Solaris Archive

The articles are: Q&A with the Solaris 10 Engineers and Solaris 10 Privileges.

The $11.6-billion Sun Microsystems Inc, will soon unveil a brand new subscription-based pricing model for its Solaris 10 operating system (OS) in India. The Solaris 10 price plans will be determined based on the total number of CPUs (central processing units) at client locations and will be computed annually. Also, Solaris 10 ably equipped with fixes and features. Update: More on Solaris.

Sun Microsystems' Solaris 10 may be powerful enough to power a data grid, but for real market growth, Sun is looking inward to the embedded space. Despite the hoopla at this month's announcement party to launch Solaris 10, the focus for the operating system has been outside the usual realm of server rooms and desktops. Solaris Express 11/04 will be build 72 and should be available on or around November 30. The big thing for this one is... 64 bit Solaris on AMD.''

You can try the new Solaris 10 Online on SPARC or Opteron/x86 platform at freely (registration req.)

November, 15 2004. The Solaris 10/NC04Q4 Launch 2004. Dawn in San Jose, CA was a truly beautiful sight to behold on Monday. As the sun rose over the mountains and shed its light on the valley below - the city, which the night before had seemed so unimpressive, suddenly came to life in the shimmer of the sun's rays. It seemed a perfect morning for the launch of Sun's most ambitious project to date. The press and other attendees looked happy, hopeful. Sun's folks were excited - especially the engineers.

Anyone who registers with Sun will be able to use Solaris for free on servers with x86 processors, said John Loiacono, executive vice president of Sun's software business. It's not a totally free lunch, though: Sun will provide security updates in the free version but will charge an annual subscription fee for bug fixes and support.

If you were expecting a sneak peak of an open source Solaris or to buy a commercial version next week when it launches, don't hold your breath. Although Sun Microsystems said it is on track to officially launch Solaris 10, the next generation server operating system, on Nov. 15 at its Network Computing 04Q4 event in San Jose, the products will actually take a bit longer.

While the secrets of Easter Island in the South Pacific remain a mystery, Sun Microsystems is planning to reveal new details regarding Solaris 10 on November 15.

Solaris 10, Beta7 is expected to be released tomorrow; you can get it here. This 'blog posting covers the changes since Beta6. A lot has changed: The Service Management Facility, the Java Desktop System, and a new X.org-based X server on x86 have all been added.

There's a benchmark comparing Solaris to Red Hat at Sun's web site. Solaris 10 features a new TCP/IP stack architecture, project FireEngine. Sunay Tripathi posted some performance data on his blog as well that people might be interested in. He will also be posting details about the new architecture and how it allows Solaris 10 to perform exceptionally well on 1-2 CPU and also scale linearly across large number of CPUs. With the low end x86 platform moving soon to 8 CPU (and AMD's dual core, 8 CPU), scaling is something that can't be ignored anymore.

Solaris Systems Programming is the latest release by Sun Press. This is an essential guide to systems programming on any UNIX platform that finally has taken Stevens' Advanced Programming in the UNIX Enviroment off my desk. Read a full review of the book. Both SA's and developers will be very interested in check this book out.

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.

Sun Microsystems will create an open-source project around its Solaris 10 operating system by the end of the year, company executives said Monday. Also, Jonathan Schwartz showed 32-Way UltraSPARC chip that runs Solaris 10.

Sun's Trusted Solaris 8 builds on the vendor's Solaris foundation with stronger access controls and support for multilevel data separation that extends from the core to the desktop environment. Trusted Solaris demands greater administration expertise than do mainstream OSes, but it can make potentially vulnerable pieces of a company's infrastructure significantly more secure. Read the review here.