Solaris 11 came out today

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They blew the 11/11/11 launch date.  I guess Oracle really just doesn’t care about magical numbers or whatever.

I guess for the two or three people who even run this stuff (no doubt to run Oralce and it’s draconian licensing) you can find out all about it here.

It appears they still keep the Fortran stuff around for it…  Oh and this release is x86_64 only.  Sorry 32bit users.

Installing gcc (and I imagine everything else) revolves around the pkg command… In this case ‘pkg install gcc-3’ will download and install gcc 3.  While ‘pkg install gcc-45’ will install GCC 4!.  Don’t forget to install system/header or you won’t have things like stdio.h!!

Another GCC tidbit, is that you can build 64bit binaries with GCC 4.5 by supplying the -m64 flag!

While Solaris 11 installs somewhat quickly in VirtualBox (but wow does it take forever to boot), it is bare minimum…

Also for those who want it, here is lynx & ircII for Solaris Oh and a Quake World Server.  At least wget is in the base, but I don’t see why lynx isn’t.

14 thoughts on “Solaris 11 came out today”

  1. What the… they missed 11/11/11 by a day… or 2… ARRGGHH. That _would_ have been sweet.

    Ubuntu 10.10 was released in 10/10/10, if I recall correctly. I don’t have much love for that distro, but the release concept was cool (and, obviously interesting or I wouldn’t have remembered it).

    And yeah, I don’t know about the price for Solaris and its support (does Sol7 count? don’t rat me out), but I do know that Oracle’s DB prices are f*cked up :
    http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/technology-price-list-070617.pdf

    Over $47K for Enterprise version (which is basically the standard, for most needs). And we pay, oh yeah, with a smile…

    • Oracle charges more the bigger you are… I think we paid over 500k for our install… their ‘support’ is anything but.

      I really did like Solaris 10 but as things changed, esp how you couldn’t use it on non sun HW for x86… What sucks is that I’ve lost my sol 10, C & fortran disks. damn.

      Oh well there is always gcc.

  3. What version of Qemu are you using? I am using 14.0 on Win XP (SP3) and it’s so sloooow. I can’t get to run my old 0.9.1 + Kqemu anymore. It just crashes. Is it because of SP3? It was OK until SP2.

    • I’m using Qemu 0.15.0 … I’m on x86_64 so there is no acceleration for me which has lately driven me to VirtualBox.

      At any rate, I’ve found the following boots into the installer:

      qemu-system-x86_64.exe -m 1024 -L \qemu\qemu-0.15.0\pc-bios -k en-us -drive file=sol11.qcow2,if=ide,index=0,media=disk,cache=writeback -net nic,model=pcnet -net user -drive file=sol-11-1111-text-x86.iso,if=ide,index=1,media=cdrom,cache=writeback

      Or more so I’ve gotten to the point of selecting a keyboard & language. There was some weird changes in Qemu 0.14 & beyond regarding disk caching that had a dramatic impact on performance. I guess I should bench it and post it but I never got around to it.

      • Is VirtualBox faster by itself or does it offer a hw virtualization for x86_64?

        I have a use case for running a x86_64 guest on a Windows XP host (cpu is a x86_64 but runs in 32 bit mode), and wondering what can be the fastest solution. I guess no virtual machine can use a hw virtualiazation in this case, right?

        • I’m pretty sure to run ‘long mode’ with HW acceleration you’ll need a long mode OS…. VirtualBox does offer hardware accel, it is a more ‘refined’ version of Qemu that has been C++ified….

          Their USB & Network drivers leave a *LOT* to be desired however…

          • Oh, yes! I can confirm it. Didn’t want to cheat on qemu, but VirtualBox totally rocks for my use case.
            My test takes 27 minutes under qemu, and just 2 minutes 50 seconds under VirtualBox.

            Thanks for the hint!

    • 0.10 …? I just know that kqemu went out as it only worked with GCC 3, and 32bit versions of Windows… While I trust GCC 3 more than 4 there is just a lot of platforms that only have GCC 4…. But anyways when Qemu transitioned from GCC 3 to GCC 4 compatible it pretty much left kqemu behind…

  5. Oh, and BTW… the first boot of Solaris after installation takes much longer than usual, because Solaris is setting up 100+ services. This is cleverly hidden by the graphical boot screen, and the user is left to think that booting is just ultra slow. You can hit Esc to show a text console and see what’s going on.

    • well that’d certainly explain what on earth it is doing… You’d think they’d take a page from the old nextstep/openstep/osx and do the progress bar of nonsense… but I guess it would be too much traffic for a 300baud console or something.

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