Sun to Make Solaris More Linux Like 400
ramboando writes "In an effort to spur adoption of Solaris, Sun Microsystems has begun a project code-named Indiana to try to give its operating system some of Linux's success.
Sun has been trying for years to restore the luster of Solaris, but that since has faced a strong challenge chiefly from Linux. Sun wants to embrace some Linux elements so "we make Solaris a better Linux than Linux," said Ian Murdock, Sun's chief operating systems officer, quoting Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, whose latest start-up, Ning, uses Solaris.
But it's a tricky balance to adopt elements of Linux while preserving Solaris technology and advantages such as the promise of backward compatibility. "As we make Solaris more familiar to Linux users, we don't [want to] lose what makes it more compelling and competitive.""
I'm frightened already. (Score:3, Insightful)
*shudder* I still remember Mad Hatter. Such promise. Such failure to follow up,
First Java open-sourced, now this... go Sun! (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, I know they ship a DVD with lots of GNU tools, but the fact that the built-in make, vi, grep, etc. are still basically unmodified from the early 1990s (if not longer) is not, to me, a feature. Those hoary old versions should be the ones on a supplementary DVD for those who need perfect backward compatibility with 15-year-old shell scripts and so forth.
It sounds like that's a focus of this project, so I say fabulous. If I can get ZFS and DTrace plus a modern toolset out of the box, Solaris will start to look much more attractive.
Err.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Sun is hemmoraging cash. Their hardware is fairly standard (in an enterprise way) and all the functionality of Linux has jumped ahead of Solaris... So what do they have to offer? Nothing. I can't see what they can do in this regard to gain back market share. making a "better linux" than Linux is not it.
There are probably other paths that they can take that would be more effective than this one. But I don't know what they are.
Business model? (Score:5, Insightful)
Better Linux than Linux? (Score:4, Insightful)
-matthew
Re:I'm frightened already. (Score:3, Insightful)
Okay, call me a noob. (Score:4, Insightful)
For that matter, sure, the machines look cool on the outside, but why do so many people consider them worth buying (even models up to 10 years old) today, and for that matter, what makes them worth switching over to? Is it sheer geek chic, or do they actually provide some form of useful function, as opposed to Windows/Mac/Linux's growing trend towards multipurpose multimedia machines?
Smells like a corporation in decline, to me (Score:2, Insightful)
Just give us more drivers.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:First Java open-sourced, now this... go Sun! (Score:5, Insightful)
Who cares? Do they work?
Re:Just give us more drivers.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes Sir! Anything else you would like for free?
Re:Err.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Is it only me... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:First Java open-sourced, now this... go Sun! (Score:3, Insightful)
try running ubuntu on a fortune 500 companys network and see how you fair.
Re:Start by making bash the default shell... (Score:3, Insightful)
Also if the bash manual page says this:
BUGS
It's too big and too slow.
Then you just know it is a bad choice beyond even other considerations.
Re:Okay, call me a noob. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I'm frightened already. (Score:1, Insightful)
We named the dog 'Indiana'.
Re:Okay, call me a noob. (Score:4, Insightful)
Simple is better.
This single thought is perhaps the biggest lesson I've learned in my whole career, about almost any aspect of computing. Complexity is the enemy.
caveat: by 'Linux' I mean 'The particular distro your company has standardised on'
caveat: I'm only concerned with servers. Solaris may be the worst desktop OS in the world FAIK.
1. Less shovelware. Although a base Solaris install is still annoyingly large, it's not nearly as bad as most Linux distros. It infuriates me that operating systems think its useful to install entire database, programming languages, you name its 'just in case you need them'.
2. Better backward compatability. Upgrades to discreet parts of Solaris don't usually require upgrades to other parts of Solaris. This means that you aren't constantly trying to run the latest versions of everything.
3. Better hardware integration. When you are running a lot of servers, it's very useful to have a nice console, so you can talk to the things properly. I think Linux has improved a bit in this area, but I'm not aware that it has an equivalent to the OK prompt, and the various diagnostic tools therein.
Others have talked about various tools and kernel level stuff, but I wanted to make that point that while the Solaris userland might feel archaic to some, to me it feels pleasantly simple - devoid of hidden complexity, obscure features that badly written apps come to rely on, and all the other 'let's have another feature' attitude prevalent in much OS software.
To me, Solaris feels like HTTP, and Linux feels like SOAP.
About Sun's Support - a view from the inside (Score:4, Insightful)
Caseih" is correct when he says "This certainly isn't quite the same Sun as in the olden days", in regard to support and how it is delivered. It certainly isn't the same Sun for those of us who are tasked with delivering support. Management has implemented all sorts of programs to improve customer "sat" and bring down call hold times, programs that INTERFERE with the day to day support work; effective and seasoned TSEs are bailing out right and left and ARE NOT BEING REPLACED in many cases; the EDS "partners" have a large turnover rate (what do you want for $9 an hour?); more time on the phone taking live calls, meaning the TSE have less (or no) time to do followups, research, spend time in the lab . .
The "Dell-ization" of tech support is spreading like a virus; support is a commodity now. Even enterprise level tech support. Sold to the lowest bidder. Who cares if the person on the phone can't spell "LDAP", as long as the call is picked up in X minutes and keeps the manager's pager from going off? THAT is where Sun support is today.
Re:Err.... (Score:3, Insightful)
If anybody could easily maintain binary kernel drivers then more people would do so, and less code would be released open-source. Now, the total amount of code (proprietary+otherwise) might increase, but that isn't really Linus's concern. If the code isn't open it doesn't really benefit him. When you think about it, more people using linux doesn't really benefit him either...
Re:Keep solaris different!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
Good, professional admins will always command a premium. There are very VERY few good, professional Linux or Windows admins, but they're paid roughly as well as Solaris (or HP-UX, etc.) admins.
"any monkey thats run linux for a bit has the same skills?"
I suggest you upgrade your skills beyond those of a monkey. And your attitude, while you're at it.
Re:First Java open-sourced, now this... go Sun! (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, even if your statement was 100% accurate in every sense of the word, Nexenta's lack of development does *not* represent a stable and basically functional system. It represents a stale Nevada build. Sun has done many better builds since the last Nexenta release. A pity, Nexenta debian-ified Solaris enough to have the package management and general interface strategy be bearable (No matter how you slice it, Nevada's UI may have better options, but it's still ugly and misses a lot of the point in my opinion.
The Wheel Turns Full Circle (Score:3, Insightful)
The GNU project was originally meant to be an alternative to the closed-source Unix implementations of the day. Like a heroin dealer relying on the twin pillars of illegality and addictive potential, closed-source Unix vendors had little incentive to improve their products; they just had to be different enough from the competition that you couldn't switch easily.
It really took for Linux to come on the scene to get GNU into a usable state; the BSD kernel (which had been favoured by the GNU developers prior to the advent Linux) already came with well-matched userland tools. And you've got to be serious about something to buy a whole car that already works just to rip out the engine and use it in a different chassis that looks identical to the first one from a distance. The GNU/Linux combination sparked interest in GNU. In turn, the BSDs diversified; today FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD all have their own respective market niches.
Closed-source Unix continues to stagnate and ultimately will grow irrelevant. The elephant in the room is that neither hardware nor software make up the bulk of the intrinsic value of a computer system; that value comes mainly from users' saved data.
Open Source pretty much forces you to implement Open Standards for saved files, which leads to transparent interoperability between programs that do the same sort of thing. In the end, AbiWord on GNU/Linux, OpenOffice.org on Solaris and KWord on FreeBSD will all be able to open the same documents. The brand of tools used to shape the data is becoming less important than the result of using them. That's already how it is in other industries. After all, who ever asked what brand of cooking equipment a restaurant uses, or what make of tools a cabinet maker uses? The important thing is that chopping food with one make of knife doesn't block you from cooking it in a different manufacturer's pans, and rough-cutting a piece of wood with one make of power saw doesn't prevent you finishing it with a different manufacturer's chisel. Using one OS and application stack on your computer shouldn't preclude you from working with data manipulated using a different OS and stack. That's already the way it's heading, slowly but surely.
Nextenta! (Score:3, Insightful)
But, uhm, is there any real evidence that the Solaris kernel is actually *better* than the Linux kernel? The Linux kernel definitely supports a LOT more hardware. Although Solaris is seen as more heavy duty by a lot of IT folks, I'm not sure if there's a good reason for this besides long-time familiarity.
Solaris is a toy operating system (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Okay, call me a noob. (Score:3, Insightful)
+5, Insightful? Oh, come on, mods.
This is not a problem that can be tuned away. I'll tell you exactly what's going on. The kernel has, for each process, a table which contains one entry for each contiguous region of address space with the same page protections. Since the Lisp implementation I'm using makes use of page protections to implement its GC write barrier -- a very useful technique for an SMP garbage collector -- it creates lots of small regions, so that this table gets quite large. And, there are algorithms in the kernel that are quadratic, or worse, in the size of the table.
The result is that as the Lisp heap grows past a couple of GB, one of the CPUs (I'm doing this, BTW, on a quad Opteron with 16GB of DRAM) comes to spend 100% of its time in the kernel, doing whatever this quadratic algorithm is doing, and the machine becomes pretty much unresponsive.
Solaris has no trace of this behavior. Clearly, it comes from a culture where the OS is expected to scale in many dimensions, and quadratic algorithms are strictly forbidden.