Wow! With Solaris 10, Sun Microsystems has done a marvelous job of bringing Solaris fully into the x86 world. Gone are the days when Solaris only runs on Sun hardware or when it only runs well on Sun hardware. Solaris 10 comes with greatly expanded off-the-shelf x86 hardware compatibility and a license that is hard to beat. It’s a binary right to use and Open Solaris, the open source version is soon to come. IT Managers that have been wanting to bring a stable, scalable Operating Environment into their network infrastructures, but who have been unwilling to commit to the Sun hardware platform, for various reasons, are now free, pun intended, to bring Solaris on board and to run it on the hardware of their choice. When I attended the Solaris 10 launch event, last November, I was very impressed with what was planned. Technical feature after technical feature were revealed. Solaris Containers (Virtualization Zones), Project Janus (Linux Binary Compatibility), ZFS (the hardware agnostic file system), Predictive Self Healing, DTrace (Dynamic Tracing), FireEngine (the new, completely rewritten TCP/IP stack), and on and on. I remember asking myself, “Can the reality even come close to the hype?” A couple of releases later, I am definitely tempted to say, “maybe”. With ZFS and Linux Compatibility still missing in action, I lean towards, “no.” However, what is demonstrably there, is very worthy and to be frank, amazing.
I have just spent three weeks putting Solaris 10 3/05 through its paces and on the whole, it was an impressive display of technological muscle. The developers at Sun deserve huge raises. Three technological features were standout: Solaris Containers, DTrace and FireEngine. I will address each, in turn.
Raves
Solaris Containers
What is a container? It is a software partition. Sounds pretty innocuous, doesn’t it? Well, it is anything but. This baby allows you to “create up to 4000 secure, fault-isolated software partitions (or containers), each with its own IP address, memory space, file area, host name, and root password”, to quote Sun’s marketing material. If you want to maximize your system’s utilization, this is the way to do it. Zones are a technological marvel but they can be a configuration Hades. I typed, “man zonecfg”, and wished I hadn’t. Not to worry though, Angel Camacho, a Sun employee has written a very nice tutorial, over at BigAdmin that is a breeze to follow: Container Demo at BigAdmin.
Image 1 – JDS Terminal Window Showing Some Running Zones
I was able to get the containers up and running, chewing up cpu and memory, in about an hour (I was exceedingly careful, or I could have been done in 15 minutes). I had to make some adjustments to accommodate for differences in our hardware configurations, but Angel’s work is commendable and clearly demonstrates the feature. Extending the demo is straightforward and illustrative of the power of the technology. It is all about driving utilization and containers maximize system utilization. Containers are easy to backup, restore, boot and reboot. In my experience, it took about 10 seconds to boot/reboot a container – much faster than the equivalent physical computer.
DTrace
What can I say? DTrace is still the cream of the crop. Maybe it is the developer in me, but I love this techno-gem. DTrace exposes EVERYTHING about running processes, and I mean EVERYTHING. The GUI or lack thereof is appalling, but even as a command-line, scripting language, DTrace is the most powerful tool of its kind. I am not going to embarrass myself by recreating my DTrace adventures. I will simply point you at the BigAdmin DTrace resources page and if you are truly curious and technically savvy. I suggest that you read the tutorial. Suffice it to say that DTrace works, as advertised, and then some.
FireEngine
Now known by the exciting, “Networking Performance”, moniker, FireEngine is likely to provide the biggest performance boost of all for networking environments. The new TCP/IP engine included with Solaris 10 so outclasses its predecessors and even many of its competitors, that it’s simply stunning. I enjoyed moving massive amounts of data around without much more than a momentary spike of CPU utilization. It might have been apropos to call it FireHose – a massive torrent of data moving at unbelievable speeds. More information on the Networking Performance feature of Solaris 10 can be found here.
Disappointments
Missing Features
With all of the goodness, is there any badness? Definitely, as I mentioned above, ZFS and Linux Compatibility are still MIA. The Sun marketers spent a lot of time and effort pumping up these features and yet, here we are in mid 2005 and these features are still missing. Read about them on the following pages:
ZFS – Zetabyte File System
Linux Interoperability – Project Janus
Sparse Menus
Another disappointment for me is the sparseness of the Java Desktop System – JDS, menus. JDS is the new interface of choice in Solaris 10. I had high hopes that the switch to JDS from Common Desktop Environment – CDE, would be a vast and telling improvement considering that CDE is fairly unchanged, since the dawn of computing. JDS is a huge leap forward in usability. But it has some of the appearances of being tacked on as an afterthought. The CDE menus contain important commands that are either missing from the JDS menus, or are buried in some obscure location. Take the puzzling omission of the Solaris Management Console – the main graphical administrative tool and the Printer Administrator from the JDS menus. It is amazing to me that these critically important programs do not have a corresponding menu item in JDS. CDE includes these applications in the menus along with other, less critical applications. CDE also comes with a Help menu that contains help in addition to links to the Answerbooks, Solaris Support and Sun Solve. Even so, on balance, JDS is still a serious improvement to the UI.
Not Bash
Some folks consider this a feature – I consider it an annoyance. Solaris insists on not having Bash, or another modern shell, as the default. What this means to the user, is that there are not reasonable line editing or history features. For example, in most modern operating systems you can use the left and right arrow keys to move the cursor left and right to modify the command on the command line and use the up and down arrow keys to select previously executed commands. In the default shell, you are completely out of luck.
Wrap-up
Solaris 10 is chock full of new technology. Along with XP, Linux and Mac OS X, Solaris represents the new best of breed operating environments. To underscore the importance of Solaris, one need look no farther than academia. Reference, Wiley’s “Operating System Concepts”, 7th Edition, by Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne, dedicates a significant amount of text to Solaris. If Sun can get the missing features into Solaris and improve the UI, the sky is the limit. To read more about the features in Solaris 10, start by looking at the Solaris Data Sheets.
Recommendation
Get it! Solaris 10 is a stable, powerful and speedy operating environment that is free to use, works with commodity hardware and has a vibrant, growing community of users. This is a “must have” upgrade for existing Solaris users. Get Solaris 10 Here.
If you would like to see your thoughts or experiences with technology published, please consider writing an article for OSNews.
How do I make a desktop OS out of it? Where do I find enough software? Where do I find good documentation?
I would like to see a more in-depth review of Solaris 10, but I guess I’ll have to wait for Solaris to become mainstream. Some benchmarks wouldn’t hurt either.
Other than that, I am curious about the bash part. How could Solaris possibly insist on not having bash around? Shouldn’t it be possible to install any piece of software that compiles?
How do I make a desktop OS out of it?
Install it on your desktop and use it.
Where do I find enough software?
Define “enough” for me and I’ll try to help.
Where do I find good documentation?
http://www.sun.com is a great start.
Solaris’s Container tech is very advanced.. S10 has very nice server features out of the box..
By the by to desktop it includes Sun’s Java Desktop System, Release 3.. Screenshots as OSDir.com to download
http://www.sun.com/software/solaris
MrX
Just to add:
“Where do I find enough software?”
/usr/sfw
http://www.sunfreeware.com
http://www.blastwave.org
Solaris 10 Companion CD
“Where do I find good documentation? ”
docs.sun.com
sunsolve.sun.com
Happy computing
As for bash…
It’s there alright in /bin/bash and can be used anytime you wish. The default “root” shell is still /sbin/sh.
screenshots: http://shots.osdir.com/slideshows/slideshow.php?release=279&slide=3…
> Other than that, I am curious about the bash part. How could Solaris
> possibly insist on not having bash around? Shouldn’t it be possible to
> install any piece of software that compiles?
bash is in Solaris 10 (it has been part of Solaris since Solaris 8).
You can probably find bash in /usr/sfw/bin, although I’ve wiped my Solaris 10 installation so I can’t check. Personally, I prefer tcsh, and it along with bash can also be downloaded from sunfreeware.com as a Sun package (pkg_add -d)
Torvalds nailed it when he said that opening up Solaris didn’t mean THAT much… x86 support is still terrible (haven’t been able to install it on 3 different boxes that are all linux/windows friendly) so you’re either stuck with a shortlist of x86 components or Sun HW. I hope Sun improves in this area, as it would be great to bring the advanced OS features to the desktop for developers like myself =)
The review was pretty accurate in that Solaris 10 has a ****-load of new features. So far I’ve used JDS, SMF, and DTrace and am quite happy that Sun is still on the bleeding edge of operating systems. Microsoft is nowhere close, Linux is closer but lacks integration.
As far as JDS goes, I actually liked its relative simplicity. There are still a few points that need polishing, like multimedia. But it generally works well, and I use it as my primary desktop. The only things I added were the latest release of Firefox and several goodies from Blastwave.
For so many new features, I’ve also had good luck with stability. The only times I reboot the kernel is when I go out of town or there is an extended power outage.
…
depends on the criteria.
if you dont want your work to be owned by sun, then i think a lot of licences beat it.
sun are a commercial company and solaris is open enough that you can rad the code and at to it, which is better than nothing, and pragmatically good.
but they are not open enough to give code to the whole open source community, not that they have to.
it would just be nice if we could all just be friends and share 🙂
For non-commercial users like myself, who don’t have support contracts with Sun, what is the most effective way to submit suggestions and or potential bugs back to Sun?
Define “in depth”. Here are links to the two articles I wrote for OSNews (not that I am plugging my articles):
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=9865
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=5485
If you want more infromation, just ask for specifics.
Torvalds nailed it when he said that opening up Solaris didn’t mean THAT much
Of course, if you’re taking about the interview he had with CNET, he then went on to say that he lets other people tell him what technologies he should think are important:
“But more importantly, if I’m wrong, that’s OK. People who know Solaris better than I do will tell me and other people about the great things they offer. To try to figure it out on my own would be a waste of time.”
http://news.com.com/Torvalds+A+Solaris+skeptic/2008-1082_3-5498799….
It’s just that Torvalds isn’t actually listening.
IMHO, it’s better to try it yourself and make up your own mind.
[Y]ou’re either stuck with a shortlist of x86 components or Sun HW
This isn’t the end of the world, really. If you harken back to Linux’s early days, they didn’t have much hardware or driver support either. The HCL for the Linux 1.1 kernel was much shorter than that for 2.6, and as more people at Sun and elsewhere work on Solaris driver support, the list will grow.
FYI, I was able to install Solaris on my laptop and it worked out of the box. It’s an unsupported configuration, but everything just worked for me.
For me, the only downside of Solaris was the install process… I was required to have 4 discs, and the process took about 2.5 hours.
Today, that is unacceptable, I almost gave up, but for my interest in seeing what it was all about.
Other than that, the only other issue I had was with my NIC, it wasn’t supported, although the drivers are around. However, it is kinda hard to download NIC drivers when the only box currently at your disposal is unable to get online.
Other than that, Slowaris is certainly a thing of the past. It is rather a nice OS, so long as you avoid CDE like the plague.
I didn’t have it installed long enough however to really say whether I like it, I didn’t get a good enough feel for it. I certainly had few complaints from what I saw though.
I wonder why your install process took so long? Mine didn’t take any longer than Suse 9.3 (5 CDs). I installed Solaris 10 on a Dell 400sc to check it out and then put Suse 9.3 on it. However, there are serveral things that annoy me about Suse 9.3 (I’m coming from Redhat land), so I’m thinking of putting Solaris back on.
I see the same old stories about how Solaris x86 is here to stay and some information about its OS features but never about hardware compatibility or hotplugging some odd wifi card or anything that would impress actually everyday *nix users.
Sun will continue playing NIH until the very end. Solaris 10 is a great product but great products alone don’t do it, otherwise OSX would be over 20% market share after three years on the market.
The problem is that the market has written off Sun for dead. Buyers of Sun tech are almost certainly part of a pre-existing installed base…Solaris 10 won’t win over many converts from Linux or even Windows Server (yuck), if simply because there is a good chance the OS will not fully support their existing hardware.
Sun could have been RedHat+Novell+the linux part of IBM by now if they had the brass to just admit they were peddling a dying architecture back in 2001. But no, they are going to do NIH right into the grave, maybe that is why BusinessWeek lists McNealy among the top execs who should “quit immediately”.
I’m fine with the JDS GUI except for the word “Java” in the bottom left corner. That bugs me to no end. It makes the “Start button” way too big and looks out of place. It appears to be there only to advertise for Sun, not to add any usabilty to the desktop.
The problem is that the market has written off Sun for dead.
Why are Sun reporting lots of new customers this quarter? Why are half of their Opteron customers coming back for more? Why is their bottom line better now than in years? Why do they have over a million Solaris 10 licenses distributed already? Why are they installing so many compute clusters now?
Why are you stuck in the past?
Let’s see if I have this right, you didn’t have enough time to work out how to use it, but you found the time to bitch about what you thought was wrong about it! The issue about the long install time has been hashed out here more times than I care to admit, and has been fixed in the last build of Solaris Express (which will become part of Solaris 10). It took me around two hours to install Solaris 10 (Full Distribution) on two machines.
The “slowaris” bullshit is also getting old, the last time I looked any OS doesn’t run optimally “out of the box”. People who use the “slowaris” argument don’t know how to use or tune Solaris. So how did you evaluate it if to use your words “I didn’t have it installed long enough however to really say whether I like it, I didn’t get a good enough feel for it. I certainly had few complaints from what I saw though.”
Maybe if you read some documentation (docs.sun.com) or asked for some assistance, your issues could have been solved.
Nice try! I can go to yahoo and read the news for SUNW too.
your 100 new customers appear to have bought about 100 pieces of hardware. YAWN. Dell moves the same $$ amount of goods in a day. has it come to that? announcing each box sold in a press release? dire days indeed.
oh by the way the stock is down over the last three months because they UNDERPERFORMED this querter, not outperformed.
keep trying though
Sun is getting on board, I guess late is better than not at all.
Getting in bed with AMD when they did was an utter stroke of genius (for them) and should keep them well in business for the forseeable future. It even helps them look more “cool”.
But Sun has a huge amount of inertia to overcome with the installed Linux base out there.
In our case at work we’re pretty heavily entrenched in Linux.
We’ve got a side project that had to use solaris, but they’re running sparc hardware. We do have one P3 666 box with solaris 9 on it for doing admin tasks for that project.
Admin on those boxes is so way different from on the Linux side that migration isn’t even something I’d consider exploring or talking about.
Not to mention that the one guy who’s full time IT and myself run Linux full time and game heavily. I even overclock and hack on my own hardware through the drivers. With Sun that type of thing isn’t even a remote option, I would never stick it on my home desktop.
And yes, we have serious usage here. About 2TB spinning storage per employee, we’re probably pushing 60TB I think now (98% of it IDE raid5/some raid6)…
Chris Ratcliff, director of product management at Sun says that the Linux Application Environment (formerly Janus) will be available as a technology preview in the next month or so and that ZFS is in beta and should be available by the end of the year
Nice try to you, too! Don’t forget that Sun is also AMD’s biggest customer. That isn’t 100 pieces of hardware–its tens of thousands.
Sun’s stock price is irrelevant. By bringing up stock prices, you automatically lose (equiv. to Godwin’s Law).
[T]he last time I looked any OS doesn’t run optimally “out of the box”. People who use the “slowaris” argument don’t know how to use or tune Solaris.
This is a fair point; however, in the best of all possible worlds an OS should perform well out of the box. I can’t find the link any longer; however, in Solaris 10 we re-wrote a lot of the SysV IPC mechanism to improve performance and functionality. As part of that, we eliminated a lot of the useless and confusing tunables, and optimized SysV IPC so that it just works well out of the box. One of our field engineers later located a presentation from HP where they were claiming that HP-UX was better because they had more SysV IPC tuneables.
So, just getting customers and developers to agree that tunables are sub-optimal is a challenge; however, it’s something that Sun is trying to do more of with Solaris. There are obviously still plenty of tunables, but in the long term the goal is to eliminate as many as possible and arrange the OS so that it picks the most optimal values.
@Trey
For me, the only downside of Solaris was the install process… I was required to have 4 discs, and the process took about 2.5 hours.
I installed from DVD, and enabled DMA before installing, took less than an hour.
DMA is disabled by default because there used to be a lot of flaky hardware out there. I believe the next Solaris release will have DMA enabled by default though as it seems that the majority of hardware doesn’t have problems anymore.
Today, that is unacceptable, I almost gave up, but for my interest in seeing what it was all about.
It’s perfectly acceptable if it does what you want it to do. Besides “acceptable” is relative, what one person considers acceptable another does not.
Those of you who have used Solaris inasmuch as you did an install and then wiped it cause you were too lazy to figure out how to do it correctly should not post lame messages about how you couln’t get a NIC to work. If this is how I did my thing at work, I would get fired (in fact, I would fire myself for being lame). Go get a cheap supported NIC (3C905) and use that if you REALLY want to try Solaris. If you quit the first time something does not work, then adios, muchacho’s. Sure, x86 support is not where we would all like it, but it’s getting better. No OS is different here. Shall I give examples of where Linux sucks comared to Solaris? No, I won’t cause each has its strong and weak points.
I’ve been using Solaris for quite a while, just a bit longer than Linux. There is a lot of stuff in there, under the covers, that you can’t possibly know about until you read up. And I have to admit, Sun has some of the best technical documentation out there available for free as I have seen from any vendor. I much prefer that than having to search for Linux doc, which is pretty much chaotic, at best. Flame me if you disagree, but for Solaris stuff, I know where to go, and it all looks professional.
As for using Solaris, I am finishing a deployment of a large project (32 servers so far) that I chose to use Solaris on Sun hardware. Did I consider an x86 box and Linux? You bet. But, the price of similar hardware came in more expensive (go figure). Besides, I knew 100 percent that if I bought the Sun gear (Sunfire V120 1U rackmounts) that I would have no problem with OS compatibility. Next, the app only ran on Windows 2000 or Solaris (Sparc only) or HPUX. Just to show you that yes, Solaris is still being used, but you just don’t hear about it as much. There were no os licensing issues as it came with the hardware. Made that part of my job easy.
Linux is nice for home and hobby, to be sure, and in other respects, but in some cases, it can’t be used in the enterprise. It’s just that way. If others disagree, then you probably don’t have enough info available to come to the same conclusion. Linux is OK, I like it, but it’s not the best for everything.
You can criticize Sun if you like, but nobody is forcing you to work there, or buy their stuff. It’s your choice. I hope they continue to provide Solaris and products, and continue to work at making Solaris Open Source. For those that whine about why it’s not ready yet, can you not find anything else to focus your energy into? They said it was being open sourced, and it will be. Is this not a huge win for the OSS camp as far as a vindication that OSS is viable and works? Why slam Sun for trying to change it’s ways?
I don’t work for Sun, so I’m not a fanboy or anything, and I hope that they can continue to provide a solid real UNIX OS. I think it has its place, and this place is expanding now that it is free (without support). I think it’s wise to let people try it (that truely want to try it, not install and then complain as soon as they login). As long as the hardware choices are expanding (x86), I think it can only be a good thing because enterprises can run a real UNIX on hardware of their choice and decide to get support, if they need to, from Sun.
The more UNIX, the better.
Oh, and finally, people slam Solaris vs Linux, but this is really funny, because the same group also does this between 1 Linux distro and another. This is getting real tiring. I guess their perfect OS world is their 1 Linux distro of choice. Meh.
/rant
My issue is with people who can’t read the HCL, install Solaris, don’t like it and complain without giving it a “fair shake”. Most of the people who post here that have had issues with Solaris more often than not (1) do not have hardware that is on the HCL (2) is some low-end machine that should have found its way to a dumpster, or (3) expect Solaris to be exactly like Linux. If I or another “Sun Fanboi” was to write similar trash about Linux we would be crucified!
Solaris has come a long way since the days of Solaris 7 x86, but there are some people who will never be happy. I am pleased with the performance of Solaris on both x86 and SPARC hardware. But from time to time I have found machines that need a “little help” getting better performance. It just gets old listening to the same tired nonsense.
“Not to mention that the one guy who’s full time IT and myself run Linux full time and game heavily. I even overclock and hack on my own hardware through the drivers. With Sun that type of thing isn’t even a remote option, I would never stick it on my home desktop.”
Quiet…can you here it, a collective sigh of relief from the Solaris x86 support team (Sorry, I couldn’t resist
And as for “And yes, we have serious usage here. About 2TB spinning storage per employee, we’re probably pushing 60TB I think now (98% of it IDE raid5/some raid6)…”
You’re a braver man than I. I don’t even want to ask what kind of disaster recovery plan you have?!?
By the way, on your Solaris/SPARC project. You shouldn’t have to use a Solaris/x86 box to manage it…any linux “du jour” box should do. But that’s OK, the more the Solaris the merrier.
Here’s a question maybe you can answer for me. What is the recommended maxphys for an IDE system? I have asked this question before and got no response. According to this document, the default maxphys for x86 is 57,344:
http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/817-0404/6mg74vs9m?a=view
for Solaris 10
http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/817-0404/6mg74vs9m?q=maxphys&a=vie…
Keeping in mind that you are not supposed to modify any parameter other than the blocking factor in ata.conf, will setting the maxphys to something other than 57,344 actually help? Considering the vast majority of people installing Solaris are going to be doing it on IDE systems, this could potentially help them with poor performance.
My bad, without realizing it I posted the same link twice. DOH!
For me, the only downside of Solaris was the install process… I was required to have 4 discs, and the process took about 2.5 hours.
Like, Shawn, I installed from DVD and it took less than an hour. The 3/05 release has the easiest Solaris install of any release, very simple.
Today, that is unacceptable
Nah, if the OS performs as you need it to in the long term, it’s a cost/benefit issue and might well be worth the effort.
“1) do not have hardware that is on the HCL (2) is some low-end machine that should have found its way to a dumpster”
well most of the hardware that are on the hcl belongs to the dumpster class machines.
after browsing non of my newer or semi new hardware is on
the support list but a bunch of hw that i just did dump in a dumpster was.
guess i will wait until atleast my 3ware card has some support
Here’s a question maybe you can answer for me. What is the recommended maxphys for an IDE system? I have asked this question before and got no response. According to this document, the default maxphys for x86 is 57,344:
You’re correct that the default is 56k on x86 and 128k on SPARC. My suspicion is that it’s set lower on x86 because of the limited amount of kernel VA that is available on x86 using a 32-bit kernel. This wouldn’t be an issue on a amd64 64-bit kernel. I would also guess that if your machine has a lot of memory it would be fine to tweak the default, but I would test under a high I/O load to make sure you don’t suddenly run out of memory batching up larger transactions.
After some looking, it appears that there’s no official Sun position on tuning maxphys for IDE drives. For SCSI disks, the documents I’ve come across suggest 1mb, and no larger than 2mb. For vxvm or other redundant filesystems, it is reccomended that you try to optimize maxphys for the stripe-size of the underlying disk subsystem.
Another document mentioned that this is the size at which things will be split up; however, the device driver is free to break the data up into smaller chunks anyway. So, it’s entirely possible that tuning this may have little effect on an IDE drive, which has to process each request in order. (Read: all decomposed into 512-byte chunks at the end of the day) The story may be different for a SATA drive, which does tagged queuing, but my suspicion is that you may have to benchmark the modification to see if it has actually given you any benefit.
There’s also a caveat regarding soft partitions (on IDE disks) and Solaris 7 crashdumps, both of which are reported to be unhappy with maxphys being tuned.
This is one reason I despise tuneables, because instead of the OS figuring out how much memory you have and what the I/O transfer characteristics of the attached devices are, it makes you do some amount of estimating and testing and figure it out yourself. *grumble*
Keeping in mind that you are not supposed to modify any parameter other than the blocking factor in ata.conf, will setting the maxphys to something other than 57,344 actually help? Considering the vast majority of people installing Solaris are going to be doing it on IDE systems, this could potentially help them with poor performance
Having never attempted this myself, I’m not sure. I’ll see if I can find a more conclusive answer, but constructing a sensible test case and benchmarking may be a more reliable indication of whether it helps or not.
Well, not really…
I have yet to upgrade my X86 Solaris 9 box to Sol 10, but I have put it on my Ultra 5. I like what I see, but… I’ve also recently upgraded the Linux partition (it’s dual-boot) to Debian Sarge and was favorably impressed. I think it’s great that Sol 10 has advanced, but it has by no means slam-dunked Linux, hype notwithstanding, nor will it. If Sun stays in business, then Linux and Solaris will coexist. Linux does not need to ‘defeat’ Solaris (whatever that means). If it doesn’t, we still have Linux. Either way, Linux wins.
I don’t mean to feed the trolls some more, but it’s in the news now that Sun is #1 in the HPTC market (high performance & technical computing) in unit volume. Where are the Slowaris trolls when we need them?
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/050426/sftu070.html?.v=7
Looks like no one noticed Solaris Express 4/05 is available for download.
http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/solaris-express/get.jsp
http://blog.sun.com/roller/page/dp/?anchor=what_s_new_in_solaris5
Downloading right now..
Allow me to flame myself…
It is actually ME that hasn’t noticed yet. I’m about a week behind in my OSnews reading.
It is ugly as hell. You actually think this is nice? On your desktop?
Looks like no one noticed Solaris Express 4/05 is available for download.
Wrong :-),installed it yesterday.
Runs nice and stable.Never thought Solaris is so simple.They should however make the companion CD install a bit more productive with automagically added menu-links,icons etc.But it sucks as Desktop OS,ambiquous though,the most secure desktop PC’s are the ones with a server OS installed on them (and properly configured),however some are to arcane and need to much work to “compete” with Linux on the desktop .As a server Solaris is top notch.
woooooo! hold it there. SUN bashing maybe my favourite past time next to Christian fundamentalist bashing and Microsoft bashing, but like I said, give SUN until the middle of next year. If nothing has improved then, well, we all know what creek SUN will be swimming up, with that being said, however, the terrible marketing doesn’t help one iota.
Very much like Digital, a company run by engineers. Great if you’re an existing customer, terrible if you’re trying to attract new customers do your portfolio.
FYI, a feature of Solaris Express 4/2005 is that CD/DVD DMA *is* enabled by default; we got tired of getting bashed for trying to be compatible with old, broken hardware (you can now disable CD/DVD DMA if you need to). This is why installs have gotten faster in builds *after* S10 FCS.
We (Solaris team) are also looking at other ways to improve the speed of installs. One existing problem is that we don’t stream the data off of the CD/DVD device very effectively. We’re hoping to improve that, and IIRC some preliminary results show about a 30% improvement in install speed. But that’s at the chewing-gum-and-spaghetti prototype stage right now.
Thanks for the response. As I stated in the follow up e-mail message I am base lining Solaris Express with iozone. Once the base line is complete I will modify maxphys and see what happens.
My bigger question is why the small data transfer rate in the first place? On SCSI I can bump up maxphys to 16 MB (the upper limit on some FC HBA’s). With modern IDE disks (both ATA and SATA) we should have a much better data transfer rate than 56 kb!
Maybe you should pay attention to what MJ and I are talking about here instead of trolling! Even if Sun supported your 3Ware IDE controller it would be limited by what the Solaris kernel determines as the “best” data transfer rate.
Remember Solaris=!Linux, if you want bleeding edge hardware go with Windows or Linux. I can remember a time where Linux had the same issues, I guess everybody forgot about those days! And before the Canopy Group got a hold of SCO (the other major x86 Unix vendor) SCO was just as picky about hardware as Solaris is. I think it is a good thing that “everything” is not supported.
Solaris Containers: Cool
DTrace:Blah
Project Janus: Big Blah
ZFS: Very Cool
Predictive Self Healing: Cool if it works however my guess is it will be a feature turned off my most SA’s
FireEngine: About time
I would like to see a more in-depth review of Solaris 10, but I guess I’ll have to wait for Solaris to become mainstream.
This is the funniest statement i have read in a long time..Wait for Solaris to become mainstream thats funny.
Torvalds nailed it when he said that opening up Solaris didn’t mean THAT much… x86 support is still terrible (haven’t been able to install it on 3 different boxes that are all linux/windows friendly) so you’re either stuck with a shortlist of x86 components or Sun HW.
Give them a year or two besides Solaris x86 will run on commercial hardware packages like Dell,HP etc first like it always has. Solaris x86 installs flawlessly on HP/Compaq Proliant hardware.
The more UNIX, the better.
Amen Brother!
“Solaris x86 installs flawlessly on HP/Compaq Proliant hardware.”
This is where the parts-bin PC critics come up short. Sun knows where to start in getting Solaris x86 going–the companies who sell the most x86 servers by far, such as HP, Dell, and IBM. If I had a business with a rack or two of HP servers ready for a software upgrade, why not try Solaris on a few of them as a pilot? Put Solaris on them and migrate a few of the web apps or databases over, see how they work out.
Exactly, Sun has always had drivers for Compaq equipment as far back as I can remember using Solaris x86. And certain Dell models actually could be labeled Solaris Ready.
“Solaris x86 installs flawlessly on HP/Compaq Proliant hardware.”
This is where the parts-bin PC critics come up short. Sun knows where to start in getting Solaris x86 going–the companies who sell the most x86 servers by far, such as HP, Dell, and IBM. If I had a business with a rack or two of HP servers ready for a software upgrade, why not try Solaris on a few of them as a pilot? Put Solaris on them and migrate a few of the web apps or databases over, see how they work out.
I’m sure that if you also made a good enough case, SUN might even work with you to get the hardware supported, and provide drivers (if the hardware isn’t supported out of the box).
Sorry to dissapoint but Solaris 10 just doesn’t make it. Lack of support for hardware such as network cards make it plain terrible to set up. And once setup it is so barebone you could cry. It may have a lot of things under the hood but they are just not in plain sight and setting up is still terrible. Solaris 11 maybe?
And just what are you looking for? So you have to set it up for your preferences, why is that a problem? Have you tried reading the documentation at docs.sun.com?
The network card support is fine, why would a vendor producing a high performance OS want to drag down its network performance by supporting cheap NIC’s. Remember Solaris=! Linux.