Sun Microsystems plans to release the first update to Solaris 10 by the end of the year, adding an overhauled start-up process, software update feature and performance improvements.
Sun Microsystems plans to release the first update to Solaris 10 by the end of the year, adding an overhauled start-up process, software update feature and performance improvements.
i’ve been trying the recent solaris express builds (not community edition) and they’re very good. more hardware support – and unlike traditional slowaris – these are nippym, fast and responsive – desktops are snappy, and boot process is unbelievably fast the first few times you try it … and more and more useful tools are installed by default now -= openssl, gnu tar, etc etc …
good work.
all it needs now is a good package manager.
I agree, the Express builds are really sweet.
Comment re. package management: I find it quite powerful yet simple, actually. From my conversation with many oldtime Solaris admins, my impression is that the people with Solaris experience find it quite good and flexible. And these people are still the majority of Solaris users, even though every day there are more newcomers. Which is good.
> all it needs now is a good package manager.
What about http://www.pkgsrc.org/ 🙂
is it default or de facto? is it robust with lots of well-tested packages? is it easy-to-use?
I think most ppl under-estimate the value of packag managment. I think that’s the reasonwhy Linux is more popular on the desktopthan *BSD. And the desktop BSDs don’t cut it since they seem to be focussing on the desktop itself whereas you need a solution to scale UP and _DOWN_.
That said if I could get most of my applications tested and easily installable on Solars I’d love to try it.
I think most ppl under-estimate the value of packag managment. I think that’s the reasonwhy Linux is more popular on the desktopthan *BSD.
What the hell are you talking about? BSD package management has always been superior to anything available on Linux.
all it needs now is a good package manager.
It has a “good” package manager. I think you mean good package manager frontend CLI or GUI. Just like APT is a frontend for dpkg, the real package manager on APT systems.
Any idea what (PC) hardware will be supported for this updated release?
And Sun announcements, just about every day. One might be fooled into thinking that anyone cares anymore.
And Sun announcements, just about every day. One might be fooled into thinking that anyone cares anymore.
Let’s extend a warm welcome to the first troll of the day
Yes look how much Sun is advancing, whereas Linux…
And Sun announcements, just about every day. One might be fooled into thinking that anyone cares anymore.
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Whether you like it or not, it is a major OS. This is OSNEWS, by the way, or did you forget. If you don’t care for a particular OS, exercise your freedoms…your freedom to not view the thread or waste bits with a lame post.
As for Solaris, I’m glad to see that they are taking it in a direction that is useful to those that need to use it. There were some missteps along the way, but at least they are going the righ direction these days (with x86 support). It’s tough to make money on hardware these days, but I guess Dell/IBM/HP are not the only ones that should be able to put together very EXPENSIVE x86 servers. Gee, where is the benefit of x86 as being cheap/commodity hardware anymore? Now that it has infected the datacenter, the prices are going way up due to SCSI, redundancy, etc. Seems like the same thing that happened in the past with the incumbant non-x86 hardware vendors. Same game, different players, IMHO.
I totaly agree!!
How can sun relaease solaris when linux exists??1
Linux is Free and sun is against linux kernel Freedom, where-as Linus, craetor of Linux has it Open Source!!
iT seems sun is trieng to kill Freedom of kernel from Linux
Generally IMO Linux (with Kernal) is better than sun without a Kernel!.
I totaly agree!!
How can sun relaease solaris when linux exists??1
Linux is Free and sun is against linux kernel Freedom, where-as Linus, craetor of Linux has it Open Source!!
iT seems sun is trieng to kill Freedom of kernel from Linux
Generally IMO Linux (with Kernal) is better than sun without a Kernel!.
wow. thats one for the record books. “iT seems sun is trieng to kill Freedom of kernel from linux
” is now my new email sig.
yhbt gg n00b
I totaly agree!!
How can sun relaease solaris when linux exists??1
Linux is Free and sun is against linux kernel Freedom,
where-as Linus, craetor of Linux has it Open Source!!
iT seems sun is trieng to kill Freedom of kernel from
Linux
Generally IMO Linux (with Kernal) is better than sun
without a Kernel!.
Exactly how much crack have you been smoking in the last 15 minutes? Your spelling just sucks, your grammar is
worse, and the stuff coming out of you is full or crap!
and how exactly do you know the poster uses English as his first language ?
just because he spelt a few words incorrectly, you assume he is smoking crack ?
sort it out man
and of course the new technologies are very good, SMF, Zones, Dtrace … i won’t be the last person to say so.
sun is innovating – in order to keep solaris ahead of the pack. and that is good.
heya,
I’m sure I can’t be the only one wondering where the new ZFS filesystem, and the Janus compatability layer are.
I think I remember reading somewhere that they’d both be in Express builds by year end, but they have yet to surface.
Any word from Sun people (if you’re allowed to say)?
If they don’t turn up in the 11/05 build, I might just download that anyway, and try it out.
Thanks,
Victor
I’m sure I can’t be the only one wondering where the new ZFS filesystem, and the Janus compatability layer are.
All is revealed in the the article linked in the header.
For ZFS, read the article. It should be in express by
the end of the year. Not sure when it will appear in
Opensolaris. It’s integrating with the main source
gate very soon.
LAE was already released as a technology preview. As
the article says, the feedback from users was that it
would be more useful if it could be zoned. That is what
is planned.
Can someone with insight tell me what the default compiler that ships with Solaris is? Is it gcc or is it some proprietary compiler? Now that the OpenSolaris project exists, how feasible would it be to port the compiler to other operating systems? BSD comes to mind; they’ve been using GCC for years and its a slap in the face for a BSD project to rely on using GNU software. Maybe they can port the compiler so we can be happy?
Solaris 10 ships with GCC as part of the the /opt/sfw packages. For OpenSolaris developers, you can download the Sun Studio compilers for free. Sun has only promised to open source the OS, not their compilers. Studio is not open sourced, so porting would be extremely difficult. 😉
GCC is part of Solaris 10 and is located in /usr/sfw, /opt/sfw is the location where software from the Software Companion CD is installed.
Just a quick note – the Sun Update Manager – due to be released in this update – is already available as a seperate download. Go to http://updates.sun.com/ to find out more.
I hope the updated package installer will update also the environment variables.It’s plain annoying to cd in to /opt/sfw/..
I personally think when you choose to install everything from the value-add CD,it would be nice when everything is realy installed and not collected as binairy in some obscure directory.Plz at least the compiler and some very basic tools.
No your environment will not be updated when you use the Update Manager. The Update Manager is for patches, not to download additional software packages. And why does the “environment” have to be updated? Can’t you do this yourself?
If you added /usr/sfw/bin to your PATH you would find gcc and other tools necessary to compile software. As I have said here before, I was compiling software within seconds after installing Solaris 10. The only time you should use the Software Companion CD is if there is something that is not installed as part of the various install clusters.
And how is /opt/sfw “obscure”? It is a standard for Solaris and ISV’s for the installation of software not part of Solaris. An example is Symantec (Veritas) NetBackup, by default it installs in /usr/openv and links to /opt.
Well, Solaris complies with multiple UNIX related standards, SVR4 being the primary one. This is done by having varients of commands located in different places (/usr/ucb for BSD compatible binaries, /usr/xpg for X/Open binaries, /usr/sfw for GNU binaries, etc.).
As these binaries are named the same but behave differently, the actual activation of these alternate binaries must be explicit: Use absolute path or set up your own environment variables.
As such, having to explicitly invoke commands from /usr/sfw is not an annoyance – it’s a clear design decision. The same logic applies to every software and add-on supplied by Sun for Solaris.
Whether you like it or not, it is a major OS. This is OSNEWS, by the way, or did you forget. If you don’t care for a particular OS, exercise your freedoms…your freedom to not view the thread or waste bits with a lame post.
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Well, maybe I’m exercising my freedom to waste bits and make lame posts!
The industrial strength coffee maker.
You expect us to believe there are that many wildly upbeat Sun guys here on this site, when Sun has been beat to a bloody pulp over the last 10 years?
Please.
How is Solaris 10 as a Java development environment?
You’d think it was a no-brainer that all the typical Java stuff (Java 5 sdk, ant, Tomcat, SunOne Application server, NetBeans, etc) would be installed by default.
But I don’t want to assume that.
So does Solaris come with all the Java stuff installed by default?
You would have the following in a Full Distribution installation:
j2sdk (I can’t remmeber the version off the top of my head), the two machines I have near me have the 1/06 Beta installed.
Sun Java System Application Server
Tomcat
NetBeans you would have to install and there are no IDE’s for Java development (purchased separately).
While it certainly seems Sun has overcome its case of “the stupids” (embracing x86 instead of fighting it, low-cost servers instead of trying to get everyone to buy $20,000 web servers), it seems like they’ve yet to hit the tipping point. Solaris 10 (or OpenSolaris or Solaris Express for that matter) haven’t overwhelmed datacenters yet, and Sun servers (x86-64 or SPARC) don’t seem to be sprouting up all over the place yet.
The freefall has stopped thankfully, but the climb may prove more difficult.
The problems with deploying Solaris 10 have to do with ISV applications, everybody did not “jump on the bandwagon” and update their apps to run on 10. And this is the case with any OS, not just Solaris 10 in my experience.
As far as penetration of x86-64 machines goes, well one of our Sun reps says a site he knows has 500 V20z’s, a place I used to work at haas 40, and we currently have 10 of them.
The problems with deploying Solaris 10 have to do with ISV applications, everybody did not “jump on the bandwagon” and update their apps to run on 10. And this is the case with any OS, not just Solaris 10 in my experience.
Even so, beyond Sun hardware, I haven’t seen much in the way of Solaris on x86 in datacenters. Some experimentation here and there, but not what you’d think if you’d believe some of the more extreme Sun fanboys
As far as penetration of x86-64 machines goes, well one of our Sun reps says a site he knows has 500 V20z’s, a place I used to work at haas 40, and we currently have 10 of them.
In the datacenters I’ve been, at least in the northeast, older SPARC Sun hardware is the most common Sun hardware I’ve seen. Far more prevalent is of course HP and Dell, and at least anecdotealy I haven’t seen any evidence of inroads that Sun has made, not yet at least.
From their recent 10-K for fiscal 2005, system revenues haven’t changed sine 2004. I couldn’t find individual sales figures on their new boxes anywhere, and the 10-K obviously wouldn’t include those.
As far as penetration of x86-64 machines goes, well one of our Sun reps says a site he knows has 500 V20z’s, a place I used to work at haas 40, and we currently have 10 of them.
Hmm, from what I’ve seen older SPARCs are by far the most common Sun hardware you’ll see. It has an installed base and people generally trust it, until they see a need to replace it. The problem for Sun is that they know they need to do something with x86 but that isn’t where most of their income comes from. It’s like Novell with Netware, Groupwise etc. on the one hand and Linux and open source software on the other.
The problem for Sun is that they know they need to do something with x86 but that isn’t where most of their income comes from. It’s like Novell with Netware, Groupwise etc. on the one hand and Linux and open source software on the other.
Too soon to jump to conclusions on Sun’s x86 future. Sun’s x86 products are a only a couple of years old. The galaxy machines were announced very very recently to even matter to the bottom line.
Too soon to jump to conclusions on Sun’s x86 future. Sun’s x86 products are a only a couple of years old.
Does this mean that the 80’s were just a “couple” of years ago, that 386s don’t count as x86 machines or that you aren’t thinking about when Sun sold Intel processor based workstations 20-some odd years ago?
When should we jump to conclusions on this? Or on Motorola processor based workstations? Maybe they’ll start buying Power chips from IBM, eh?
Does this mean that the 80’s were just a “couple” of years ago, that 386s don’t count as x86 machines or that you aren’t thinking about when Sun sold Intel processor based workstations 20-some odd years ago?
Oh, welcome out of the rock you have been living under. Since the 80s, the cold war has ended, USSR is no longer a super power, Germany isn’t divided anymore ( the berlin wall was demolished) and A company called Sun has since then been shipping systems based on a cpu architecture called SPARC all through out the 90s (from 1987) and into this millenium.
In August 2002, they started selling a little server called the lx50 based on an x86 porcessor. So repeat after me Sun started putting x86 into more products only 3 years ago.
The 386i was a product so short lived it isn’t even in the Sun system handbook anymore. Oh is also ran SunOS 4.0.1/4.0.2 which I am sure nobody uses anymore. Sun today ships Solaris 10 (SunOS 5.10).
I hope that brings you up to speed with current events.
It may only be since August 2002 that we are shipping Sun hardware with x86 processors as the main CPU agin. However the Solaris x86 product is MUCH older than that it goes back at least 10 years.
Yes Solaris x86 is being around but how much has it affected the bottom line. Sun makes most of it’t money selling hardware and systems which include Software. So discussions of revenue which I was responding to are not quite relevant when a product doesn’t affect the bottom line.
Also Sun sent mixed messages to customers about Solaris x86 over the years. It is only recently that Sun has comitted to x86-64 as a platform and Solaris x86 as a viable product. Solaris x86 was never as feature complete as Solaris SPARC. All of which makes this a failry recent development to judge the affect of this strategy on Sun’s future revenues.
We have the big stuff here as well (SunFire V480, V880, 3800, 4800) and a collection of various Sun SPARC workstations and servers. The 10 V20z’s we have are used for a specific project and the glitches we are seeing are software related.
I think a lot of people are sitting on the fence and waiting for the early adopters to chime in on the quality of Sun’s x86-64 offerings before spending money.
“(embracing x86 instead of fighting it, low-cost servers instead of trying to get everyone to buy $20,000 web servers)”
I don’t know about you, but where we work, there are PLENTY of expensive x86 servers used for running web servers. These are in the same ballpark as the 20,000 server that sun has. I guess it depends on what level of performance and redundancy you need.
Last I looked, there were no “beige box” PC’s running in our datacenter.
I don’t know about you, but where we work, there are PLENTY of expensive x86 servers used for running web servers. These are in the same ballpark as the 20,000 server that sun has. I guess it depends on what level of performance and redundancy you need.
Not for $20,000, and not for web serving. 1U web servers, even dual proc, don’t go much above $2K. And it doesnt’ make much sense to pay for a ton of redundancy in a web server in most cases, since load balancers take care of that. For boxes that do more than web serving and require lots of horsepower, even a fully spec’d 4-way box doesn’t hit $20K, closer to $12K or so.
A few years ago, Sun’s idea of a web server was a $20K E250, $30K nicely spec’d.
Just exactly how many years ago was that? According to SunSolve the V100 has been avaialble since March 2002. And why would you want to “nickel and dime” your web presence? If you are serving up static content and you are not concerned about performance, a “cheap” server is fine. However, if you are using dynamic content and web applications a low cost server is an exercise in pulling your hair out (I have first hand experience in this).
Tony, you might want to double check your prices too! The average cost of a dual processor 1U machine (HP, Dell, Sun) is over $2,000.00 once you add the second processor.
http://h71016.www7.hp.com/dstore/ctoBases.asp?oi=E9CED&BEID=19701&S…
http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?c=us&cs=555&l=en…
http://store.sun.com/CMTemplate/CEServlet?process=SunStore&cmdViewP…
> How can sun relaease solaris when linux exists??
> Linux is Free and sun is against linux kernel Freedom, > where-as Linus, craetor of Linux has it Open Source!!
Hello!?! Solaris has been OPEN SOURCE for quite some time now! If you had even the slightest clue what you were talking about you would have known that!