Sun Is Giving Away Solaris 10 DVDs

Tarmas writes "For a limited time only, just like Ubuntu's ShipIt service, Sun Microsystems lets you order Solaris 10 absolutely free of charge. The operating system comes on a single DVD supporting both the x86 and SPARC versions. Also included is Sun Studio 11."

I wonder

[rolfwind (528248)]

Is this a sign of desperation? (Not bashing Sun here, just heard that the company is going through a tough time.)

Re:I wonder

[bladesjester (774793)]

Actually, it's just a way to drum up interest in a new product. A lot of companies do it.

Microsoft does it with the functional betas of a lot of their software including Visual Studio and they aren't really hurting for customers

Re:

[ceeam (39911)]

Oh, and if Sun wants to ship me an Acer Ferrari notebook with Solaris 10... where do I send them my postal address?

Re:I wonder

[222 (551054)]

Microsoft also did something along the same lines with their Power Together [powertogether.com] program, although the end result of that was a fully functional copy of Office or Vista.
You actually had to watch a few webcasts (Hit play and go to sleep) but its essentially the same thing.
I'll be getting a free copy of Vista as well as Solaris, but more as a novelty than anything on both counts.

Yes, but who is their competition?

[Kenneth Stephen (1950)]

In the good old days, when Sun was making money, they had their guns trained on IBM. These days, there seems to be a tacit acknowledgment in their strategy that they are no longer in the same league as IBM. They seem to be aspiring to compete with HP, Dell and *shudder* Gateway. You dont see IBM giving away their AIX operating system for free, do you? And this is despite the fact that AIX soleley exists to exploit IBM hardware (it doesnt run on anything else) and therefore, could legitimately be given away, since IBM's objective is to sell hardware.

The bottom line is: yes, its a way to drum up interest in a new product, but they appear to be targetting the lower-end market segment with this gimmick.

Re:Yes, but who is their competition?

[TheRaven64 (641858)]

You dont see IBM giving away their AIX operating system for free, do you?

No, but then I don't really see IBM selling AIX, except to those people already using it. They seem to be doing everything they can to gut it and put everything that makes it worthwhile in to Linux. They are pushing the Linux brand hard, because Linux is cool at the moment. This could backfire for them, since people will start to wonder why they should by from IBM, rather than some other random Linux vendor.

Sun, on the other hand, is trying to position Solaris as a Linux competitor. Technically, it's superior in most regards (driver support being a big exception, but this is not a problem for servers, since they are certified for the OS or not sold). It already has the reputation. It has a license that the FSF call Free, although some people have problems with it. At the really high end, systems like OpenVMS and z/OS still rule. Solaris can't compete with these, and neither can Linux. Yet. At the bottom end, there is Windows or Linux (or the *BSDs, but even though I use them I realise they are a tiny percentage of the market). Solaris lives in the middle, where the volumes are small and the margins are high. The bottom is creeping up on the middle though, and so it is important for Sun that they focus on the bottom.

Personally, I wouldn't try to compete in the top end. IBM are there, and they are welcome to the market. SIG used to be there; remember then? There are some people who can't make do with commodity hardware, and there will be for a long time, but this segment grows smaller every year. Sun are focussing on the bottom, because as technology increases, more and more people are adequately served by the bottom. The trick is to have a differentiator. Sun sell Linux and Windows systems, but they also sell Solaris systems. Now, anyone can sell a Solaris system as cheaply as they can sell a Linux system. Why is this good for Sun? A few reasons:

1. They can say 'Look at all these other Solaris sellers[1]! No vendor lock-in here.'
2. They can say 'Look, Solaris is better than Linux, buy Solaris'
3. Most importantly, they can say 'sure, you could buy Solaris from those guys, but isn't it more sensible to buy it from us? After all, we wrote it. If you need support, we have people who know the source tree inside out who can quickly track down and fix any bug you find. Just sign here for our platinum support. In blood please...'

The hardware will be cheap. The software will be free. Having someone who can fix whatever problem you might encounter on call will be very expensive, and for a lot of people will be worth every penny. How much does ten minutes of downtime cost you?

[1] They already had Fujitsu as a second source, which has helped them a lot.

Re:I wonder

[QuickFox (311231)]

Is this Sun's site?

Interesting question.

Answered thus by whois:

Domain: sun.de
<snip/>
  [Holder]
  Type: ORG
  Name: Sun Microsystems GmbH
  Address: Sonnenallee 1
  Pcode: 85551
  City: Heimstetten
  Country: DE
  Changed: 2006-01-06T14: 03: 1001: 00
<snip/>
  [Tech-C]
  Type: PERSON
  Name: Sun Hostmaster
  Organisation: Sun Microsystems Inc.
  Address: 4150 Network Circle
  Pcode: 95054
  City: Santa Clara CA
  Country: US
  Phone: [phone]
  Fax: [phone]

Re:

[Thalagyrt (851883)]

Well, whois can be faked, but the full proof is that the sun.com nameservers (ns1, ns2, ns7, and ns8.sun.com) handle DNS for sun.de, and also if you use nslookup to look it up from the sun nameservers, they show themselves as authoritative and resolve to the same IP. So as you said, yep, this is legit.

Its been free for a while

[ArchieBunker (132337)]

At least in downloadable form. I remember getting Solaris 8 iso images from them almost 5 years ago. Theres plenty of hobbyists and admins that need or want to run it at home. Their attitude is much better than SGI, IRIX cds still cost plenty on ebay. O2 and Octane workstations are dirt cheap now.

Re:I wonder

[AchiIIe (974900)]

Canonical: Free Ubuntu cds shipped!
Community: Whoa, great innovative, breakthrough, sign that ubuntu is a serious contender

Sun: Free Solaris dvds shipped!
Community: Whoa, sign of desperation, they can't even give their os for free.

Re:I wonder

[Dirtside (91468)]

You mistyped:

Sun: Free Solaris dvds shipped!
One random guy on Slashdot: Whoa, sign of desperation, they can't even give their os for free.

Re:I wonder

[davmoo (63521)]

You're apparently new here. Let me explain the Rules of Slashdot.

1. We love Apple (especially when they do something just like Microsoft, and even more if their product is vaporware).
2. We hate Microsoft (especially when they do something just like Apple, and even more when their product is vaporware).
3. Steve Jobs can do no wrong (especially when he does the same as Bill Gates).
4. Bill Gates can do no right (especially when he does the same as Steve Jobs).
5. Any story that is positive about Bill Gates or Microsoft will get tagged "fud" or "troll".
6. Any story that is negative about Steve Jobs or Apple will get tagged "fud" or "troll".
7. "One Laptop Per Child" is the second coming of Christ.
8. Nicholas Negroponte is Christ.
9. We ignore Sun (especially when they dominate any specific industry).
10. We adore Java (even though it was developed by Sun).
11. It has been "The Year That Linux Takes Over the Desktop" for about 8 years.
12. It has been "The Year That Microsoft Dies" for about 15 years.
13. It has been "The Year That Apple Overtakes Microsoft" for about 10 years.
14. Ubuntu is God's chosen Linux distribution.
15. All other distributions of Linux are wannabes...especially the ones that have been around longer than Ubuntu.

I've got $5 US that says this reply gets moderated as "troll" or "flamebait" because it contains so much truth about the attitudes of the majority of the Slashdot community.

Re:

[corsec67 (627446)]

16. Any post containing the disclaimer that it will be modded down will instead be modded up.

(This post will be modded down. But, by saying that, people will mod it up. Does claiming that it will be modded get people to mod it down?)

Re:I wonder

[Fyre2012 (762907)]

Canonical: Did it first.
What about AOL?

Re:I wonder

[Jah-Wren Ryel (80510)]

Canonical: Did it first.
Sun: Shouldn't need to.

Oh, baloney.

First release of Ubuntu was October 20, 2004.
Sun was giving away solaris on DVD since at least May of 2002. [theregister.co.uk]

Re:

[fm6 (162816)]

x64/x86 DVD ---- non sun hardware install set

Actually, Sun has long since stopped being a SPARC-only company. They officially admitted the stupidity of ignoring the x86/x64 marketplace a couple years ago, and brought back Andrew Bechtolsheim [eweek.com] to design a line of x64 servers [sun.com].

Re:

[Thomas the Doubter (1016806)]

This is a sign that Sun is coming to terms with the economics of the Free/OpenSource movement. Get your OS out there and you will make more friends, sell more hardware and services. I think Sun has the right idea, whereas HP still does not know what to do.

Re:

[thogard (43403)]

Is it desperation? I think so.
There are lots of Solaris shops that looked at Solaris 10 and told sun to come back when its done.
Solaris 9 wasn't impressive as a development environment but for a production system you could rip out all the bloat and have a very lean system that was rock solid. The core system rarely needed patches and if you kept careful track of what modules where needed and checked what got patched, you would find that most patches were for things that wouldn't even be loaded on a secure

Re:

[swordgeek (112599)]

You must live in a fascinating world.

Solaris is the dominant OS in the oil company datacentres of the world. Windows is the dominant desktop. Linux is making inroads on the desktop, and is a complete bit-player on the server side, in this industry. In commerce, AIX is still dominant, and Linux is unheard of. Telecom companies, admittedly, are getting more friendly with Linux.

Solaris is not only alive, but will remain that way for a while.

Re:

[An dochasac (591582)]

The comment about Scott and GPL is nonsense. But it's true that Scott et. al made some enormous mistakes during the peak of the last bubble. When Sun was golden, they started selling Ultra workstations with inadequate memory, a PCI bus and IDE drives. These low end machines introduced many a college student to Solaris and helped promote the "Slowaris" meme. Sun delayed X86 Solaris at precisely the right time to insure that GNU/Linux could take advantage of a steep part of the X86 moore curve and decades

Source

[vga_init (589198)]

Is the source code included? It says only "Solaris," not "OpenSolaris," so I'm guessing that it's not. If it were, that would be cool.

It's the only way

[nxtr (813179)]

It's the only way I can keep my productivity up; I install an operating system on my computer that won't run any games.

Re:It's the only way

[Chineseyes (691744)]

You run OSX?

funny coincidence

[hildi (868839)]

im giving away my SUN stock as well.

VMware to avoid hardware compatibility problems

[ufnoise (732845)]

When I installed Solaris last year, there were no drivers to support my hardware. I was able to get it to work in VMware and it worked great. There was file which you had to tweak for the interface, but that was about it.

Open The Floodgates

[kahanamoku (470295)]

Now that it's on /. you can basically not expect to receive your copy for the next 6 months with the flood of /.ers filling in the form!

Free Coasters!

[lorg (578246)]

Yay! Free coasters for everyone :)

Nice

[flyingfsck (986395)]

I've used the Free version Open Solaris for a while on a 4 way box. Works very well and uses Gnome desktop. No serious bugs, except that dragging and dropping a file on the desktop can make Gnome lock up.

It's true

[faragon (789704)]

I received the disks on december 8 '2006, postal box labeled as:

Sun Solaris 10 Media Kit Program
Fulfillment and Customer Service by:
BrandVia Alliance, Inc. - Fulfillment Center
2300 Zanker Road Suite E, San Jose, CA 95131, USA
Telephone: [phone] [e-mail]
Reference: 23072-588

To *Your Name*
-reserved-
*Address*
Air Mail $5.05

Contents: Free Solaris 10 Software Media Kit. Commercial Value less than $10

Postal service used: UNITED STATES POSTAGE, from ZIP CODE 95131 to Barcelona (Spain)

The package include 3 DVD:

* 6/06 Solaris 10 Operating System (SPARC DVD)
* 6/06 Solaris 10 Operating System (x64/x86 DVD)
* Developer Tools (Sun Studio 11, Sun Java Studio Creator 2 Update 1, Sun Java Studio Enterprise 8, NetBeans 5.0)

The DVD box shows a photo of castellers [wikipedia.org], quite curious, as it is typical from where I live (human tower, representing that the union make you stronger, etc.).

Corollarious: I'm glad the DVDs crossed the ocean. Thank you Sun! If Solaris become GPL v3 licensed, I would consider to use it for homebrewed hacking. Although I love Linux, and I will not leave using it, I like the possibility of have a GPL v3 alternative... just in case!

Go straight to the source...

[mritunjai (518932)]

Folks

The Solaris 10 DVD program looks aimed at pro users primarily.

If you want to start on SunOS (kernel) and Solaris (the OS from SUN = SunOS + userland) and you are primarily an enthusiast, may I recommend you OpenSolaris and its distributions.

OpenSolaris - It is the opensourced core OS + networking components of the Solaris OS. Solaris 10 and all future Solaris releases shall be based off it.

There are a number of distributions of OpenSolaris-

1. Solaris 10 - The official distribution from SUN and officially supported. (ROCK SOLID)

2. Solaris Express - Stable builds of development code. Supported by SUN.

3. Solaris Express Community Release (SXCR) - Bi-monthly development builds. Reasonably stabled (haven't seen it crash on the machine I have here in 3 months... 24x7 up, development server). [THIS is what you probably should be running if you want a SUN release to play with!]

4. NexentaOS - [This is what Linux folks should try] This is built off same code base but with GNU userland. It is based on Ubuntu with OpenSolaris kernel (SunOS).

5. BeleniX - A crazy fun distro of OpenSolaris. Also available as LiveCD

For more info please look at http://www.opensolaris.org/ [opensolaris.org]

Thank you

- A Solaris Fan

Quit Whinging!

[Kozar_The_Malignant (738483)]

Christ on a crutch. Sun is giving away a current/recent version of their OS and you lot are going on and on about pissing on them for it. It works. It's rock steady. Besides which, it's the first *nix version I learned.

Re:um...

[Virak (897071)]

It's 'news for nerds' because it's Solaris. It's 'stuff that matters' (at least, to said nerds) because they're giving away DVDs of it for free.

And if you only find it mildly interesting, you've probably got too much of a life. Try spending less time talking to people and going outside, and more time participating in OS flamewars, bashing Microsoft, and filling your multi-terabyte RAID (you *do* have a multi-terabyte RAID, right?) with porn.

Re:um...

[Realistic_Dragon (655151)]

Solaris beats Linux hands down for porn hunting because of that nifty app it comes with, ddtrace.

Re:

[cp.tar (871488)]

Is that a program for filtering out pics of girls with boobs smaller than DD?

If it is, I think I can convert several hundred people to Solaris and leave the thinking up imaginative reasons for the conversion to them.

Re:

[2ms (232331)]

Haven't you heard, people who don't like MS are yesterday's MS? If you are one us, you are supposed to bash, by accusing them of bashing MS, people who dislike MS or its products. I can't believe you didn't know that. You must have a shitty karma level.

Re:um...

[NormalVisual (565491)]

Yeah, I'm not seeing the "news" angle since Solaris 10 and Sun Studio 11 have been available as free downloads for quite some time. Sure, it's nice to have them on pressed media instead of a writable CD/DVD, but I'm not sure why/how this is a big deal.

Re:

[Tony Hoyle (11698)]

It's interesting because I'll finally have a decent copy.. never got around to burning the copies I downloaded months ago (we were going to port to solaris 10 for a customer but they balked at the cost & went with solaris 9 instead).

Re:

[larien (5608)]

No, you're only required to supply a state/province if you in USA or Canada.

Re:

[shades66 (571498)]

>"US & Canada only."

That is only on the address "State/Province" box only which is not needed for non-us addresses. The box below the state/province selection has most of the planet covered

Re:

[LurkerXXX (667952)]

As others have said, you only have to enter as state/province for the U.S. or Canada.

As for why you should have figured this out yourself...Huge hint for you... The website is .de

Re:Not "just like" ShipIt...

[QuickFox (311231)]

"US & Canada only."

They included that in the form as an IQ test, so that only Real Geek Geniuses will get their CD. All the people who can't get past that question to the list of countries are non-geniuses who should stay with Windows.

Re:

[leonmergen (807379)]

What makes you say that ? I live in .nl and I just ordered myself a set.

Re:General Information on Solaris 10?

[larien (5608)]

Vendor support - you'll get full support for things like Oracle, SAP, etc, etc on Solaris easier than Linux (yes, I know you can get Oracle on Linux, but only certain versions, mainly Redhat)

Support for huge boxes. The Solaris 10 you run on a single CPU sunblade 100 is the same OS as will run on a 144-core loaded 25K - there's also very little real difference in the OS between SPARC & x86 (main differences are boot loaders & X-windows).

Then there's feature set - zones, dtrace, ZFS, workload management & so on all come out of the box. Most linux software will run with a recompile.

Re:

[flyingfsck (986395)]

Yes, it works on Sun machines in particular. Apart from that, it is very much like running RedHat Linux with Gnome desktop.

Re:General Information on Solaris 10?

[swordgeek (112599)]

I'll assume you've missed all of the Solaris 10 hype, and are genuinely curious. That said, there are a lot of interesting things in Solaris 10.

First of all, it is robust and reliable to a degree that Linux still doesn't achieve in a general-purpose environment. It's also immensely scaleable--dealing gracefully with as big of a machine as you want to throw at it. In terms of technology, Solaris 10 was a complete rewrite, and in many ways was a rethinking of Unix. It provides service-level fault tolerance (via SMF, which replaces the traditional /etc/init.d method of starting services). There's dtrace which can trace anything in the computer (massively, incredibly more powerful than strace or truss). Zones are an implementation of virtual machines, and allow for complete isolation of environments all under one kernel. Related to that is the scheduler, which allows a very granular means of resource allocation to a process or application. Also, Brandz will let you run Linux code under Solaris, within a zone. I know of developers who are using this, because it lets them run dtrace against their Linux code for debugging and optimisation.
Finally there's ZFS, which is truly a new filesystem--the first in a long time on any platform. It combines filesystem operations with volume management, and results in a filesystem that has been abstracted from the hardware it's running on.

These are just the highlights of the most robust Unix out there right now.

What Solaris 10 will NOT buy you though, is the same end-user experience of Linux. The graphics routines, multimedia applications, and audio support just aren't at the same level in Solaris yet. That's changing fast enough, but it hasn't caught up yet.

Re:General Information on Solaris 10?

[2ms (232331)]

Are they really working hard on these things? I'm curious. Those are more home or desktop only type user things. Just as an example, it's not as if Solaris will ever be used for pro music production or anything -- none of the industry standard apps are available for it. Who are they working on the multimedia, audio, etc support for exactly? I'm not doubting what you say, I'm just curious what their goal is.

Re:General Information on Solaris 10?

[Yvanhoe (564877)]

That means you have to formulate your request differently when addressing to Slashdot or to Google : Don't say "What features of Sun OS can not be found in linux distributions ?" but say "Solaris is just a toy! Linux is far more superior!" and you may get a full detailed list of the said features

Re:US/Canada only! Why not just allow ISO download

[ratbag (65209)]

As a UK resident who has just successfully ordered the set (using the handy Country drop-down) I think the first part of your "subj" sez "ivi didn't read the form".

Rob.

Re:

[dosius (230542)]

I actually like one major thing about Solaris... Free CDE.

Okay, so the CDE is ancient. It's still the official standard GUI for Unix. A pity it's binary-only, as I'd like to use it here (and NO, xfce isn't close enough - and no way in hell am I paying pumped-up prices for deXtop!)

-uso.

Re:

[ilikejam (762039)]

Security and driver updates are still free.