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."
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No Solaris 9 for x86
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No proprietary unices left on x86 (Score:5, Interesting)
As this article [theregister.co.uk] on The Register points out, there are now no proprietary unices being actively developed on x86.
Linux and the BSDs remain the only options.
john
looks like cobalt is linux (Score:2, Interesting)
they where proud of it as all the Unix vendors where selling NT
now they have linux and solaris that makes 2 in my book
(granted they are both unixy)
I wonder what the SUN sales Spin is going to be now
regards
john jones
Re:Prevailing market conditions... (Score:5, Interesting)
And it has done this admirably. I learnt Solaris largely by playing around on my x86. It was fun - I really learned it like I wouldnt have done with a production system - man, I mangled that f*cker no end. Not that I could really do anything hugely useful with Slowaris that I couldnt do better with BSD/linux, but that wasnt the point. I have taken my experience with x86 Solaris onto using a 4500 workstation, where it is a good option for what we are doing. Who knows, if I hadnt had that first hand experience with Solaris, Sun may have been a few hundred thousand worse off.
On the other hand, I doubt the experiment as a 'tester' was really worth the expenditure. The growing diversty in the x86 world was prolly the big killer, what with all these various chips and chipsets etc.
Really no surprise...... (Score:2, Interesting)
When it comes to the x86 platform, Linux is ubiquitous, and there are thousands of precompiled binaries available for it. AFAIK, unless one is willing to compile everything from source, the number of apps available for x86 Solaris is much smaller.
This is nothing more than the free market at work. Consumers choose the best product for a job based on ease of use, availability, and other factors. For most x86 users, there is not enough of a difference between running Linux and Solaris to justify the support of the latter.
Re:Why dont they ... (Score:5, Interesting)
In some ways, it's a bit of a chicken and egg problem. You won't get more drivers without more people using the OS -- but it's not worth spending thousands of dollars to create a driver that dozens of people are going to use... on the other hand, people aren't going to use the OS unless you have the drivers. . . . .
rinse and repeat as necessary.
Limiting the hardware you support even more than already would make the lack of users problem even more acute -- and the crowd (large handful?) of people using current hardware that would be orphaned by such a move would be up in arms about it. Far better to take your hit and essentially walk away from the X-86 market. Give end of life support to people running solaris 8 on X-86, and wean everybody else either onto real sun boxes (the preferred for Sun), or onto Linux -- which at least keeps them in the UN*X market.
The other issue (as someone else pointed ou) is that Sun's primary interest in Solaris-86 was probably to keep people intersted in Unix-type operating systems, even if they only had commodity Intel boxes -- but Linux now does that so well, that it's easier (and cheaper) to put together Linux -> Solaris migration tools (done!) and Let Linux and the BSDs handle the X-86 market which they serve so well, already.
Solaris 8 on x86 just a novelty (Score:2, Interesting)
First off, to be fair, the box had a K6-II@400 mghz so I didn't expect it to blaze in the first place. But I'm used to the performance of the E10k's we have layin' here at work as well as various 6500s and 4500s so I was a bit disappointed. It was cool for a while though. The box is back to running whatever linux distro I feel like messing with. (I should put a crontab entry to fdisk every Saturday
I had to go through the parts box for a video card that was old enough for Solaris to like (I don't remember Trident or Virge something). No Voood Doo or Rage goin' on here although I suspect some patch might work later after the install.
Sun did a nice thing releasing Solaris 8 for x86. I certainly helped me become more familiar with that OS as a whole. I wouldn't recommend, however, using the x86 version on a production intel machine. There are better OS's for 32 bits :).
I don't mean to be putting down Sun's efforts. The gave us Solaris 8 (for free even). I just don't think we're going to miss much without Solaris 9 x86.
Delay ? (Score:4, Interesting)
Solaris x86 is pretty irrelevant anyway (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course half the software you needed didn't run on x86 and hardware support was abysmal (couldn't get v8 to talk to my 3C905, I mean c'mon here). But damn that was a lot of money you just saved.
Then Sun decided to release their Ultra 5 workstations at 6k a piece or so, IIRC. The market for Solaris x86 went **POOF** in about 4 seconds. The damn things are real live UltraSparcs and they work like a hot damn.
Sun made the usual moves to try and spark interest, gave it away free, devoted new marketing resources to it etc. But it didn't catch on, unless you really needed Solaris on your x86 for some reason most of us tried it for 2 days and ran right back to linux or *BSD as fat as we could.
I mean really, with a nicely setup Blade 100 going for $2,450 at store.sun.com [sun.com] who would ever bother with a half suported stepchild?
Better to make Sol-x86 or soffice? (Score:3, Interesting)
it's deeper than that (Score:3, Interesting)
And there's a bit of spite involved, too