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

Why did they bother

[Tsugumi]

I just don't know why Sun had a Linux distro in he first place. What value did they think they were adding? How could it contribute to their server sales? From the beginning, this stunk of some suit saying "we're getting creamed by Linux on commodity hardware - we should be doing Linux!"

I know for a fact that businesses told Sun they could not envisage using their offerings - it just didn't get you anything you couldn't get elsewhere better and cheaper...

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.

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.

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: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.