Solaris 9 x86 Review 292
ValourX writes "Here is a review of Solaris 9 x86, 08/03 edition. Now that the single-CPU edition is free to download for non-commercial use, people will be compelled to write a Solaris CD and try it out. Read this first -- there are a lot of things you should know before you begin. You might want to check out the documentation or explore other resources like the hardware compatibility list as well."
better yet (Score:5, Interesting)
Most useful in an existing Solaris environment (Score:5, Interesting)
That said, Linux or BSD with olvwm [plig.org] or XFce [xfce.org] can be made to look so much like Solaris that most users won't care, and the hardware compatibility won't be a problem. I guess it depends on what is more important in a given context, really.
Solaris X86 is no different than a Linux distro. (Score:5, Interesting)
And your lying through your teeth if you say there is no support.
Software: http://www.sunfreeware.com
Help/Guides: http://www.sunhelp.org
Patches: http://sunsolve.sun.com
Solaris9 X86 is a good stepping stone, a good resource to learn from and if accepted by the industry a very stable platform.
Sun DOES provide security updates, sun DOES provide software updates and there is already a ton of Gnome/KDE/Enlightenment stuff ported to solaris.
Give it a try, i'm sure you may like to see what an industrial strength workstation feels like to run. Honestly.
No free SMP? (Score:2, Interesting)
Anyway, if there is no SMP support I wasted a fair amount of emotional energy that could have been saved had SUN made this restriction more clear.
I'm not sure that I'm so keen anyway. I have a big Ultra-SPARC and many Linux systems. For the most part I find that I have grown to prefer the Linux environment. But I have a few memory management issues with Linux SMP and was going to investigate Solaris as a solution. At $250, forget it.
(Also, 2.6 kernel appears to cure my memory management problems, and I still have BSD to try.)
Re:How does this help us, or Sun (Score:5, Interesting)
We've got a group of geophysicists who use high-end sparc desktops (just receieved eight loaded Blade 2500s this week). Now having the rest of the group using the same computing platform would help substantially, and Intel hardware is still substantially cheaper than the Blade 150.
Really, I suspect that Sun releasing this is a way of seeing what the maximum prospective customer base might be. They're pushing their "X86 Java desktop" hard right now, and before they get too far into that I think they want to gauge how much development to put into Solaris/x86 as a desktop OS. (i.e. fancy apps, user friendly stuff)
Re:How does this help us, or Sun (Score:3, Interesting)
Those Blade2500's are pretty nice machines though, we have a couple internally.
Sun's real rationale for this (Score:4, Interesting)
Solaris/Sparc will continue to be their preferred high-end server platform, and the place that they put most of their R&D money. It will never be pushed as a desktop environment, except for those environments which require it (data analysts, geophysicists, etc.)
Linux/Sparc they won't touch.
Linux/x86, they're pushing on the desktop now with their "Java Desktop." I think that they'll push this _heavily_, even trying to sell to random people off the street. (witness their dealing with Office Despot, last week.)
Solaris/x86. With their recent ties to AMD, I suspect that they're going to encourage people to use Solaris/x86 on their cheap server lines (esp. the blades), and possibly push the application companies to port their Sparc versions over. Ideally they'd be running Landmark apps and such on Solaris/Sparc machines, but right now many of them are pushing Linux/x86, which is much cheaper for a given performance level right now.
The biggest reason for Sun having Solaris/x86 at all is to keep people who can't justify the hardware costs of Sparc gear right now, to keep (or in some cases, start) running Solaris (ideally on Sun boxes), rather than going to ye randome Linux platform. Now if Sun can differentiate between their own Linux/x86 offering (end-user desktop) and Solaris/x86 (workstation and low-end server) while maintaining their REAL product (Solaris/Sparc), then they might have a good plan.
I think that this latest action is mostly to run the x86 product up a flagpole, just to see if anyone cares.
Re:How does this help us, or Sun (Score:3, Interesting)
Always been curious, but never found a Sun person sit still long enough to grab them and get a good layman's answer
thanks
Sun is no different than SCO and Microsoft (Score:5, Interesting)
You are trolling, aren't you? Or you completely do not know what are you talking about. Or you just work for Sun. There is no other explanation why would you post here such a bullshit.
The only company that still insist that Solaris has lower than Linux TCO is Sun. Another company that is saying the same about Unix vs Linux is SCO. All others, including IBM, HP, and even SGI, agree that Linux has lower TCO, despite the fact they sell own Unix distros.
By the way, it becomes suspicious, all three companies are saying the same about Linux: Sun, SCO and Microsoft. Something is common for them behind the scene.
Re:How does this help us, or Sun (Score:3, Interesting)
Sun needs an entry level system to get users that may graduate to enterprise SPARC systems to get started with Sun.
Sun's situation without Solaris x86 would be much like Apple's situation before the introduction of the I-Macs. All of Apple's systems were quite good and quite expensive. All of Sun's systems are quite good and quite expensive. Apple did and Sun does have a fiercly loyal and satisfied customer base being erroded thru attrition. Few new customers translates into slow death. Introduction of the I-Mac gave apple a shot in the arm. A viable Solaris x86 could help Sun the same way.
Unfortunatly I don't think Solaris x86 is quite enough like Solaris SPARC to fill this role for Sun. I also think it isn't a good enough product to encourage users that do try it to consider graduating to the SPARC product.
Where I work we have a handfull of smart people tearing their hair out trying to migrate some of our systems from Linux to Solaris x86 to satisfy our management. Our own applications seem to run (so far as we can tell) but the OS install for our production hardware environment (Proliant servers with Qlogic fiberchannel connection to a SAN the only disk on the system) has so far been impossible.
Re:Solaris X86 is no different than a Linux distro (Score:5, Interesting)
Sun machines are not different from PCs in any significant way besides the processor (which is slower than modern PC processors at most tasks in spite of being 64 bit and having boatloads of cache) unless you have a multiprocessor machine. The days when every Sun machine was superior to every PC are long, long gone. The days when Solaris was superior to Linux for single-processor machines, likewise, have receded past the horizon and are well out of sight. Solaris' only real advantage today is on systems with many processors, especially when you get out of the realm of what Linux will actually run on.
As for your lowest TCO, I don't believe Sun when they say it, and I don't believe you. Where's the figures?
Re:How does this help us, or Sun (Score:5, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Save some time (Score:3, Interesting)
Another great option to make installing lots of free software packages painless on Solaris (disregarding the obviously superior strategy of LARTing all those l33t L1nux c0d3rz who think that "portable" means "compiles on both Red Hat and Debian" until they beg for a set of Coherent floppies to test their buggy code on it) is the NetBSD pkgsrc tree (what the other BSDs call ports), which happens to be actually platform independent. Not every package works, and it is completely non-integrated with the native Solaris package management, using its own package database, file format and utilities, but it's still great that it's there.
With these tools package management on Solaris can become nearly as comfortable as on a community-developed free OS; I'd say you reach about the same convenience level as with a commercial freenix distribution.
Re:Not a fair review (Score:1, Interesting)
> There are interesting issues porting Sparc code over to x86.
Is that so? Other than byte order issues and those involving machine differences like stack layout, what are you talking about? Most code just works with a recompile; it's usually more work to go between 32 and 64 bit since so many apps assume long == int === ptr
> I don't see any evidence Solaris for x86 would go beyond 4 processors.
We run it regularly on 8 way machines. Right now internal compiled in limits are 21 cpus if I remember correctly. Note again that that most of the kernel is compiled from the same source as the sparc kernel, so the scheduler, VM, etc, are just as scalable on x86 as they are on SPARC. Our biggest difficulties here are that the hardware platforms often don't scale very well; I'm eager to experiment with Solaris x86 on an 8x Opteron...
> Well supported? Sun has dropped Solaris x86 in the past, and picked it up again (for how long?)
We're now shipping x86 hardware (LX50, V60 & V65) with more on the way; this was very much not the case in years past.
> on single processor Sparc with limited memory (128M) Solaris certainly isn't the highest performance OS one can run.
Yup. Not the design center esp. with modern GUIs like Gnome. Mozilla often runs an 80M heap. Plug in more RAM or use the box as a server. It's not the OS that's using all the RAM
Re:My Solaris Review (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Poor Review (Score:3, Interesting)
My install went a lot more smoothly than Jem's, the only issue was not getting more than 8 bits of color. The network came up with no problem when installing Solaris x86 - was even able to browse the web during installation.
My experience is that Linux beats Solaris in device support, SMB support and eye candy. Solaris comes across as more polished, header files are in standard locations, IPsec is supported semi-natively and has better PostScript support built into the OS.
I haven't found anything as nice to do simple photo editing (cropping, resizing, printing) as sdtimage - though it would be nice to have png and JPEG2000 support.
Thoroughly non-researched article (Score:3, Interesting)
SunOS and Solaris pre-date 4.4BSD-Lite by over ten years.
SunOS describes the kernel and operating system services. Solaris describes the "operating environment".
Solaris was not "designed for SPARC and UltraSPARC." It was written originally to run on SPARC derivates as well as the x86 platform, specifically the AT&T NCR platform which preceded Sun's short-lived x86 SunOS machines, though, technically, the AT&T NCR and Sun x86 boxes predate Solaris. The x86 port of Solaris is by no means a new product.
The author complains quite a bit, but that should be expected in the Compatibility and the Installation sections of the article. Long-time Solaris users are familiar with all these problems.
I would have liked some facts to back-up the throwaway comments like "not all that restrictive", "rinky-dink", and "not very impressive".
Kris