A recent
post in Jonathan Schwartz blog says there were 151,039 SPARC and 269,856 x64/x86 downloads for Solaris 10 so far. “An early look suggests we’re not going to have a problem with demand” Schwartz said.
Total number of Solaris 10 downloads exceed 420000
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Eugenia Loli
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This shows that there is a lot of potential market growth out there for Sun as they embrace a wider set of platforms to supplement Sparc. Let’s just see if they can capitalise on it.
Considering the fact it has only been available since the 31st of January this year things are rolling along very nicely.
We’ve been told by the GPL fanboys that Sun/Solaris has no “community”.
The x86 move was an intelligent one and I think that the next step should be extend the Hardware Compatibility list.
Indeed I could only wish it runs on a real 64 bit hardware. x86-64 is an extension of an already dated architecture which is satisfactory for low end workstation. x86-64 basically supports only more memory as improvement over IA32.
On the other hand Sparc development seems to have stalled and could not compete (Fujitsu chips I guess are better performing). I wish Power5 and/or IA-64 is supported by Solaris.
Can someone explain to me why apple don’t want to release MAC on x86? I know i am off-topic but still i would like to understand this. Anybody has any insight on this? Is it because they don’t want to lose their hardware business? If that is the primary case, then it seems stupid to me.
On topic, i really like the move made by SUN on x86. I just hope that their x86 release is as good as sparc one. Though i see one uphill battle for SUN on x86 getting companies to write drivers for them.
I think you’re a couple threads too late. Scroll down on the main page.
Before someone starts pointing out, by MAC i meant OS X
I sure was late…at late night (3 am here)…i read the steve jobs thread and it sure gives some insight on this.
Drivers and hardware support is biggest win for Microsoft.
I think it has become a chicken and egg problem for new os for x86. If they don’t have windows like hardware support, they won’t have a market and if they don’t have a market, they will never have hardware support like windows…seems like a dead end to me…
There is a news topic about Steve Jobs not wanting to move to x86 about 8 topics down on the main page at osnews.com. Why not post there?
It’s a comin…
check out http://www.blastware.org/pages/1/index.htm
Basically Genesi are OpenSolaris Pilot members and are already getting down to business.
Intel/HP’s 64 is where it belongs, I hope no-one wastes any time on it.
X86 Solaris has come a long way, finally Slowaris is a legacy term. In terms of hardware support It has improved immensely, I have installed Solaris 10 on quite a few boxes so far and haven’t come across a single show-stopper.
Fedora status :
http://www.redhat.com/magazine/003jan05/departments/fedora_status/
Fedora has been successfully downloaded from the Torrent more than 117,000 times. (only with bittorrent !)
* 10626 subscribers to fedora-announce-list
* 6721 subscribers to fedora-list
* 2350 subscribers to fedora-test-list <==
* 1725 subscribers to fedora-devel-list <==
* 570 subscribers to fedora-docs-list
* 775 subscribers to fedora-config-list
* 72 subscribers to fedora-extra-list
Should I create a news ?
“We’ve been told by the GPL fanboys that Sun/Solaris has no “community”.”
when did the number of downloads indicate the community status?. what the hell does this have to do with GPL. cut the crap ok?
Are you jealous that solaris is getting popular? Chill down buddy… Solaris is an excellent OS and when we can have one hunderd reviews of one thousand different linux distros then why not some news about Solaris?
“Indeed I could only wish it runs on a real 64 bit hardware. x86-64 is an extension of an already dated architecture which is satisfactory for low end workstation. x86-64 basically supports only more memory as improvement over IA32. ”
Well a improvement is that at least. The x86-64 CPU instructions help reduce the total cost to consumers. This could be old out dated software, mixed with new networking and security features. NX tech is helpfull buffer overflows but can be worked around on windows platform.
IA-64 is going to or is now supported by OpenVMS. Intel rushed to market and got left in the cold with first gen 64bit. It would be nice to see a Intel and AMD agreement to release chips on the same day for dual cpu.(rant soz)
Although solaris10 did not work on my system it shows that people are interested in NON GNU code.
It would be nice if Microsoft gave the public a look dont touch code. But these things arnt going to happen.
Solaris now need what linux developers are starting to get and that is major companies supporting the platform. Linux can write most of the drivers from standards and I belive this is what SUN are doing now.
—————————————–
hardware:
Gigabyte GA-K8VM800M
VIA K8M800 chipset Liteon 48xburn 2x Maxtor SATA 80gig HDDS
Get a grip, please. This is an industry news page. It’s interesting news that Solaris 10 is in relatively high download demand, because it’s not necessarily what anybody expected.
On the other hand, everybody is aware of the fact that the top 10 of Linux distributions, which are far more established in this realm, have higher numbers of downloads. This is not news.
It’s not a contest.
> It’s interesting news that Solaris 10 is in relatively high download demand
_download_ demand.
I download two times Solaris. First time, Solaris does not install. Second time, I play a little with it and get rid of if.
I was curious. No more.
> We’ve been told by the GPL fanboys that Sun/Solaris has no “community”.
In my *opinion*, it doesn’t, at least not on any scale relevant to the product (unlike e.g. Linux), and this news doesn’t indicate otherwise. The number of downloads can be explained with the positive buzz Sun has been able to create with interesting new features like DTrace, which are intriguing and warrant giving the system a spin for a lot of people without prior Solaris experience.
Depending on how this turns out, it may well be the beginning of a larger community. At this point, however, Solaris mostly has a customer base, not a community of users – IMHO.
FreeBSD downloads pale into insignificance against the Linux top 10, does that make Linux better than FreeBSD?
The interesting thing here is the renewed interest on the x86 platform.
Just because something is popular does not necessarily make it any better, what was the market share of Windows?
Not only does it feature the NX flag, it also boasts twice as many general purpose registers. Still only half as many as PowerPC/SPARC/MIPS/etc, but a noteworthy improvement.
> No matter what SUN does, some people won’t be happy until they bend over for the open source zealots. If you don’t like it don’t use it.
It not about open source zealots, it’s about free software. Patent are incompatible with free software. Period. And Sun love patents :
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jonathan/20040930 “I Believe in IP”
NB : Sun don’t grand their patents to free software but only to CDDL. But Sun can use all “intellectual property” of GNU/Linux.
I’m not bashing sun – I downloaded 10 to test drive for a few weeks before I decide what to think. I’d wager that over half of the downloads (probably more like 75%) are by people like me, or people who will download anything, so long as it’s free. I’ve never understood the idea that total downloads is any sort of metric of actual demand/usage/migration/etc.
“NB : Sun don’t grand their patents to free software but only to CDDL. But Sun can use all “intellectual property” of GNU/Linux.”
Actually, sun can’t do that either. The GPL license is incompatible with CDDL.
Contrary to popular belief, GPL is *more* restrictive (and thus *less* freedom) than BSD/Public Domain.
Its great to see such a massive interest in Solaris 10. As soon as I have a x64/x86 system I will definitly be trying it.
I would like to note though that it mystifys me as to why everything has to be compared to Linux. Sure there are a lot of good distributions of Linux out there but it does not mean that others operating system’s can’t exist. Sun has done a damn good job getting Solaris 10 out the door and some of the features being dismissed will make sysadmin lives a lot easyer.
I would bet that a vast majority of the Linux zealots never spend their nights and weekends slaving for the betterment of mankind by enhancing there favourite Linux distribution, rather they spend their time trolling sites looking to discredit when and where possible.
The engineers doing all the work seem to be the ones that complain the least , probably because they don’t have time to troll every forum thread.
If you don’t like Solaris , Windows, FreeBSD or what ever thats perfectly ok. Just run what you enjoy running, last time I heard no one was shoving Solaris down your throat – relax and get some fresh air and sun.
The trolls have emerged from their caves
Can the GPL V BSD V MIT V Apache V LGPL V CDDL please get over it. Isn’t it possible to accept a third-way in which we accept that we all have common or similar goals?
I have asked this countless times and nobody has ever given me an answer. How would you reconcile the following scenario with your so called freedom:
I start a company to develop a new application. I hire four full-time developers, a few QA people, and a marketing/sales person. It will take 1 year to get the application ready to sell. In the meantime I have no income and the cost of salaries, benefits, hardware/software, office space, and utilities cost me about $800,000.00 for the year. Now if I release my software under the GPL, in which people can redistribute it free of charge, how much should I charge for it? Since anyone can repackage the software I paid to have developed and provide support, I have created a huge amount of potential competition who did not invest almost a million dollars into the development of the software. Since I have to recoup this cost, they will be able to undercut me every step of the way. So it would only make sense to charge enormous amounts of money for the software [$50, 000.00 – $100,000.00 – $2000, 000.00] to reduce the risk of losing my initial investment. Would anyone pay this amount? Would it even be worth the risk of developing the software?
If I spend MY time or money developing software then you are *free* not to use it if you don’t like the conditions. I believe you own the copy of the software you’ve purchased and can do with it as you like, but I would have a real problem with someone redistributing the software that I developed without being compensated for it. Unless of course I charged a million dollars for the first and only copy. Do see my point?
http://mute-net.sourceforge.net/
This guy makes money developing *free* software which is licensed under the GPL. Read his story, read how he does this.
You have to think of new ways to make money with software if you develop GPL’d software. Not by selling it but by creating new strategies.
I co-founded a company which develops exclusively open source software http://www.xolinc.com
trust me it’s not a problem, add value to your product through service and support and build up your name. Your name is your asset, this is why Red Hat is turning massive profits.
If you went into it thinking the way you do, yes, you would fail dismally.
from http://mute-net.sourceforge.net/
The monthly fund-raising goal is based on my estimate of the amount of money I will need to support myself and my family during the month of project work (we spend roughly $27 per day as part of our $10,000 yearly budget).
This is the one of the new strategies you’re talking about?? You’re kidding right?
He mentions Benefactors and commissioned work as well in his article which are valid ways of making money. But if someone is paying me to create something for them then they are the ones who own the code and more often than not decide what to do with it.
Most of the work that I do is commissioned work [i.e. custom software for business]. They pay me to build something and they own it. That model doesn’t address my original post.
Next…
There is already a move by some of the OpenSolaris members to port Solaris to POWER/PowerPC, as for IA64, its a dead end, let the damn thing die.
Regarding SPARC64, that is going to be taking the high end of town for SUN – a joint development between Fujitsu and SUN, which should enable both to continue to be competitive with Intel and IBM, and reduce the cost of development and production.
Regarding AMD64, I think it is rather short sighted what you are saying about the Opteron. It is a 64bit processor, no different to the UltraSPARC being a 64bit extension to the HyperSPARC/SPARC and POWER4 being an extension to the original POWER 32bit series.
The AMD64 offerings by SUN, IMHO will eventually kill off the SUN SPARC workstation offerings – SUN will continue to offer SPARC workstations until they’re non-economical to produce, by that time, however, the AMD64 will be in a position where it will become THE platform to develop for.
As for its architecture; considering that the sweet spot for server sales is the 2-4 way servers, I don’t see how it is a disadvantage to AMD in regards to their current scalability.
Sun say Solaris 10 will be opensource but nobody can download its source code for now. And there will be many parts who remain closed because of “Sun partners Intelectual Property”.
I only believe that Solaris 10 is free software when I can download its source code and when I can do “./configure; make; make install” resulting in a bootable and working OS.
Redhat’s success is largely based on someone elses work. Selling/supporting software that they didn’t develop. If it wasn’t for their IPO the would’ve been out of business years ago.
I have looked at your site and can’t find any mention of open source software that you’re selling only solutions using existing open source software. I will concede that their is a business model for a services company whose main revenue stream is implementing solutions using, or supporting existing technology. If that business decides to write some software to provide better services that’s great. But that doesn’t address my initial post. Your solution is built using FreeBSD and Asterisk. How much money did YOU invest in the development of your solution? And since [I’m assuming] there’s a hardware component, there’s very little risk in someone redistributing your solution.
You should wake up and read my original post again. The scenario I describe is very different than your business model.
The choice in licensing goes to the copyright holder, if you are contracted to write the code by a business it is their choice as to which license the code is under. true.
Supporting a product can be more profitable than it’s initial sale. Take for instance HP selling toners for it’s printers, I will buy a HP cartridge for my LaserJet 4500 every month and trust me those things aren’t cheap. Red Hat sells support contract’s on RHEL as does Sun with Solaris the difference being that Sun has a $0 RTU.
This approach is not unique to software obviously and the Mobile Phone market is another perfect example.
Support is expensive and very profitable for the provider. Look at IBM Global Services, it is one of IBM’s profit centres.
We don’t have our own products…What about News-Announcer?
Yes, News-Announcer is our only in-house developed product, our develpers contribute back to projects such as Asterisk M0N0. That is the point of Open Source we collaborate and work together with the community, why re-invent the wheel. For our call center solutions we have put in a lot of work in R & D which is all available to the community.
IBM didn’t create Linux yet they contribute alot to it…it’s a win-win situation for all involved. Same with Sun & Gnome, Novell and Evolution….blah blah blah
> I have asked this countless times and nobody has ever given me an answer.
See Trolltech/MySQL AB/Red Hat story for examples.
> Redhat’s success is largely based on someone elses work. Selling/supporting software that they didn’t develop. If it wasn’t for their IPO the would’ve been out of business years ago.
Red Hat maintain most part of gcc, glibc, linux.
Red Hat developed nptl.
Red Hat maintain glib/panto/gtk+/nautilus, …
Red Hat do a lot of jobs (here job mean IPO).
egrep “copyright.*@redhat.com” in a linux tree : 260 files.
“Expect to see buildable Solaris code here in Q2 2005.”
That’s right, but it is *NOT* still there.
Sun has been using the excuse of “open solaris” “because it’s going to be released soon” for months if not years. I hope they release the source soon, but I’m tired of hearding “open” when I still can’t download the source.
By the way, I *don’t* doubt that lot of people has downloaded solaris 10. But 420000??? Solaris 10 was released a couple of months ago as much.
A quick search tells me that solaris 10 is 5 CDs long (or a dvd). 5*680 = 3.4 GB. 420000 * 3.4 = 1428000 GB
??? In two months? Unless Sun is dedicating all of their income to buy more bandwith I just don’t believe those numbers, not ecause i don’t like solaris, they’re just insane. IMHO Jonathan knows that some news sources have dedicated people to look at his blog, I understand it, he’s a CEO after all not a programmer, this is his job.
th “OpenSolaris is nearly here, Solaris 10 already is. And it’s definetly coming. No company would back up from such promise, that would be ‘the end’
”
Indeed If SUN microsystems did a backflip and said we are not going to bother anymore. The whole debate will backfire. SUN would be unhappy and the community hate them.
SUN have other companies that they have to consider otherwise SUN will end up stuck in a Legal mine field. Binery drivers or the like would be good. But there would be so much code that they could not allow others to read.
This subject may have alot of trolling but if the posts are constructive then there is only good. Nothing is a free even in linux. There is a cost. Developers time, you download a beta you have the obligation to help the project. Freeware is the same nomatter what lable you put on it. You need to give your Free time back to the project to help maintain it.
SUN do this by selling hardware. People download the ISO and the hardware support isnt that good. This is due to the fact that the developer community is awaiting the source/network.
So that is enough from me for now anyway.
Hang on to your chairs its going to be a long chopy ride, but well worth the time.
i downloaded the 5-parts for dvd iso,.. and the individual md5sum for these files seemed to be correct (agreed to the one supplied by sun). But after concatenating them into single iso (first try using cat, then using copy /b), i never got the md5 of the dvd correct.
I wonder if I should worry about this.
Nope
Like I said in another thread, if you haven’t tried Soalris x86, you should. The hardware support is better and the installer is vastly improved. If you can install Linux, you can install Solaris 10. JDS 3 is included and is a very nice desktop.
So it’s been downloaded many times, that doesn’t mean it has a community around it. I myself downloaded the ISO’s to give Solaris a whirl on one of the boxes here when I have some free time on hand. No intention whatsoever to switch from Linux to Solaris at all at this point in time, just curiosity and I think there are _many_ others out there who downloaded the ISO’s for exactly the same reason.. curiosity.
I’d like to see Solaris tweaked so that it could run on top of Xen. That way it would be much easier to experiment with it.
“An early look suggests we’re not going to have a problem with demand”
The adaptec 19160 is still unsupported, so my download (and I suspect others’ too) doesn’t really count. I might try it on a computer with crap-ide devices, but I won’t be running it on my main PC.
I downloaded Solaris 10, but after the mysql benchmark I saw no reason to keep it installed; as it was very similar to GNU/Linux. As I am already familiar with Linux, and Linux seems to perform better and already works with my hardware.
If I have a problem, I can always go out to the vast GNU/Linux community. Including straight to the Linux Kernel Mailing List, if it warrents it.
i agree, i might download it just for testing purposes, if i did not have to register (either true or fake info) i would download it and give it a spin on a test machine if sun let people download it anonymously without filling in any forms, since Sun likes to play big brother they can keep their solarus…
<quote>
By the way, I *don’t* doubt that lot of people has downloaded solaris 10. But 420000??? Solaris 10 was released a couple of months ago as much.
A quick search tells me that solaris 10 is 5 CDs long (or a dvd). 5*680 = 3.4 GB. 420000 * 3.4 = 1428000 GB
??? In two months? Unless Sun is dedicating all of their income to buy more bandwith I just don’t believe those numbers, not ecause i don’t like solaris, they’re just insane. IMHO Jonathan knows that some news sources have dedicated people to look at his blog, I understand it, he’s a CEO after all not a programmer, this is his job. </quote>
Ever heard of Sunsites? Probably never bothered to think of that network of mirror sites the community has provided Sun for years to facilitate the distribution of Solaris Patches, Java downloads and such.
I have no doubt they did that many downloads.
But I think they have missed the boat by about 5 years on opening the source.
Why? Look at Adam’s response but saw no reason to switch from to Linux which he is already familiar with to Solaris.
Which is funny five years ago more *Nix people in the industry were already familiar with Solaris. But the *Nix admin community is being turned out its head with more and more Linux focused admins.
The SunManagers list is still going strong and a number of forums focused on people who manage Sun or x86 Solaris servers.
From the cuddletech guys who do the great Veritas read through and Enlightment packages to the Blackwave.org folks with their up to date builds of Gnome, KDE, Mozilla and other package right over the traditional support of the wonderous sunfreeware.com folks and their packages.
It is I admit a small community folks.
I also admit that Solaris has little funky legacy qualities but out of the commercial Unix variants I find I am most comfortable and it has long had the best community in terms of creating packages etc…
I run Gnome 2.8 on Ultra Sparc 5 at work as my desktop with Evolution, Gnumeric, OpenOffice, xmms with Solaris output plugin, Helixplayer, gxine, gaim and gftp all from blastwave.org and I am actually surprised at how snappy it is with menu re-draws in X being better and faster than in X.org right now.
And I say all of this realizing Sun made this move to late and having been a linux user 1998.
This is sort of off-topic, but someone mentioned Solaris not supporting Adaptec 19160 SCSI adapters. If you consider buying a SCSI adapter in the future, consider LSI Logic. I bought one instead of an Adaptec 29160 because for the same tech specs, it was 2/3 the price. And then I was amazed at how well supported it was on other platforms.
It was well supported in FreeBSD on x86, and then I bought an Alpha off eBay. The SRM firmware supported it as a boot option, where only the very newest Alphas support Adaptec. It’s the brand used in Compaq controllers, and also Sun controllers. The particular chip isn’t supported as a boot device (many other ones are, though) from my Sun Blade’s PROM, but once it boots there’s a driver for it.
For some reason, it just seems they don’t have the name recognition. But if you want SCSI, you might be able to find something cheaper that’s just as good and well supported under open source OS’s and non-x86 platforms. Sorry for the commercial, too.
I don’t much worry about Solaris eating up Linux market share. See, for example, “Using MySQL to benchmark OS performance” article, to understand why Linux seems to be doing fine: http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=9653
But I have a hunch that there might be many BSD users now that could be tempted to switch to Solaris. In many ways, Solaris and the BSDs seem to serve similar interests (they’re for servers mostly, security emphasis, views on open source licensing etc.), and Solaris may also have some technological advantages over the BSDs as a sever OS.
… are a few of the pro Solaris guys. Right off the bat, the thread started with comments on those “Linux zealots”, then later criticism of the GPL, then comments of “tear down the poster of Che Guevara from the wall of your parents basement”. Lot’s of inflammatory stuff, when some pro Linux posters were only bringing up legitimate questions.
I’ve noticed that the pro Solaris camp in the OSNews threads can really have a big chip on it’s shoulder and is like a coiled rattlesnake ready to strike at any pro Linux poster or anything slightly criticising Solaris or Sun. It’s probably due to Sun losing lot’s of money, and Linux having eaten Solaris’ lunch in the market place over the last 3 or 4 years. The Solaris fans are tired of taking it in the chin, which is understandable.
That said, the Solaris vs Linux flame wars have grown tiresome. Let’s face it, they’re both fine OS’s, and they are both basically *nix. The Solaris and Linux camps should actually contragulate each other, join forces, and attack Windows for all of it’s problems.
BTW – Sun’s CDDL is a good license. Not everything has to be GPL (another good license).
I doubt, however, that Solaris will get a very sizeable developer community because the license is one way – the developer writes code, and it stays in Solaris under Sun’s control. If the developer tries to publish derivative works, he/she could be sued by Sun. This basically means that the developer is writing code for Sun for free, with nothing in return. GPL Linux, by contrast, lets the developer keep their own code and publish any derivative work, so long as it remains GPL. It’s the share and share alike principle. Everybody and nobody owns the code – a true community.
CDDL is “give Sun free labor with little in return” principle.
Now, I’m not knocking Sun, since they spent hundreds of millions of dollars developing Solaris. And the CDDL is perfectly valid. If someone wants to give free code to Sun with little in return, they can knock themselves out, if that’s what floats their boat. But I doubt that a big developer community will form around this kind of scenario.
It means little. We have yet to have some reviews.
“And you’re a lame troll. By visiting opensolaris.org you’d know the timeline:
“Expect to see buildable Solaris code here in Q2 2005.”
I think YOU are a troll because nobody guarantees that this future “buildable” Solaris is the same version you can download now.
Solaris 10 is now only one more freeware (not free software) and this future “open and buildable” Solaris can be as useful as Darwin operating system to Mac OS X users…
“And like Sun has said, mostly few drivers are from 3rd parties which cannot be opened. (NVIDIA,ATI on Linux anyone? not very open).”
Yes, these drivers are proprietary and closed but you have the option of don’t use them. You can use vanilla “nv” or “vesa” XFree86/Xorg drivers.
“Please, stop that trolling… OpenSolaris is nearly here, Solaris 10 already is. And it’s definetly coming. No company would back up from such promise, that would be ‘the end’
”
SCO was a linux vendor and now it is anti-linux and anti-free software. I don’t belive in companies, specially american companies.
We’ve been told by the GPL fanboys that Sun/Solaris has no “community”.
Downloads doesn’t equal community I’m afraid. Sorry to point out the obvious. That’s the fine line Sun have to tread. They seem to assume that offering something for free will instantly give them a more substantial developer community. It won’t. Solaris already actually has a reasonable developer community, and people have been porting things to it for years. They’re just not working on the bits that Sun would hope they would take over so they can share developer resources. Unfortunately you need the correct license and balance to do that.
> I doubt, however, that Solaris will get a very sizeable developer community because the license is one way – the developer writes code, and it stays in Solaris under Sun’s control.
I don’t think it is Sun’s goal is to ask community to develop the OS for them, Sun has got plenty of resource to do that on their own. Sun has more than successful developing Solaris without external help and remain one step ahead of the competion in technology (Linux included). I’m guessing Sun wants to adopt the MySQL type of open-source where you can take a look under the hood and see all the innards of the OS, but the most of the contributing developers remain within the company. MySQL has been very successful with that model and so will Sun. You don’t need a bazillion developers squabbling with each other to develop something half decent (Linux comes to mind), you just need a small bunch of extremely talented developers that can do their job very well. Sun has proved it with Solaris 10, which miles ahead of any OS out there, being developed by a relatively small group of developers.
> > We’ve been told by the GPL fanboys that Sun/Solaris has no “community”.
>
> Downloads doesn’t equal community I’m afraid.
Exactly. When Netscape 4.x was released as open source, there was a spike in downloads, but no real community developed. Development stalled for four years until the Mozilla community built up. In that time, Netscape went from being #1 to a distant second headed for oblivion. The Mozilla community did eventually start to regain it’s ground, but it was only because Microsoft was stupid enough to gave up on the browser. If they had continued to update the browser, add tabbing, adblockers, decoupled ActiveX, and other features found in Firefox, they might still be a distant #1 on Windows.
Building a community is hard. Unless OpenSolaris has the right infrastructure in place and the right transitioning team in place, no community will form.
My own take is that they’ll take the Fedora approach to OpenSolaris. Sun people will do all the work on OpenSolaris and accept bug fixes and create regular distribution ISOs. The community will mostly focus on things like creating repositories like “Fedora Extras for OpenSolaris” and “Livna for OpenSolaris”. Which is all well in good. Fedora has a lot of happy users and RedHat has benefitted quite hansomly from the community involvement around the edges.
So when’s it coming out on CD already?
I was unable to use grub boot loader to dual boot linux and Solaris. Has someone able to do this, I was able to do it with 32 bit versions. Any help appreciated.
I don’t know about what you have been reading, but from what I see the Linux crowd wastes no time in posting what they think is relevant comments. And anytime a “Solaris zealot” responds to a Linux user on this forum it is a flame!
And I will ask you the same way I asked A nun, he moos, show us the numbers. The reason why Linux users are treated as flamers by Sun users is because of this. Many of the “Sun is losing” arguments sounds like the BSD is dying posts on Slashdot.
Here is my opinion about Linux in regards to IBM and HP, I would be very careful who supports Linux. Notice that both IBM and HP have their Unix variants (AIX and HP-UX) still very much in development. This is so both vendors can hedge their bets if Linux falls flat on its face. IBM and HP will come to the rescue with their proprieatary OS and “save the day”. HP openly advertised their Integrity servers as being able to run Windows, Linux, and HP-UX. Their support of the Open Source community is based on them making money. Ask IBM sometime to release the code necessary to run Linux in an LPAR on thier zSeries mainframe and see what kind of response you get. You also don’t necessarily see any effort on the part of IBM or HP to open source its “money maker” products.
I do not know what kind of problem Linux users here have with Solaris, and I do not care. I am interested in intelligent discussion of relevant facts, not FUD. And some of the posts here are way over the top and I can see people getting upset over it. The difference is with me I either post something like this, or ignore it.
By the way, I am working on a Solaris 10 article for OSNews and hope to have it finished soon.
From Lumberg:
“I’ll tell you the problem they have with it. The source won’t be covered under the GPL so they lob their usual volley of hatred at anything that doesn’t conform to their exclusionary, hate-mongering ideology.”
This was the kind of inflammatory post I was referring to.
“hate-mongering idealogy”? I mean, c’mon, you can’t get anymore inflammatory than that. Just because one likes the GPL, doesn’t mean one hates everything else.
It’s okay for Linux users to come in here and say they think the GPL is better than the CDDL. I happen to agree with them, but that doesn’t make CDDL invalid or bad. It just means that many people think the GPL is better. That’s all.
And BTW, I’m a Linux user, and I have absolutely nothing, and I mean nothing, against Solaris. By everything I’ve read about it, Solaris is an awesome, advanced, full featured server operating system, and I congratulate Sun for pouring millions into developing it. I also wish Sun the best of luck in being successful with it. To me, Linux success and Solaris success are not mutually exclusive.
At my workplace, we sell 100s of server computers weekly. We used to get 98% of the boxes installed with some form of Windows. However, during the last few years, there has been a slow pattern change, and now it seems that we only get around 20% Windows. I am not sure if people don’t like all the antipiracy stuff in Windows 2003 or just that Linux has improved so dramatically, but Linux accounts now for around 80% of our shipped servers. But it isn’t all good news for Linux either. RedHat, any open source foundation, has made exactly $0 from all our thousands of sales. Fedora has proven to be good enough for the vast majority of customers. Also, with CentOS, WhiteBox Linux, and the other 3-4 free beer perfect copy cat’s of RedHat, that has proven to be another popular choice when you want things to run a lot longer. These companies are very happy with Linux but they are not willing to donate a few dollars per server. People keep saying support cost will keep RedHat floating, but I just don’t see it. As Linux grows even more popular, the already extreme stability and ease of maintenance will just get better and the need of any type of support will just diminish.
If those numbers are not enough here http://www.mininova.org/tor/6025 you can find a torrent for the DVD iso plus Companion and Language CD isos plus the lables in pdf format
cheers
You make some great points and sound like our company. We saw the writing on the wall regarding OS/2 and so did our port to Linux back in ’97. I think one guy at work bought one copy of Linux over all of these years, after all of the thousands of boxes we’ve sold since. We just moved over to Slackware and Debian once RedHat started their enterprise/fedora business. We don’t need any support from RedHat or anybody else and never have. I guess RedHat should probably start making things more complicated and not easier or eventually nobody will need support. There’s going to be a lot of people fighting over some meager scraps – well, they already are.
> Exactly. When Netscape 4.x was released as open source, there was a spike in downloads, but no real community developed. Development stalled for four years until the Mozilla community built up. In that time,
Yes. At the beginning Mozilla use MPL (GPL-incompatible, the community don’t like this) and switch to MPL/GPL (The community is happy).
> Solaris (an old OS)
> Linux (younger than Solaris)
Uh, Solaris is ’93. That’s way younger than Linux.
> First time it doesn’t work.
> Second time I play around with it.
It’s a bit idiotic to download it _twice_.
<quote>… are a few of the pro Solaris guys. Right off the bat, the thread started with comments on those “Linux zealots”, then later criticism of the GPL, then comments of “tear down the poster of Che Guevara from the wall of your parents basement”. Lot’s of inflammatory stuff, when some pro Linux posters were only bringing up legitimate questions.
…..
BTW – Sun’s CDDL is a good license. Not everything has to be GPL (another good license)</quote>
I hear a good bit of zealotry and bigotry from both sides here which is fairly common in my experience reading OSNews.
Wait, till the next Mac review comes through and that whole XP vs. OS X stuff starts especially another 200 posts about the damn one button mouse.
I have used Linux and Solaris.
I have replace a number of Solaris backup servers running Netbackup in a medium sized company to RedHat using NetVault for Linux.
I have been shot down when a larger company still felt enamored with their Solaris/Legato backup solution.
I was not able to get a clustered nfs raid server going in a place where they insisted on using SuSE. Ok, LVM was fine but the setup had to be done manually and you can not even click near the LVM stuff in Yast2 or SuSEConfig would hose the setup. Kimberlite was just fine. It worked as advertised. But you plug the second server into the Raidtec JBOD and the Seagate U320 drives talking to our Adaptec cards would autonegotiate down to their lowest possible speed only on the second server.
Two 220Rs later with Sun Clustering and Veritas and – BAM! – it worked.
Then again, I have replaced a lot of old Sun hardware to RedHat Dell and Compaq 1U servers running Apache and Apache/Tomcat.
Homogenous solutions always have issues. Use the right tool for the job and sometime commercial enterprise software support for Sun/Solaris is better. Even Oracle the last time I used it for Linux at work only supported really old distros and only certain ones. Or sometimes one solution either way just works better for the task at hand.
Use what works for your environment without any zealotry (as long as its a *Nix variant
) and you will find that things tend to go a looot easier.
Yeah, and only 50,000 were able to actually use Solaris 10. What a joke this system is. Did they even try to use it before they released it? Even on SPARC most of the GNOME-based Java Desktop System icons don’t work, saying “Support for XXX feature has not been compiled-in to GNOME.”
How stupid.
I can’t believe there are 600 engineers working on this piece of trash.
I have never had an issue with Solaris x86 on hardware listed on the HCL. If you have a specific issue in regards to Solaris, either post it here, comp.unix.solaris or alt.solaris.x86 and I am sure someone will help. And during the Beta period there were some “growing pains”, I know because I was one of the External Beta Testers. But right now I have Solaris 10 GA running on one of my Intel machines and plan to install it on another.
Recently I downloaded Solaris 10, but it does not work on my computer. After the boot-manager asks for the type of installation, the kernel is started but complains that no framebuffer driver could be found, and then nothing happens anymore.
I would really like to test Solaris 10, especially as Beta 10_55 did work on my PC(1). So does anyone know what I could do?
Or should I just give up and just stick with Solaris 9, which works flawlessly on my PC(2)?
(1) It sort-of worked. It could boot, I could get into Gnome, but half of the time the kernel would core-dump at startup, and the CDE file manager didn’t work, and it doesn’t contain some of the great new features that the final release has.
(2) Yes, such a thing exists. Now that I have replaced the Via Rhine III with another kind of NIC, and the on-board CMI8330 with a Creative Vibra 16, Solaris 9 supports *everything* and it seems it really works well!
I logged into my Sun account to download Solaris10 (x86 version). I did not download it. However, in my account now there is an entry showing I downloaded Solaris10, which I believe Sun is adding to the total number of dowloads.
This is getting rediculous. Please don’t sink to the “Lumbergh level”. He seems to be a seriously troubled individual, there is no need to imitate this “master”.
Daan,
What kind of video card are you using in your machine? My experience has been if it works with Solaris 9, it should work with 10. Build 55 is really old and more information is always helpful.
It is a SiS 6326 AGP 8MB card, which is built into my mainboard. It is VGA compatible but does not support VESA.
Solaris 8, 9 and 10_55 all work fine, at least in text-mode. After loading the kernel (“Loading kernel/unix…” I think), the screen is cleared and the background turns bright white, and then the system starts.
When I try Solaris 10, the message “Loading kernel/unix…” appears, below that appear two messages about a faillure to intialise the framebuffer. The screen isn’t cleared and doesn’t turn bright white, and after about 10 minutes nothing seems to happen anymore.
Would there be a way to turn off the graphical console, to make it work like in Solaris 8 and 9?
Daan,
You could try Option 4 (Solaris Interactive Text) and see if that works for you. You will probably never get X to work with that card, that is why I have always used ATI video cards with Solaris x86. Sun’s midrange video cards in the past used ATI chipsets (this is prior to the nVidia deal).
Thanks for your suggestion, but that didn’t work either. I did try all the options except the “Custom JumpStart”, and none of them worked.
At this moment I am running Solaris 9, which works perfectly fine, including networking, sound and X Windows using the XFree86 drivers that come with it.
Therefore, if I can’t convince Solaris 10 to use either real text mode or a standard VGA framebuffer, I think I’ll stick with Solaris 9 for now. It works really well, I can even burn CD’s with one easy command, and without fiddling with IDE-SCSI emulation settings and the like.
How is this stupid?
If you develop Solaris under the CDDL, what are my rights?
* If I develop code under the CDDL what are my rights?
I only believe that Solaris 10 is free software when I can download its source code and when I can do “./configure; make; make install” resulting in a bootable and working OS.
Well you’re going to be waiting a long long time for that,
because Solaris does not use the gnu configure/automake/…
suite for configuration or building.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1754155,00.asp
Read this for more information. When I say develop code, I mean contributing to Open Solaris.
When I say develop code, I mean contributing to Open Solaris.
Well say that to start with. Don’t do yourself an extreme
dis-service and contribute to flamewars by being obtuse
about what you mean.
Solaris has Qt and Java so now my only remaining question is whether or not it has KDE, a free IDE and a free C++ compiler. Can anyone who uses it tell me? (free is in no cost btw)
Its too bad there is so much trolling, however its even more unfortunate that people are blaming it on entire groups. I do occasional volunteer work for a Linux distribution and I have never said anything against Solaris or any of Sun’s public source initiatives, so please people when replying to a troll don’t use a generalisation that includes me in your criticism.
http://solaris.kde.org According to the site both kde 3.3.2 and 3.4beta1 are available.
Kde is available from http://blastwave.org
Alan.
If I develop code under the CDDL what are my rights?
What rights do you have if you develop code under the GPL? The GPL askes you give your right to the code up and make it freely distributable.
When you contribute code under the GPL to linux kernel what rights do you have? None.
Why is any of this different than developing under the CDDL?
I am not getting what you mean by rights.
I think Adam means “rights” as in his rights to troll about things he for whatever reason doesn’t like. There was a link earlier on the last page delinating one’s rights under the CDDL – however he apparently didn’t feel like reading it.
My analysis, to which you have yet to provide a valid counter-argument, was that in order to overtake Linux, Solaris x86 will need to overcome three advantages that Linux currently enjoys: its sizeable mindshare, community and momentum. In my view, Solaris x86 is still far behind Linux as regards to these.
Why are you even talking about overtaking Linux? What world do you come from. It’s about Linux overtaking Solaris, not the other way around. Solaris has always been the king and Linux the little promising prince who one day might take the kings place.
Regarding your view. MS is compared to Linux, sizable in mindshare, community and certainly momentum (if they squeeze their muscles the world halts). Besides.. if you decide your OS based on those issues, I really hope you don’t work with anything remotely related to IT.
How about the quality of the community? Stability of your system? Flexibility? Security? Support? Reliability of the company behind it? Now here is plenty of issues where Sun is still market leader and will most likely be for some time to come. I’d be very surprised if IT managers all suddenly all over the world would say “Hey, Linux has a more sizable community, let’s throw out our Unixshop and go all Linux”.
But hey, I might be wrong, hype seems to be very important to some…
And I will ask you the same way I asked A nun, he moos, show us the numbers.
Well, what kind of numbers are you looking for? If you want to see the increase in Linux shipments in 2004, check out this article:
http://www.computerweekly.com/Article132910.htm
“Low-cost servers based on Linux or Windows continue to sell faster than their Unix counterparts, following a trend that has been evident for several quarters. Linux server shipments grew 61.6% and revenue from them was up 54.6%, Gartner said.”
It also says that Hewlett-Packard and IBM lost market share to Sun and Dell, however as indicated on the HP site Sun has Linux to thank for that, as they sold more Linux than Solaris x86 (and x86 boxes outsold all other hardware).
I do not know what kind of problem Linux users here have with Solaris, and I do not care.
Well I, for one, have no problems with Solaris. I’d download and try it if there was a live CD of it (I don’t have a spare box to install it on). I wish it success. What I have a problem with is anti-GPL posters and Solaris fans with a chip on their shoulder who go out and proclaim that Solaris x86 will overtake Linux. I just don’t see this as a probable outcome with regards to the current situation. For expressing this opinion, I’ve been repeatedly flamed and insulted by Lumbergh and co.
I am interested in intelligent discussion of relevant facts, not FUD.
And I must say, you have been very polite and respectful in exposing your opinions and arguments. Thank you.
And some of the posts here are way over the top and I can see people getting upset over it.
Getting upset is not a reason to forego rational debate, however.
Why are you even talking about overtaking Linux?
Please refer to the previous Solaris thread. This is basically what some of the pro-Solaris posters were implying, i.e. now that Solaris is open-sourced, there is no reason to choose Linux (and therefore it is no longer relevant).
What world do you come from.
*sigh* Please try to conduct yourself in an appropriate manner. Such misplaced arrogance will not get you any points.
Regarding your view. MS is compared to Linux, sizable in mindshare, community and certainly momentum (if they squeeze their muscles the world halts).
Of course, I do not dispute that. What is your point exactly?
Note: I never claimed (or wished) that Linux would overtake Windows. In my ideal OS ecosystem, every OS (or OS family, rather) would have a roughly equal market share. Why can’t we all get along?
Besides.. if you decide your OS based on those issues, I really hope you don’t work with anything remotely related to IT.
We’re not talking about me here, but the reality of the marketplace, where perception is at least as important as reality. You, like others who have been criticizing my posts, seem to believe that I have some vested interest in this. I don’t – I just don’t think that Solaris x86 has the mindshare, the momentum or the community to overtake Linux, as some pro-Solaris posters have suggested. That’s all I’m saying, and it is completely irrelevant to my personal preferences or what I do for a living (I design console games, btw, so I have absolutely no impact on any OS purchase of any kind).
How about the quality of the community? Stability of your system? Flexibility? Security? Support? Reliability of the company behind it? Now here is plenty of issues where Sun is still market leader and will most likely be for some time to come.
That may or may not be, but it is irrelevant. Note: “quality of the community” is a highly subjective appreciation; I don’t think you can say that Sun is “market leader” in that category. Also, as far as stability goes there are more stable and/or secure OSes than Solaris. VMS comes to mind.
I’d be very surprised if IT managers all suddenly all over the world would say “Hey, Linux has a more sizable community, let’s throw out our Unixshop and go all Linux”.
And yet most of Linux’s (and Windows’) gains in the server room are done at the expense of Unix. So something is definitely happening there. Even Sun is selling Linux – and in fact they’re selling a lot more Linux on x86 than Solaris…
But hey, I might be wrong, hype seems to be very important to some…
Indeed, suits are very sensitive to hype. I’m not saying that it’s a good thing (or even that Solaris is or isn’t a better choice than Linux), simply that this is how businesses work.
Thanks.
tortuous. You need at least 4 cds to finish the installation, and it’s too slow (1.8ghz Celeron, 256MB); took me more than 1 hour. This was the most difficult unix installation I have ever attempted. The OS boots slow (1m or more). The partitioner is more complex than OpenBSD’s (which I viewed as one of the most difficult). You have to specify path to Xorg -configure to configure X. It comes with Gnome 2.6 and an intuitive window manager. Performance? Not as fast and responsive as Linux. There’s practically nothing better than Linux it can offer you. The only positive thing is it by default comes with better TTF fonts (which you can easily download). This isn’t not at all user-friendly (at least with installation & configuration). I don’t believe this Solaris will make a good desktop.
it messes with your bootloader; there’s no option to leave the mbr in peace, or install its bootloader in the root partition or a floppy.
It seems that only sparc version could be counted as user base the x86 version seem that is downloaded only for take a look, may be only 1000 or 2000 x86 donwloads are used as main system
You are either misinformed or outright lying .Your choice.
When you develop kernel code, you retain all copyright to your code. Get a life and stop making shit up!
Stop lying, please. I never said that there was no Solaris community – simply that it is much smaller than the Linux community.
Yeah, you pretty much alluded to it on your posts in the previous Solaris thread.
you’d mention that in the other threads there were various posts about hyou’d mention that in the other threads there were various posts about how Solaris x86 would overtake Linux.ow Solaris x86 would overtake Linux.
In what bizarro logic world would I “have to mention it”. I could care less either way. I just upgraded Ubuntu to Hoary last night and couldn’t be happier. I’ve got the Solaris 10 isos, but until ndiswrapper is ported or realtek ports their drivers to Solaris then it’s a showstopper on the desktop to me. I don’t attack Linux or open source, I attack the haters from the extremist wing of the FSF/GNU crowd.
My analysis, to which you have yet to provide a valid counter-argument, was that in order to overtake Linux, Solaris x86 will need to overcome three advantages that Linux currently enjoys: its sizeable mindshare, community and momentum.
You’re analysis is a moot point because I don’t care if Solaris takes ove r Linux or vice-versa or if 99% of the world starts using Vic20s again. There’s always going to be free Unix code out there.
In my view, Solaris x86 is still far behind Linux as regards to these.
Solaris needs drivers. I don’t see why 99% of the userspace stuff won’t already run on Solaris.
The rest of your ramblings about mindset, and community is your and David’s attempt to spread FUD. You should read the Mono thread to see your “buddy’s” other FUD action.
I hope Solaris makes it. The more the merrier. It is not a zero sum game. Choice is good.
You just performed a Full Distribution installation and that contains about 4 GB of software. During the installation you could have selected from five different install options based on what kind of machine you are trying to build. Partitioning of disks is straightforward from either the GUI or CLI interface.
Since you also did not specify hardware other than CPU and memory, I can’t begin to tell you where your issues are. I have heard of some people having to configure Xorg (this hasn’t happened to me since Beta 63). Although I think your comments about Linux being better based on your installation problems as less than fair.
Is the hardware you are using on the HCL, if it is not do not expect it to work. If you needed help, you can post here, look at docs.sun.com, or Google comp.unix.solaris or alt.solaris.x86. I check this site on a daily basis so if I can’t help, I can point you in the right direction.
Quote: “Contrary to popular belief, GPL is *more* restrictive (and thus *less* freedom) than BSD/Public Domain.”
mmm. Let’s see – the BSD licence allows rich company (Apple anyone) to take someone elses hard work, milk it for all it’s worth, sell it for a mint and not return a single thing to the community. That’s a great community license isn’t it?
The GPL specificially forces those that are using someone elses hard work to make a buck to return back to the community.
The CDDL that Sun is trying to palm off to us is rubbish. It does not encourage a true community spirit, it’s solely there to make it look like Sun wants to be open, and wants a ‘community’ when in fact all Sun really cares about is protecting its own software patents, and getting a user base it can make a buck out of, and then con them into improving it for them. Sorry, but the GPL leaves it for dead.
As to Solaris 10 itself – I also downloaded it, and let’s just say an archaic installer, too many CD swaps, default bourne shell, default CDE, I found it sluggish on my Athlon 3000 xp system, overwrote my bootloader without any warning, thus screwing my linux system (and having me have to fix that), can’t co-exist with a linux partition on the same drive (*must* delete it – no choice). Sure, it’s a great system – NOT.
I would not recommend it…
DAve
Yeah, you pretty much alluded to it on your posts in the previous Solaris thread.
No I didn’t. Are you going to tell me what I meant to say, now? I said that Solaris didn’t have the community that Linux has. I didn’t say that Solaris didn’t have a community. I know you have a habit of putting words in other people’s mouth, but this is ridiculous.
I don’t attack Linux or open source, I attack the haters from the extremist wing of the FSF/GNU crowd.
No, you attack anyone who disagrees with you. You’ve been doing this since you’ve started posting here. You do this by painting anyone who subscribe to the GNU philosophy as loonies (without actually debating that philosophy, or by misrepresenting what it says). And when moderates like me (who like Free Software but also proprietary stuff – and in my case, actually produce proprietary software products) try to introduce a rational, balanced view, you lash at us, call us names and say we just a bunch of Stallman groupies.
You’re the one full of hate, while I’m the one preaching for a diverse OS ecosystem where free software coexists with proprietary software. I try to foster debate, you start flame wars. I present rational argument, all you can provide are ad hominem attacks and strawmen arguments.
You’re analysis is a moot point because I don’t care if Solaris takes ove r Linux or vice-versa
Then why did you enter the conversation in the first place? I guess someone must have mentioned the FSF or RMS and it was a pavlovian reflex, you had to come in and start a flamefest. I see you got quite a few of your posts moderated as well…
My analysis is correct, which is why you haven’t tried to provide a counter argument (as usual).
Solaris needs drivers. I don’t see why 99% of the userspace stuff won’t already run on Solaris.
Oh, I’m sure it will. That’s irrelevant.
The rest of your ramblings about mindset, and community is your and David’s attempt to spread FUD.
Actually, those are my ramblings. I’m the one who first brought that argument, and you still haven’t presented a valid counter-argument.
It’s simple: Sun faces an uphill battle with Solaris vs. Linux (its direct competitor), because it has less mindshare, less momentum and a smaller community than Linux. The fact that Sun offers Linux solutions as well (therefore acknowledging that it is a good product – after all, they wouldn’t sell crap). This isn’t FUD, this is the truth. And it really has nothing to do with personal preference: I also don’t care if Solaris eventually has a larger market share than Linux – as long as they both have a larger share at Microsoft’s expense!
Meanwhile, you still haven’t made a single argument. You’ve spent most of your posts making personal attacks against those who disagree with you. Don’t be surprised if no one takes you seriously.
Lumbergh: have a look at Masayuki Murayama’s driver
collection at
http://homepage2.nifty.com/mrym3/taiyodo/eng/index.htm