Solaris Might Become LSB-compliant

lvv writes "Register: according to Sun's Jonathan Schwartz, Solaris - one of the most proprietary Unixes, might become LSB compliant OpenSolaris. Also some info about future of Solaris desktop (Gnome)."

Comments

Darn...

[Anonymous Coward]

For a second there I thought it said "LSD-compliant"... how cool would it have been to be able to hear the video output and see the audio output?

Re:Darn...

[Yarn]

You can already hear the network output with snoop.

wait a minite

[JamesCronus]

hang on, solaris, becomeing linux compliant???? eh???????? i thought solaris, being UNIX was posix complient, and so didnt need to be LSB compliant. hang on wont this turn solaris into a linux clone, but linux is a unix clone................ i'm gonna go and lie down, i think i'm dreaming

Re:wait a minite

[Empty Threats]

POSIX compliant and POSIX conformant are not at all the same thing.

Windows is something like 85% compliant but not conformant; OpenVMS is 100% compliant but not conformant.

I believe compliance is a matter of having the right API's in place, while conformance specifies just how things should work inside the OS.

Re:wait a minite

[mikeee]

Of course, we should be referring to this operating system as GNU/Solaris.

One of the most proprietary?

[Clue4All]

Solaris - one of the most proprietary Unixes

I'm going to take issue with this statement. Solaris isn't open source by any means, but it's a free download on SPARC and until recently Intel platforms, and you can download the source after agreeing to Sun's license. You can make changes to the source, recompile anything you damn well please, and contribute changes back to Sun (I have done so myself), the only thing you can't do is redistribute it. It's not on par in the open nature of Linux or FreeBSD, but compare this to DEC/Compaq/HP Tru64 or HP-UX or AIX where you pay a huge sum of money for a binary CD. I'd hardly call that the most proprietary.

Re:One of the most proprietary?

[yomegaman]

In Slashdot-land the word 'proprietary' doesn't have a well-defined meaning, it is just a general-purpose pejorative.

Re:One of the most proprietary?

[alsta]

While I realise this is a troll, I just wanted to point out to others that most commercial UNICES do NOT come with C/C++ compilers. UnixWare, OpenServer, HP-UX, Solaris, DEC UNIX etc. do not come with C/C++ compilers.

SunOS 4.x came with a K&R C compiler, but if you wanted ANSI C or C++ you needed to buy SparcWorks.

Virtually the only UNICES that come with C/C++ compilers are the free ones, e.g. distributed with GCC. But first of all, these can not be called 'Unix' and second, GCC is available for most of the above commercial platforms anyway, so the point is moot.

Re:One of the most proprietary?

[1nt3lx]

GCC is a good compiler. It's neither as good as Compaq's C compiler on Alpha nor is it as good as Sun's compiler on Sparc, however. GCC couldn't even make 64 bit binaries until the 3.0 release.

Although, the compiler is a minimal issue, I use Solaris as my desktop at work and we run it on the production servers. I've also worked with Tru64, etc. I've never worked with a UNIX so broken out of the box. It's a good 4 hours of work before you can comfortable use a Solaris system. Unlike many other UNIXes, which require post-installation work but aren't as ugly. (Ever service enabled by default, open mail relay, /bin/sh, insufficient path, hideously outdated drivers, 30,302 patches to apply, broken patches, patches that re-enable services you've disabled.)

We recently purchased a Sun Fire 150 system to use for a few web-services. The system came preinsatelled with The Solaris Operating Environment version 8. It presented a minimally impressive configuration menu but it wasn't able to configure the NICs because it couldn't figure out what they were.

Solaris may technically be a good Operating System, however I do not find it particularly excellent. I'll take MacOS X (or Server) over Solaris anyday. I'll even go so far as to say I'd rather use Debian than Solaris.

Re:One of the most proprietary?

[larien]

Unix don't start GUI in single user mode.

Huh?? What makes you think that Solaris does? I've booted loads of workstations/servers into single user mode for maintenance and I've never seen it start up a GUI for it.

As others have pointed out, most other Unices don't come with a C compiler either, but I will allow the fact that it's strange to have /etc/vfstab instead of /etc/fstab. Then again, Solaris isn't unique in having certain files with different names in different places.

Re:One of the most proprietary?

[alsta]

Your frustrations with Solaris are most likely due to, forgive me if I sound condescending, inexperience.

I have never heard of a Sun Fire 150. Sun has a Fire V100 and Fire V120. These have two ethernet interfaces, which I think are called dmfe[01]. I don't have access to one so I can't verify that. You can figure this out by using prtconf(1M).

To harden a Solaris box takes a little time. But it shouldn't take 4 hours. You basically need to make sure that RPC services are turned off and that you step through inetd.conf.

Patching Solaris is a breeze compared to various Linux distributions, including Red Hat. Apply the latest MU and then either use PatchPro or Recommended clusters.

You're right, Solaris isn't exactly point-and-click. Perhaps you should, as you suggested, stick with MacOS X.

Re:One of the most proprietary?

[h2odragon]

"free download"?

Not really. Solaris 9/SPARC is free with a registration, Solaris 8 still costs $20 to download. I'm pretty sure it cost money to download 9 until recently. If you want a real giggle, look at the prices they charge for a multi-CPU license.

Re:One of the most proprietary?

[lvv]

I worked with Unix for more then 20 years. I installed and worked with at least 15 brands of Unix-es, most of them commercial. I am certified (by Sun) Solaris System Administrator. Most of my income comes from supporting Solaris shops as consultant.

Yes, I believe that Solaris is most proprietary, which means difficult to support for those who support not only Solaris. Proprietary in the sense - don't adhere to historical Unix standards (posix != unix) and suffering from Not Invented Here syndrome. I will agree that most of commercial unix-es are proprietary. And I also agree that Sun contributed a lot to Unix and that pre SysV it had very decent product.

By my observation many of Solaris sysadmins worked only with one Unix - Solaris. This is probably why there is so much controversy about calling it proprietary. The same as Windows users who know only Windows become very defensive about MS products.

Re:One of the most proprietary?

[MikeApp]

Solaris 8 was a free download for systems with 8 CPUs (IIRC) when it was current.

Solaris 9 is a free license and download for single CPU boxes. It has been free since it was released.

Service contracts for hardware include OS updates. Every sane business will have some sort of service contract for their servers. The prices you see quoted really only kick in if you buy a secondhand box or a clone.

Re:One of the most proprietary?

[alsta]

Every release of Solaris ships with a companion CD which contains lots of GNU tools, including GCC, GNU make, autoconf etc. Also included on this CD comes KDE and GNOME.

To continue this, Sun is moving towards GNOME and should have a supported release soon.

How do you come to the conclusion that Solaris is the most proprietary, when comparing with DEC UNIX and HP-UX?

O.K.!

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

I think that this will finally earn them the right to increment a Major Version Number!

Re:O.K.!

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

I like your idea! It would be fun: Solaris Version 0x1f

Re:O.K.!

[sparkz]

And, SunOS 5.10 will, of course come with Solaris 10, like SunOS 5.9 came with Sol9, 5.8 came with Sol8, and so on. This should not be a difficult thing for either techies or suits to understand.

In related news...

[steveadept]

In another fantastic display of pandering, Schwartz noted, "OpenSolaris will be based on UnitedLinux, because that's the direction everybody's going, isn't it? Isn't it?"

LSB means you can use source RPMs

[yerricde]

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.

All your Linux Standard Base are belong to us.

Sun and standards

[germinatoras]

A lot of us like to accuse Sun of being no better than Microsoft at a lot of things. This may be true on some level, but this is definitely a step in the right direction. While their motivation may be purely profit-driven, at least they are taking the approach of "Linux is getting popular, so we should be more like it", rather than "We need to squeeze every last $0.01 out of our locked-in customers".

Lately, Sun seems to be establishing a good track record for openness. They've created a fairly decent platform-independent programming language and development environment, and have made their Solaris environment look more like the other Unices out there. They are starting to come out with Linux products, or at least are talking about them. Even the source code to Solaris 7 used to be available for purchase on CD-ROM (although they may have backed away from that).

I hope that this is more than just a bid to recapture lost market share, but a real committment to play fair and adhere to open, published, and somewhat popular standards.

Re:Sun and standards

[Richard_Davies]

> While their motivation may be purely profit-driven

Um - aren't pretty much all (profitable) companies profit-driven?

I mean Microsoft, Red Hat, Sun, IBM, etc - none of them are charities right?

Re:Sun and standards

[Anonymous Coward]

And don't forget OpenOffice.org...

Re:Sun and standards

[platypus]

I hope that this is more than just a bid to recapture lost market share, but a real committment to play fair and adhere to open, published, and somewhat popular standards.

Re:Sun and standards

[platypus]

Please disregard the above lapsus ...
I hope that this is more than just a bid to recapture lost market share, but a real committment to play fair and adhere to open, published, and somewhat popular standards.

Well certainly it is just a coincidence that they do this now that they seriously feel the pain.

Re:Sun and standards

[be-fan]

There is a difference between profit driven and profit obsessed. Microsoft is profit obsessed. Almost *everything* they do is there to further their own bottom line. Other companies (IBM and RedHat for example) are profit driven, in that making a profit is their number one priority, but they do non-profit oriented things as well that help the community. Just take a look at all the open source IBM projects. Do those help IBM? Maybe to the extent that they enable enterprise level applications and thus create a demand for more IBM h ardware, but that's indirect, and still helps the community in the process. Compare this to Microsoft's open source projects. Let's see, the only one I can think of is the CLI. Not only is the CLI directly profit-related (the more people that use it, the more people that are tied into Windows.NET) but it doesn't help the community a whole lot because it's under a draconion license.

Re:Sun and standards

[Anonymous Bullard]

>> While their motivation may be purely profit-driven

Um - aren't pretty much all (profitable) companies profit-driven?

I mean Microsoft, Red Hat, Sun, IBM, etc - none of them are charities right?

As a general rule I would call a company purely profit-driven when they fail to take ethical and/or social consequences of their business decisions into consideration.

While big corporations like Sun and IBM might be doing the right thing because it helps drive revenues, Microsoft has never allowed ethics or social consequences get in the way of their single-minded drive for profit through world domination. Or shouldn't that be world domination through profit instead?

Umm, come think of it that way, Microsoft isn't a good example of purely profit-driven company either. For them money is largely a means to global domination and therefore a resource (aka air supply) that must be squeezed away from their competitors. Incidentally, this is largely why Open Source Software is good for anyone but Microsoft or their remaining parasitic cronies.

Re:Sun and standards

[aussersterne]

There has always been one very important difference between Sun and Microsoft, a difference which remains regardless of any new Sun licensing policy:

Sun's products work.

Re:Sun and standards

[foxtrot]

Um - aren't pretty much all (profitable) companies profit-driven?

Of course. While this gets thrown about as a bad thing, a company must have profit as one of its highest motives.

You can talk about doing all sorts of wonderful and interesting things _as well as_ turning a profit, but let's face it: If you don't turn a profit, you only get to do the other stuff once.

-JDF

No, I think that was BSD

[cyber_rigger]

"2 things to come out of Berkley: Unix and LSD"

Commercial vs. proprietary

[yerricde]

Proprietary: Having a good OS and making money at it

No. Software that produces revenue is called "commercial". The term "proprietary", when used in the context of copyrighted works such as software, refers to licensing that restricts your users.

Re:Commercial vs. proprietary

[Henry V .009]

I'm +2ing it today.

Yerricde, you are an ass that couldn't get a joke in a million years. Stop commenting to slashdot, please.

Big Endian or Litle Endian?

[Snork Asaurus]

Solaris Might Become LSB-compliant

Is Solaris already compliant with all the other bits?

It only makes sense

[Anonymous Coward]

Solaris doesn't make Sun any money. It's the hardware that keeps them afloat. Every developer they've got working on Solaris is a salary that doesn't go to working on the money-making hardware.

Running Linux as their main system allows them to get an OS for free. Granted, it's not quite as polished or stable as Solaris, but they don't have to apply any development effort, people are willing to give their work away for free!

Re:It only makes sense

[ToasterTester]

But you need Solaris in order to take advantage of their advanced hardware features. So the salaries are necessary expense. Linux has a LONG way to go to come up to being a enterprise class OS like Solaris.

Re:It only makes sense

[jbolden]

People made similar claims about Irix and AIX. Yet both SGI and IBM are trying to close the gap. If Sun joins the effort it may not take very long at all. 2-3 years ago Linux didn't scale well. Today the fastest computer in the world is a Linux machine.

Re:It only makes sense

[ToasterTester]

Speed has nothing to do with real production servers. Solaris is a fine example of that, it appears sluggish to newbies, but as the load increases Solaris and your app's don't bat an eye. Plus all the features it has to support dynmaic reconfiguration and other HA features. Linux is good and will continue to mature. Yes, Linux Beowuld clusters are fast, but they are special purpose servers not day-to-day production workhorses. Linux is still mainly used in the same small niche it always has. Also Solaris scales better than Linux, but a lot that is Sun hardware. Intel systems can't scale as well as Sun systems. IBM and others are working on Intel based NUMA systems that will address scaling with Intel. Also Linux HA features are still in very early development stage.

Re:It only makes sense

[SN74S181]

Does 'close the gap' mean converging on all the existing hardware, and having open support for it all universally?

That would, uh, mean Sun would have to rely on patent protection to protect their features. Rather that the fairly successful 'obfuscation' that's earned them their pay up until now.

An example of 'closing the gap' would be: I am running Solaris right now on this SparcStation 10SX box (a dual headed one to boot!) because XFree just doesn't support the advanced hardware features of it's cgfourteen framebuffer(s) (yes, two of them on this particular SS10SX). Without the Sun X Server, this machine is doomed to be an 8 bit color machine, and that sucks.

Granted, cgfourteen is probably considered obsolete by Sun, but it'd be cool to be able to run NetBSD on this box like I do on most of my other hardware (pkgsrc rules!, and I lost my wrestling match with Zoularis).

Before I drift further off topic: Sun is like Apple: a hardware company that produces a value-add OS to reap the benefits of their expensive hardware. Like it or not if they open everything up they'd become just another Compaq, or be driven out of business.

Re:It only makes sense

[chegosaurus]

> Solaris doesn't make Sun any money. It's the hardware that keeps them afloat

I hear this a lot, but reliable (relative to /. anyway) sources inform me it's support where Sun makes $$$$.

Re:It only makes sense

[jbolden]

No by "close the gap" I meant features which are generally found on higher end systems but don't exist for Linux. XFS being a good example until SGI's work Linux didn't have a filesystem with good performance on very large files. I don't see any incentive for IBM, SGI or Sun to extend the life of very old hardware.

Re:It only makes sense

[jbolden]

I don't see how your post contradicts mine. You don't seem to value supercomputing but do value a large number of simple clients. And that is an area where both IBM and Sun have a great deal of experience and technology which they might choose to port.

My point was that current limitations of Linux are not permanent limitiations and scaling was an example of this.

Re:It only makes sense

[SN74S181]

I don't see any incentive for IBM, SGI or Sun to extend the life of very old hardware.

Sadly, there doesn't seem to be much support anywhere for extending the life of old hardware. The days of putting free OSes on older hardware to extend their life seems to be fading. The frothy desire of 'leading edge' OSS developers to 'beat Microsoft'- read: all the eye candy bloatware projects.

Examples include:

The end of support of graphic hardware, re: S3 Trio64 cards 'deprecated' in XFree86 (I thought that was a Microsoft trick, dudes...)

The murmurs being heard lately about bugs being ignored in NetBSD/Sparc on early SparcStation hardware.

And vice-versa

[Alethes]

I think it's the fact that Linux apps will run almost out of the box on Solaris that makes the move wise. This means Sun now has the thousands of Linux software developers as a resource.

And if they'd done that ten years ago...

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Solaris isn't open source by any means, but it's a free download on SPARC and until recently Intel platforms, and you can download the source after agreeing to Sun's license. You can make changes to the source, recompile anything you damn well please, and contribute changes back to Sun (I have done so myself), the only thing you can't do is redistribute it.

And if they'd done that ten years ago, when I (and others) had a significant need to hack up some min or features and no budget to buy into their source distribution package it wouled have been wonderful - and might have headed off the obsolescence of Solaris.

Now, with Linux (+ GNU utilities + X + Gnome|KDE), and Free/Open/Net BSD, and Mach, and the rest of the Open Source world, it's too little too late.

I've reverse-engineered OSes on IBM, Control Data, DEC, Mac, and Altos when useful to add features or custom hardware. But with Spark's RISC instruction set and Sun's insistance on keeping both hardware and software closed, the cost/benefit balance was tipped.

I retired my last Solaris home machine on Dec 31, 1999, rather than upgrade it for Y2K.

At work:
- The serious networking software development is now done on NetBSD and variants. BSD desktops.
- The ASIC development is still partly on Solaris ... because we still have legacy machines from when that was all the tools would run on. But the simulation farm was ported to Linux long ago. New machines are PCs and the Sun boxes will run - mostly as legacy desktops - until they die or become too painful to maintain.
- And of course the administrators are still on Windoze - though it wouldn't surprise me to see them move to Linux in the near future.

Re:And if they'd done that ten years ago...

[lemkebeth]

You wrote:

At work: - The serious networking software development is now done on NetBSD and variants. BSD desktops.

That is quite ironic as Sun's OS used to be a BSD at one time.

Re:And if they'd done that ten years ago...

[sirinek]

Upgrade it for Y2K? What were you running, 4.1.3? I'm pretty positive all the later versions had Y2k patches that you could freely download from Sun's site.

siri

Re:And if they'd done that ten years ago...

[magellan]

"But with Spark's RISC instruction set and Sun's insistance on keeping both hardware and software closed, the cost/benefit balance was tipped."

First, Sun's hardware is not closed. Sun does not own SPARC. SPARC International does (www.sparcinternational.com). You can license the SPARC instruction set from them.

You can buy boards from Sun and build your own SPARC computers.

You can buy complete SPARC computers with no Sun hardware at all from Fujitsu.

You can obtain a license Solaris for single SPARC CPU systems for free (beer).

Solaris 8 is also available for Intel-based computers. Solaris 9 added no features of use for Intel, so the lack of availability for Solaris 9 is irrelavant.

Re:And if they'd done that ten years ago...

[Ungrounded Lightning]

SPARC and SBus are open, fully documented IEEE standards. Nowadays Sun uses PCI for I/O expansion. You wouldn't know "closed" if it bit you on the ass.

That is now. This was then.

Back when the Sun 4 was current, finding out anything about the SBus was like pulling teeth - and signing away your soul.

Re:And if they'd done that ten years ago...

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Upgrade it for Y2K? What were you running, 4.1.3?

yep, if I recall correctly.

I'm pretty positive all the later versions had Y2k patches that you could freely download from Sun's site.

And in fact even 4.1.3 worked pretty well on new year's day, much to my suprise. Major exception was the version of calendar manager (which wouldn't display any appointments after 1999 - and hadn't even during 1999). So if I ever discover that I really need to do something on the old machine (before I throw it out or some bitrot sets in) I can power it up again.

But by that point I'd already gotten fed up with a decade of Sun's now-it's-open-kinda, now-it's-closed-again vacilation, on both hardware and software (and Apple's too, for that matter.) I'd determined years before that open source was where the action would be. (Chosing Linux over *BSD was tougher, given BSD's more standard build enviornment and its function as the canonical exchange platform for network software. Jury's still out on that, but it still looks like I picked the winner.)

By Y2K I'd bit the bullet long since and been on Linux for some time. New year's was just an excuse to cut the apron strings. So I moved the last server (the MTA) off from it, and pulled the plug. (And saw a significant power bill reduction. B-) )

After all: If I'm not going to use Solaris any more (except maybe on work sites where somebody ELSE can do the sysadmin drudgework), why bother burning my precious manhour-capital upgrading it?

Re:And if they'd done that ten years ago...

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Ever since the first real SBus machines (SS1 4/60) came out in 1989 (well over ten years ago) there have been full SBus developer's kits that Sun gave away to anyone that asked. That included hardware specs, software/firmware specs, reference designs, Etc.

Well, not EVERYONE who asked. I asked and got the runaround big-time. (Probably asked the wrong people - or at the wrong time.) Non-disclosures, tell-us-your-business-plan, etc.

Guess I should have gone to Usenix. B-b

Re:And if they'd done that ten years ago...

[pmz]

...with Spark's [sic] RISC instruction set and Sun's insistance on keeping both hardware and software closed...

What is closed, exactly, about Sun's hardware and software? Solaris is extremely well documented (if not fully documented; regardless, it makes Windows envious), CDE and X Windows are standardized, SPARC is an IEEE standard, and other important hardware components, such as SBus, PCI, SCSI, and IDE, are also standardized. If their hardware is so closed, why do Linux, NetBSD, and OpenBSD run well on Sun-branded machines with comendable peripheral support?

I think the only thing that makes Solaris "closed" is that Sun's compiler (~$1000, now-a-days) is required to build their Solaris source distribution. For a business, a few thousand dollars isn't that big of a deal, especially given that the Sun compiler provides optimizations targeted for each type of SPARC cpu.

In fact, I look forward to SPARC-based systems being one of the safe-havens from Intel and AMD if/when Palladium and "user untrusted" computing tries to take over. PowerPC and MIPS will also be important in the Palladium age. It's important to keep our options open, especially when our current popular "open" systems turn against us.

Re:you all realise

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you're making a false assumption... If Solaris becomes LSB-compliant then it can install any LSB-compliant packages just as easily as on any other platform, but Sun could still release their software in a Solaris-specific manner.

For example, Debian is LSB-compliant (or working at becoming) by supporting RPMs in addition to its default packaging system. Any LSB-compliant software will install fine (once Debian's compliancy is finished), but you could still release a .deb which takes advantage of specific Debianities that other LSB-compliant distros don't have. (I'll admit the analogy is weak because Debian's .deb package is well documented, but the concept still holds.)

Re:you all realise

[Anonymous Coward]

Actualy if they are LSB complient it mean all those hords of Linux developers can now have skills ported over to Solaris. Solaris developers arn't going to chuck their Solaris experience just to develop for Linux. Sun is a hardware company and as such Solaris runs better on Sun boxes expecialy if programs are optimized to the hardware. Think of it as layers. There is teh LSB layer that can be used to compile Linux code out of the box on Solaris. Now there is the Solaris layer that has optimized syscalls that developers can use to get more performance out of their program. What Sun is doing is making sure that if you need the power that a Sparc chip can give you, you are not going to overlook it just because XYZ program will need some investment to port to Solaris. Sun has had Linux binary compatabiliy for a long time now. LSB complience just goes one step further.

You can already

[turgid]

RPM is provided on the Solaris Companion CD so you can already use source RPMs with Solaris.

Re:You can already

[Wesley Felter]

But if that software uses Linux-only APIs, it won't compile on Solaris. If Solaris adopts LSB, most Linux apps will compile without needing to be ported.

Re:You can already

[turgid]

That's true, but most (not all) of the API's are already in there. A lot of Open Source/Free Software libraries have been migrated into the Solaris WOS (and are supported by Sun). I can't think of all of them off the top of my head but they're in /usr/sfw/lib on Solaris 9. Also, you get a lot more (but unsupported) if you install the Companion CD (which installs in /opt/sfw). So, for many applications, it's just a case of giving ./configure the right paths, and stuff Just Works(TM). I agree that being LSB compliant would be good, and an improvement, but a lot of the (important) stuff is already there.

Re:What the hell is LSB?

[strmcrw]

Linux Standard Base
Standards for directory structure, Object Format, libs, tools, shells, user & groups, system init and more
currently Caldera, Mandrake, RedHat && SuSE are LSB Certified

Arrrrggghhh

[Snork Asaurus]

Litle Endian

I can spel - honust. Must proof-read, must proof-read ...

Re:you all realise

[afidel]

When Dell ships a pc with more than 4(8?) cpu's I'm sure Sun might care. Sun stopped being about best single cpu performance some time ago as Intel and AMD caught up and recently surpassed them, but there are things that a Sun box can do that no Intel can do.

Where were you? You're very late ...

[Snork Asaurus]

... I expected that I'd have both comments within 5 minutes of my posting. Call it poetic license - it's funnier this way. Good thing I beat you to the typo, eh?

Re:LSB Windows?

[Wesley Felter]

Absolutely. Now that Linux is taking over the Unix market, nobody cares about Posix compatibility any more; LSB is the new de facto Unix API standard.

Least significant bit

[DahGhostfacedFiddlah]

Until now, Solaris has been based on MSB (Most Significant Bit) technology, which made it incompatible with many PC devices. For instance, you couldn't network a Solaris and PC machine without going to the TCP/IP level, because what would leave the Solaris machine as

11100000 00000111

woule return as

00000111 11100000

As you can tell, this was a major PITA. I, for one, am glad that I'll be able to use all my favourite hardware on my Solaris machine now.

Take a look at all the open source Sun projects

[magellan]

http://www.sunsource.net/

Re:No, I think that was BSD

[Guy Harris]

...and UNIX came from Murray Hill, New Jersey.

Solaris is 10 years ahead of Linux in some areas

[Anonymous Coward]

Given that Linux 2.4 and previous are very similar to SunOS 4.1.3, one could fairly say Solaris is about 10 years ahead of Linux 2.4. Linux 2.6 will be a big improvement with its new threading models, and bring Linux up to about the Solaris 2.6 level (1996) in some areas.

With Solaris 2.0 (SunOS 5.0) Sun went to a modular kernel architecture.

In 1994 Solaris supported hot addition of CPUs and memory to a running system.

In 1997 Solaris supported hot removal of CPUs and memory from a running system.

In 2000 Sun supported 1M simultaneous processes.

I will give Linux credit for supporting Intel PAE extentions. Solaris supported similar capability on Solaris with Solaris 2.6, and Intel PAE on Solaris 7.

Developing LSB-compliant apps

[Anonymous Bullard]

Here's a quick howto by IBM developerWorks (in fact written by the actual chairman of the Linux Standard Base, George Kraft IV) on developing LSB-certified apps. It's got that October freshness about it...

Incidentally there's a link to a Solaris-to-Linux porting guide in the resources section of that article but LSB isn't even mentioned in that lengthy document...

Why not...

[joto]

The directory hierarchy, and location of important files on Solaris can only be called one thing: confusing. So I bet they've always wanted to clean it up somewhat, but once they do it, it's better if they do it one big change, rather than piecemal, which will break things continually (instead of once).

And if you are going to clean it up, you might as well look at how other people have done it. As for going for full LSB compliance, that might be a bit overkill, and a very surprising move away from the NIH-principle Sun usually follows. But I don't think it's going to have too many negative consequences.

Re:Great!

[Tet]

This would be great if it happens.

I'm not too bothered about the whole LSB issue. But I'd love it if Solaris at least adopted the Linux FHS. This is one of the best thought out and best documented standards I've seen in a long time. Everything has its place, and everything is given a rationale to explain why it's there. Solaris has inherited too many things from Unix that were poorly thought through at the time, but have stuck due to inertia.

My favorite quirks:

[Ayanami Rei]

/etc/hosts and /etc/netmasks are soft links too /etc/inet/hosts and /etc/inet/netmasks. It would make sense if /etc/inet was designed to store host dependant information that could be mounted via NFS. However, there are files like /etc/defaultrouter which are NOT in there, which is confusing!

There are other little quirks. Solaris does something weird when you use NIS during startup. It sets your netmask to a 24-bit default before trying to find an NIS server via broadcast even if you have the /etc/netmasks file set. So if your netmasks come from NIS but your NIS server is not on the same subnet, then you are treated to a hang at bootime.
You have to change the netmasks line in /etc/nsswitch.conf to files only to get it to use that netmask, and live without a NIS distribution list. Or modify the boot script to use the one in /etc/netmasks explicitly.

Also I hate how interfaces are identified via IP explictly (there is no way to assign two interfaces the same IP address, it balks and says device busy) This may simplify routing code but it makes designing interesting network topolgies more difficult (and the related hosts files, YOW)

I could go on... but I like Solaris more than any other commercial Unix so I shouldn't be TOO hard on them. ^_^

Re: GUI in single user mode

[larien]

In answer:

• Versions have been from 2.6 to 8; haven't tried it in 9 yet.
• Not screen/keyboard, IIRC
• 1, s & S are equivalents. I've either started it as reboot -- -s from the OS or boot -s from the OK prompt.

In default config, Solaris never starts openwindows. It does start dtlogin at run level 2. If it's starting any GUI at run level 1 (i.e. single user mode), it because you've changed something in the Solaris config or there's something in the .profile file.

Get rich quick!

[Hard_Code]

1) commoditize your hardware!
2) commoditize your software!
3) ???
4) $$$!