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

Further proof

[Drunken Coward]

This is only further proof that Sun plans on dropping out of the entry level server market and sticking with their old method of selling enterprise level systems with a more robust and proven operating system, Solaris. Too much competition exists on the Linux side of things to make enough money, with Dell, IBM, HP, and others fighting it out.

Watch for Sun phasing out the blade-style systems next.

If they're leaving the Linux market

[GreyWolf3000]

Why do they want to get their own font handler in xfree86? They have their own commercial implementation for solaris right? They want linux/bsd users to wait for their favorite toolkits to bundle in support of this new standard? I know Sun has interest in GNOME, but still GNOME is based on gtk which is based on pango, and pango+xft+fontconfig does the same thing as their own (not-yet working) design (can't remember the name).

Re:If they're leaving the Linux market

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, Sun does have its own X server but it's increasingly phasing these things out in favour of open products like XFree86. Sun's eventual goal is to take the Gentoo model: applications downloaded as source code, and then compiled locally, automatically. Indeed, their dropping of RedHat is largely because what they intend to do is make Solaris 10 essentially Gentoo Linux with the SunOS kernel and Sun user space.

This is why people need to switch over to Gentoo Linux, it's so much easier than RedHat, Debian, and OpenDarwin. By always compiling locally, the apps on your machine are optimized the platform they run on, rather than the lowest common denominator. This helps Sun as very few apps are compiled for Sparc architectures when distributed, so leveraging Gentoo this way will really help them.

Gentoo is awesome. I recommend you check them out.

what about madhatter

[stonebeat.org]

what about the Sun's Linux Desktop "madhatter". what happened to that?

Has anyone ever used it?

[incom]

Has anyone ever used Sun's distro? What 'was' it like?

Sun has no Linux direction

[Anonymous Coward]

(Please excuse my AC post.)

I attended a 2-day NDA meeting with Sun in California some months ago ... several of the "top brass" were there to give us warm fuzzies about Sun's direction. We're a huge Solaris shop, and Sun hosts these meetings with their large clients from time to time. (Scott also shows up at some of them, but not at ours.) I asked about Linux and if they were going to embrace the Linux platform for "edge of network" applications, or for web servers (we have a lot of Linux web servers here.) The next day, they arranged a long meeting with me and their Linux guy.

The Linux meeting was to tell me about the new Linux offering they were weeks away from announcing. That's the idea they just killed. The idea was that Sun would start out by basing their Linux distro on RedHat, then would immediately fork the distro to create a specific Linux for their "PC blade" hardware platform. Really, they said the goal was to use Linux to push the PC blades. And they thought people would jump on this bandwagon.

Personally, I thought that a Linux distro that used the Solaris package manager, and had a layout that was close to how Solaris is set up, and was managed the same way you managed a Solaris box, might be a cool thing for shops that ran a lot of Solaris but not a lot of Linux. Your Solaris admins could pick up this new Linux thing in a hurry, since it looked just like their other Solaris boxes. And you could run it very cheaply on the new "blades". But that wasn't where Sun wanted to go, and they said that to me very plainly.

So what I learned in that long meeting with Sun is that Sun has no plan for Linux. They honestly don't know what to do with it. I'm frankly a little surprised that StarOffice still supports Linux, but I guess since all the SO work is done in Germany by the StarDivision/Sun group, maybe that's why StarOffice still supports Linux.

On the PC platform, it's amazing that Sun actually recommends WINDOWS rather than a UNIX OS (like Linux.) They've given up on the PC platform - they let Microsoft own the entry-level systems.

Ah well.

No maintenance

[fm6]

Except that they never really had their own distro. Sun Linux was just Red Hat "with a few tweaks". It's the old rebranding game. You buy somebody else's technology and sell it under your own name, on the assumption that your name makes the product more sellable. Small problem: companies like Sun and SGI (which also used to rebrand Red Hat) are known for their hardware, not their software. The brands that have established reputations in the Linux world are the well known distros, not the big iron johnny-come-latelies.

So people who order Sun (or is it Sun Cobalt?) boxes with Red Hat preinstalled will probably get exactly the same software that the would have had with Sun Linux -- tweaks and all. The only difference will be the brand.

Re:Reasonable?

[haggar]

Imagine if one of the BSD's had Linux's hype behind it, but with *BSD's existing code-review and QA systems

And the BSD documentation! Anyone who used FreeBSD can vouch for the incredible job these guys did in documenting everything clearly and with examples! Sorry but Linux is so much behind in this respect (you wouldn't know it if all you ever used is in fact Linux).