Got the link at the original article from BSDForums.org: “With Sun getting ready to launch Solaris 9, the next generation of its Unix operating system, sometime between now and the end of June, everyone is scrambling to try to figure out what will make Solaris 9 different from the existing Solaris 8, Timothy Prickett Morgan writes. One of the big differences, it turns out, will be substantially enhanced security mechanisms for both the operating system and its applications.”
Solaris 9 to Beef Up OS, Application Security
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I have always liked Solaris, but hate the CDE window manager. I have heard that Sun will be including Gnome as the default desktop for Solaris in this release (don’t know if it’s true – but I hope it is).
While Gnome isn’t my favorite thing (root beer floats are), it is light years better than CDE.
I hope they do release an x86 version of Solaris 9.
Sol 9 sounds absolutely fantastic. Can’t wait ’till Sun releases it. I’d be willing to actualy pay alot of money for this. And all those retarts spouting off about how much better Windblowz is. Puhhh-lease.
Regarding Gnome –
from my understanding, 9 will not come with Gnome as the *default*, although it will probably be an option – kinda like OW. I’ve tried the gnome beta that came with the later Sol 8 release and it SUCKED. believe it or not, CDE is way faster and more responsive. Especialy under heavy load. This was running on a Blade 100 w 512MB RAM. Gnome was on my workstation for exactly 24 hours before I deleted it.
Gnome is ugly for now, although I definitely appreciate the efforts of those who work on it.
As for Solaris: Sun has a lot thinking to do on that one. They are not getting new customers, and they are having great difficulty retainining old ones. Microsoft is Pulling on one side and Linux is pulling on the other. And IBM and other hardware vendors are taking their market as well. They need to do some creative, and quickily too, if they hope to remain in business five years hence.
From the article:
“SunScreen is a dynamic packet filtering firewall that includes VPN support and proxy support for Web servers, FTP servers, Telnet sessions, and SNMP servers. It will run on the 32-bit and 64-bit Sparc and Intel Solaris kernels. Finally, Solaris 9 will have a built-in random number generator for both the Solaris kernel and for applications.”
Being that it was mentioned at all shows some sign of hope.
Sun’s stock slipped again today. Wonder why the execs are leaving… Good thing that Scott is a very bright guy, hopefully he’ll be able to get some new blood in the company and turn Sun around.
I just took a look at Sun’s current stock price and they are all the way down to 6.45 now.
Good grief, at this rate Sun will soon become a good takeover target maybe even for SGI – “Welcome to the bottom.”
I am now starting to doubt your intelligence (I thought, so far, that you were a reasonably bright person): Sun’s market capitalization is over 20 Billion, SGI’s is 600 Million! three orders of magnitude smaller.
Also: Sun has 2.4 Billion in cash, SGI has 230 Million. No contest. Sun could buy SGI with cash alone.
But, let me talk a bit on some other points discussed here: I believe that CDE vs. Gnome is a largely irrelevant question for those Solaris users who really need to use Solaris. I administer and develop on Solaris every day, and I didn’t see the CDE in more than a year. It’s not important. All my tasks are done from the command line, and please believe me, they are very diverse sysem administration tasks, including kernel manipulation, filesystem, metadevice configuration, striping and mirroring, network reconfigurations, all sorts of installations and deinstallations. CDE is not important, but I am not going to create my VideoCD on Solaris. For that purpose I will use Windows.
Well, I wish I could use BeOS, but since the Dazzle won’t work there, I have no choice. But you get my point: you use Solaris for one purpose, and there the graphical environment is not really relevant, and you use Windows for other tasks, and ther the graphical interface is very relevant.
It’s aready confusing enough –
SunOS 5.6 was Solaris 2.6 , Solaris 8 is SunOS 5.8, I don’t remember about 7.
How Sun is going to name the really new version of Solaris – Solaris ME or Solaris XP ? Or Solaris-ONE – the most confusing probably.
Interesting to see that Intel version was mentioned –
AFAIK Sun stoped Solaris 9 on x86 development and layed off developers. But all I know comes from the news and I may be missed some announcements.
Yes, I know that SGI cannot even remotely afford to buy Sun realistically – I was being intentionally facetious to make a point, and I did say “at this rate” also. Do I have to put <SARCASM></SARCASM> tags around my text every time that I do this? Maybe I do.
Still though, I think that SGI probably has better odds for long-term survival than Sun does at this point. A lot of SGI’s bigger bread-and-butter customers are more willing to pay the premium for what SGI does so well and not ditch them for Linux alternatives, just yet. I think Sun is more vulnerable to other hardware vendors (IBM, HP) and Linux than SGI is.
A better GUI and x86 compatibility, thats all I ask! (well mebbe some nice kde porting)
I thought there was something amiss with mario’s “three orders of magnitude” difference in market caps between Sun and SGI. I just looked them up now:
Sun: $26 billion
SGI: $515 million
So Sun is only[/] 50 times bigger than SGI in market capitalization, not 1000 times. No big deal, I get the point, but I just don’t want mario thinking that I’m quite [i]that crazy.
I use Solaris 8 and i can’t imagine it without CDE desktop, all other desktops are junk. All i need is speed and no fancy colors and windows or fuc**** transparency, Gnome, XFCE, KDE are slow & resource hungry. CDE is standard on HP-UX, Tru64, Solaris, AIX…so be it until i die.
We’re not going to migrate our production servers to Solaris 9, becouse it’s not mature. Solaris on x86 is faster than on sparc, but you don’t have support for good hardware. Anyway i like solaris, becouse of easy to use and Oracle is up to date on that platform and with full suport.
Solaris 2.5, 2.6, 2.7, 2.8, 2.9 but now they’ve dropped the 2. where’s the confusion? I guess they’ll be Solaris 10, 11, 12, 13……..Yawn!
Sim
Solaris 7 == Solaris 2.7 == the first OS version where sun adopted their funny new versioning scheme.
That’s all for now.
It’s simple….
Every Solaris release is ALSO named SunOS. This is for backwards compatibility for scripts and what not….
SO…
Solaris 9 == SunOS 5.9
Solaris 8 == SunOS 5.8
Solaris 7 == SunOS 5.7
Solaris 6 == SunOS 5.6
Solaris can ALSO be reffered to in the 2.x notation. This is ’cause the current version of Solaris is it’s second incarnation.
This of course may be false…..
so I presume Solaris 10 will be SunOS 6?
SunOS was marketed as Solaris starting with 5.6, The difference is just that SunOS is Solaris without all of the additional packages, ie a core Solaris install is SunOS. The numbering scheme equates to SunOS 5.7 = Solaris 2.7
With Solaris 7 marketing dropped the 2.X to sound more impressive compared to Windows 95/98.
so I presume Solaris 10 will be SunOS 6?
<p>
no, Solaris 10 could be == SunOS 2.10
<p>
DUH!