Sun Drops Linux Distro

The Wireless Guy writes "eWeek is reporting that Sun has decided to stop offering a Linux distribution. From the story: "Yes, this is a change in strategy. Our Sun Linux distribution is essentially Red Hat Linux with a few minor tweaks," John Loiacono, vice president of Sun's operating platforms group"... so, is this good news for Red Hat?" They were rethinking it, and I guess they've had a good long thunk.

Comments

Re:Further proof

[elmegil]

Your post is only further proof that you don't know jack about Sun. If we were doing well sticking to the old method, we never would have travelled down this road in the first place.

It is my impression, though I am not speaking as a Sun PR/Marketing person or in any other official capacity, that we had pushback from customers on selling a "non-standard" linux, and so we have changed our direction only slightly, from "modified RedHat" to whatever distro or distros we end up pulling off the shelf without making modifications.

Re:Has anyone ever used it?

[Anonymous Coward]

(can't believe I'm losing my karma bonus from this)
1) I wouldn't bet on this. I had a demo in the past couple of weeks, and it looked like they had done a good job with this distribution.
2) Like Red Hat, but with a buttload of tweaks, Gnome with different icons, extra packages, etc, etc. Very well done.

Just to be clear

[Jahf]

I work for one of the groups specifically involved in this ...

To be clear, since the title of the original article and this /. article are a bit misleading (IMO):

Sun will:

* Continue to offer Linux as an offering on x86-based servers. These offerings will come in the form of standard distributions that everyone today knows and loves.

* Continue to develop x86 Linux hardware offerings. Currently stocked by the LX50 (released last year) and the Cobalt appliances (where I originally came from). Coming up there are a number of things due out by the end of the year. I'm not going to cover them now so that I can keep my job :)

* Continue to add software value on top of the Linux distribution by making various Sun softwares (like Star Office, Sun ONE, Java, etc) run ever better on the Linux platforms. ...

The only thing that Sun is not continuing is the customized Sun Linux 5.0 line. Anyone who took a close look at SL5 knows that it is virtually identical to Red Hat Linux 7.2 (in fact, you can even use Red Hat Network or Ximian Red Carpet to update with RH72 patches, though at that point it's not considered SL5 by Sun).

The only differences from RH72 were a modified installer (and some might say broken, since it had problems with Kickstarting), some custom Sun labelling, and value-added software (like the Sun Streaming server).

What is being "killed" is the modification of the base distribution ... in other words, the installer whatever distributions Sun chooses to ship will be the same installer that you get when downloading that distro from it's main website, and the graphics you see during install, etc will be the same as well. We are continuing to layer above and beyond that with things like Sun ONE, etc. ...

In other words, not much has changed except now Sun does not have to go and recertify drivers (that already worked perfectly well) or try to explain why Sun Linux is NOT a proprietary closed Linux (which many people seemed to think even though it was not so). Now we can concentrate on providing software value add above the base distros, which are already maturing quite well on their own. ...

This doesn't mean Sun has abandoned Linux or Open Source. The worst it means is that when a Sun engineer creates a patch (for example, on the kernel) that it has to be submitted either to the distro parent and/or the maintainer of that software before it will make it into the core of a Sun Linux product offering. That should be considered a good thing by most people in the community, as it further confirms that Sun is contributing and not closing off any open code.

Re:Further proof

[guacamole]

I don't understand why this has been modded up.

No, this is not a further proof. Read the article. Sun is not saying that they're dropping their Linux products or low-end Solaris/SPARC servers. What they're saying is that they're dropping "Sun Linux" in favor of more standard Linux distributions.

Re:If they're leaving the Linux market

[Jahf]

Sun's not dropping Red Hat. We're dropping the modification and rebranding of Red Hat. The article, if you read it, states that the hope is to ship -actual- Red Hat (and other distros) products on Sun x86 hardware (rather than rebranding it Sun Linux and dealing with all the hassles that takes).

And, being a Gentoo user myself as well as a Sun employee, I can say I've heard almost nothing about Gentoo internally with regards to Solaris -or- Linux. Not to say there might not be a group I don't work with that has learned to love the Gentoo like I do, but in every case that I've talked to someone about it, I had to explain what it was.

Sun -is- focusing on LSB compliance, both for Linux (which can be accomplished by using LSB compliant distributions) and for future parts of Solaris.

But as far as the idea of compiling packages from source like with Gentoo, when it comes to Solaris on SPARC, there is almost no reason to do this. One of the beauties of the SPARC platform is the backwards compatibility. If you have that compatibility, and you have known quantities for system configuration, you don't need to compile from source, it just steals cycles from your customers.

Re:what about madhatter

[Jahf]

Still in the works ... the Hatter's not dead.

Until specs are announced, not much to be said.

Re:Has anyone ever used it?

[haggar]

It seemed a bit more consistent than the RedHat of the same version. They had a table showing the differences between RedHat x.x (sorry, I forgot what version was) and Sun Linux 1.0. (again, I am not 100% sure it was 1.0). What I mean is that all the libraries, the compiler and the apps seemed to work together OK. This was no doubt due to having had the time and go through the problems the RH version had. Basically, they added a round of bugfixing, but that's about it.
There were a few system-level apps available only in Sun's distro, but I forgot what they were. Obviously nothing earth-shattering...

Re:Hardware support on non-redhat systems?

[Jahf]

That's never been the case, even with Cobalt appliances. The Cobalt appliances had -no- hardware support beyond their warranty. If you modified the software, you didn't void the hardware warranty, only your free software support. If you modified the hardware (beyond adding supported PCI cards), then you did void your hardware warranty (they are "appliances" after all, not meant for general purpose modification).

It was unfortunate that we didn't offer hardware service contracts, but for the low-cost appliances it (especially for a start-up company) it was not feasible. The cost of the hardware contracts would have been prohibitive to the customer (more than the cost of the box itself) -or- would have been a loss for us (the manufacturer). We looked at many was of providing this but it just never worked out. Even once we were a part of Sun, Sun came to the same determination. You would be surprised how expensive it is to stock a worldwide hardware service organization, even with commodity components and even when you already have an organization for your high-end systems.

As for the x86 general purpose stuff, yes, we provide separate hardware and software support contracts in addition to the base hardware warranty. If you want to run Debian on an LX50 and still have a Sun hardware service contract, no problem and you don't pay for software service that you don't run.

(For those intimately familiar with Sun's service levels, note that the LX50 doesn't offer Sun's high-end "Metals" programs (Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum). Future products may, but to get "Metals" you have to be running both Sun hardware AND software. However, if you're happy with "Hardware Only" and/or "Software Only" support, you can mix and match as you please.)

we tried sun linux 5 and put it up against ...

[dlasley]

suse 8.1 and redhat 8.0 - found absolutely nothing special except a couple of tweaks for the LX-50 series rackmount that you can easily emulate with a couple of recent kernel patches (and you don't even need those for suse 8.1 since it's on 2.4.19). in fact, running apache, tomcat, and coldfusion on suse 8.1 was a breeze and performed better than a lot of the other combos and platforms we tested.

it's good that sun should drop this idea and spend more time on the x86 Solaris build which still has it's niche market. especially since the 280Rs are still unreliable ... what the hell was the software group thinking? be nice if they'd post here and clue us in on both of those aborted initiatives.