OpenSolaris Indiana Released 359
Lally Singh writes "The Linux-friendly OpenSolaris Indiana has been released! A new, modern package manager and all the goodies of Solaris: ZFS, DTrace, SMF, and Xen on a LiveCD that was designed for Linux users. 'Why use the OpenSolaris OS you ask? It's pretty simple, you'll find it full of unique features like the new Image Packaging System (IPS), ZFS as the default filesystem, DTrace enabled packages for extreme observability and performance tuning, and many many more. We think you'll be quite happy to came by to take a look!'"
Re:Still not sold (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:yawn (Score:2, Insightful)
As for hardware, the solaris kernel doesn't change its ABI every couple of weeks. Drivers written once continue to work.
Re:yawn (Score:2, Insightful)
But perhaps your zealotry does not allow you to try new things...
Re:Still not sold (Score:3, Insightful)
You were correct up to this point.
Indiana... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Still not sold (Score:4, Insightful)
That train already left the station.
It's not just good enough that you make something cool but you should also make it available when people want it rather than 10 years later.
Now Sun has to put on a good showing just to keep from looking silly.
Although this is ultimatey a good thing as it's one of the key benefits of free market competition.
Re:Still not sold (Score:5, Insightful)
As a proud LDD touting, LWN gazing, MSc wielding geek; the Solaris kernel is a heck of a lot better coded, structured and organised than the Linux kernel. But alas, it lacks the many new features that have truly driven linux over the last decade.
Naturally my opinions lie with the ease of code readability and ease of initial development - these are not the same as a lkml hardened pro
Linux-friendly = GPL-compliant license (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:zfs (Score:3, Insightful)
Much as they might trumpet that it is, it isn't actually proper open source. I can't take it, rip out any bits I want and use them elsewhere. No matter what the license says, if I can't do that, it isn't 'Open', and as you point out, some bits you can't.
Also, it has hardly any developers not already on Suns payroll, and those that are independent are shackled by a lack of proper tools.
Sun doesn't want to engage with the open source community, they want to 'leverage' it, to exploit its advantages, and avoid its more uncomfortable freedoms.
That's a good thing (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:zfs (Score:1, Insightful)
Still, it may come to MacOSX at some point.
I am guessing that Sun know ZFS is the draw card. If they GPLd it, why would we even look at OpenSolaris??
Re:Still not sold (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
Those are just some of the big items that get mentioned. Solaris' resource management and auditing tools are very impressive and I haven't seen anything comparable in linux that can give as much control for as little overhead.
What is the news ? (Score:2, Insightful)
I see no use for Dtrace as I use nothing more fancy than Matlab for analyzing my data. No fancy number crunching or developing here. I used to do a lot of heavy duty Fortran 95 programming, but that is history (which will not be repeated).
So, Sun wants me to trial an OS that is about 5 years late, and has major hardware problems while offering no compelling reasons for the switch. Sorry, but Microsoft beat Sun by a year or so. Its called Vista.
I used to be a Solaris user (on Sun hardware) - used it for about 5-6 years. The image of pricey hardware that worked at half the speed of commonly available Intel/AMD hardware running Linux has sort of stayed with me.
Re:zfs (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Who cares? (Score:3, Insightful)
There's more to free unix then Linux you know..
Re:Who cares? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hey! It's Debian! (Score:5, Insightful)
GNOME is also the default for most mainstream linux distributions that Sun would want to position OpenSolaris against. RHEL, SuSE, CentOS, Ubuntu, Fedora.
You should be able to compile KDE, or you can get a precompiled package on blastwave.org.
Re:Hey! It's [not] Debian! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:zfs (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Still not sold (Score:3, Insightful)
The code has apparently gotten a bit cleaner although BSD still remains more legible.
Still it doesn't change the fact that for the time being Linux is *it* (whatever that is). It's the system that has the mind share (apart from Windows of course). And for the most part it works just fine.
So while there certainly are other more advanced solutions, I don't see them taking Linux's place in the sun (ha ha) any time soon.
Re:Who cares? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hey! It's Debian! (Score:3, Insightful)
OPIUM: Optimal Package Install/Uninstall Manager
http://pho.ucsd.edu/rjhala/papers/opium.html [ucsd.edu]
Also worth reading are:
Search heuristics and optimisations to solve package
installability problems by constraint programming
http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/report_ingi2800_C.pdf [ucl.ac.be][pdf]
Maintaining large software distributions:
new challenges from the FOSS era
http://pauillac.inria.fr/~xleroy/bibrefs/EDOS-FRCSS06.html [inria.fr]
where they mention "Theorem 1 (Package installability is an NP-complete problem). Checking whether a single package
P can be installed, given a repository R, is NP-complete." (result is to be published elsewhere, though).