Slashdot Mirror

Firefox manages to run on Mac, Linux, Windows, and BSD.

...and (from a quick google search) AIX, OS/2, Solaris, HP-UX, BeOS, and something called RISCOS that I haven't even heard of before now... and probably more!

If you replace a few choice utils with their GNU counterparts, Solaris is just fine to use. You can have the best of both worlds.

The review didn't address desktop vs. server and as a "lightweight" review doesn't look any deeper than the distro package for answers to the questions and objections raised.
OpenSolaris works well as a server OS - that /is/ it's heritage. It's easier to run OpenSolaris headless and on a serial console than any of the *BSD and Linux distros that I've used over the years. All of the "standard" server packages are available to run web and net services out of the box. For truly lights-out server rooms it's still necessary to choose hardware that implements some sort of remote power cycle or remote system monitor capability.
The ZFS filesystem is interesting for desktop installations - it does allow seamless use of the 1-2 terabyte desktop disk configurations that are now possible. ZFS was designed for the datacenter - eliminating the need for the time-honored but fragile combination of journaling filesystem over software volume manager (usually over HW RAID). It's the first real innovation in filesystem architecture since journaling filesystems were developed.
Additional software packages are available from 3 well-known (in the Solaris community, at least) sites. Sun has it's own freeware site, blastwave.org and sunfreeware.com
http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/freeware/s10pkgs_download.xml
http://www.blastwave.org/
http://sunfreeware.com/

The package manager for blastwave.org is their own, the others use the standard Solaris pkgadd commands. The package naming convention is a long-standing convention - each vendor uses a different prefix, making it easy to differentiate the source of packages.
OpenSolaris commands, where Sun hasn't replaced stock UNIX commands with their own, reflect SVR5 standard rather than the more Linux-ish BSD syntax.
One of the places where Sun has replaced "normal" functionality is the init process. SMF is Sun's attempt at fixing the long-standing problems and in-efficiencies of the BSD or SVR5 init process. Apple has launchd, there's openrc and gentoo's baselayout that all have similar goals. SMF works well and there's a fair amount of support on the net for integrating non-distro apps.
One of the "why OpenSolaris" answers is that there is value in running the same OS on the desktop as on the server. For Solaris shops OpenSolaris on the x86* servers provides a common platform that enables system management efficiencies to be extended.

I'm just waiting for a Firefox package for Solaris ..

http://www.sunfreeware.com/mozilla.html

mplayer is available for download at Blastwave and you could try asking for mencode.
Check SunFreeware for precompiled packages as well.

If you want to build things yourself, Solaris 10 and the Sun compilers are free for download and use. gcc is also included with the OS but is slower.

You can find OS source code at OpenSolaris.

They donated a fast mirror to Sun Freeware, which makes all of us Sun jockey's breathe a little easier.

- ditch the forte crap and vendor lockin scheme

Done. Sun released Studio 11 (http://www.sun.com/software/products/studio/index .xml) on Tuesday. It's completely free to use unless you want support. They also ship lots of GNU tools included in Solaris (under /usr/sfw) in case you would rather use them.

- ultrasparc performance is terrible. Address it.

Done. The UltraSPARC-IV+ chip (http://www.sun.com/processors/UltraSPARC-IVplus/) is up to five times faster than UltraSPARC-III and up to twice as fast as the initial UltraSPARC-IV. And the UltraSPARC T1 chip (code-name Niagara http://www.sun.com/processors/UltraSPARC-T1/index. xml) delivers incredible throughput (in my testing, often faster than a V40z with four Opteron 850 CPUs) while consuming much less power and generating much less heat than any other chip delivering anything close to the same performance and throughput.

- get the X11 libraries and headers fixed - completely

Done. Solaris 10 (at least on X86) uses the Xorg implementation. The previous Xsun implementation is also available if you need it, though.

- Get ldap working without so many support applications

I can't say that I understand this one. Sun's Directory Server is the best performing and most scalable server available. It's very in-line with the standards so any LDAPv3-compliant application should work with it just fine. It is the preferred directory for use with most commercial LDAP-enabled applications.

- make your platform work better with OSS software (eg: gcc)

What else needs to be done in this area? Solaris 10 ships with a lot of OSS software, including GCC, and Sun makes a lot of additional OSS software available on the Companion CD (http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/freeware/). If that's not enough, you can use the SunFreeware (http://www.sunfreeware.com/) or Blastwave (http://www.blastwave.org/) collections to get what you need.

I'm pretty sure the DoD singlehandedly props up Sun.

Then you'd be wrong. Sun's biggest customers (and thus their bread and butter) are the Telecom companies. Sun makes no secret of this.

As a developer I find Sun/Solaris a complete paint-in-the-ass to work with.

Really?

Impossible to find binary versions for most packages

I assume you're referring to the Open Source Software that Sun Freeware provides binaries for, and not the commercial software? Because I can't say I see much Solaris software in binary form.

endless back-and-forth dealing with version dependencies

You mean patch levels? Bah, that's easy. Sun tells you which patches you need for a package up front, then provides you with all of them. Try keeping an RPM system up to date sometime. Now THAT is pain and anguish.

and ordering a server that didn't come with a CD drive, DVD drive or video card?

Whoever ordered that server must have explicitly not wanted a drive. AFAIK, all Sun servers have CD or DVD drives by default. Otherwise you'd have a hard time installing all that software that Sun sends with the machine.

Then the admins blindly install Sun updates and we all get to be Sun's gunieapigs learning side-effects.

This differs from MSCEs, how again?

I will disagree... http://www.sunfreeware.com/ has been around for YEARS and provides 100% free software for the Solaris platform since from 2.5 to Solaris 10. They are sponsored by Sun.

Not installable by you, of course. But not installable?

Haha, yeah, I don't even know how to go to SunFreeware or Blastwave and download a copy of GNU textutils in Solaris package format. You can think that if you want to, but in the enterprise world, every software package I want to install has to be approved by about 3 levels of management. They want to know what it does, why we need it, how much it costs, and who else will know how to maintain it after I leave the company. The chance of providing them a list of all the GNU utilities necessary to compile your single average open-source app and getting approval for that is close to nil. Forget Perl modules and CPAN. These are real-world systems that might handle lots of real-world money, and they don't necessarily trust code that's been written by anyone on them.

Anyway, I'm just (hopefully) educating people on some of the problems that a real-world sysadmin runs into on a daily basis.

OpenSolaris is based off of the Solaris Next source tree which is the working codebase after (and built on code from) Solaris 10. I've run PostgreSQL 7.3, 7.4 and 8.0 on Solaris. http://www.sunfreeware.com/ has Subversion binaries. As for Trac it should compile fine. Solaris has a lot of development behind it and a lot of resources from Sun. OpenSolaris is still in its early stages though. Solaris 10 (the commercial one) might be a good fit for your hosting/running apps instead of FreeBSD. Solaris 10 is free to use but not open source. For distributing OpenSolaris might be a good choice but it was just released and not quite all the code is out there.

The CDDL is a per file license so unless you're hacking the actual OpenSolaris code it should serve the needs you have for using the BSD's. Some different benchmarks (like the mysql os benchmark) showed Solaris doint better than FreeBSD. Different independant benchmarks (think zdnet had some and different ISV's) show that the new Solaris can even hold it's own against Linux.

Though you'd probably want to consult a lawyer or at least check out the cddl faq and not just take my opinion.

Ckeck out Blastwave.org http://www.blastwave.org/ for some torrents, apps, guides, and other goodies.

Additionally, SunFreeware http://www.sunfreeware.com/ is another great site for getting applications.

However, from just trying to install software on a Solaris box I can tell you, I don't like it one bit. When I install software, I don't want to have to manually copy files and go in and edit config files myself. If this was 1980 I wouldn't mind.

Blastwave
NetBSD pkgsrc
Sun Freeware

Sol 10 has a lot of freeware apps included, but still not all. Check out http://sunfreeware.com/.

That's a big IF, as in IF you download them. GNU tools aren't part of the default Solaris Distro-- at least they weren't with 7 and 8. Maybe that's changed.

Before we went to all Macs with a Linux backbone, we always had to download stuff off of Sun Freeware to get a get reasonable commmand line tools.

The rest of them are the people who installed Solaris 10. Why wouldn't Sun put a copy of Mozilla or Firefox on there anyway?

...is what the parent is referring to. It's a great storehouse of F/OSS packages all ready to be installed on your new Solaris box.

For clickable crispiness on your Monday morning.

Check out http://www.sunfreeware.com/

without a doubt, solaris has been the biggest pain to set up out of ANY unix i've installed

I agree. I spent a week fighting with Solaris 10 preview for all the wrong reasons. It was basically an experiment to see how much GNU software I could pack into it. To my horror, once I finally got the thing installed I learned that it doesn't even come with a compiler. Sure you can add GCC to it, but there must be some art to making GNU's tools work properly with Sun's libc that is beyond me. The biggest problem I had was libtool seems to be completely broken with respect to shared libraries on Solaris.

The good news is there are lots of repositories for Solaris binaries:

Sun Freeware (Sun sponsored - mostly GNU in Solaris package manager form, can be installed with pkgadd)
OpenPKG RPM OpenPKG Solaris 10 RPM's (Lots missing from here and needs to be compiled via the SRPMS)
OpenPKG SRPMSAlmost everything I use, I found here and compiled without problems
IbiblioThere's a bunch of binary packages here for x86 and SPARC Solaris, I didn't use any of them


Anyone else looking to venture down this road, you should be warned that Solaris is really no fun to try to use as a desktop. Out of the box, Gnome is at version 2.2 or something, and has many many bugs (like Nautilus crashes when you try to drag desktop icons for example).

Summary: Solaris is not ready for the desktop.

/me ducks

Anything that runs on linux will run on solaris!

I think that falls into the "...or do we have to do everything by hand?" category from the parent-post ;)

There is a package-management system for Solaris, it's probably some way from BSD's ports, though. Checkout pkg-get - it'll go some way to saving you from hand-compiling every single piece of software. Blastwave also have a selection of pre-built packages.

The funny thing is, for as much as our friends at SCO are threatened by OpenSource

Not necessarily. It appears SCO is threatened by free software running on other companies' kernels. The GNU operating system normally runs with the Linux(tm) kernel, but it can run on HURD and NetBSD kernels as well. In fact, the first thing that many admins do when they install the Solaris OS is to install much of the GNU OS right on top of it.

Seeing this, it implies to me that you are just ranting with no idea what you talking about. The part of FreeBSD that Apple is not using is the kernel.

The kernel in MacOS X is a hybrid between Mach and BSD, primarily FreeBSD. This is well documented.

Above the Mach layer, the BSD layer provides "OS personality" APIs and services. The BSD layer is based on the BSD kernel, primarily FreeBSD. The BSD component provides

• file systems
• networking (except for the hardware device level)
• UNIX security model
• syscall support
• the BSD process model, including process IDs and signals
• FreeBSD kernel APIs
• many of the POSIX APIs
• kernel support for pthreads (POSIX threads)

So unless you think the Apple website is wrong and they don't really use FreeBSD in their kernel, despite their own developer's website saying that they do, I think you might be mistaken.

A small portion of those titles were distributed with Solaris 8 (I'm thinking less than a half dozen. That was the release they added ssh and Apache.)

Less than half a dozen? Solaris 8 shipped with an entire CD full of free software; the Companion CD. It was out in at least 2001. There's a manifest on the sunfreeware website. It's 130 packages.

I don't quite understand why you keep harping on OpenOffice too. They bought a failing company producing an office productivity suite because they wanted some sort of word processing and spreadsheet option to sell with the workstation systems. It was sort of like SGI buying the MIPS CPU maker. It wasn't good for them to do, but it would be disastrous for them no to do.

I see. So OpenOffice doesn't count as a contribution to the open source movement because the company they bought the code from was failing.

You're an idiot. Go away.

Sun sponsors a site, Sunfreeware.com with lots of prepackaged free software for Solaris.

Solaris is a pain in the ass if you're looking to use many typical open-source software. If you can't find a prebuilt package at either Sunfreeware or Blastwave (my fave), you have to build it yourself. Then comes the problem of having very long $PATH's to various third-party package "bins". /opt/sfw/bin, /opt/csw/bin, /usr/bin, /usr/local/bin - and becomes a bit of a nightmare when having to specify library paths and header locations.

for those interested, this is a cool solaris resource too, as well as the software companion cd from sun.com:

http://www.sunfreeware.com/

Try downloading the software_companion cd - has all those compiled and ready to install in both pkgadd format - and with a webstart installer - u dont even need to burn a cd - just use lofiadm Also check http://www.sunfreeware.com

Selling x86 Linux servers is actually quite profitable for them these days. Not as much of their market as the Enterprise Class SPARCServer market though.

Instead of quacking and crying about it - instead of trying to corner Linux and OSS out of the Market, Sun has done quite the opposite. First, they work with OSS to try and make sure that popular OSS projects work on their platform. At the same time, they started offering their current O.S. as a free (or nominal) download.

Second (Sun re-invention, part II) they started selling x86 systems with Solaris x86 _AND_ Linux support. This plays on Sun's old-school strength of being known as a very reliable hardware vendor (less true now, but their reputation is still strong).

Finally, (re-invention part III) they are moving their Solaris OS (the preferred OS for their SPARC hardware) into a subscrption model that more closely resembles what RedHat has to offer. I highly doubt that this has any more reason than to more closely align sun's two product lines (Solaris and Linux).

Part 1 that I mention happened way back in '94-'96.

I know this is a trivial thing, but it's a real pain in the butt to have to use ksh all the time because most Solaris boxen I've worked on don't have Bash installed by default.

We keep a local sunfreeware mirror for new sunos installs. Bash, updated Perl with modules, wget, lynx, openssl, bzip, sudo, lsof, openssh, and ncftp. (no gcc) If it wasn't for sunfreeware, I'd go nuts using Solaris. Anyone that has to move/push/alter data, needs common tools on all platforms, thank god for Sunfreeware.

# pkginfo SUNWbash
system SUNWbash GNU Bourne-Again shell (bash)

Perhaps not always installed by default, but it is available. That's on Solaris 8, BTW. As for other stuff, check out www.sunfreeware.com

If I buy Solaris I have to pay extra for the compiler

Or use GCC and Lesstif.

If I buy Windows I have to pay extra for the compiler

Or use GCC and the w32api package.

Don't forget to check out Sun Freeware to save some time trying to compile stuff on Solaris. The Sun guys love to compile things using the Sun cc compiler, which they don't include in the normal distro. Good luck adding in new perl modules that aren't native perl to the perl that comes with Solaris.

Check Solaris Freeware, they have GNU binaries for Solaris SPARC/Intel 8 and 9.

Apache, wget, gcc, nmap, openssh, samba, tcpdump, you name it:

Solaris Freeware

You can also install Gnome 2.0 under Solaris!

GNOME 2.0 Desktop for the Solaris Operating Environment

Ricardo

> Mozilla's not supported on solaris 7 so I installed
> netscape 7.0 which seems to be working, even if a little
> slow.

Well, if the hardware matches the OS version, I'd say you're doing pretty well. Gotta love Unix machines. There's no such thing as "out of date", simply "slow" and "fast". :-)

> I am able to see your site as presented though

Excellent! Sorry it doesn't work in Netscape 4.0, but when faced with the choice of using modern CSS to develop a nice looking site, or creating a less attractive site that adds functionality for 0.5% of all users (that's about 0.1% of my users), I decided on the former. The funny part is that it's a really stupid bug in NS4. I'm using special rollover links that produce a shaded box over the link. To support this correctly, netscape can do one of two things:

1. Support recoloring of CSS areas
2. Ignore CSS that it doesn't implement

Instead, it goes for option #3:

3. Screw up the entire render job, turn the screen black, and make sure that no one can click on anything. Bonus points if the browser locks up!

*sigh*

BTW, if you ever want to compile Mozilla yourself, your best bet for pre-compiled dependencies is SunFreeware.com. The last pre-compiled version of Mozilla for Solaris 7 is 1.4.

Good luck! :-)

Solaris uses .pkg packages. Have a look at http://www.sunfreeware.com for a few examples.

Most packages, including g++, configure themselves to run in one location, and they'll get confused if you move 'em.

Huh? No they don't. Most packages don't give a rat's ass where the binary is located. Historically, GCC was one of the few that did, and recent versions have changed that so that you can move the install tree around.

The remaining few packages that care are mostly just suffering from bad design. Fortunately, as you say, they usually pay attention to environment variables telling them where to look.

Here's a better writeup than what I can fit here, at sunfreeware.com. They've been repackaging open source stuff as Solaris-style pkg files for a long time, so they've good experience with these sorts of questions.

• docs.sun.com: Every one of Sun's documents, all right there, free.
• sunsolve.sun.com: a wealth of information, patches, and bug reports.
• Sun Freeware: Free binaries of common open source programs, includes documentation.
• groups.google.com: Duh, tons of Solaris help here.

I'm pretty sure that the Forte compiler couldn't get through the configure script because linking the test applications seemed to fail.

There's your problem. Go to sunfreeware.com and download the GCC toolchain. I know that Forte will produce better binaries, but Mozilla was built around GCC's brand of C/C++.

Since Solaris 8, Sun has shipped Netscape as the default browser, not HotJava

All your fun happy binaries are available at http://www.sunfreeware.com

And Sun now ships a Software Companion CD with most common GNU tools and GUI installer.

Finally, Solaris 9 now includes /usr/sfw, which also has many of the GNU tools.

For all that, it still takes me about 30 min-1 hour of work to get a Solaris system to the same nice command-line environment as Linux (ksh or bash, color ls, gtar, and vim 6)

Solaris is severly lacking exactly where Debian excels. When I administered Solaris boxen for a living, I described them as "administrator hostile" because of the difficulty of installing and configuring up-to-date software. Sun's pkg tool is a joke compared to dpkg+apt, and what few third-party pkgs you can find on SunFreeware are all months out of date.

Sun has already replaced their gimpy command-line tools with the GNU equivalents and should be fully transitioned to Gnome2 for Solaris9. Why don't they just go all the way and hire a bunch of Debian developers to make Debian GNU/Solaris? Other than their wacky enterprise apps that are gradually being reimplemented in Java, Solaris' kernel is the only thing that's worth keeping.

Why isn't anyone mentioning S/Key?

I can't think of anything more safe than disposable passwords.

I talked to the fellow that ports packages over at SunFreeware, but it never got done. I'm beginning to wonder if there is some other disposable password package to which most everyone has switched and I'm not aware.

Anybody?

- OrbNobz
The administrator IS the network.

You can get bash for Solaris on Sunfreeware.com.

The most sensible thing to do is compile a fresh copy of perl using the compiler of choice, and then install it into a different directory, and modify the system wide PATH.

Basically what I do, but I install perl from here. They have versions compiled for older Solaris versions too, and everything's in Sun's pkg format, so it's real easy to manage.

Ever check out sunfreeware.com? That kinda answers most of your packaging requests. As for CDE, couldn't you just use pkgrm to remove all the uneeded stuff (like the X-server, CDE, misc documentation, etc)?

That shrinks your list down to 2 items if the above are new to you. Of course can't really fix the naming thing now, unless they decide to start over with the naming scheme.

There's plenty of information avaiable on how to tighten a Solaris install. Start with a checklist like this and customize it for your needs. I don't think its four hours of work though.

BTW, I do hope you know about Sun Freeware to pick up freeware for Solaris.

i thought solaris, being UNIX was posix complient, and so didnt need to be LSB compliant.

Any LSB conforming operating system can use source RPM packages that meet the LSB specs. This should expand the selection of free software that runs on the Solaris operating environment as well as make it easier to install.

• Ebay for starters.
  
• comp.sys.sun.wanted
• comp.sys.sun.misc
• comp.sys.sun.hardware
  found some good stuff there
  
• http://www.sunhelp.org/info-sparcbook.php
  this used to be a good site.
  
• http://www.sunfreeware.com/
  that's a good place for solaris software
  

Broken, stupid compilers; braindead default configs; a useless, trash desktop; lackluster performance; finicky printer queues; workstations that inexplicably lock up and refuse to log out; header files and libraries with all kinds of wonky problems; etc...

Any OS is gonna run like crap if it's not configured right, so I won't go into that.

If you don't like the defaults that come with Solaris, you can get quite a bit of GNU and other stuff from Sunfreeware

I don't get why slashdot geeks are giving this the thumbs down. At the end of the day, it's one more choice for a hardened geek and as such can only be a good thing.

In addition to the choice angle, Solaris on x86 is there for 3 key reasons:

1) A proportion of us that opposed its death would be quite happy to offer payment to continue its existance - there are a reasonable number of developers & admins with time and money already invested in Solaris on x86 for one reason or another.

2) There will be those who take Solaris on x86 as a chance to learn before they jump in to the world of Solaris on Sparc - For example, it may be better than investing in a Sparc just to pass your exams.

3) For those who want to push Solaris on Sparc, it may be an easy way to prove to management that Solaris does have the advantages, again without buying the Sparc kit - hell you could even sneak it in in just the same way BSD and Linux advocates do, under the radar.

Sure, Solaris on x86 isn't perfect and certainly doesn't perform as well as on the Sparc architecture but is this any great surprise - Sun are trying to hit a moving target when it comes to modern PC hardware - if you stick to whats supported you should be fine.

The other criticism is that you need to install additional tools, but isn't this the case with any OS. These days, Solaris is supplied with most of the key open source tools. Additionally, resources like Rutgers RPM archive + apt-get bootstrap kit along with SunFreeware make getting a Solaris box up easy.

As I see it, this news has 4 (i/c the aspect of choice) positive points and 0 negative. Having said that, the news is moot to me, I run Sparc :>

What? You'vce never been to sunfreeware? I'd suggest you head over there first and get the pkg's you need. Now your setup time will be shortened to mere minutes. Heck, these packages are even useable for jumpstart installs.