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Sun Microsystems

Solaris 10 to be Released Late in 2004 418

Posted by michael from the sunshine-lollipops-and-rainbows dept.
ptolemu writes "The Register has the scoop on Sun's latest iteration of Solaris. The article includes some details of the new and improved features that will be included in the OS. The OS is scheduled to be released in the second half of 2004."
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Solaris 10 to be Released Late in 2004 More

Solaris 10 to be Released Late in 2004

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  • SO????? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 16, 2004 @02:08AM (#8291766)
    Will it be called SunOS 2.10 or SunOS 3.0?

  • Sub roots (Score:5, Interesting)

    by AmVidia HQ ( 572086 ) <gfung @ m e .com> on Monday February 16, 2004 @02:10AM (#8291773) Homepage
    Sun has also added a new security tool with Solaris Privileges. This lets the root user create sub roots that can have permission, for example, to patch applications but not to touch hardware components.

    When will I see it in Debian stable? =b

    • Considering Debian stable, last I checked, still has the 2.2 kernel as default, I'd say you have at least a ten year wait.

    • Re:Sub roots (Score:4, Interesting)

      by KrispyKringle ( 672903 ) on Monday February 16, 2004 @02:22AM (#8291829)
      Sounds vaguely similar to sudo.

      • Re:Sub roots (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Frymaster ( 171343 ) on Monday February 16, 2004 @02:44AM (#8291921) Homepage Journal
        Sounds vaguely similar to sudo

        you can easily roll your own one of these with a combo of sudo and acls.

        but of course if you let sun do it for you a) you save yourself some work b) management feels more comfortable about it.

      • Re:Sub roots (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Imperator ( 17614 ) <slashdot2@NOsPaM.omershenker.net> on Monday February 16, 2004 @06:38AM (#8292589)

        It would be more than that, at least from what the description suggests. The problem with sudo is that you're often giving suid access to programs that aren't designed to be suid, so someone who was the right entries in the sudoers file can root the machine with ease. Proper privilege separation in the admin tools would mean being able to give someone access to run apt-get dist-upgrade (or whatever it is) without his being able to install his own packages. It would mean letting someone add non-root users but not root users, or resetting passwords but only for users in a certain group. It requires planning when creating admin tools, not a "slap it on" solution like sudo.

        Of course, given that it's Solaris, it may end up just being sudo after all.

    • SELinux gives you this (Score:5, Informative)

      by Oestergaard ( 3005 ) on Monday February 16, 2004 @05:17AM (#8292381) Homepage
      Solaris 10 contains the Trusted Solaris security features (labeled security, mandatory access controls (MAC)) which is what allows such flexible administration without the almighty root user.

      I haven't run the prerelease of solaris 10 myself yet - but from what I've read, they have really taken the trusted solaris features and put them in solaris 10 - this is not just the RBAC features from solaris 9 (which would actually allow the described sub-root concepts, but not all the other goodies that come with real MAC).

      This is what SELinux brings to Linux. You can run Debian stable with SELinux if you really want to. Otherwise, look for RH AS 3.0, or get to work on testing SELinux in debian unstable so that we can all get this functionality in the next debian stable.

      Google around for selinux on debian and you should be able to find out how to do this.

  • N1 Grid Containers Look Interesting (Score:4, Interesting)

    by TravisWatkins ( 746905 ) on Monday February 16, 2004 @02:11AM (#8291780) Homepage
    It should be interesting to see how the N1 Grid Containers work. It would be great to setup a shared server with this so scripts can't eat all the CPU and crash the entire server.
    • If N1 Grid Containers work well it will be a major improvement on the competition. In HP-UX if you want to set up V-Pars you need to dedicate at least one CPU, physical disks and a network interface to every partition, and resource allocation is at the whole CPU level. With an 8 CPU machine that doesn't give you much leeway if you want to have 3 or 4 test environments.

      With N1 Grid Containers OS instances sit on top of a "master" OS, so resources can be divided at a much finer level. You could presumably
    • Posix has had resource limits for a long time now. See setrlimit(2), for example. PAM has had a module to support this for quite a while. I'm sure Solaris has resource limits. Virtualization (what the N1 system seems to be) is a whole different beast, with different uses. If all you want is to stop a script from eating all the CPU, any Unix will do that for you.

  • Is Unix Unix? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ObviousGuy ( 578567 ) <ObviousGuy@hotmail.com> on Monday February 16, 2004 @02:12AM (#8291786) Homepage Journal
    I've wondered for a while now, is one Unix like another Unix? I've used Linux in the past and am trying out FreeBSD now. Frankly, I don't notice the difference from an end-user perspective.

    Linux has SMP support, so does FreeBSD, and so does Solaris. They all have process management functionality (which is what Solaris is introducing with N1 Containers in this release). What would possess me to use Solaris (which costs) instead of Linux or FreeBSD (which are free)?

    Is any one of them more robust than another?

    • Re:Is Unix Unix? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Frymaster ( 171343 ) on Monday February 16, 2004 @02:54AM (#8291959) Homepage Journal
      What would possess me to use Solaris

      one word: support.

      i have worked in two shops in the last four years. one is a red hat shop. we use rhel es with paid support. the other was a full-meal-deal sparc/solaris shop.

      in the solaris shop we had a dramatic failure of a storedge sena array. i called the sun support line and a guy in tweed jacket was at my door in 40 minutes with a grocery bag full of spare parts (gbic cards, if you care). the problem was solved in a total time of one hour.

      in the linux shop i made a web support request for a very simple question (that being: is stronghold bundled with rhel es like the marketing material says? it doesn't seem to be... anyone know?). i logged that request twelve days ago and it's still listed as "awaiting technician". twelve days! and every time i go to check the status the web page throws a NullPointerException. and i got an email for resolution on a support request i didn't even make. i informed red hat that i'd received someone elses support mail and they replied that it would be rerouted, but the erroneous issue still shows up on my incident tracker a week later.

      so... sun costs a bundle. but if you need tech support from a team that makes the justice league of america look like a quilting bee, they're your guys.

      • Re:Is Unix Unix? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by whereiswaldo ( 459052 ) on Monday February 16, 2004 @03:31AM (#8292082) Journal
        in the solaris shop we had a dramatic failure of a storedge sena array. i called the sun support line and a guy in tweed jacket was at my door in 40 minutes ...

        in the linux shop i made a web support request for a very simple question ... i logged that request twelve days ago and it's still listed as "awaiting technician".

        You must admit that these two issues are *very* different in severity. Try logging a failure of a similar magnitude with Red Hat and report your results back for an apples to apples comparison.

      • Re:Is Unix Unix? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Veridium ( 752431 ) on Monday February 16, 2004 @03:49AM (#8292133) Homepage
        I have to agree with you. Sun support kicks butt, second to none. At the one company I worked at as a Solaris admin, the few times I did call Sun, I was never on hold more than a few minutes, and whatever parts were needed were delivered to us within hours.

        Though I always saw that as one of the advantages of having the OS & hardware coming from the same vendor. It seems to keep them from playing the "it must be your hardware" game that so many software vendor support people play whenever the answer isn't easy. Though that doesn't explain your experience with RH.

        Anyone out there have experience with their X86 support?
      • in the solaris shop we had a dramatic failure of a storedge sena array. i called the sun support line and a guy in tweed jacket was at my door in 40 minutes with a grocery bag full of spare parts (gbic cards, if you care). the problem was solved in a total time of one hour.

        And if you had bought Linux machines for the same amount of money, you could have bought so many extra machines that you could have just pulled that machine, dumped it in the trash, and gone on merrily with your work.

        in the linux shop

        • Re:Is Unix Unix? (Score:3, Insightful)

          by stevens ( 84346 )

          Also consider yourself lucky that you have not experienced Sun at their worst yet: yes, they, too, sometimes have less than stellar service even though you pay them a bundle.

          Like diagnosing a memory card failure, replacing it to have the OS panic in a few hours? And then they changed out all the RAM again. And did it again three days later.

          After a few calls the replaced everything but the chassis. But that was several failures in a week!

          Or when our CPUs started blowing, but they wouldn't give a new

        • Re:Is Unix Unix? (Score:3, Informative)

          by Servo ( 9177 )
          And if you had bought Linux machines for the same amount of money, you could have bought so many extra machines that you could have just pulled that machine, dumped it in the trash, and gone on merrily with your work.

          You obviously aren't used to working in a mission critical environment where downtime costs money. It isn't about the hardware, its about the service that system provides. You can't just throw out a production server.

          The only place that makes any sense at all is in a dumby web farm where

      • Re: stronghold (Score:3, Informative)

        by phr1 ( 211689 )
        Stronghold basically doesn't exist any more. It's just regular Apache with mod_ssl now. There stopped being any reason to maintain the old Stronghold module. And mod_ssl is included with Apache 2.0 by default. So yeah, RHEL comes with an SSL web server; whether they bother still labelling it "Stronghold" is not terribly relevant.

      • Re:Is Unix Unix? (Score:4, Informative)

        by christophersaul ( 127003 ) on Monday February 16, 2004 @09:01AM (#8293195)
        Sun's actually a lot, lot less expensive now. Check out the V440, which can come in much cheaper than an equivalent 4 way Xeon.

    • Re:Is Unix Unix? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by deek ( 22697 ) * on Monday February 16, 2004 @02:54AM (#8291960) Homepage Journal
      • I've wondered for a while now, is one Unix like another Unix? I've used Linux in the past and am trying out FreeBSD now. Frankly, I don't notice the difference from an end-user perspective.

      Well, from a basic end-users perspective, there isn't much different at all. Especially if you install a bash shell on solaris, or whatever unix you're using.

      From the administrators perspective, there can be a world of difference [bhami.com]. Many admin tasks can be very similar, but many are also pretty different.

      As for why you'd want to use Solaris over Linux, nobody does NFS better than Sun. I'm not sure what the current status of NFS is under Linux, but I've heard some stories that don't look favourably on Linux and NFS.

      Also, Solaris performs and scales very well on multi-cpu machines, compared to Linux (although with Linux 2.6, this may not be such an advantage anymore).

      Then you've got the added advantages of Solaris being a full 64 bit OS (ignoring the Intel version), with large max file sizes and RAM without any special hacks (again, Linux 2.6 has gone some way to fixing this, with 64 bit file support).

      Basically, for the enterprise, Linux wasn't really an option until 2.6. With 2.6 only in its infancy, Linux still isn't an option. Solaris is though, 'cause it's got the features, the performance, the reliability, and it has been thoroughly tested on the anvil of time.

  • A simple question (Score:2, Interesting)

    by SoIosoft ( 711513 )
    Can we expect Solaris 10 to be released to run on the x86 as well as Sparc hardware?

    It's nice to have a real UNIX (Linux and BSD aren't really UNIX) that is relatively cheap will run on inexpensive x86 hardware.

    • Re:A simple question (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Brandybuck ( 704397 ) on Monday February 16, 2004 @02:54AM (#8291957) Homepage Journal
      Linux and BSD aren't really UNIX

      In all but name, BSD is every bit as much UNIX as Solaris. In fact, Solaris's precessor, SunOS, was directly derived from BSD. If you're hung up on names and trademarks, than BSD is not UNIX. But in every other sense it is.
    • More important than just x86, it's going to come out on x86-64 (AMD). Anyone remember the two or three DUPED stories a month ago on the topic? *cough cough*.

      It means rock-solid 64-bit UNIX on commodity x86 hardware. Very cool...

      • Re:A simple question (Score:4, Funny)

        by Znork ( 31774 ) on Monday February 16, 2004 @04:13AM (#8292215)
        "It means rock-solid 64-bit UNIX on commodity x86 hardware. Very cool..."

        Not really. It means a rock-solid 64-bit unix that you should be running on SPARC. And by the way, it's gonna be discontinued next month. Or wait... no, we're gonna support it. Maybe. Or maybe not. You should be running Solaris on SPARC. But wait, you can run it on x86-64. Or SPARC. But we're going to discontinue Solaris on anything but SPARC next month. Or not. Well, hey, run x86 Solaris! No, it's not supported. Yes it is. Etc. Etc. Etc.

        The fact is, until Sun can get their story straight for 6 consecutive months I wont ever consider running Solaris on anything but SPARC. As long as they cant commit for more than the attention span of a stoned gnat with split personality syndrome I have serious doubts about both the stability and the level of support one will recieve for non-SPARC platforms.

    • Re:A simple question (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Only in the strictest sense of not being able to use the trademark.

      Linux and BSD both do a pretty good job of being standards compliant despite not having been put through certification to use the trademark.

      Some real (trademark using) Unixes are (or at least were) based on the BSD code base more than the SysV code base.

      And if you look too much into standards...well, I'd say that in many cases, it's sad that POSIX chose the SysV rather than BSD ways of doing things (e.g. times is standard rather than getr

    • Re:A simple question (Score:3, Interesting)

      by MosesJones ( 55544 )
      Can we expect Solaris 10 to be released to run on the x86 as well as Sparc hardware?

      Quick answer: yes
      Long answer: YES

      NB The above only works in proportional fonts.

      But to add more. Sun are supporting Solaris x86 as standard going forwards and they have a strong alliance with AMD. Probably the best way to thing of Solaris x86 is as Solaris AMD, sure it might work on the old stuff... but it will fly on the AMD stuff.

      One interesting enterprise question about N1, Solaris 10 etc is this.... right now all o

  • sub roots (Score:5, Interesting)

    by gokulpod ( 558749 ) <gpoduval@ho[ ]il.com ['tma' in gap]> on Monday February 16, 2004 @02:15AM (#8291797) Homepage
    Sun has also added a new security tool with Solaris Privileges. This lets the root user create sub roots that can have permission, for example, to patch applications but not to touch hardware components.

    This is a very interesting feature. Except for using sudo, does anyone know of any effort going on in linux to provide a similar feature ? Maybe Sun can port it to linux just to prove how OSS friendly they are ;)

    • Re:sub roots (Score:5, Informative)

      by Russ Steffen ( 263 ) on Monday February 16, 2004 @02:21AM (#8291827) Homepage

      This feature sounds like the privilege model from Trusted Solaris is being mainlined into the plain ol' Solaris tree. In which case, yes, someone is working to bring that into Linux. That's one of things SELinux [nsa.gov] is doing.

      • selinux (Score:5, Informative)

        by Vic ( 6867 ) on Monday February 16, 2004 @02:30AM (#8291860) Homepage
        SE Linux is being included in upcoming releases of Fedora Core, and eventually Red Hat.
        Link [redhat.com]

      • Re:sub roots (Score:4, Insightful)

        by ryanw ( 131814 ) on Monday February 16, 2004 @03:06AM (#8292004)
        Interesting... Everyone has the debate of Linux GPL vs putting Linux out there with a BSD license. Would would be the problem of letting an older linux kernel tree off and call it something else and go with a BSD license? If it dies a horrible death, so be it, the main GPL linux tree will continue... But that way it could give the debate a run for it's money.

    • Re:sub roots (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 16, 2004 @02:44AM (#8291923)
      In linux you can set up SELinux.

      this is Security Enhanced Linux.

      It basicly isolates every thing from everything else in linux right down to the kernel level.

      For example if you have a Apache webserver and it gets comprimised, a hacker can't use Apache's security level to give him elevated permissions to control another part of the OS. In a regular OS you have to allow the Apache some root control over the computer to have it work properly and a hacker can use this to violate your computer.

      In SELinux even if a hacker gained root access their is a limited amount of damage he can do, depending on how you set it up.

      You could if you wanted to use this to set up roles for users, like a apache admin or a sendmail admin, or a filesystem admin or a /dev/ file admin.

      SeLinux is brought to us by our freinds and future government overloads: the NSA.


    • actually using something as simple as groups can achieve this in case you (obviously) didn't know. ACL's work fine and lsacl [toadstool.se] written in Ruby can be tweaked to run elsewhere. But just in case you don't feel like tweaking, or perhaps you just ... don't know how... ACL Linux [srnet.cz] can be downloaded. Personally I prefer solaris [netcraft.com] over most flavors of *nix, and I've been through them all starting about 6 years ago with Linux. As an admin, for financial purposes... I would go with the following in this order... Sun* (inc
    • Yes, you can get similar functionality for Linux.

      From a security standpoint, it's a bad idea. But it markets itself well because everybody thinks that more security features mean more security.

  • Solaris vs. Linux (Score:4, Informative)

    by bazik ( 672335 ) <bazik AT gentoo DOT org> on Monday February 16, 2004 @02:16AM (#8291804) Homepage Journal
    Solaris is great for the big Sun (Ultra)Sparc servers, but for the "smaller" machines with less than 32 CPU, Linux works so much better and faster. Not to mention the bigger choice of more current Software.

    But then again, I might be a bit biased [gentoo.org] in my opinion :)

  • That rocks .... (Score:5, Funny)

    by jobbleberry ( 608883 ) on Monday February 16, 2004 @02:20AM (#8291824)
    I loved the first movie, I hope they recast George Cloony, but I didn't like the other 8 ....

    Uh wait this isn't about the movie Solaris is it?

  • Solaris 10????!!!!??!?!? (Score:4, Funny)

    by _ph1ux_ ( 216706 ) on Monday February 16, 2004 @02:23AM (#8291840)
    I just recently saw Solaris. Not even a sequel out yet... how could they be coming out with a 10th version?

    It was good I guess, but good enough for 9 sequels in 3 years??
  • sure, some people are running solaris 8 still, by the cs dept here is running five .8

    • Re:Slow Solaris Upgrades (Score:4, Informative)

      by ogre57 ( 632144 ) on Monday February 16, 2004 @03:13AM (#8292027)
      sure, some people are running solaris 8 still, by the cs dept here is running .. SunOS 5.8

      Solaris 8 is SunOS 5.8, 9 is 5.9, 7 is 5.7, 2.6 is 5.6, etc. Guessing Solaris 10 will be SunOS 5.10. Part of why, pre-Solaris was 4.x so Solaris became 5.x, for eg version testing by scripts.

      Other, have noticed that for whatever reason several companies deployed the even numbered Solaris versions, mostly skipped the odd ones. Meaning they were on 2.6, played with 7 a little, upgraded to 8 soon after it came out, have only played with 9. Seems they are treating it as if it were the Linux even/odd release/devel scheme.

  • Arrgghh! (Score:5, Funny)

    by jaguarxse ( 730735 ) on Monday February 16, 2004 @02:41AM (#8291908)
    Just when I finally decided to get certified in 9.....at least the upgrades aren't as prolific as with MS!

  • I've been running the beta for a while.... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Desmoden ( 221564 ) on Monday February 16, 2004 @02:42AM (#8291913) Homepage

    Has some cool features. Once apps (oracle etc) get "blessed" it will be nice to have a new core OS to go to since no one will support 5.9.

    If for no other reason than getting away from a 101.5MB recommended patch cluster.

    There are a lot of cool new commands for kernel info. There is also a performance increase depending on which cpus you are running.

  • Will they charge for x86 Solaris 10 (Score:3, Interesting)

    by rueben ( 112216 ) * <rueben26&gmail,com> on Monday February 16, 2004 @02:46AM (#8291929)
    And then change their minds a few months later, like Solaris 9?

  • So is this version going to (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 16, 2004 @02:50AM (#8291945)
    So is this version going to include the feature of it not being *fricking painful* to compile nearly anything not specifically targetted at Solaris?

    No, I'm not trolling. Anyone who's worked with previous Solaris versions knows what I'm talking about. Anyone who's tried to compile GNOME as a non-root user on Solaris 9 is rolling on the floor crying from the memories right now. It seems like Solaris has everything just *barely* different enough that absolutely everything is a slightly different kind of complete pain to compile.

    Yes I realize that at least part of this is that apps are targetted for Linux, so of course it isn't Sun's fault when shit doesn't compile. And yes, I'm exaggerating, the compilation problems only happen occationally, it's just that when they do happen it's really bad. But through the shit-colored glasses of memory, it seems like every time you try to compile some large free software package in solaris you uncover some new and painful oddity about the OS.

    • Re:Not just Solaris (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Bastian ( 66383 ) on Monday February 16, 2004 @03:24AM (#8292053)
      I've run into the same problem on Mac OS X. Usually you're fine, but when you aren't, you're in a world of pain. I think this is a lot of why fink just creates a separate file tree rather than trying to merge itself in with the main one.

      I've actually been considering dual-booting GNU/Linux on my mac for just this reason.

    • Re:So is this version going to (Score:5, Informative)

      by Phibz ( 254992 ) on Monday February 16, 2004 @03:28AM (#8292069)
      I maintain packages for 300 or so programs for Solaris. I've compiled all of them using Sun's compiler, Forte from SunONE Studio 7. Although I agree that some programs are more difficult than others to compile under sSolaris, I've been able compile nearly anything I've attempted using forte 7. I used to use gcc but the speed improvements that forte adds make it very attractive.

      I compiled GNOME and KDE and although I wouldn't say they were easy to compile I did get them working. And no I didn't compile any of it as the root user. I even was able to compile libavcodec something that supposedly runs on Solaris but is coded in a very very gcc specific way.

      So I'm not really sure what difficulties you're refering to. So long as you have a sane build environment, gnu make, autoconf, automake, m4, a good compiler, gcc or forte, and know your compiler well you shouldn't have any problems.

      Phibz

    • Re:So is this version going to (Score:5, Interesting)

      by plankers ( 27660 ) on Monday February 16, 2004 @03:33AM (#8292089) Homepage
      IBM has gone so far as to build a number of GCCisms into their native compilers [ibm.com], just to deal with this sort of thing on AIX. It's actually really nice -- most everything Open Source builds on AIX 5.2 now.

      • advocatus diaboli (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Imperator ( 17614 ) <slashdot2@NOsPaM.omershenker.net> on Monday February 16, 2004 @07:01AM (#8292641)
        Isn't this the sort of thing that we'd be up in arms about if it were MS compiler quirks other compilers were emulating? The GCC compilers should make strict conformance to modern standards the default, and make you turn on the extensions manually.

        Why, for example, does GNU C++ include binary <? and >? operators for min and max? I could see the attraction in C, where preprocessor macros and their issues with side effects are a pain in the ass. But in C++, inline templated functions can do it just as well and are much more portable. This is the sort of irresponsible "extend the language by default" approach that the GCC compilers are full of.

        Don't get me wrong; I love the GCC suite and for all the supposed performance issues, I wouldn't trade GCC for any other toolchain I've ever used. But free software should set an example by encouraging portable code.

        </rant>

        • And they are: R. M. S.

          This is the sort of irresponsible "extend the language by default" approach that the GCC compilers are full of.

          So, you'll be submitting a patch, then. What's that? You say you haven't tried it? Ah.

          We've tried getting rid of some of the extensions that were not well thought out. He's just dead-set on keeping them.

          Also -- unfortunately -- many of them are actually being used. Pulling the rug out from under your users is not a keen move.

          It's a slow battle. Many were re

    • Re:So is this version going to (Score:4, Insightful)

      by javiercero ( 518708 ) on Monday February 16, 2004 @04:53AM (#8292312)
      "Yes I realize that at least part of this is that apps are targetted for Linux, so of course it isn't Sun's fault when shit doesn't compile. "

      That is the understatement of the year. Us BSD users have feel the pain of shitty code for years, as well as most other non Linux/GNU userland dependant Nixes out there.

      I guess you have to take the good with the bad of OSS, the bad being the amount of shitty coders outthere that do not have a clue. And I have had my love/hate relationship with gcc for over a decade, sometimes I wonder why they still try to pretend to be a C-compiler :) and at least be honest enough and call it "new and improved C" or whatever but not C. And yes even with the strict ansi c flags I have had trouble with gcc. But I do not complain too much because I have gotten good things out of gcc too.

      I just wish portability was real sometimes :(.
    • I'm still trying to compile GNOME on Solaris *as* a root user. It's been a year now. Not done yet. Seriously. I wasted a lot of time trying to get that OpenJade crap working. I couldn't figure out why OpenJade would crash every time I ran it. It was only months later that I found out that a shared library version of OpenSP doesn't work on Solaris. The Openjade people didn't think it important enough to mention. But even after getting that stuff built and figuring out how to install DTDs by looking at my Lin

      • pkgsrc may be what you're searching for (Score:4, Informative)

        by cquark ( 246669 ) on Monday February 16, 2004 @08:00AM (#8292847)
        Only a few years ago, SPARC/Solaris was the most standard platform for open source software and IA32/Linux was the nonstandard, difficult one to build on. It's amazing how fast times have changed.

        As for libraries compiled with a different C compiler than you're using to link with, that's a common problem between gcc and vendor UNIX C compilers. However, the vendor C compiler suites shouldn't be disregarded as they offer many advantages over gcc (take a look at some of the Solaris bugs in gcc and gdb.)

        However, if you want something like /usr/ports on Solaris, check out pkgsrc [netbsd.org]. It's NetBSD's ports collection, and it has been ported to Solaris 8 and 9.

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday February 16, 2004 @08:38AM (#8293061)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • there's an old saying... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by SuperBanana ( 662181 ) on Monday February 16, 2004 @03:02AM (#8291993)

    There's an old legal saying- never ask a question you don't already know the answer to.

    The company is so confident about Solaris' speed that officials repeatedly offered to challenge Linux on benchmarks in the coming months.

    Now, usually companies don't make such bets unless they're well hedged. So, perhaps running some benchmarks against the preview versions of 10(the article mentions most of 10 is available already to update subscribers) might be a nice idea, to see what's got Sun so cocky, instead of just saying "oh. Solaris is crap"(which is at least partially wrong anyway).

    • Re:there's an old saying... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by jcupitt65 ( 68879 ) on Monday February 16, 2004 @04:10AM (#8292207)

      I found this other article linked on the reg, talking about the new TCP/IP stack:

      http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/61/33440.html [theregister.co.uk]

      The relevant quote is (near the bottom):

      We worked hard on efficiency, and we now measure, at a given network workload on identical x86 hardware, we use 30 percent less CPU than Linux.

      So I guess that should give them a fair performance advantage under very heavy static loads. Although he doesn't say which linux.

    • Umm, microsoft claims that XP/2003 is more secure than Linux. In the wake of the last eight virus attacks and source code leak, I think M$ is wrong. Maybe I'm wrong, though? :)
    • There's a reason why they are piping up the rhetoric... very recent recommended patchkits include a kernel patch (dated around Christmas eve) that have very specific "fixes" which include massive performance improvements in over a dozen system calls. Each fix/report states that those system calls were slower when tested against Linux 2.4/2.6. The fixes have been back-ported to Solaris 9 and are included in Solaris 10. Hope this helps.

  • Why all the bad comments? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by KidSock ( 150684 ) on Monday February 16, 2004 @03:04AM (#8292001)
    Excuse me but this actually sounds pretty good. This "containers" thing permits running hundreds of virtual machines on one host (and not a moment too late as that idea is becoming a very popular -- I have a VPS runing UML and it's very snappy). The DTrace utility sounds nice although I probably shouldn't say that considering I've never tried it. And they're going to run Opteron and claim that they can beat the Linux benchmarks. I don't know about you but I wouldn't mind having an Opteron box running Solaris 10.

    [disclaimer: I have 50 shares of SUNW]

  • Dtrace? (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The comments about DTrace are clearly ludicrous:

    DTrace sends the probes through a server looking for hardware errors and anything that might be slowing application performance.

    DTrace is a sweet tool for anyone who's had the chance to run Solaris Express, but a much better description can be found at the source [sun.com].

  • timezones & reboot (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    with this release will i be able to change the timezone without requiring a reboot?

  • Linux Business Week says Solaris 10 has.. (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 16, 2004 @04:39AM (#8292276)
    ...600 new features [linuxworld.com]

  • all my replies in one go (Score:5, Insightful)

    by chegosaurus ( 98703 ) on Monday February 16, 2004 @07:39AM (#8292737) Homepage
    Wow some of the comments on here are uninformed. Especially those modded informative or interesting.

    "Hey, Solaris sucks! Linux is way better and it's free as in speech!" +5 interesting

    "Hey Linux does everything Solaris does and it's free as in beer" +5 informative

    "Hey there was a film called Solaris! OMG LOL!!!" +5 funny

    Do you *never* get bored of pointing out that x86 chips have higher clock speeds than SPARCs?

    Don't you think we *know* by now that Linux is free?

    If you know how to handle Solaris, you will know that: it has some features that linux does not. It's no harder to build software for than linux. Trusted Solaris privileges are not the same as sudo. dtrace is not the same as cat /proc/whatever. Solaris is not so slow it's unusable on 32 CPUs. Version 5.8 is not four versions older than 9. There are smarter ways of patching than downloading the recommended cluster every day. But hey, post uninformed crap and up your karma. That's what matters.

    If you don't know what you're talking about, shut up and leave the discussion to people with some interest and background in the subject. And stop complaining that "no one uses Solaris, so who cares there's a new major release", when you've probably been up all night bitching on IRC that the mods here rejected the 2.6.3-rc3 release story you submitted.

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