SOLARIS OS, what is it?

J

JVC

[H]ard|Gawd
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anybody have that solaris operating system? what's that made for?
 
Solaris is Sun's Unix-variant, called SunOS until verson 4-something. It's actually derived from 'real Unix' rather than scratch-built so that it looks-like-unix as Linux was (which may or may not mean anything to you).

Historically, it's been primarily targeted at Sun machines - their current line-up has everything from single-processor x86 workstations up to 128-processor SPARC monsters, with a few weird bits in the middle, like the T1000. The same OS scales pretty gracefully across their whole lineup & their higher-end machines have some pretty mind-blowing features (if you've never been exposed to enterprise-grade hardware - "Oh, these 4 CPUs are bad, lets swap them out, while the machine is still running").

10 years ago, Sun was one of the big names in Unix workstations - they'd be used for compute-intensive, technical work (CAD/CAM, circuit design, etc) but in recent years, PC-based hardware, running Linux and Windows, has taken over that role in most cirumstances. Non-PC Unix systems still live on as high-end servers - big database servers, high-volume web-servers, Java application servers and the like. It's still hard to get an x86 machine with more than 4 CPUs, but all the big-name Unix vendors (Sun, HP, IBM, SGI) offer at least 64-way machines (up to 512 at SGI). Some jobs work fine with a cluster of cheap boxes, some jobs -really- need an assload of processors on a single system.

If you've got an investment in a Sun/Solaris infrastructure for your servers, running Solaris on workstations is very attractive. Chosing Solaris over FreeBSD or Linux, if you're only working with standard PC-hardware... that's entering into religious territory. People have their opinions.
 
back in the 90s i once played with a unix pc but all was in text only. probably there aren't many software for it. anybody uses it?
 
JVC said:
back in the 90s i once played with a unix pc but all was in text only. probably there aren't many software for it. anybody uses it?
Click to expand...

Anybody here use solaris? I do at work. Other managers at my company love to task me with testing, investigating and fixing issues our products exhibit on Solaris platforms because I work in a Linux/Unix-only development team.

Solaris has a lot of software, but since I mainly use Linux distributions and sometimes adventure with FreeBSD, I do not know if Solaris has as wide a variety of software support that Linux/FreeBSD do. My main work with solaris involves testing application servers and other stuff related to my company's work, so pretty much all I use on Solaris is java, oracle db, apache, and some application server software.

However, if you expect it to be like a Windows, it's not. Personally, outside of myself and a few of my coworkers in the company, I don't know many people who use Solaris, but I know some big big companies do, which is why we support Solaris platforms.
 
Last time I looked, both KDE and Gnome were available in solaris, as is most other linux software you'd want. It's a fairly nice environment to recompile linux apps in.
I haven't tested it for a long while (got spare disks; want time), but I believe a desktop install of Solaris 10 leaves you with a reasonable Gnome desktop, not unlike what you'd get from a desktop-oriented linux distro.
 
Hi all,

I've been doing Solaris support for about 7 years. We use it pretty heavily at work. Mostly on the Sun SPARC platform for business apps, Peoplesoft, Kronos, etc. I have Sparc processor based workstation I use pretty heavily for support. Sun just recently got back into the X86 platform. They had a big presence with Solaris 2.6, then kinda just dropped it. I think this left alot of companies and developers with a 'bad taste' in their mouth. The reintroduced Solaris on X86 with Solaris 10, but it seems for the most part 'major' players, like Oracle/Peoplesoft, etc. have been 'gunshy' to support it because of the history with Sun just dropping the x86 support in the past. It really is a good operating system, they are just lacking the the business app support, since Linux got the jump on them when the dropped support after Solaris 2.6. I personally am hoping that they can get the vendors to support Solaris on X86 again. As far as a desktop goes, it's pretty good, CDE (Sun's version of KDE) and GNOME are both available, although Sun calls GNOME, Java Desktop. There is alot of opensource software available pre-compiled at http://www.sunfreeware.com . I personally am multibooting, Vista, Fedora7, and Solaris 11 (Nevada) on my laptop (a thinkpad T60p). The only thing I don't have working right now is my wireless card, but I haven't really made the effort to get it working yet (no time).


Hope this helps,

SR
 
Sun doesn't put Solaris on cheap x86 hardware to get users to use Solaris - people use Solaris on x86 hardware because they -already- run Solaris. You mostly buy low-end Sun hardware because you have high-end Sun hardware running Solaris and they want seamless integration. You buy high-end Solaris hardware because...

a) you've got a homegrown legacy app that -needs- to run on Solaris
b) you're paying for support on a commercial app and then vendor says "run Solaris"
c) you really need a 32+ processor machine with ungodly amounts of RAM.

...and then you have the people that buy low/mid-range Sun servers because they have better things to do when mission-critical hardware goes down than sit on hold while some semi-illiterate Dell 'technician' has to find a supervisor who understands that "same-business-day on-site hardware support" means you DO NOT need to spend the next 3 hours swapping out memory trying to diagnose the problem over the phone before they'll send out a technician capable of at least tying his own shoes.
 
Of course, they wouldn't mind if more random people used solaris at home (instead of e.g. Linux), and there's been some programs with that specific target (such as the "order a free solaris install DVD" one). It's peanuts compared to the above, but it's there. It's probably a side effect of instead of a reason for the x86/amd64 - version, though.
 
We use SPARC machines with Solaris in the CS lab for Java development. Other than that for me, I have no use for it.
 
HHunt said:
Last time I looked, both KDE and Gnome were available in solaris, as is most other linux software you'd want. It's a fairly nice environment to recompile linux apps in.
I haven't tested it for a long while (got spare disks; want time), but I believe a desktop install of Solaris 10 leaves you with a reasonable Gnome desktop, not unlike what you'd get from a desktop-oriented linux distro.
Click to expand...

CDE all the way....

I use to administrator solaris systems. Really liked them. I'll tell you though KDE and Gnome have come such a long way since the old CDE interface. Haven't even seen CDE used in solaris 10 yet. Even with solaris 9 I think most people I know had switched to gnome. Anyway solaris is a good unix system to know. Knowledge in it will help in other unix systems.

Also whoever said cde is suns version of kde is off. If I remember right KDE was started because people didn't like cde. Think gnome was started around the same time if I remember right to address issues with licensing with kde and qt(well qt). Also CDE is not a sun enviroment. It was based on hp's enviroment and hp, sun, ibm, and novel worked on it.

The java desktop thing kida holds though as it is based of gnome.
 
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