.

Sun Microsystems has sent some of its operating system staff packing as it finishes up a long period of layoffs. Sources have informed The Register that a larger number of staffers in Sun's operating platforms group have been shown the door.

This article illuminates many reasons why Sun faces an uphill battle in keeping enterprise customers interested in it's operating system, describing a large enterprise customer choosing Linux over Solaris and IBM over Sun.

Solaris 10 for SPARC/x86 is now available for download. Get it while it's hot.

Sun has a whitepaper from Seal Rock Research comparing Solaris to Linux for Enterprise Level deployment.

The source code to DTrace is now available for public download here, more info on a blog entry introducing the code here.