No Solaris 9 for x86 272
Jon writes: "Unsurprisingly, LinuxWorld is reporting that Sun is not going to support Solaris 9 on PCs. The article cites a marketing suit who claims that the prevailing economic conditions account for this."
No amount of careful planning will ever replace dumb luck.
mistake, but not fatal (Score:2, Informative)
Solaris x86 was a dog on uniprocessor systems and multi-processor boxes aren't worth the cost when you can get a decent SPARC *blade* system for $999 and have 64-bit processing power.
IA-64 is still far off, and you can bet that Sun will be there when that technology is actually released and more mature since they *have* to compete with M$, IBM and HPaQ on enterprise turf where dumb suits and admins think of "plug" when they hear "spark".
As a Solaris daily user, I'd rather run Linux or QNX on PC h/w than Solaris anyway. Better updates to match h/w advances along with solid performance on single-chip boxes.
Sol/x86 disappearing is not good (Score:3, Informative)
It's not good. When starting to work with Solaris in my company I really enjoyed it to have a free Solaris8/x86 to install it at one of my PCs at home in parallel so I could hack it a bit and get more used to it by playing around with configuration options that I'd never dared to play around with on the systems at work.
It would be _so_ good if one could also do this with Solaris 9 at home, provided your employer started to use 9 at work. At least Solaris 8/x86 is still there.
Too bad this really fits with the news from today that Sun has removed the download links to Solaris 8. :-(((
Because Linux at home on your Average Cheap Hardware doesn't help you to get used to SunOS. IMHO it was quite a clever idea from Sun to support Solaris on cheap x86 hardware and give it away for free, so more people had a look at it. And for you at home, it is always a good chance to know how as many as possible different systems look and behave. Yes, it's Unix. But if you've never seen Solaris/SunOS before and only hacked with Linux, you'd be amazed how different the system is.
Re:Shame. (Score:2, Informative)
Well, you can download the Solaris 8 iso images and burn your own CDs of it as well though.
Just buy a sunblade 100? HELL NO (Score:3, Informative)
YES FOR A NETWORK CARD.. that network card better be one designed by god for that price... sun hardware is way to costly for a student that just wants to learn to use it.. not every school has sun boxes laying around for use.
Re:Just buy a sunblade 100? HELL NO (Score:5, Informative)
It cost me around £1200 for a fully working 64-bit system with 2Gb RAM at home (the boxes are much more expensive here in the UK as usual) which is easily comparable to a "reasonable" development-standard PC workstation with the same levels of stability.
(I have two - one at work and one at home - they're great - try them!)
Q.
Solaris 9/x86 really killed or just deferreded? (Score:4, Informative)
There is currently a beta for x86 and a release is still planned and worked on.
I believe this engineer quite trusworthy, especially more than a Linux gazette...
Another interesting piece of information from this source: they are stopping the possibility to download Solaris 8 x86 from their webserver, but you have to buy the media kit.
Re:Sol/x86 disappearing is not good (Score:3, Informative)
Although they removed the links to the download page, it appears that you can still download x86 solaris 8 from sun by just changing the 'sparc' to 'intel' on the download link [sun.com]
Good thing too, I had decided to cobble a machine together to install solaris over the holiday break and had downloaded the HCL to make sure I was using stuff that was supported. I have the machine assembled, but I hadn't downloaded the CD images yet. Guess I'll be doing that tonight.
Re:Solaris x86 is pretty irrelevant anyway (Score:3, Informative)
It uses PC133 ECC SDRAM, which does not cost a lot of money (I paid $63/512M stick in November). 3x512M + 1x128M, ah, sweet necture of the gods....
Also, think about adding a SCSI controller and HDD if it is for something other than development. The IDE drives won't cut it in a multi-user environment. Should set you back about $300 for an Adaptec 160 controller, and about the same for a SCSI-160 drive. The IDE drive I got was only 15G, not sure what RPM....
Re:Why dont they ... (Score:4, Informative)
note also that while your suggestion would reduce their support costs, it would not be trivial, and would likely not reduce them by nearly as much as you'd think. there'd need to be a certification process, and some detailed tracking of what cards of various types are/arn't supported, beyond just the base system. remember that when you by a "Dell Whatever" pre-built system, you have no real idea what exact video, network, or whatever card's in it; Dell (and all the others) think it's fine to change revisions of cards.
Performance of Solaris x86 and Sun's decision (Score:2, Informative)