“Sun will use the LinuxWorld venue here to discuss its second change of heart — the resurrection of Solaris for the Intel architecture, sources said. […] Internal friction within Sun still could prevent Solaris from returning to the Intel platform. Sun has moved its Solaris and Linux efforts under the supervision of Anil Gadre, former vice president of Solaris and now vice president of marketing and operations for software at Sun, combining the OS teams for the first time, sources said.” Read the report at InfoWorld.
A Last Chance for the x86 Solaris
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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With IBM, Oracle and the rest of the UNIX computing world focusing on Linux, it is only a matter of time before Solaris fades away into the sunset.
Sure, existing customers get screwed when Sun decides to have an anti-Intel tantrum. And bringing back Solaris/Intel for the Cobalt Dual P3 rack is not very interesting. Solaris is more for big iron apps than anything else.
Sun has blown it with Solaris. It will soon be Sun’s version of AIX unless they radically change their approach to the market.
I’d start giving away Solaris on Intel right now. Keeping Solaris on SPARC is the 100% sure method to make sure it dies.
#m
Solaris probably the most stable server OS out there, its not going away anytime soon… This only really hurts staging and development environments where it is more cost effective to use x86 then SPARC..
Yes.
I never felt curious about Solaris; just about CDE. I even bought a version of SCO UnixWare to have it (CDE) running on my desktop.
With Linux being so vigourous and supported (by IBM, HP, etc) and Sun not supporting x86 where is it (Solaris) going to end (die) ?
Sun is in a tough spot. Their unit sales growth rate is not doing well, especially after the bubble.
Customers are finding that using Sun computers is simply not cost effective. More and more apps are moving towards larger clusters of inexpensive computers. Why buy giant SPARC box when you can purchase a cluster of 50 Dual Athlon machines for the same price or cheaper?
Certainly there will be big SPARC-iron sales for years to come, but there is no way (other than making the OS available on Intel and porting tons of apps) that Sun can dramatically increase the popularity of Solaris.
All the developer mindshare is captured by Linux, MacOS X, and Windows XP/.NET.
This is why I say Solaris is the next AIX. Certainly it is still there, but it is quietly dying at the end of its lifecycle.
#m
Back when I was in college, I did lots of work on Solaris machines at school, and thought it might be neat to be able to work in the same environment at home. Problem was that x86 Solaris didn’t support quite a bit of common hardware that so many other *nix-like OS’s do….
Yeah, it was neat being able to get it to work. But it really didn’t do anything for me that Linux couldn’t. And it was slow. (On a side note….a nice CDE environment for Linux would be cool, if only for nostalgia reasons…I use gnome most of the time nowadays)
I suppose maybe it’d be useful if you’ve got a large Sun base, and want to setup a cheapo fileserver or something….
But I never really saw the benefit of it for anything other than serving a niche market. Nonetheless, I was bummed when they announced it’d be going away.
If i’m not mistaken, there’s a window manager called Xfce out there that emulates CDE quite nicely. Give it a try, it’s a lot leaner and meaner than gnome and kde.
CDE proper has been ported to Linux more than once. It is definitely a niche market (RedHat at one point sold CDE for Linux; that didn’t last very long). For example: http://www.xig.com/Pages/DeXtopGUI.html
– Sam
Didn’t Sun publish some stats saying that 75% run Solaris on x86?
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75% run Solaris on x86?
Is that true, 75% of Solaris installations are on x86 ?
If so why did they stopped the development ?
That’s like using Microsoft tactics (to fight Intel) on the CPU market.
If I remember it well there is a version of Internet Explorer ported for Unix that will run on Solaris – or is it HPUX ? (can’t remember).
The x86 would be a nice way to let users/developers to learn Solaris, Sun would only gain with it.
My SCO UnixWare 7, “hobbyist license” or something like that, hardware support list is short and was also slow, the FileSystem is slow and old but it’s really rock stable for a file server and good support for win32 clients via SCO – now caldera’s – software, I got SCOVision, SCOMerge, SCO SQL Retriever, a good Java development kit and so on, and it had a Linux app emulator and Linux software: apache and a zsh/bash shell, GCC, XEmacs and others (and CDE) but I never really learned it when I had it installed
, it’s a very stable FSystem/kernel, empirically speaking, of course; still empirism is a good benchmark if you trust your objectivity and sixth sense, maybe I will install the OS again for CDE and the like > nostalgia too. Don’t know about Solaris software on the x86 version.
I think if you consider the direction they are going with the UltraSPARC chip (asynchronos), it might be pretty tough to maintain compatibility with legacy CPU architecture. I, however, sure do appreciate being able to run it at home on a cheap toybox which is something important to keep people interested. Another factor to consider is; so many machines out there are still running versions of Solaris earlier than 8 that Sun is frustrated that people won’t migrate regardless of whether they continue x86 Solaris or not.
Hi chicobaud,
you’re right, there is (still) a UNIX version of Internet Explorer (5.1 AFAIK), for Sun Solaris (SPARC) and HP/UX (PA-RISC). Unfortunately there are no executables for Solaris/x86 and I don’t think Microsoft is going to release a version for this architecture anytime soon.
I also remember the free offer for SCO Unixware (and also SCO’s own SVR4 Unix) some years ago, but I don’t know whether it is still free (as in beer) or even still developed/maintained. I liked Unixware, but SCO Unix sucked alot!
Solaris/x86 was quite buggy IMO in comparison to Solaris/SPARC. I often had kernel panics or lockups because of (non setuid) user apps (third party) that ran amok. This really shouldn’t happen! Except from this it was quite nice, but definitely nothing for Unix newbies, as the software installation/administration is not as easy as in Unixware.
>Didn’t Sun publish some stats saying that 75% run Solaris on x86?
I’d like to see those numbers. I’ve seen lots of Solaris installation, but actually never seen Solaris on x86.
No idea, I read it on some news site once, but didn’t really care about. That stat seemed bogus to me too.
I wanted to try Solaris/x86 but I could never get it to install…I would get to various stages of the installation procedure and then the kernel would panic on me.
I gave up after trying it on the third machine. Oh well.
The gnome gui is being incorporated into Solaris 9. Granted this is not much of a change but something is better than nothing.