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Torvalds on Opening Solaris
An anonymous reader sent in a link to this interview with Linus Torvalds, where the questions center on Sun's movement toward the open source world (and Linus' dismissive view of the threat posed by Solaris), as well as a few questions about 2.7 and the future of Linux.
Surely if you like the idea of standing on the shoulders of giants, there might be some handy ideas in Solaris. Why ignore it?
Because I personally don't think they have anything left worth taking after I've applied the general Unix principles. I really do think Linux is the better system by now, in all the ways that matter.
But more importantly, if I'm wrong, that's OK. People who know Solaris better than I do will tell me and other people about the great things they offer. To try to figure it out on my own would be a waste of time.
Just a paragraph below your quote. And it's not like he dictates every move for Linux. If there are (and on Solaris/SPARC there sure are) better things in Solaris than Linux, I'm sure he'd welcome any improvement suggestions.
We received a Sun Blade 2500 running Solaris 9 with an NMR that our company bought. I thought it would be cool to learn some Solaris. I was very disappointed. The software seems to make no sense, the provided applications are old ( it comes with Netscape 4.7x as the only provided browser). I was surprised to have been so under whelmed. Sun seems to be SO conservative in regards to their software that they seem to be paralyzed. I fired up Netscape 4.7x to find some answers on questions I had about the OS and when I hit a site that used JAVA the browser told me that the version of Netscape I was running didn't support the version of JAVA the Webpage was using!! This is what came with a standard install of Solaris? I am much more comfortable with Linux and so understand I am a bit biased, but I just don't see SUN and Solaris being a threat to Linux unless they really put out a better product bundled with more current software.
"We will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends. " Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
You must be new here. All Linux (and Unix) distributions are rated solely by how easy the installer is to use. This goes for pretty much all review sites as well.
Never mind what happens should you ever change any settings on the system, it gets five stars if it comes with OpenOffice preinstalled.
Trollish, I know, but it's true. It's mostly attributed to reviewers' unwillingness to run the OS for more than ten minutes.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
I dunno man... I recently installed Solaris 9 on a dual opteron, 2GB of DDR 400, Adaptec AIC-7XXX SCSI. No messing around, worked fine.
This is brand new hardware, and although Solaris 9 was indeed running in 32-bit mode (and not the 64-bit Solaris 10 would enjoy on the same hardware), it worked and worked very well.
I've never had much of a problem getting Solaris to run on a wide variety of Intel hardware. The key, if you want to build a Solaris/Intel box, is to consult the HCL. Sun is pretty specific about what Solaris will and will not work with, though I've never found it to be as restrictive as most people imply.
bash-3.00$ uname -a
SunOS panda 5.10 Generic sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-2