Sun Is Giving Away Solaris 10 DVDs

Tarmas writes "For a limited time only, just like Ubuntu's ShipIt service, Sun Microsystems lets you order Solaris 10 absolutely free of charge. The operating system comes on a single DVD supporting both the x86 and SPARC versions. Also included is Sun Studio 11."

I wonder

Is this a sign of desperation? (Not bashing Sun here, just heard that the company is going through a tough time.)

Re:I wonder

Actually, it's just a way to drum up interest in a new product. A lot of companies do it.

Microsoft does it with the functional betas of a lot of their software including Visual Studio and they aren't really hurting for customers

Re:I wonder

Microsoft also did something along the same lines with their Power Together [powertogether.com] program, although the end result of that was a fully functional copy of Office or Vista.
You actually had to watch a few webcasts (Hit play and go to sleep) but its essentially the same thing.
I'll be getting a free copy of Vista as well as Solaris, but more as a novelty than anything on both counts.

Yes, but who is their competition?

In the good old days, when Sun was making money, they had their guns trained on IBM. These days, there seems to be a tacit acknowledgment in their strategy that they are no longer in the same league as IBM. They seem to be aspiring to compete with HP, Dell and *shudder* Gateway. You dont see IBM giving away their AIX operating system for free, do you? And this is despite the fact that AIX soleley exists to exploit IBM hardware (it doesnt run on anything else) and therefore, could legitimately be given away, since IBM's objective is to sell hardware.

The bottom line is: yes, its a way to drum up interest in a new product, but they appear to be targetting the lower-end market segment with this gimmick.

Re:Yes, but who is their competition?

You dont see IBM giving away their AIX operating system for free, do you?

No, but then I don't really see IBM selling AIX, except to those people already using it. They seem to be doing everything they can to gut it and put everything that makes it worthwhile in to Linux. They are pushing the Linux brand hard, because Linux is cool at the moment. This could backfire for them, since people will start to wonder why they should by from IBM, rather than some other random Linux vendor.

Sun, on the other hand, is trying to position Solaris as a Linux competitor. Technically, it's superior in most regards (driver support being a big exception, but this is not a problem for servers, since they are certified for the OS or not sold). It already has the reputation. It has a license that the FSF call Free, although some people have problems with it. At the really high end, systems like OpenVMS and z/OS still rule. Solaris can't compete with these, and neither can Linux. Yet. At the bottom end, there is Windows or Linux (or the *BSDs, but even though I use them I realise they are a tiny percentage of the market). Solaris lives in the middle, where the volumes are small and the margins are high. The bottom is creeping up on the middle though, and so it is important for Sun that they focus on the bottom.

Personally, I wouldn't try to compete in the top end. IBM are there, and they are welcome to the market. SIG used to be there; remember then? There are some people who can't make do with commodity hardware, and there will be for a long time, but this segment grows smaller every year. Sun are focussing on the bottom, because as technology increases, more and more people are adequately served by the bottom. The trick is to have a differentiator. Sun sell Linux and Windows systems, but they also sell Solaris systems. Now, anyone can sell a Solaris system as cheaply as they can sell a Linux system. Why is this good for Sun? A few reasons:

1. They can say 'Look at all these other Solaris sellers[1]! No vendor lock-in here.'
2. They can say 'Look, Solaris is better than Linux, buy Solaris'
3. Most importantly, they can say 'sure, you could buy Solaris from those guys, but isn't it more sensible to buy it from us? After all, we wrote it. If you need support, we have people who know the source tree inside out who can quickly track down and fix any bug you find. Just sign here for our platinum support. In blood please...'

The hardware will be cheap. The software will be free. Having someone who can fix whatever problem you might encounter on call will be very expensive, and for a lot of people will be worth every penny. How much does ten minutes of downtime cost you?

[1] They already had Fujitsu as a second source, which has helped them a lot.

Re:I wonder

Is this Sun's site?

Interesting question.

Answered thus by whois:

Domain: sun.de
<snip/>
  [Holder]
  Type: ORG
  Name: Sun Microsystems GmbH
  Address: Sonnenallee 1
  Pcode: 85551
  City: Heimstetten
  Country: DE
  Changed: 2006-01-06T14: 03: 1001: 00
<snip/>
  [Tech-C]
  Type: PERSON
  Name: Sun Hostmaster
  Organisation: Sun Microsystems Inc.
  Address: 4150 Network Circle
  Pcode: 95054
  City: Santa Clara CA
  Country: US
  Phone: [phone]
  Fax: [phone]

Its been free for a while

At least in downloadable form. I remember getting Solaris 8 iso images from them almost 5 years ago. Theres plenty of hobbyists and admins that need or want to run it at home. Their attitude is much better than SGI, IRIX cds still cost plenty on ebay. O2 and Octane workstations are dirt cheap now.

Re:I wonder

Canonical: Free Ubuntu cds shipped!
Community: Whoa, great innovative, breakthrough, sign that ubuntu is a serious contender

Sun: Free Solaris dvds shipped!
Community: Whoa, sign of desperation, they can't even give their os for free.

Re:I wonder

Canonical: Did it first.
What about AOL?

Re:I wonder

Canonical: Did it first.
Sun: Shouldn't need to.

Oh, baloney.

First release of Ubuntu was October 20, 2004.
Sun was giving away solaris on DVD since at least May of 2002. [theregister.co.uk]

Re:I wonder

You mistyped:

Sun: Free Solaris dvds shipped!
One random guy on Slashdot: Whoa, sign of desperation, they can't even give their os for free.

Re:I wonder

You're apparently new here. Let me explain the Rules of Slashdot.

1. We love Apple (especially when they do something just like Microsoft, and even more if their product is vaporware).
2. We hate Microsoft (especially when they do something just like Apple, and even more when their product is vaporware).
3. Steve Jobs can do no wrong (especially when he does the same as Bill Gates).
4. Bill Gates can do no right (especially when he does the same as Steve Jobs).
5. Any story that is positive about Bill Gates or Microsoft will get tagged "fud" or "troll".
6. Any story that is negative about Steve Jobs or Apple will get tagged "fud" or "troll".
7. "One Laptop Per Child" is the second coming of Christ.
8. Nicholas Negroponte is Christ.
9. We ignore Sun (especially when they dominate any specific industry).
10. We adore Java (even though it was developed by Sun).
11. It has been "The Year That Linux Takes Over the Desktop" for about 8 years.
12. It has been "The Year That Microsoft Dies" for about 15 years.
13. It has been "The Year That Apple Overtakes Microsoft" for about 10 years.
14. Ubuntu is God's chosen Linux distribution.
15. All other distributions of Linux are wannabes...especially the ones that have been around longer than Ubuntu.

I've got $5 US that says this reply gets moderated as "troll" or "flamebait" because it contains so much truth about the attitudes of the majority of the Slashdot community.

Source

Is the source code included? It says only "Solaris," not "OpenSolaris," so I'm guessing that it's not. If it were, that would be cool.

It's the only way

It's the only way I can keep my productivity up; I install an operating system on my computer that won't run any games.

Re:It's the only way

You run OSX?

funny coincidence

im giving away my SUN stock as well.

VMware to avoid hardware compatibility problems

When I installed Solaris last year, there were no drivers to support my hardware. I was able to get it to work in VMware and it worked great. There was file which you had to tweak for the interface, but that was about it.

Open The Floodgates

Now that it's on /. you can basically not expect to receive your copy for the next 6 months with the flood of /.ers filling in the form!

General Information on Solaris 10?

Is there anything in particular that makes Solaris 10 stand out from say FreeBSD or various flavors of Linux?

Re:General Information on Solaris 10?

That means you have to formulate your request differently when addressing to Slashdot or to Google : Don't say "What features of Sun OS can not be found in linux distributions ?" but say "Solaris is just a toy! Linux is far more superior!" and you may get a full detailed list of the said features

Re:General Information on Solaris 10?

Vendor support - you'll get full support for things like Oracle, SAP, etc, etc on Solaris easier than Linux (yes, I know you can get Oracle on Linux, but only certain versions, mainly Redhat)

Support for huge boxes. The Solaris 10 you run on a single CPU sunblade 100 is the same OS as will run on a 144-core loaded 25K - there's also very little real difference in the OS between SPARC & x86 (main differences are boot loaders & X-windows).

Then there's feature set - zones, dtrace, ZFS, workload management & so on all come out of the box. Most linux software will run with a recompile.

Re:General Information on Solaris 10?

I'll assume you've missed all of the Solaris 10 hype, and are genuinely curious. That said, there are a lot of interesting things in Solaris 10.

First of all, it is robust and reliable to a degree that Linux still doesn't achieve in a general-purpose environment. It's also immensely scaleable--dealing gracefully with as big of a machine as you want to throw at it. In terms of technology, Solaris 10 was a complete rewrite, and in many ways was a rethinking of Unix. It provides service-level fault tolerance (via SMF, which replaces the traditional /etc/init.d method of starting services). There's dtrace which can trace anything in the computer (massively, incredibly more powerful than strace or truss). Zones are an implementation of virtual machines, and allow for complete isolation of environments all under one kernel. Related to that is the scheduler, which allows a very granular means of resource allocation to a process or application. Also, Brandz will let you run Linux code under Solaris, within a zone. I know of developers who are using this, because it lets them run dtrace against their Linux code for debugging and optimisation.
Finally there's ZFS, which is truly a new filesystem--the first in a long time on any platform. It combines filesystem operations with volume management, and results in a filesystem that has been abstracted from the hardware it's running on.

These are just the highlights of the most robust Unix out there right now.

What Solaris 10 will NOT buy you though, is the same end-user experience of Linux. The graphics routines, multimedia applications, and audio support just aren't at the same level in Solaris yet. That's changing fast enough, but it hasn't caught up yet.

Re:General Information on Solaris 10?

Are they really working hard on these things? I'm curious. Those are more home or desktop only type user things. Just as an example, it's not as if Solaris will ever be used for pro music production or anything -- none of the industry standard apps are available for it. Who are they working on the multimedia, audio, etc support for exactly? I'm not doubting what you say, I'm just curious what their goal is.

Free Coasters!

Yay! Free coasters for everyone :)

Nice

I've used the Free version Open Solaris for a while on a 4 way box. Works very well and uses Gnome desktop. No serious bugs, except that dragging and dropping a file on the desktop can make Gnome lock up.

It's true

I received the disks on december 8 '2006, postal box labeled as:

Sun Solaris 10 Media Kit Program
Fulfillment and Customer Service by:
BrandVia Alliance, Inc. - Fulfillment Center
2300 Zanker Road Suite E, San Jose, CA 95131, USA
Telephone: [phone] [e-mail]
Reference: 23072-588

To *Your Name*
-reserved-
*Address*
Air Mail $5.05

Contents: Free Solaris 10 Software Media Kit. Commercial Value less than $10

Postal service used: UNITED STATES POSTAGE, from ZIP CODE 95131 to Barcelona (Spain)

The package include 3 DVD:

* 6/06 Solaris 10 Operating System (SPARC DVD)
* 6/06 Solaris 10 Operating System (x64/x86 DVD)
* Developer Tools (Sun Studio 11, Sun Java Studio Creator 2 Update 1, Sun Java Studio Enterprise 8, NetBeans 5.0)

The DVD box shows a photo of castellers [wikipedia.org], quite curious, as it is typical from where I live (human tower, representing that the union make you stronger, etc.).

Corollarious: I'm glad the DVDs crossed the ocean. Thank you Sun! If Solaris become GPL v3 licensed, I would consider to use it for homebrewed hacking. Although I love Linux, and I will not leave using it, I like the possibility of have a GPL v3 alternative... just in case!

In other news..

AOL exec works for SUN now.

Shades of OS/2

Not to say it's exactly the same thing, but IBM did this with OS/2 about 10 years ago. It didn't really do a whole lot for them back then, and my CD seems to have been shipped to the same place as my Guinness bar towel.

free Solaris????

done and done ;D

Problem with SUN

Is that they never really cooperated with the Asia hardware makers. And it seams that the hardware layer issues are the core of all the problems they have. Everyone who has some brains switched over to PC already where the latest GPU upgrade for example cost less, is way more powerful and at the end of the day is also more fun. That show the real smarts of Microsoft what even has that annual event for driver and hardware developers, just to cheer them up give a hug and make some money together..

Could be good

I ordered it.

Figure can't hurt to load it on VMWare, or VirtualPC and take a look, perhaps learn a thing or two. Knowing a little bit about yet another OS can't be harmful (unless it's Win ME).

I guess they figure if enough people do like me, they may win some people over. Couldn't hurt.

Yeah but

Now they are charging you for the patches. Try getting the
Solaris 10 recommended patches without a contract.

DVD ?

Am I the only person who thinks the DVD media delivery is a waste? How many server boxes do you have with DVD capabilty? Almost none of mine have it. And definitely none of my test boxes do. To me this is bloat.

I want Sun to take a serious shot at the desktop.

Ok, I know the answer. They make there money on hardware--not software. But I still wish they would give a serious attempt toward giving Microsoft some competition on home and business desktops. I like Linux. The software is fine. But the GPL seems to cause a lot of complications. You can't ship this codec with that player, and you can't link this library with that program. If you use this driver you violate this rule.... I would like to see Sun and the Open Source community they are trying to build really make a decent desktop system out of Solaris. Give people another alternative to Microsoft, Apple, and yes, even Linux. My pragmatic (at least where it involves software) would like to see a free (as in price) with freely available source code that allows one to use proprietary drivers and codecs without a lot of legal uncertainty. And if you don't want to use them, you wouldn't have to. As to whether it will happen or not, I don't know. But I hope it will.

just wait until you go to patch it...

...and find that many patches are not available to people without a paid support contract with Sun.

I've got a rack full of Sun hardware in my master bedroom at home (yes, my wife is a saint) and reloaded them with Linux and OpenBSD primarily due to the way in which Sun handles their patches for hobbyists.

May Be Slightly Older Than Current Rev

I'm fairly certain Sun is still shipping the Solaris 10 06/06 release if you request media. However, the current rev is Solaris 10 11/06, and is downloadable at http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/get.jsp [sun.com]. This is a minor update and, once all the regression testing is completed, there will be patches (for a price, except for security patches and driver updates) to bring an 06/06 release up to 11/06. But if you want the latest version now, download the ISO image(s) for free and burn your own DVD/CDs.

(I'm referring here to the current release of the supported Solaris 10 product. As others have noted, there's also OpenSolaris, which available from http://www.opensolaris.org/os [opensolaris.org], is well ahead of the mainstream release and provides source code, but is a somewhat less complete product bundle. Also, Solaris Express, which is a snapshot of what will become the Solaris 11 release, which like the supported product can be downloaded from Sun's website.)

Go straight to the source...

Folks

The Solaris 10 DVD program looks aimed at pro users primarily.

If you want to start on SunOS (kernel) and Solaris (the OS from SUN = SunOS + userland) and you are primarily an enthusiast, may I recommend you OpenSolaris and its distributions.

OpenSolaris - It is the opensourced core OS + networking components of the Solaris OS. Solaris 10 and all future Solaris releases shall be based off it.

There are a number of distributions of OpenSolaris-

1. Solaris 10 - The official distribution from SUN and officially supported. (ROCK SOLID)

2. Solaris Express - Stable builds of development code. Supported by SUN.

3. Solaris Express Community Release (SXCR) - Bi-monthly development builds. Reasonably stabled (haven't seen it crash on the machine I have here in 3 months... 24x7 up, development server). [THIS is what you probably should be running if you want a SUN release to play with!]

4. NexentaOS - [This is what Linux folks should try] This is built off same code base but with GNU userland. It is based on Ubuntu with OpenSolaris kernel (SunOS).

5. BeleniX - A crazy fun distro of OpenSolaris. Also available as LiveCD

For more info please look at http://www.opensolaris.org/ [opensolaris.org]

Thank you

- A Solaris Fan

Quit Whinging!

Christ on a crutch. Sun is giving away a current/recent version of their OS and you lot are going on and on about pissing on them for it. It works. It's rock steady. Besides which, it's the first *nix version I learned.

big deal...

big deal, i've been getting my free aol cd's for years now

Sweet!

Thanks for the link!

I have an old server thats just collecting dust that would love to try out Solaris 10... and the Developer kit!

Thanks again!
Grinin

Xen domU yet?

Has OpenSolaris been xenified yet? That might get me to try it.

Re:um...

It's 'news for nerds' because it's Solaris. It's 'stuff that matters' (at least, to said nerds) because they're giving away DVDs of it for free.

And if you only find it mildly interesting, you've probably got too much of a life. Try spending less time talking to people and going outside, and more time participating in OS flamewars, bashing Microsoft, and filling your multi-terabyte RAID (you *do* have a multi-terabyte RAID, right?) with porn.

Re:um...

Solaris beats Linux hands down for porn hunting because of that nifty app it comes with, ddtrace.

Re:um...

Yeah, I'm not seeing the "news" angle since Solaris 10 and Sun Studio 11 have been available as free downloads for quite some time. Sure, it's nice to have them on pressed media instead of a writable CD/DVD, but I'm not sure why/how this is a big deal.

Re:Not "just like" ShipIt...

No, you're only required to supply a state/province if you in USA or Canada.

Re:Not "just like" ShipIt...

That limitation is only for selecting a state or province from the drop down. There are plenty enough fields for filling in an international address.

Re:Not "just like" ShipIt...

>"US & Canada only."

That is only on the address "State/Province" box only which is not needed for non-us addresses. The box below the state/province selection has most of the planet covered

Re:US & Canada only

What makes you say that ? I live in .nl and I just ordered myself a set.

Re:US & Canada only

Wrong. Interesting too that the site I got directed to when ordering mine was in Germany (.de)....

Re:Not "just like" ShipIt...

As others have said, you only have to enter as state/province for the U.S. or Canada.

As for why you should have figured this out yourself...Huge hint for you... The website is .de

Re:lolol

Sun Studio software provides optimizing C, C++ and Fortan compilers

Aren't you hip? I guess you've never heard of g77?

Re:Not "just like" ShipIt...

"US & Canada only."

They included that in the form as an IQ test, so that only Real Geek Geniuses will get their CD. All the people who can't get past that question to the list of countries are non-geniuses who should stay with Windows.

Re:Solaris vs. Linux

Full GUI configurability, excellent package installation, stupendous plug and play hardware support. Why in the world would anyone leave that behind? Maybe dtrace is amazing, but there isn't even a GUI for it.

Funny that it sounds like a windows vs linux argument of a few years ago.

Re:Who needs it?

Nah, they've been doing this for years and years and years. I have a copy of Solaris 2.6 kicking around somewhere, same deal; shipped for absolutely free, by request.

No different than any other tech company giving free for personal use or student copies of software.

Re:US/Canada only! Why not just allow ISO download

As a UK resident who has just successfully ordered the set (using the handy Country drop-down) I think the first part of your "subj" sez "ivi didn't read the form".

Rob.

Re:US/Canada only! Why not just allow ISO download

That's not correct. I ordered the DVD at the beginning of last December and got it a couple of weeks later. I live near Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain, Europe. So it looks like they send it worldwide (well, maybe except to the Axis of Evil... including Redmond, WA? hehehe).

By the way: the picture on the DVD cover features the "castellers" (castle makers), a very traditional Catalan (that is, from my homeland) show/sport/activity. The place appears to be Barcelona, in front of the City Council building. I guess the guys at Sun want to emphasize the importance of teamwork.

English article about castellers: http://www.castellersdebarcelona.org/eng/ [castellers...celona.org]

Re:Solaris vs. Linux

I actually like one major thing about Solaris... Free CDE.

Okay, so the CDE is ancient. It's still the official standard GUI for Unix. A pity it's binary-only, as I'd like to use it here (and NO, xfce isn't close enough - and no way in hell am I paying pumped-up prices for deXtop!)

-uso.

Re:Profit!

Ok. So you sat on your ass all day and watched TV, and he made a hundred bucks.

Re:Solaris vs. Linux

"Maybe dtrace is amazing, but there isn't even a GUI for it."

Sure there is, called Chime, and on opensolaris.org. harder? compare setting up logical volumes on Linux compared to much easier ZFS on Solaris

Re:US/Canada only! Why not just allow ISO download

You only have to tell them what state you're in if you live in the US or Canada.

I think perhaps you shouldn't order a DVD, you seem to have problems with basic comprehension, Solaris would just confuse you.