Solaris 9 x86 finally released by Sun

By Steve Malone

Posted on 7 Feb 2003 at 13:39

After months of waiting Sun Microsystems has finally released its Unix-based Solaris 9 x86 Platform Edition operating system for PC based servers. With the release of this product, Sun is hoping to capture part of the entry-level Unix based server market and take some of the wind out of the April launch of Microsoft's Windows Server 2003.

Included with the product are SunScreen 3.2 firewall software, Sun ONE Directory Server and the Solaris Resource Manager which allows sysadmins to prioritise system resources.

Sun says that currently there are 1.1 million registered licences for Solaris x86 Platform Edition. Sun spokesman Chris Ritchie told us, 'this product has been demanded by the developer and commefrcial community for some months now and we are now able to bring Solaris x86 into line with the Sparc versions.'

Sun doesn't see a conflict between offering Solaris and its own Sun Linux product. 'We see Solaris and Linux as complementary,' Ritchie said. 'Its entirely customer driven. If people want Linux they can have Linux, if they want Solaris they can have that too.'

'Linux, as yet is not in a state for mission critical applications,' he continued. 'Solaris x86 is being used as a development platform on commodity level Intel machines but with a clear migration path to a 64 bit platform'.

The product is available for free download for non-commercial use. At the time of writing, the product was not available from the Sun UK site.

In the US, the company is offering a CD version although Sun UK says this will not be an option. However, manuals will be available from Sun UK.

Solaris x86 requires a 32-bit x86 processor, 600 Mb of disk space for desktops or 1Gb for servers and a minimum of 64 Mbyte of RAM.