Sun offering free, open source Solaris 10 - not quite yet

I'm reading everywhere that Sun is making Solaris 10 free and open source

However, that's not quite true yet: if you go to their download pages, you'll have to accept a license that says (among other things):

2.0 LIMITED LICENSE 
Sun grants You a non-exclusive and non-transferable license to internally 
reproduce and use Software solely for purpose of evaluation in a test 
environment. Software shall not be used in a production environment. (Refer to 
Section 5.2 for reporting requirements)
 

This is supposed to include complete Linux capability. According to Sun:

We've made Solaris 10 the most interoperable operating system platform ever. 
Linux applications will run on Solaris 10--natively. No emulation, complication, 
no performance hit.
 

I admit to having always liked Solaris. I wasn't overly impressed by their earlier x86 releases, but maybe this one will be different.

Moved some comments to the main text so they don't get wiped out:

---November 28, 2004

I downloaded the iso images, burned them, and did the install. I
thought it was going pretty well until it asked for the "Documentation"
CD - unfortunately, there is no such thing on the download page.
I continued without it, and upon reboot it looked like things might
be good, but it then failed to start X. I could login, but no X.

I've seen this same thing with RedHat? and other Linuxes too: you
do a graphical install, and obviously that is perfectly happy with
your graphics. Yet when the system comes up, it has no understanding
of it. Maybe I can fix it, maybe I can't - I may have to throw a
simpler graphics card in the machine and try again. It's annoying
that they at least don't default to whatever they used for the
install - that may not be high-res and I may want to try to make
it better, but at least it WORKED.

If anyone can explain why this isn't just automatic, I'd sure
appreciate it.

--TonyLawrence

---December 1, 2004

Don't know. Does Solaris use XFree86? I think it's something that
has been improved with X.org. Or does Solaris use it's own X server
that isn't something that I am familar with...

You can see how smart X is at configuring itself automaticly by
running XFree86 -configure or Xorg -configure

Then it will automaticly generate a configuration file inside your
current directory. Then you test it with: XFree86 -xf86config
XF86Config.new or Xorg -config xorg.conf.new

That way you can find out how smart the autodetect stuff is. If
they work, don't use those config files directly. They won't have
DRI setup (I think) and will miss out on system-specific configurations
like modules or font paths, but you can edit in the relevent parts
into your /etc/X11/XF86Config or /etc/X11/xorg.conf

I don't know why they don't do at least that sometimes. Or at least
provide a compatability vesa/vga mode like window's "safe mode".
They should.

--Drag
 

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