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."

Re:Not "just like" ShipIt...

[larien]

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

Re:Not "just like" ShipIt...

[shades66]

>"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:um...

[Tony Hoyle]

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:I wonder

[222]

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.

Re:General Information on Solaris 10?

[larien]

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:General Information on Solaris 10?

[swordgeek]

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.

Yes, but who is their competition?

[Kenneth Stephen]

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:Last Gasp of Air for Solaris

[swordgeek]

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.

Oracles Knifes Solaris to Death

[Anonymous Coward]

According to the latest news [infoworld.com], Oracle has abandoned Solaris in favor of Linux. Oracle programmers do their development first and foremost on Linux. Then, if there is customer demand, the programmers port their code to Solaris.

Re:I wonder

[QuickFox]

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:Yes, but who is their competition?

[TheRaven64]

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

[ratbag]

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:Free Coasters!

[baldass_newbie]

Forget the coasters, I want the DVD case.

Re:I wonder

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

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:I wonder

[Thalagyrt]

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.

Yeah but

[thomasa]

Now they are charging you for the patches. Try getting the
Solaris 10 recommended patches without a contract.

Re:Yeah but

[ilikejam]

Security and driver updates are still free.

troll with bad karma gets +4, film at +11

[hildi]

the slashdroids have forgotten by true identity. blinded by silly jokes, they allow me to slowly gain points. soon i will have their confidence, and become a moderator... whereupon i will unleash the wrath of innocents imprisoned by bad karma in the past. 'bitchslap' away, rob malda and you other man children. the people who you have insulted will not cease until a system of justice prevails on the slashroid!

Re:Fruit Issues

[fm6]

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].

Go straight to the source...

[mritunjai]

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