Solaris Archive

Solaris is the Unix variant produced by Sun Microsystems and is the result of over 20 years of continuous development. It is the only Unix variant that can run on commodityIntel PC hardware as well as Sun and Fujitsu hardware using Sparc and UltraSparc processors. Sun makes many changes to Solaris, some of them are big news and many are not. It is usually a system administrator that finds out about a new command or an undocumented command or feature (like the -k switch for netstat). This review is about two different installs of Solaris Express on different hardware to show some of the many features of the new release.

"Sun recently confirmed that they will do a full 64-bit port of Solaris to the AMD64 platform. This work started 6 months ago, with a beta expected in spring 2004 and a full release in the summer. Almost certainly, the AMD64 port will start with Solaris 10 - I would expect Solaris 10 to be released for SPARC, x86 and AMD64 on the same day, probably in Q3 2004." Read the article at AcesHardware.

This sample chapter discusses the operations that the system must perform from the time you power on the system until you receive a system logon prompt. In addition, it covers the steps required to properly shut down a system.

"Sun Microsystems' Solaris will become the third operating system to take advantage of Advanced Micro Devices' 64-bit Opteron processor. Solaris, Sun's version of Unix, already runs on 32-bit "x86" processors including AMD's Athlon and Intel's Xeon. But Sun also will release a version in 2004 that will take advantage of the 64-bit extensions that make Opteron different from those other chips, Sun software chief Jonathan Schwartz told reporters in a meeting here Thursday." Read more at ZDNet.

Also, let me really clear about our Linux strategy. We don't have one. We don't at all. We do not believe that Linux plays a role on the server. Period. If you want to buy it, we will sell it to you, but we believe that Solaris is a better alternative, that is safer, more robust, higher quality and dramatically less expensive in purchase price. Read more on eweek's interview with Sun's Schwartz here.

"Before, Linux could run only on single- or dual-processor boxes," Yankee Group senior analyst Dana Gardner told the E-Commerce Times. "Now you're starting to see people many of these low-cost boxes in a gridlike fashion to perform highly intensive computing tasks." Read the part 1 of the article at eCommerceTimes. Sun stands behind Solaris from both a support and a legal standpoint, Sun's Bill Moffitt told the E-Commere Times. "As Scott McNealy says, it's a 'one-throat-to-choke' service," he said. "If there's a problem, you know who to call." Read the part 2 of the article.