Casper Dik has updated his excellent Solaris 2 Frequently Asked Questions document (for the first time in 2.5 years).

I’ve come into possession of a number of copies of UnixWorld magazine, circa 1992-1996. I’ve started scanning interesting ads and articles and am putting them online for historical purposes. So far, the most interesting ad I’ve run across is one from 1993 for Sun’s INTERACTIVE Unix, the SVR3 port for i386 that was marketed before Solaris x86.

I’m interested in acquiring any other UNIX-related magazines and advertisements from the early 80s to the mid-90s; if you’ve got something of historical interest please don’t throw it away, contact me instead.

Solaris Express 04/05 (Nevada Build 10) has been made avalible. Very little is reported as new in this release, according to the “Whats New” doc only TCP Keepalive Tunables. The 03/05 Express release was pretty lack luster as well. The last major feature release in Express was the 02/05 drop (Nevada Build 7) when we got Xorg 6.8.2, iSCSI, HBA tools, crypto additions and more, so if you are already running 02/05, don’t bother, but if you are a couple months behind then grab it in the usual place. Big things are expected in the next Express release, but we’ll just have to wait and see.

Sun has announced the availability of its first AMD dual-core-cpu machine, the V40Z, and that its entire line of X64 systems will be upgraded to use the dual-core chips.

The Center for Internet Security has updated their CIS Level-1 Benchmark and Scoring Tool for Solaris with Solaris 10 support.

Sun has released results for its fiscal 2005 third quarter, which ended March 27th.

Revenues for the third quarter were $2.625 billion, a decrease of 1.0 percent as compared with $2.651 billion for the third quarter of fiscal 2004. Total gross margin as a percent of revenues was 41.3 percent, an increase of 1.0 percentage points as compared with the third quarter of fiscal 2004. Net loss for the third quarter of fiscal 2005 on a GAAP basis was $9 million or a net loss of $0.00 per share. This net loss included the favorable impact of $54 million in additional settlement income from Microsoft, a $69 million benefit related to the impact of a change in foreign withholding tax legislation, and a $23 million net beneficial correction to the valuation allowance on deferred tax assets and foreign tax provisions. This compared with a net loss of $760 million or a net loss of $0.23 per share for the third quarter of fiscal 2004.

Excluding a charge of $45 million for workforce and real estate restructuring, a $2 million gain on equity investments, $54 million in additional settlement income from Microsoft (recorded in other income), a $34 million beneficial correcting adjustment to the valuation allowance on deferred tax assets, and a tax benefit of $7 million for related tax effects, net loss for Q3 fiscal 2005 on a non-GAAP basis was $61 million or a net loss of $0.02 per share. This compared with a net loss, on a non-GAAP basis, in Q3 fiscal 2004 of $260 million or a net loss of $0.08 per share.

The cash and marketable debt securities balance at the end of the quarter was $7.357 billion.

This Register article has details on Sun’s upcoming code-named-“Galaxy” servers based on AMD’s dual-core Opteron processor.

The lowest-end system will be the 1U box that supports up to 16GB of memory, 2 PCI-X slots and 2 hard disks. A larger 2U box will hold two-processors, 16GB of memory, 5 PCI-X slots and 4 disks. On the 4U front, Sun looks set to ship a four-processor box that supports up to 32GB of memory, 6 PCI-E slots and 4 disks. The big daddy system will support up to 64GB of memory, 8 PCI-E slots and 4 disks. All of the boxes will hold AMD’s soon to be released dual-core Opteron chip.

These machines will be Sun’s first in-house Opteron designs, done by a team led by Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the cofounders of Sun and designer of the Sun-1 and SPARCstation 1 computer systems.

From this ZDNet article, Sun President Jonathan Schwartz on Tuesday proclaimed support for open-source software, but criticized the General Public License

Sun today announced the names of the five individuals selected to participate in the OpenSolaris Community Advisory Board (CAB). The Community Advisory Board was created to steward the evolution of the OpenSolaris community towards self-governance.

The five member board consists of two members who were nominated and elected by the OpenSolaris pilot community: Al Hopper, engineer consultant, Logical Approach; and Rich Teer, independent Solaris consultant and author of “Solaris Systems Programming”. The three other members on the advisory board are Roy Fielding, chief scientist at Day Software and co-founder and member, the Apache Software Foundation; Simon Phipps, chief technology evangelist, Sun; and Casper Dik, senior staff engineer, Sun.

As outlined in Jan., Sun plans to release buildable source code for the Solaris 10 OS under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) in the second quarter of 2005. Background on the five CAB members and information about the OpenSolaris community, can be found at www.opensolaris.org.