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Solaris 11.4 free for non-production personal use
- netman21 5y agoI remember emailing Scott McNealy in 1995 telling him urgently that he should opensource Solaris. If I had persuaded him it would be a different world today. We would not have had to live through two decades of NT on servers.
- Aleksdev 5y agoDid he ever reply?
- pilsetnieks 5y agoWas there a meaningful possibility he might have done that? Was your relationship close enough that he'd have regarded you as a competent authority on the subject? I know people who have written missives like that to both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Nothing came of it, obviously, because nothing could have come of it.
- fomine3 5y agoSolaris supports OracleZFS rather than OpenZFS (forked from old OracleZFS). It's interesting and maybe there are some good feature only available on OracleZFS, but I don't want to build a new server with Solaris that would not good for recent hardware support.
- andix 5y agoWhy would somebody use Solaris, does it have any real benefits?
- rvnx 5y agoAt some point, Solaris Containers / Zones were a great innovation, just outdated now that there is LXC (+ ZFS obviously)
- hdjjhhvvhga 5y agoSolaris used to have some interesting features that were later implemented in Linux and FreeBSD. It took years and not all of these work perfectly well, but at this point there is no reason whatsoever to use Solaris instead of Linux. Unless you want to test if your software builds for the dozen or so of existing Solaris users.
- pjmlp 5y agoThere is no Linux using something like SPARC ADI, unless we are talking about Android, which isn't proper Linux anyway.
- trelane 5y agoThere is, ADI is a feature of the SPARC architecture, not Solaris. https://lwn.net/Articles/678410/ https://lwn.net/Articles/678410/ is support for it in Linux.
- sgt 5y agoAbsolutely. Solaris is rock solid and you should definitely use it, but only if you happen to go 15-20 years back in time.
- pjmlp 5y agoSolaris with SPARC ADI is still a future that Linux is yet to reach.
- monocasa 5y agohttps://lwn.net/Articles/678410/ https://lwn.net/Articles/678410/
- pjmlp 5y agoContributed upstream by Oracle after being implemented in Oracle Linux. The point was that most Solaris deployments are SPARC based, thus it is the only UNIX in production with hardware memory tagging at scale. Linux currently needs a SPARC for it, in which case most enterprises will use Oracle Linux anyway. CHERI and MTE Linux mainstream workloads are far from being a common deployment.
- monocasa 5y agoSparc with ADI is also far from a common deployment; it came out on the M7, and then Oracle cancelled Sparc development upon taping out the M8. And ARM MTE on Linux has millions of deployments in Android.
- jlouis 5y agoSome of the core offerings in Solaris (ZFS, Zones, dTrace, mdb) were ahead of their time, arguably. And the implementation is far more balanced than what you see in e.g., Linux, with good central documentation. So if you have a system which was built on Solaris, it might be smart to keep it operating on Solaris because you happen to know the tools and so on. It's likely any greenfield tech is better built on other systems. I'd use Illumos over Solaris, or FreeBSD.
- pjmlp 5y agoFor one, it is one of the few UNIXes with proper hardware memory tagging, so if one cares about UNIX and security critical apps, that is a possible benefit.
- blihp 5y agoUnless you are part of their existing installed base, don't waste your time. It's an attempt to generate interest in a dead product. Oracle long ago killed any chance of it remaining relevant in the larger software world.
- blinkingled 5y agoIt doesn't even run on qemu /kvm due to very poor compatibility so not sure what Oracle is trying to achieve here - maybe get me to buy their x86 servers if they are still selling one? Or find specific old h/w in my basememt anf try it on there? If you needed dtrace or zfs luckily FreeBSD runs fine on most hypervisors and real world x86 hardware.
- fredoralive 5y agoThe specific mention of open source developers makes me think "more open source software that works on Solaris" might be part of it. Doubt it'll help much, but it might move the needle from "they still make Solaris?" to a "guess I'll make sure it at least builds" sort of state.
- josephg 5y agoSo does Illumos and OmniOS - which are direct forks from the last opensource versions of Solaris. I played around with illumos a few years ago before getting into FreeBSD and it’s a lovely little operating system.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y agoI assume it runs on virtualbox?
- nix23 5y agoYep: https://www.oracle.com/solaris/solaris11/downloads/solaris11-vm-templates-downloads.html https://www.oracle.com/solaris/solaris11/downloads/solaris11...
- usrusr 5y ago“not sure what Oracle is trying to achieve here“ Yeah, this seems weird. Perhaps they aren't trying to achieve anything at all, and this opening is just the small visible part of some internal conflict where one participant used to advocate for a grand open source Solaris strategy. Resolved by giving that participant this partial opening as a token concession.
- HstryrsrBttn 5y ago
- thatjoeoverthr 5y agoI’m confused, didn’t they kill Solaris years ago?
- h2odragon 5y agoYes. And took the corpse to a taxidermist. So now we can fiddle with the dried out crunchy remnants... if we can ignore that smell.
- sgt 5y agoAt least the smell isn't coming from the code.
- johannes1234321 5y agoThey stopped the OpenSourcenversion OpenSolaris but Solaris continued to be worked on and used in some niches as commercial product.
- mgerdts 5y agoBetween November 2016 and August 2017 pretty much the entire Solaris development team was shown the door. I was on the Solaris Zones team in August 2017. A small number were allowed to stay and they are keeping the lights on. I have no idea what happened on the sustaining engineering (support) side.
- silon42 5y agoLooks like it has the good variant of Gnome desktop.
- blippage 5y agoI had the pleasure of programming on Sun machines back in the late 90's. I loved them. They had humongous screens. I wouldn't want one of those falling on me. They had a package management system. I occasionally had to update the system, and I found the update process a really pleasant one. The guy who did my performance appraisals noted that most programmers preferred the Unix environment over Windows. That was the late 90's, though. This is now. Linux won. It was great for its time, but I feel that Solaris is too little, too late.
- uuyi 5y agoI don’t share the same memories. Working around commercial compilers was horrible. I actually preferred NT for a bit around then. Plus I could afford to buy a machine to run it at home. Early days of win32 were quite fun. I can see why it won on the desktop and perhaps unfortunately is still doing quite well.
- jjav 5y ago> I feel that Solaris is too little, too late. I'd say it was a lot, very early. SunOS and later Solaris were awesome before Linux existed and all through the growing-up period of Linux. Even by the time of the acquisition (2010) when Linux was fairly mature, Solaris was still so much better technically (zfs, dtrace, tooling) but just had become niche because everyone was running what was free, Linux.
- GekkePrutser 5y agoYeah if anything what was too late was solaris' open sourcing. It could have had Linux' lunch. It could have done wish some Linux dev love too, Linux was much further ahead in terms of updates. I remember updating one of our Solaris servers back in the 9 or 10 days and it was basically just a list of things I had to change manually. Almost nothing automated.
- jjav 5y ago> Yeah if anything what was too late was solaris' open sourcing. It could have had Linux' lunch. I know some disagree but I maintain that the key factor to Sun decline was the unbundling of the compiler when Solaris came out (vs. SunOS where it was included). Stepping back to early 90s, open source was generally never packaged and prebuilt. You had to download the tarball and compile it locally. Installing a new machine meant spending a good while building all the tooling to make it useful. Approximately all of academia and research labs were SunOS shops. All open source code built out of the box (tarball) with ease on SunOS since its developers were almost certainly on SunOS themselves, or at least used it as a primary testing platform given the popularity. In the early days of Linux it was a lot of hard work to get open source to compile, since the code mostly assumed SunOS. As late as the late 90s, it was still easier to compile many things on SunOS than it was on Linux. But with Solaris in the second half of the 90s[1] the compiler was unbundled. Suddenly it was impossible to build all the code you needed to make the system useful, without jumping through a buch of hoops. Either buy an expensive SunCC or go get and install the GNU compiler but then the makefiles tended to assume that if the OS was sunos the compiler was SunCC so you had to go resolve differences between Sun and GNU compilers. Meanwhile, compiling packages on Linux was steadily becoming easier. [1] Well, Solaris came out in the early 90s but was pretty bad compared to SunOS initially. So most SunOS shops, like the research lab where I was, resisted migrating for many years. Solaris 2.5.1 in 1996 was generally considered the first version worth upgrading to from SunOS.
- cyberpunk 5y agoI do know some folks that are still using it (or Joyent's SDC Hypervisor offering, which I guess also has numbered days since the Samsung aqui). Sadly, I don't think it's got much time left. I do miss it, it was rock solid and the tooling was much better than linux at the time. Containers were implemented properly from the beginning, SMF is (still) much superior to SystemD, things like resource limits and so on could be applied in a much nicer manner. And it was fast too, when you had the sun compilers. Oh well. RIP.
- jmarneweck 5y agoJoyent SmartOS is now being maintained by MNX and the GitHub repositories have moved to https://github.com/TritonDataCenter https://github.com/TritonDataCenter
- cyberpunk 5y agoOh nice. I hadn't heard of mnx.io. They don't seem to be a huge player like Sun/Oracle, Joyent/Samsung though. I really wish them well, I loved that stack -- but I wouldn't bet on that stack anymore. I moved storage to FreeBSD, (internet) networking to OpenBSD and VM's live on proxmox when I am running actual hardware. Otherwise, $cloud.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- lesgobrandon 5y agoI'd personally never use Solaris in production. Not anymore. Back around 1990 it was good.
- alsobrsp 5y agoI managed a bunch of Solaris systems for most of the 2000's. The only thing I miss is Live Upgrade, that was pretty clever stuff. I was still getting recruiter calls for a gig in South Florida until about a year ago. I felt like a Fortran programmer.
- smm11 5y agoSame, for The Man.
- lazyier 5y agoI heard that there is thing called "Linux" and "FreeBSD" that is also free for non-production personal use. I have a feeling that Solaris is a bit of a late bloomer.
- nix23 5y ago
- ThePowerOfFuet 5y ago> I heard that Linux and FreeBSD is also free for production use, but maybe you know more....NOT We try to avoid that kind of crappy reply here on HN.
- nix23 5y ago>We try to avoid that kind of crappy reply here on HN. We try to avoid that kind of crappy comment here too, first look at yourself...maybe?
- chungy 5y ago> I have a feeling that Solaris is a bit of a late bloomer. Compared to Linux and FreeBSD? Not a chance, Solaris was running circles around them in the 1990s when Linux was still a toy operating system and FreeBSD was figuring out their infrastructure. These days, FreeBSD has adopted nearly all of the cool technical advantages Solaris has, and Linux seems to be actively hostile to adopting such things (ZFS, DTrace, ACLs...).
- znpy 5y ago> Solaris was running circles around them in the 1990s when Linux was still a toy operating Thirty years have passed. I was born in the 1990s and I’m old enough to have a house on my name and probably kids in the very near future.
- 5y ago
- noisy_boy 5y agoI had luck with Linux when I couldn't get Solaris to install on my personal PC in the early 2000's due to compatibility issues - me and a colleague tried our best. So about 22 years too late.
- znpy 5y agoI'm curious to see what bcantrill will say about this.
- Findecanor 5y agoIt might not be full of information, but it could be entertaining ...
- znpy 5y ago«the lawnmower hasn’t got feelings!»
- pmarreck 5y agoWhat about ZFS?
- mgerdts 5y agoSolaris 11 does not work without ZFS. It is the only supported root file system. Keep in mind that Solaris ZFS is largely incompatible with anything that exists in an open source OS. ZFS started out by incrementing pool and dataset versions as features were added. The pool version that will be created by default in Solaris 11.4 cannot be used by ZFS in illumos, FreeBSD, or Linux. The open source versions of ZFS (found in illumos, FreeBSD, OpenZFS, ZFS on Linux, OpenZFS on Windows) use feature flags. By default, pools created with these will likely use a pool version that says "I have feature flags", which Solaris ZFS will no understand and will refuse to import. All implementations of ZFS should be able to create a pool with an explicitly old pool version and be able to be imported everywhere. That doesn't mean that pool will be useful for everything. For instance, open source ZFS does not have dataset aliasing, a feature I added in Solaris ZFS after the SoLongAndThanksForAllTheFish commit but before Solaris 11 was released. This feature is required for Solaris Zones.
- pmarreck 5y agoI guess my question was more along the lines of "does this at all impact the potential legalities of including ZFS in the kernel"? Very interesting details, though!
- KingOfCoders 5y agoHow times changed, we were using Linux on our servers in the 90s and my boss wanted to use Solaris servers because they were more "professional".
- cube00 5y agoWe were on Solaris and then directed to rebuild everything for Windows Server. Now we're being forced on to Linux because it's cheaper. At least our code is now truly cross platform so we have that going for us which is nice.
- gtirloni 5y agoSolaris was a little late in this regard even when OpenSolaris was launched. I've worked with Solaris for many years and really like it but I won't even bother to open this page. Thanks, Oracle.
- webmobdev 5y agoWhy? There is already an active open source fork of Solaris with better licensing terms than what Oracle offers - Illumos / OmniOS - https://illumos.org/ https://illumos.org/ .
- cbmuser 5y agoWould be great if Solaris was eventually open-sources again and Illumos could merge all the improvements that were made over the years by Oracle.
- nix23 5y agoProbably the other way around, Illumos made much more improvements, but Oracle cannot profit from it (because not opensource anymore)
- Findecanor 5y agoFrom what I have heard, the core of the OS engineers had left when Oracle acquired Sun back in 2010. And those developers have continued to be the largest contributors to Illumos. So, in essence, Illumos is the real continuation of Sun Solaris.
- srvmshr 5y agoThis is factually true - The exodus from Sun Microsystems started when the takeover news started doing the rounds. The OS team was a shell of what was before. Then Oracle further squeezed that division ~2015-17. All those remain are the switchovers or people who have been promised a lot of TC to keep that brand just about alive.
- jasoneckert 5y agoAs someone who worked for Sun in the 1990s, Solaris will always hold a special place in my memories. It ruled the enterprise UNIX world back then and I never would have imagined back then that it would ever fade into obscurity (as it is doing now). Will I install it again? No. Like most everyone else, I've moved on to Linux and BSD. But I'll spin up Solaris 2.5.1 on my SPARCbook or Solaris 10 on my Blade 1500 whenever I need a nostalgia kick.
- farmerstan 5y agoI work in enterprise software and around 2000 the combination of Solaris and Oracle database was the most rock solid out of all the various OS/DB combinations. I vaguely remember the threading model was weird and I think limited stack size per thread but overall it was my favorite combo because of how reliable it was. The speed with which Linux killed Solaris however was astonishing.
- jijji 5y agoa big part of the reason linux became so popular was because of the huge dollar amounts Sun, IBM and HP were charging for their OS.
- mdaniel 5y agoI can imagine that, but for me personally it was because I could run Linux on the existing machine in our dining room, and didn't need Big Iron™ to try it out. I'm sure related to that is why the Asus router in my house also runs on Linux, and likely my fridge, and _arguably_ my phone
- pjmlp 5y agoAnd most likely all of those vendors haven't upstreamed any of that.
- mdaniel 5y agoFWIW, Asus makes their GPL source available to Eric who makes the builds actually open source: https://github.com/RMerl/asuswrt-merlin.ng#readme https://github.com/RMerl/asuswrt-merlin.ng#readme AOSP's middle initials are Open Source, but I'm with you on the fridge
- moron4hire 5y agoI was just thinking that I used to really like the CDE Motif theme, but after looking up screenshots I realized what I was actually thinking of was Java's cross-platform "Metal" look and feel. I liked how MDI windows looked like they had knurled tool handles for the title bars. I liked the little notches on tab panel selectors. At the time, I liked it because it was novel compared to what I was used to (Win9X), but now I like it because everything looks like it does something. Now that I think about it, Motif is the least favorite of any DE theme I've ever used.
- crudbug 5y agoAlthough a decade late, Oracle should open source the whole Solaris stack with governance model similar to Java Community Process (JCP). They still can make $$$ from support licenses.
- zamalek 5y agoOr lawsuits.
- netfortius 5y agoLast encounter with Sun's commercial version of Solaris: 1995 - running on SPARCstation
- lizknope 5y agoWhen I was in college in the mid 1990's Sun was the dominate Unix workstation company. We had a couple of thousand on campus. Then I started working in the semiconductor industry in 1997 and every had a Sun SPARCstation or Ultra 1/2 on their desk. We had some big 16 CPU E4000/5000 class machines in the server room. All of the EDA / CAD chip design software ran on Unix and some companies started porting to Linux/x86. Some of our jobs used >4GB RAM so we required a 64-bit machine. AMD released their Opteron 64-bit in 2003 and we got a couple right after our tools were ported to 64-bit Linux. We never bought another Sun after that.
- jandrese 5y agoSun ultimately suffered the same fate of all of the Unix workstation companies. By selling only expensive "Serious Business" hardware to corporations they were able to keep the per-unit margins high, but were completely crushed by commodity PCs in volume and ultimately total profit. Ultimately those huge commodity sales volumes were turned into big R&D budgets that allowed them to produce faster and more efficient hardware than the big workstations providers. And then the one advantage they had: the OS, was undercut by BSD and Linux. So a company has the option of spending 5 or 6 figures on a big Unix box with a 4 figure yearly support contract and pain in the ass license management, or they could spend a low 4 figures on a PC running Linux that is just as good or better in all the ways that matter and doesn't have annoying salesguys to deal with or recurring costs.
- silverlake 5y agoScott McNealy, CEO of Sun, spoke at my biz school ~2000. Someone asked about the competitive threat of Dell + Linux. He ranted for a long time about Dell being junk and SunOS vastly better than Linux. Everyone after felt Sun was doomed. They crashed a few years later. It was a textbook Innovator’s Dilemma case.
- rbanffy 5y ago> By selling only expensive "Serious Business" hardware to corporations This is a mistake IBM is making as well. There is no cheap on-ramp for their POWER and mainframe platforms. I doubt those machines are running many new workloads. Almost all new corporate software is developed for Linux-based commodity servers. It's a shame, really, because they are magnificent machines.
- a-dub 5y agothere really hasn't been a compelling reason to run solaris since linux fixed its resource scheduling issues in the early-mid 2000s. (or freebsd fixed its smp issues around the same time) it was really expensive.
- javajosh 5y agoThere is a cautionary tale here for anyone who wants to write great software. Solaris is great software, and yet I wouldn't want to run it because I wouldn't want to hire for it. OSes are complex enough that you want specialists who "dwell" in the space (as opposed to casual things, like libraries), and the community is just too small. (That said, sometimes teams pick the outlier and win - WhatsApp and Erlang come to mind. But this is really rare, I think.)
- eftel 5y agoI’m too young and missed the Solaris era. Are there still valid usecases for Solaris today? Or ist this just to support some legacy systems that can’t be upgraded?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- phendrenad2 5y agoWhat's the point? Linux has surpassed Solaris in every way. The only possible explanation for this I can think of is: There may be some companies stuck with some software that only runs on solaris, and they need to keep onboarding new engineers to deal with it, and they want those engineers to go through solaris training, and this makes the training go more smoothly, since the trainees don't have to sync with a license server. But, it's a stretch.
- jeffbee 5y agoZFS, NFS, iSCSI, and CIFS services are quite superior on Solaris compared to Linux. On Linux each of these services are a bad joke, but on Solaris they are rock solid. I think anyone would be a fool to use software licensed from Oracle, but if that part doesn't bother you, on the technical side there may be benefits.
- znpy 5y ago> ZFS X doubt. All new innovations in zfs happen in openzfs, which is licensed in an incompatible way with regards to proprietary Solaris. Your comment smells…
- GekkePrutser 5y agoFree until they sneak in some "optional" component that's bundled automatically and then sue the shit out of you. Gotta love Oracle.. :X
- hereforphone 5y agoToo little too late.
- cryptonector 5y agoThis is rich. In 2010 Oracle -a company BUILT on MINDSHARE- failed to understand that OpenSolaris was an attempt at building MINDSHARE, so they killed it over a minor "embarrassment" caused by a minor "competitor" using OpenSolaris. Now they must be wondering how to re-build MINDSHARE and recoup some of their costs, and they evidently think "free for personal use" is going to do it. That's NUTS.
- thrownaway561 5y agois there a solid reason for using Solaris over Linux? at this point in life, Linux has won in my opinion. i don't see the use for Solaris at all.
- smsm42 5y agoIf they did it 20 years ago, it may have had an effect. Now it seems like Solaris is more of a nostalgic memory than anything else for most people.
- awill 5y agoThey're making it free after it's already lost relevance?
- imoverclocked 5y agoI remember the Oracle acquisition and the subsequent squelch of chatter in #opensolaris and #nexenta on irc. I worked on porting a ton of Debian packages to Nexenta and used it in a university setting along side Linux and macOS hosts. It was hard to see all of that work become somewhat worthless with Oracle's acquisition of Sun. It was an extra slap on the face that Sun hardware that I personally owned outright had a firmware bug that Sun released for free that I then had to pay for an Oracle subscription to download. ZFS, Dtrace, Zones, iSCSI, SMF ... all rock solid and extremely usable. I never liked the antiquated package management in Solaris thus my involvement in Nexenta. Solaris being "free" 8 years later means nothing to revive any of this. If anything, it signals that Oracle is taking steps to stop considering this as a product.
- freedomben 5y agoI remember that well too. I ran OpenSolaris om my laptop for years because at the time it had the best hardware support for what I had. I had damn near turned into a fanboy when the Oracle acquisition happened and they yanked the rug out. I was disappointed at the time and remained so for years, especially when I found an old laptop with opensolaris on it a couple years back and got super nostalgic. In hindsight, it was probably the best thing for Linux though. When I was hunting for open source OSes there were plenty of people like me recommending OpenSolaris to new users. Once that happened all the oxygen got sucked out of the room. Yeah the ship has long since sailed. This isn't going to make any difference to reviving Solaris. It's too far behind now and even if it weren't, it's a "fool me once" kind of thing.
- rbanffy 5y ago> Oracle is taking steps to stop considering this as a product. And even then, they refuse to license it under CDDL.
- ksec 5y ago>If anything, it signals that Oracle is taking steps to stop considering this as a product. One of the thing on my list if I ever become stupidly wealthy is to buy all those technology from Oracle and release them in BSD / MIT.
- lksus 5y agoThis is nice for SPARC hobbyists like me, because now I can play with newer packages on my SPARC T4 server. Without this the updated packages would be stuck at versions from 2018. But in 2022, there is not very big need for commercial operating systems outside of large enterprises. But still I'm happy that Oracle will be supporting Solaris until 2034. I always get sad when something is deprecated. I understand that everyone wants to use Linux and x86 nowdays, but it still makes me sad that the diversity in operating systems and hardware is decreasing. It feels like everyone is only interested in Linux. Many FOSS software doesn't even work or compile well on other free operating systems such as BSDs and Illumos distros, because the developers use Linux themselves. I'm mostly a Linux user myself, but I would like to live in a world with a lot of different operating systems and CPU architectures in use.
- therealbilly 5y agoA lot of good comments about the Unix market back then. The honest truth is that cheap no-name PC's with RedHat and a little later, nVidia graphics cards are what killed the Unix vendors. The price disparity was stark and a no-brainer for companies looking to do big things but with increasingly commodity hardware. It was sad to see Unix vendors die off.
- formvoltron 5y agoOh yeah.. Solaris! Almost forgot about you.
- LeoPanthera 5y agoAvailable for x86 and SPARC, but not ARM. An ARM port of Solaris would be very interesting.
- krnlpnc 5y agoMy first unix machine in the late 90s was an old sparcststion found in the recycling. Ironically I uninstalled solaris almost immediately and ran Slackware on it instead.
- cosmiccatnap 5y agoThat's cool for a bit of nostalgia but sad because...in a world with Linux and freeBSD I can't understand why anyone would do this for any real reason. If they had done this 10 years ago people would be thrilled, but doing it in 2022...well it's kind of like saying DOS 6.22 is free for personal use. A not so subtle reminder that at oracle for every engineer or developer there are two lawyers or managers waiting in the wings.
- pram 5y agoHuh! I thought x86 Solaris was always free for personal use. I remember installing it on my desktop in 2003? I guess something might have changed in the past 20 years :V
- racingmars 5y agoIt has remained free for test and dev use during the entire time Oracle owned it, yes. The big deal about this announcement is that it is still free for test and dev, but you get updates! Previously, you could get Solaris 11.4 from 2018, with no updates. Now you can get 11.4 with updates through December 2021, and it sounds like future updates will be made available.
- thenickdude 5y agoIf you download a copy of this while at work, be prepared for your company to receive a nastygram from Oracle's lawyers about them now owing Oracle money, just like if you download Virtualbox's extension pack. https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/d1ttzp/oracle_is_going_after_companies_using_virtualbox https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/d1ttzp/oracle_is_... Oracle is toxic waste and their IP space should be blocklisted from any corporate network.
- BrandoElFollito 5y agoNon-production personal use, gotcha. Because of course everyone would otherwise jump on a prehistoric system to use it commercially in production. Just for clarity : I administered Solaris for a living. And I would never come back from my Linux servers. Note: this comment is reusable only on Thursdays, in French and the font must be Comics Sans in green.
- walterbell 5y agoThe Solaris console font is still available in Linux, https://www.kernelconfig.io/config_font_sun8x16 https://www.kernelconfig.io/config_font_sun8x16 & https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/307356/what-is-the-identification-of-the-font-being-used-for-the-solaris-console-in-tex https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/307356/what-is-the-...
- SirChainsaw 5y agoHopefully they've removed the requirement to have at least a T4 processor. We can't all afford that :-(.
- hestefisk 5y agoIt’s not released for x64 anymore?
- gnu8 5y agoOutside of this announcement, I think all of the releases are available to download for noncommercial evaluation and development.
- cbmuser 5y agoYes, but you don’t get access to the update repositories which is what you want to keep the system secure.
- gnu8 5y agoI don’t think Solaris gets much attention from either the blue or red side these days. Patched or not, I would keep a Solaris machine segmented off with my other retro crap and not use it for anything public-facing where it might be exposed to attack.
- rsaxvc 5y agoT4, FujiSPARC-X/X+/XII, or AMD64/EM64T.
- lksus 5y agoUnfortunately, no. I guess it is because Solaris 11.4 was originally going to be Solaris 12. It has a lot of new stuff and modifications compared to 11.3. I guess they wanted to optimize it for the newer SPARC processors (or get enterprises to update their old systems).
- anthk 5y agoMeh. FreeBSD with jails and Linux with containers will send that Sun Solaris wannabe to the trash. Propietary Unixen are dead at the server space. Nowadays people doesn't care, they just keep spawning vm's and jails/vm's as nothing in order to scale up things. The hippies from the MIT/Berkeley won. We have free as in freedom hacker OSes and corporation-level setups with ease. Even FSF distros work relatively well (fck Radeon blobs). Today tech support and configuring services it's where the money lies on.
- uuyi 5y agoAgree with this. Who’d have thunk it that proprietary Unix on RISC is doing better on the desktop than ever though! https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3678.htm https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3678.htm
- NikolaNovak 5y agoIt's all context specific. When you say "people don't care", I think you have a specific, but not explicitly defined, set of "people" and "organizations" you are presuming. Proprietary Unixes are still common enough in large traditional organizations to stay profitable and developed. They get purchased or bundled by non-hands-on people likely using different criteria than average hacker news hacker might consider. (Source or disclaimer - probably half the projects I've been on in ERP space are on proprietary Unix. My problems are very different [not implying better or worse] than those typically discussed here)
- syshum 5y agoWhile that is true. It is also true that many many companies are moving their ERP systems off unix
- NikolaNovak 5y agoFor sure. Not as many as I would've thought though. A perspective in large number of orgs I've seen (not claiming right or wrong) is that Linux is better at horizontal scaling while Unix is better at vertical scaling. Vertical scaling is out of fashion but still powerful for many scenarios. So I've been in many rooms where prevalent thought is "Linux is great we love Linux we want more Linux, but we want this database to run on 128 cores and we don't feel Linux is the right choice". So I've seen clean slate ERP implementations on Unix, not just legacy upgrades. And I mean, what some of these things do in firmware is impressive. They do on firmware and hardware level what we're these days doing in software and software defined whatever. Different worlds though :-)