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]

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

Source

[vga_init]

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.

Re:I wonder

[bigtomrodney]

Yeah I got mine about 6 weeks back. The upsetting thing is that it doesn't correctly boot on either my Siemens P4 or my Xeon Poweredge 2600. Not a good start, they're both corporation targetted boxes. Pity, I was looking forward to it too. If Nexenta and Belenix can do it with the Source and no funding, it would make you wonder about Sun!

Re:US & Canada only

[leonmergen]

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

Last Gasp of Air for Solaris

[reporter]

The offer to ship Solaris DVDs for free is a last gasp of air for Solaris.

Five years ago, McNealy made a strategic error in refusing to open-source Solaris under a GNU license. He feared that Linux might simply absorb the best parts of Solaris and, thereby, eventually destroy Solaris.

Well, Linux still killed Solaris. The openness of Linux encouraged its proliferation and adoption by key computer giants: IBM, HP, and other companies specializing in commercial computers. IBM, in particular, drastically improved the reliability of Linux. It competed effectively against Solaris in important commercial accounts at telecommunications companies and banks.

Linux hurt Solaris and other commercial UNIXes much more than Linux hurt Windows. Today, there are only two dominant desktop/server operating systems: Linux and NT-based Windows.

Solaris is headed for burial, and McNealy jumped ship -- with millions of dollars in stock options.

VMware to avoid hardware compatibility problems

[ufnoise]

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.

It's true

[faragon]

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!

Re:General Information on Solaris 10?

[2ms]

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:um...

[cp.tar]

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:Yes, but who is their competition?

[Bright Apollo]

I've wondered about the AIX/ Linux strategy for IBM, because I design systems using p-series machines from IBM. From what I can tell, IBM is making money better than anyone in services, which explains the SUSE Linux as well as Red Hat Linux work that they do. The top two Linux distros are those, and IBM wants to be your preferred service provider; they will happily settle for backup at a premium.

AIX exists, though, because it can utterly exploit power CPUs. What I can have my sysadmin do with a p595 and AIX puts any Linux or MS solution to shame, on any x86 platform. Buy any VM you want, I can get partitioning that blows it away, at finer levels, with more CPU left over for processing. And my benchmarks will make you blink.

All of this comes at a cost, of course, and I'm fortunate to have at least the money component of the classic tradeoff available: you can have it fast, cheap, or robust, but you can only pick two. AIX is for those who pick fast and robust.

-BA

Re:Solaris vs. Linux

[dosius]

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:I wonder

[thogard]

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 secured production machine.
You could get trusted solaris for earlier versions but not Solaris 10. Sun's attitude is simple that Solaris 10 is the most secure Solaris ever (which is total BS-- you can't even audit what its starting up)

I've been running Sun hardware and operating systems for 2 decades because I could lock it down and make sure it was locked down. I like the hardware stack on sparc which means off by one errors aren't going to end up in the execution engine and that alone is worth buying sun hardware for things that must be secure. Too bad they broke Solaris 10 so bad. For examples, if you poke data into the smf databases you can get the system to run commands at shutdown (with no way to detect it other than the full audit log). Every time someone fixes the very broken xml shared library you have to reboot the system since init is linked to it (why? init should not be dynamically linked). Init opens shared libs and then starts programs that mount things over the top. I'm not sure you can even properly patch a Solaris 10 system now and I know it can't be secured.