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,
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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.
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Just the other day, I saw Solbourne. That was the company that was created in Colorado to sell sparc systems. They were the ONLY takers of this at a time when Sparcs were not doing so good. Well, as soon as Sparcs came on a bit, McNeally cut them off. It turned out that it had a funky clause in there, that ultimately allowed them to cut Solbourne's OEM access to the chips. IOW, he pulled a bill gates.
But keep in mind that was with McNeally in control. This is a wew era. So
Re:I'm frightened already. (Score:4, Informative)
Bullshit. Solbourne weren't the only people making Sun compatible kit, nor where they the first - Axil were. Meanwhile Tadpole and RDI were making Sparc based portables (I hesitate to call them laptops as the weight would cut the blood flow off from your legs) which were basically SS5s with an LCD screen. Tadpole later acquired RDI. Compatibles came in two forms, those with licensed mainboard designs from Sun, and those with mainboards designed in house. The reason for the demise of most of these companies was not down to licensing shenanigans but the simple fact that few of these machines offered benefits over the Suns own kit. The exception was the portables, and that's most likely why Tadpole are still around.
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Indiana?
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.
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Unfortunately, nexenta development appears to be glacial. The last alpha release was what, six months ago??? Now, "six months" might not seem to be too bad -- this is an OS that we're talking about. However, when you consider that the competition (e.g., Ubuntu) comes out with unstable releases every month or two, then, well, nexenta doesn't look too good. This is especially important, as hardware support is a problem with solaris.
PCI IDE controllers? Last I heard (a few months back), there really wasn
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try running ubuntu on a fortune 500 companys network and see how you fair.
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.
Re:First Java open-sourced, now this... go Sun! (Score:5, Informative)
If you want to prefer Linux over Solaris that's fine, but make sure that what you are criticizing is actually true. Otherwise you are misleading yourself and possibly missing out on some really cool technology. You point out the cool technology in ZFS and DTrace, and I agree that they are really fantastic reasons to use Solaris. In fact, I am right now thinking that Solaris offers a lot of technologies that Linux can't touch without giving up a lot of the characteristics that make Linux useful. Give it an honest chance and you might be surprised at what Solaris 10 can do!
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Did that and I didn't even get to the part were I was supposed to get 'surprised'. The biggest drawback of Solaris 10 when it comes to just 'trying it' is hardware compatibilty. Unfortunately it doesn't even come close to Linux. My graphics card's 3D accel, audio, wireless and SATA controller did not work. I can live without 3D on a server and without audio but no hard drive and network connection!? -- Sorry. I had to pass.
Oh I
Re:First Java open-sourced, now this... go Sun! (Score:4, Informative)
I wanted to see what Solaris 10 was like so I put it on an AthlonXP 2400 machine I had. The motherboard has onboard audio and network. I spent a few minutes trying to figure out if Solaris could detect the network adapter and it didn't seem to be able to do so, so I put in an Intel EtherExpress Pro adapter I had in a box and it immediately recognized this. As for audio, I did a Google search for "Solaris 10 audio" and found a site that had drivers that I downloaded, installed with one or two commands that were pretty clearly indicated, and rebooted. Audio worked then.
My video card is a 2D Matrox card which was immediately recognized and configured by the X11 server used by Solaris 10 (this is called Xorg and is probably the same X11 server you use on Linux). I have seen people using accelerated NVidia video on Solaris 10 but I have not personally tried this. I know that there ARE drivers available from NVidia, so I am assuming that if I can follow the instructions to get them to work with Linux that I can probably also do so with Solaris. One advantage that Solaris has here (as far as I know) is that you don't have to keep relinking the driver to deal with ABI issues that Linux has when you upgrade your Linux kernel. I appreciate that because it makes my life simpler.
I don't have a SATA controller in my Athlon, so I cannot speak to that. However I believe that the machines coming from Sun have SATA so I assume that it must work.
I do not believe that Solaris 10 is supported on notebook computers, so I do not believe that wireless cards are typical hardware for Solaris. That said, during my Googling around I did see that someone has some experimental wireless drivers, but I have not looked at them in detail nor have I attempted to use them, so I cannot speak to how well they work.
I don't think my AthlonXP 2400+, EtherExpress, and Matrox card are too atypical to expect geeks to be able to easily get if someone was determined to try Solaris 10. It was certainly nowhere near as difficult for me to put together this system for experimenting as it was for me to put together my first Linux systems in the mid-1990's that required things like SCSI adapters to really work well.
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The only problems I encountered:
1. No support for my scanner (Epson - Avasys makes binary-only drivers for Linux).
2. No support (back then) for virtual consoles. I *need* them.
3. Mouse stutt-tters. Horribly. A show stopper. Either GeForce FX5200 is not properly supported by the
Network drivers... (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, I'm typing this from a Sun SPARC laptop, and the wireless drivers are there, as well as a gui from Tadpole for configuring/diagnosing them. They were available somewhere in the Solaris 9 lifetime.
For cards where there are only or primarily proprietary drivers, Solaris is actually a pretty good bet, as Sun made the effort to go out and buy
Re:Enumerate the current advantages of Solaris (Score:5, Informative)
Coming from a BSD background, the thing I dislike the most about Solaris is that it refuses to have a 'minimal install' that is actually usable. I can install *BSD in a few tens of MBs, and then add the packages I want easily. This makes it easy to secure and run the machine, because I know exactly what's on it. Last time I installed Solaris, the base system seemed to be about 4GB.
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I've liked many aspects of Linux for a long time, but the #1 thing that turns me off it is the userland tools. BSD style UNIX is the only layout worth a dam, give that the BSD layout is more prevalent, then Linux, Sun should go back to it.
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What don't you like about them? I personally prefer the GNU tools to the older BSD derivatives.
BSD style UNIX is the only layout worth a dam, give that the BSD layout is more prevalent, then Linux, Sun should go back to it.
Solaris uses the System V layout which is very common, more common that the old BSD layout in my exerience. Linux has no single layout. Slackware uses the BSD layout while Redhat
Re:First Java open-sourced, now this... go Sun! (Score:5, Interesting)
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Heh. The very reason Unix has succeeded, and has lasted so long is the "everything is a file" paradigm. The whole MS PowerShell philosophy is catering to a completely different mindset, one that rewards complexity, and has been proven, at every
Re:First Java open-sourced, now this... go Sun! (Score:5, Insightful)
Who cares? Do they work?
Re:First Java open-sourced, now this... go Sun! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:First Java open-sourced, now this... go Sun! (Score:5, Funny)
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This can be an irritant if, for example you're installing tomcat on a client's vanilla Solaris box. Yes Solaris has some truly fantastic features, however the GNU userland is just an easier place to inhabit.
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The machine I was working with back then (until about a year ago) had backspace and del do the same (IIRC delete char to the right) and nobody could find out how to change that. And that just scratches on the surface. It didn't help that the admins were assholes, so I only had CDE as a "window manager".
It sucked. Big. I ended up working on my machine at home using tightvnc, because that solaris box was absolutely unbearable.
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Re:First Java open-sourced, now this... go Sun! (Score:5, Informative)
I have always thought of Solaris as an awesome kernel paired with a userland that was only an afterthought. Kernel features are nice (low latency, scalability, etc), and the trend continues with ZFS and DTrace, but I wish they wouldn't neglect the userland. After all, where does a user spend his time?
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Solaris grep in particular is horrible.
vi breaks every time you expand your console beyond 132 characters, and quite a few of the tools on the default PATH don't conform to any modern standard - including POSIX.
Windows with SFU provides a more compatible UNIX environment than what you get out of the box with Solaris.
Re:First Java open-sourced, now this... go Sun! (Score:5, Funny)
vi breaks every time you expand your console beyond 132 characters, and quite a few of the tools on the default PATH don't conform to any modern standard - including POSIX.
Windows with SFU provides a more compatible UNIX environment than what you get out of the box with Solaris.
Somewhere in Redmond, a demon just snorted gasoline and battery acid onto it's keyboard.
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"but the fact that the built-in make, vi, grep, etc. are still basically unmodified"
Who cares? Do they work?
I expect vi to be the same from platform to platform. grep as well. Make????
hah. I take it you don't actually spend a lot of time administering many different boxes. I hate doing anything with old Unix boxes, Solaris included. You don't realize how nice it is to be able to have something as simple as command history until you lose it. Or what about always being stuck in INS mode? Case insensitive searches with 'find'? Syntax highlighting with Vim? grep -r? A consistant filesystem? (cat /etc/route. Oops! Binary exe. Now your terminal is all fucked up). more? more?????? who the fuck
Re:First Java open-sourced, now this... go Sun! (Score:5, Interesting)
Ha ha. That "don't add child directories' disk usage to the parents'" option in the Solaris "du"? Yeah. Um, I wrote that when I worked at Sun. Along with a bunch of other things, e.g. the first CD player app (WorkMan) that could pull track listings over the network. That existed on Solaris years before anyone ported it to Linux. I think I've earned my opinion on Solaris, thank you very much.
Although you're right that one can install the companion disc (and then go to sunfreeware.com to pick up the stuff that's missing or out of date) it still remains the case that, e.g., if I log in as root on one of the random Solaris systems at work (where I have superuser privileges but not unilateral control over what root's environment looks like) I get a nasty old Bourne shell with no history, no completion, etc. If I were to change root's shell to bash or zsh, I'd run the risk of breaking system admin scripts that assume I'm using the default shell.
If in your book it makes me a Linux fanboy to want Solaris to improve in the areas where it's currently behind Linux, then so be it, I don't really care what name you put to that. My interest is in seeing Solaris improve because I think it's fundamentally a pretty good piece of software.
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What kind of admin writes a shell script without a shebang line?
Re:First Java open-sourced, now this... go Sun! (Score:5, Informative)
Most UNIX systems allow a multiple usernames to have the same user ID, but different shells (and even home directories). The convention on BSD machines is to have a 'toor' user for GNU people that is UID 0 but runs bash as the default shell. This allows things that run as root to get the shell they expect, and people from GNU-land to get the shell they expect.
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.
Re:Err.... (Score:5, Informative)
ZFS? DTrace? Zones?
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I thought you could already use DTrace on Linux, and if they GPL their stuff, it will all be ported to Linux. The article says that it would be hard, but you know it would happen. I don't really see them having a separate code base alongside linux. I think it would be rapidly absorbed, and then you would have Sun Linux. And all other flavours with similar kernels and tools if it was fully GPLed. And again, then no advantage after going GPL to them.
Re:Err.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Solaris does have those powerful features that Linux does not, but I find myself often having to install extra GPL'ed tools for solaris from sunfreeware, and I personally feel that those tools should be there from the start. But you are right, there are some things that it has that are superior to the current state of Linux.
Re:Err.... (Score:5, Informative)
If you want a GNU-like system for Solaris, try out Nexenta [gnusolaris.org]
Re:Err.... (Score:5, Informative)
May I add: Fault Management Framework [1], Crossbow [2], pNFS [3], stable device driver interface (one of the biggest point driver developers complain about in Linux). Clearly the GP has no idea about the number of technological advances Sun is pushing in OpenSolaris.
[1] http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/fm [opensolaris.org][2] http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/crossbow [opensolaris.org]
[3] http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/nfsv41/pnfs
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No thanks.
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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
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Get Nexenta [gnusolaris.org] - basically Ubuntu running a Solaris kernel.
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Furthermore, I h
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Sun is hemmoraging cash.
I've never heard of a company that's making a profit [theregister.co.uk] described in those terms.
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But here you are talking hardware, not software. The parent article is about Solaris, not sun Boxes, which are close enough to other enterprise boxes. Yes, they are different. But so are others in their own ways.
Is it going to be free? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Is it going to be free? (Score:5, Informative)
Also consider that some of the better solaris features have been added to FreeBSD recently. dtrace and zfs are available for FreeBSD 7 current.
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Sun is ignoring a huge group of up and coming CS/IS/IT students by being asshats and not giving away free sun hardware licenses for the older solaris. I had a stack of old hardware I would have loved to give away to a local computer club or school but it needed to have Solaris 9 installed as 10 is molasses slow on the stuff.
So I ended up pirating a copy of 9 and installing on the machines and giving them
Business model? (Score:5, Insightful)
Backward Compatibility?! (Score:3, Interesting)
Most of my users on various boxes are afraid to even apply Sun patches because it breaks applications left and right. Granted, we are development segment of my company, but still... the Solaris operating system is barely backward compatible within it's own major release, much less between versions. Simple tools will run just fine, of course, but the more complex the application, the less likely it is to run between major versions, and likely going to cause some sort of havoc between minor revisions within the same version. I see it happen daily.
They really don't need to worry about their "backward compatibility," when trying to make Solaris more Linux like... I'm glad they are doing this - I absolutely hate administrating a stock Solaris system. It feels so archaic and like something straight out of the late 80's or early 90's, back when I was logging into the beasts on my 300 baud modem. The only worse offender in this area is HP-UX... though I will admit that with Solaris 10 and HP-UX 11 there have been some minor inroads into the monolithic, archaic feel to both OS's, but they both have a very, very, very long way to go.
Just to clarify - I understand why those OS's are that way, but it doesn't mean I like it nor want to use them. If they can retain the stability of Solaris and make it more comfortable to use, I'm all for it.
Re:Backward Compatibility?! (Score:5, Interesting)
I just migrated an entire system from Solaris 7 to a Solaris 10 Zone - How? I tarred up
Solaris 7 is from 1999, and this is 2007. Try that on an 8 year old redhat box and see what happens. Good luck with that.
Re:Backward Compatibility?! (Score:4, Funny)
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Probably the fact that their tools don't work like Linux/GNU tools.
I remember a friend that was configuring an Apache installation on a Sun and, once finished, decided to restart the process with a "killall httpd", like he would do on a Linux machine. The problem here is that the machine was also working as a gateway to the internet and Sun "killall" actually kills every single process, not the one named in the parameters. Five sec
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I guess Ian meant "A better GNU system than the GNU system".
Making Solaris more Linux-like... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Making Solaris more Linux-like... (Score:4, Interesting)
Better Linux than Linux? (Score:4, Insightful)
-matthew
About time (Score:5, Informative)
Just to make the system usable requires a ton of third-party software that sun does not ship nor support. In the end my path has nearly half a dozen bin folders in it, by the time you could
The init system is currently in a disorganized state. Most things are migrating to svcadm, which under the hood is very much like launchd. But there are still init.d scripts, but they don't always work right. Maybe Linux should move away from init.d, but at least on redhat, they are very full-featured and quite easy to work with.
Sun's biggest strengths right now are zones, zfs, and dtrace. However, if you don't specifically need these features, Linux is a better choice in many circumstances. And Linux is gaining features in these areas. xen can do a lot of what zones do, albeit much less efficiently. dtrace functionality is coming, I hear. ZFS, well the kernel developers seem to be suffering a bad case of NIH syndrome. The only reason I'm using solaris right now is ZFS. But I'm taking a big risk deploying it on a 12 TB disk. I have yet to hear of a failure, and Sun assures me that it's enterprise-ready. Sun's assurances do carry a lot of weight; they've had a lot of experience in these things. But I'm only a silver-level support customer. It's taken two weeks and some 20 phone calls to get issues sorted out with our sunsolve account and updatemanager. Our assigned support group only wants to talk over e-mail, which is annoying. Turnaround time on trying out their suggestions is hours if not days. This certainly isn't quite the same Sun as in the olden days.
Anyway, talk to any Sun jocky and he'll tell you that none of my complaints about Solaris are weaknesses. They are strengths. Cryptic commands are second nature. Besides, they separate the real sysadmins from the wannabes. Sound familiar? I think I've talked the same way about Linux to my Windows friends. I'm glad that Ian is going to work to improve Solaris' user space (which is what he means when he says make Solaris more like Linux, right?). On the other hand, Solaris reminds me not to get complacent with the state of linux. Every complaint I have about Solaris could easily be echoed by a Windows refugee trying to make sense of Linux. Both Linux and Solaris are powerful, cryptic, and archaic OSes. They both have a lot of room for improvement. We'll have to see. I told my RedHat friend the other day that his company has nothing to worry about from Solaris. Hopefully Ian will change that.
Vitruozzo = OpenVZ = Zones (Score:2)
Unless I'm mistaken; Virtuozzo [swsoft.com] which is based on OpenVZ [openvz.org] gives you the same functionality on Linux as Zones.
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.
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?
Re:Okay, call me a noob. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm using Solaris because the data mining application I'm building (in Lisp) brings the Linux kernel absolutely to its knees. Solaris runs it just fine on the same hardware. (We're talking 30+ GB of heap -- Linux is dead meat after 3 to 4 GB.)
A friend of mine says this is because the Linux kernel hackers optimize for the common case, not for extreme cases. I suspect this is correct. To put it another way, they are more into cycle shaving than analyzing the time and space complexity of their algorithms -- just as one might expect from smart hackers with a relatively weak computer science background.
The result is a kernel that does great on normal workloads, but just falls over when subjected to unusual stresses. Unless and until this is corrected, there will be a need for Solaris.
Re:Okay, call me a noob. (Score:5, Insightful)
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+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, ther
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As for g
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.
Start by making bash the default shell... (Score:2)
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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 e
It was suggested years ago... (Score:2, Interesting)
Smells like a corporation in decline, to me (Score:2, Insightful)
Sun has been trying for years to restore the luster of Solaris, but that since has faced a strong challenge chiefly from Linux
"As we make Solaris more familiar to Linux users, we don't [want to] lose what makes it more compelling and competitive."
If it is "more compelling and competitive" [than some other OS, whichever that is], then why the obsession with following after Linux? If Solaris is on the decline, then why not suspend further Solaris development, and launch their own Linux distro along side?
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If Solaris is on the decline, then why not suspend further Solaris development, and launch their own Linux distro along side?
Because Solaris still has a lot of features, and can do many things, that Linux can't. More importantly, a lot of those features are either very hard, or well nigh impossible to port to Linux. Getting ZFS included? Over Andrew Morton's dead body. Get DTrace for Linux? Requires quite a lot of messing around with the kernel that you'll have to get all parties to agree to. How about Zones? Not any time soon. How about a stable driver interface? When hell freezes over. The list goes on.
There is still a lot tha
not helpful to change it (Score:5, Interesting)
Solaris serves a niche in the market that is growing like crazy now, and most web developers who are building apps today should look into it seriously, IMHO.
The real question is... (Score:2)
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I was actually thinking about this issue just last night. Why is it that every UI sun comes up with on their own looks and feels like a hat full of arseholes? I just recently had my first play on a Java Desktop (Solaris with gnome2) and even there they have somehow managed to use a theme that shows Gnome in its ugliest possible light. I've used their Dev tools and the are ugly and irritating to use. Why, Sun, why do you put so much effort into making human interaction wit
Just give us more drivers.... (Score:3, Insightful)
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Yes Sir! Anything else you would like for free?
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I'm not exactly on cutting edge hardware either...
More Linux Like? (Score:3, Funny)
Have they completely lost the plot? (Score:5, Interesting)
Then sun comes along with Solaris 10 and adds in a ton of complexity with out providing any additional services. The new things like zones and zfs don't need all the new extra crud but its nearly impossible to build a lean system with solaris 10. There are also a number of issues that are just plain wrong and reeks of security the Microsoft way. Why does live update look inside zones? If its in a zone, its not to be trusted outside the zone. Thats covered in Security layers 101 so back to school guys. (you can purge one file inside a zone that breaks doing patches in the global zone). The new admin tools remove the rc scripts... except that most of them are just moved and hidden by layers of config files. Then it uses a binary file to figure out what to run at shutdown, and it keeps changing the file when servers start and stop and you can't get an accurate picture of the data its going to use when it shuts down the system. Since the file is a binary file, you can't checksum it and you can't dump it so you've got no clue if someone has put a Trojan in it. The data in the file could have just gone in a nice plane text file but I guess the coders missed the Windows registry too much. The appear to be handing the keys to the source castle to any old hack. Someone "fixed" telnetd and added a new feature in one of the worst security lapses I've seen in a long time.
I just bought 3 new netra 210 because 1) they run SPACR Solaris 9, 2) they fit in my racks and 3) are one RU. I'll stop buying Sun hardware the day I can't run Solaris 9 because there is no way I'm putting Sol 10 on a production machine.
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Actually the opposite is true. If OpenSolaris goes GPL3, then they can use some Linux code (the "GPL 2 or above" code, which is quite a lot), but not vice versa. So only OpenSolaris would gain from going GPL3, not Linux, unless Linux goes GPL3 as well - which may happen in the more distant future. But meanwhile OpenSolaris will be able to utiliz
A Better Linux (Score:3, Funny)
You could have this today! (Score:3, Informative)
FreeBSD current has ZFS and DTrace now! Why wait? Run, don't walk, to your nearest FreeBSD dealer ( ftp.freebsd.org ). Let's face it, Sun just hasn't been the same since AT&T strong-armed them away from BSD into the void of System V.
Disclaimer: Your mileage may vary. May cause increased bandwidth charges. Offer not valid in Lichtenstein on odd days of even months during leap years.
Double edged sword (Score:2)
The more they make Solaris like Linux, the easier it will be for people to move off Solaris onto Linux as the environment fill be more familiar and the skills barrier lower. So Sun are taking a bit of a gamble.
Compelling and Competitive? (Score:5, Interesting)
If Solaris was compelling and competitive, they wouldn't be trying to make it more like Linux.
Solaris is something that we use as a legacy OS where I work. We have well over 700 Linux systems in the school of engineering. At last count we had maybe 35 systems running Solaris still lingering here and there in places where they either cannot be replaced or there is no economy in doing so. There has not been a NEW installation of Solaris deployed in at least two years. We've also got five Tru64 systems, two HP-UX systems, three Irix systems, and I think 4 VMS systems that a dedicated die-hard won't allow to expire.
The bottom line is that the unix wars are over, Linux has won, and whatever contender eventually does take the crown from it will NOT be one of the has-eens of the past.
I'm long past caring what Sun does or does not do with Solaris for the same reason that I don't care what E-com does with OS/2. Both OS's may or may not be configured with fancy new features in the future, but it doesn't matter because they've already lost.
Game over dude, and no you don't get your quarter back.
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Where reliability isn't just important, it's critical. Where scalability isn't just important, it's critical. Where maintainability is valued over a hacker's OS because there aren't a bunch of free grad students to do all the damn work.
Hmm reliability, scalability, and critical workloads like perhaps with supercomputers [top500.org]? You'll note how Linux totally dominates this list with over 70% of all supercomputers. Where's Solaris.. oh that's right 1%. Also lat
GPL (Score:2)
Sun is feeling the heat... (Score:2, Interesting)
In short Sun is feeling the competition from the Open Source Linux. And Jeff's blog entry shows that pretty well
I don't know much about Sun but certainly they are not very happy with the way Linux is eating up Sun's share of servers.
At this juncture such an announcement does not come to me as a surprise.
~psr
Celebrity Endorsements (Score:4, Interesting)
At any rate, it's a very awkwardly constructed and confusing sentence, and if I was some kind of grammar Nazi, I'd fucking parse the author's ass.
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.
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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.