Gentoo Announces OpenSolaris Port

A reader writes:"According to this week's Gentoo Weekly Newsletter, Gentoo is planning a port to Sun's partially-announced OpenSolaris. Something interesting to look out for, or just more hype from a developer often criticized even by Gentoo people for not looking before he leaps?"

Comments

Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[UnderScan]

I use Gentoo. I have even donated money toward Gentoo? Why should I be interested in Sun/Solaris? Is Sun's execs still slamming Linux in their blogs? Is today "We sell Linux." or is today "Linux is no good, Solaris is better."

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[koi88]

GNU's not UNIX. Solaris is.

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[PornMaster]

Gentoo's not the kind of thing you run on production servers, Solaris is. They're not really in the same "space", as the marketdroids would say.

If you're asking, "Why would I switch from Gentoo to Solaris?" then you probably wouldn't benefit.

(and for the record, I don't see portage as being a large benefit to Solaris over pkgadd for the typical server, either)

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[barryman_5000]

Haha . . . why don't you go run Hurd and tell us how fun it is to finally make a partition bigger than 2 gb?

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[I confirm I'm not a]

I sympathise, but I can think of a couple of reasons:

• legacy machines (say running Solaris 2.6, 7) can be updated using "Portaris" and standard GNU tools more easily than, say, "pkg-get"
• cheap Sparcs on eBay!

Another good thing to come from Portaris and Gentoo on Sparc is that Jonathon Schwarz will evenetually have to acknowledge the contribution Linux has made to Solaris... ;)

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[I confirm I'm not a]

(and for the record, I don't see portage as being a large benefit to Solaris over pkgadd for the typical server, either)

I prefer pkg-get, which seemed to be quite like Gentoo's "emerge". I last deployed a Solaris box before I first installed Gentoo, so I can't recall how similar they are. Does pkg-get resolve dependencies? Reason I ask is, I'm gradually falling in love with "emerge" - it's a superb tool.

Then again, I had no end of trouble convincing the owners of the last Solaris box I touched that I should be allowed to install various GNU tools, so I don't know how much of an advantage Portaris will really bring - unless it becomes accepted as "part" of Solaris.

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[mattyrobinson69]

before i start, id just like to point out that im completely ignorant to any OS that isn't windows or linux, anyway...

wouldn't the useflags in gentoo make it possible to buld a more secure system, for example, if kde were compiled with no pdf support, it wouldn't have suffered from any of the few venrabilities announced this last week.

Before anybody starts, i know kde isn't likely to be found on a server, i was using it as an example. What im saying is, does solaris's package tools have something similar to useflags or not?

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[Anonymous Coward]

Lamer! Unix is nowadays just a trademark. Linux/BSD companies could also buy the right to use Unix trademark if they wanted to. Why would they do so? That would make no sense.

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[tomstdenis]

" Gentoo's not the kind of thing you run on production servers, Solaris is."

Why not? Or is this yet another empty "marketting-statement?"

Tom

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[novakyu]

Are you really that ignorant? If you don't get the joke, could you at least refrain from a rant?

GNU, seriously, is not Unix (yeah, yeah, you are saying that the name doesn't matter, but your tone says otherwise). I quote from gnu.org itself:

(GNU is a recursive acronym for "GNU's Not UNIX"; it is pronounced "guh-noo.")

Any questions?

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[koi88]

Whoa, calm down, I don't give uhh, I don't care about names either.
I'm happily running BSD, Linux and Mac OS X.
I didn't make a remark on any OS.

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[noblesse oblige]

Gentoo's not the kind of thing you run on production servers, Solaris is.

You knew such a statement would be countered with real life people. Allow me to be the first (if I post this fast enough).

Our company runs Gentoo on our domain controllers, which handle everything from Directory Services to Email. For a while our file servers ran Gentoo kernels, until Marcello added XFS and a few other items to the main 2.4 kernel.

In that example you have a very crafted and complex server, running some of the latest features Open Source has materialized. I go to a promotional lunch at a Sun vendor occasionaly, and the fellow moochers are constantly amazed at not only what services we provide, but the volume we provide them at.

If that is not enough big iron experience with Solaris, I happen to know that Sony's online game division does not run Solaris -- they run RedHat. Even compared to deep-pocket heavy hardware, they get better Oracle performance on Linux with Dell servers.

While there are many things I like about Solaris, (I still administer our legacy Solaris *workstations*) I have to say that the "Solaris is for production" mantra is not something this decade will say very much at all. Though I admit pkg-add is good, it is only as good as a binary package manager can be.

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[JFitzsimmons]

Okay, for a second, pretend you are a PHB (I know, it is hard). Do you want Gentoo (Huh? What's that? It is free you say? What?), or do you want Solaris (The incredibly stable, highly secure, Unix made by our good friends and reputable Internet Citizens Sun Microsystems, the genius creators of Java, the best programming langauge ever).

It is hard to step into the PHB shoes isn't it? But anyway that's your answer. If you don't have a PHB then maybe gentoo could be a viable server platform, but IMO that would still be pushing it. I use gentoo for a desktop and server at home, but I know that I wouldn't entertain the idea of such at work. Compiling from source is something I have the luxury to wait for at home, but work is a different story. I suppose there are those nifty new binary package servers, but I haven't investigated how they fit in with the rest of portage (mainly because I am satisfied with compiling from source at this point).

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[Wiz]

No, it doesn't resolve dependicies. I'll refuse to use any OS at home that doesn't have a ports system of some sorts as it just makes life so much easier.

And yes, you can compile them manually under Solaris no problem. Sun also supply them on a bonus CD. The problem is, they don't update them. Vuln in libpng? Update it yourself. :(

Portage is a superb tool. I'd really like to have a good ports system on normal Solaris, let alone OpenSolaris!

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[tomstdenis]

....gentoo...supports...
binary...package...insta lls.... ...

As for your PHB reference... well it's a matter of motivation. If your stock holders knew you spent millions on SUN when free would do... your PHB may think otherwise.

Tom

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because they still haven't marked bdb4.2 stable yet. That means the piece of shit that is bdb4.1 is used all over the place. I can't even count how many times I've had to fix corrupt databases between subversion and openldap thanks to this.

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[conteXXt]

In a production environment, you would stage things first.

You build on a test box and make the packages to deploy when convenient. In an emergency, you can use the staging box as a cold standby while you restore the master.

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who is backing Sun and Solaris? A developer started a port because it interested him. Big deal.

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[DrSkwid]

In that example you have a very crafted and complex server, running some of the latest features Open Source has materialized.

Good job you said that, for a minute there, I thought you were *promoting* Gentoo.

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[JFitzsimmons]

If you had actually read my comment, I said:

I suppose there are those nifty new binary package servers, ...

I KNOW. Although I guess I did fail to mention a stage 3 install with GRP, but alas, I knew about that too. All I was really trying to say was that they don't really seem to fit in with the whole point of gentoo though, which is selective dependencies via USE flags, and maybe some optimizations (trolls read: you can optimize without being a riceboy). You can't do that with binaries (unless your mirror has a million copies of every package, with different settings; which isn't going to happen), so gentoo/binary just turns out like debian (for example) which requires the installation of every dep even if you're never going to use that particular functionality. If you're going to end up using a binary distribution, and you want it to be free (in either sense of the word), then perhaps you should just use debian or BSD instead (or, or, or...).

Gentoo was made for installing or at the very least maintaining by source, and although it is feasable to run a gentoo system with only packages installed from binaries, it isn't what the system was designed for, and therefore doesn't have any particular advantage over any other binary distro.

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[tomstdenis]

...setup....your....own...mirrors....

e.g. you have a dozen "Comp-u-matic 1000s" in your server room. You take one and build binary packages on it, even optimized and USE flaged for your environment.

then you...get this... this part is the kicker

MAKE THE OTHER BOXES USE IT AS A PACKAGE SOURCE.

Tom

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[HairyCanary]

I agree that Solaris is something you put on servers that are critical, Linux is something you put on servers that are redundant. I love Linux, and use it for a lot of things, but to this day Linux *still* does not multitask as well as Solaris does. Given identical hardware, and a lightly loaded server, the Linux box will have a faster peak speed. However, the Solaris box will degrade gently under high load, and the Linux box will crash & burn. About once a year I introduce Linux into my mix of servers to see how it does, and invariably I find myself taking it out and replacing it with Solaris, because Linux does not handle our peak loads gracefully. And that means unhappy customers, which I don't want.

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[metalhed77]

how do you deal with the slowdown from emerge compilation? Do you compile binary packages off production servers? Is this at all a hassle? I'm curious.

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[jshriverWVU]

Please forgive me this is OT.. but I've seen the phrase PHB for a long time here on /.
What is it? I've been in the comp field for almost 8 years and I've never worked with someone who's title was PHB.

BTW this isn't a troll, I'm being very serious. I've just lost the acronym war.

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[tomstdenis]

Well as someone who does a lot of development I don't have any problems with high loads.

I've seen nessus scans eat up tons of cpu time on even my AMD64 but the machine is still responsive and operating just fine. Mind you that was a different story with earlier 2.4.xx back when I had my Barton.

So maybe you were using an old kernel (2.6.10 works great ... so did 2.6.7 through 2.6.9) or you're just making stuff up for the sake of posting.

Also that "pre-emptible kernel" checkbox in menuconfig... make sure that's checked eh ;-)

Tom

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[Scarblac]

Okay, for a second, pretend you are a PHB (I know, it is hard).

No, I won't. I'm not one, you're not one, we're discussing this on Slashdot.

If you base your decisions on what a perfectly stupid "PHB" would think according to you, then you have turned into a PHB.

So, please explain in technical terms why you wouldn't use Gentoo.

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[vegetasaiyajin]

No, it doesn't resolve dependicies.

pkg-get does resolve dependencies.
I installed KDE on solaris using the command:
pkg-get install kde

Of course, pkg-get is not the package manager that comes bundled with solaris, but it builds on it. I downloaded it from blastwave.org.

I was playing with Solaris 10 X86 (version Oct 04) a few days ago, but I went back to slackware for serious work because it couldn't access the USB ports (it supossedly has USB support, but it didn't work on my PC).

I found solaris was very fast (in contrast to its fame as slowlaris). I found it much much faster than Suse 9.0. I didn't run any real benchmarks, but, for example, the "Konsole" program started much faster in solaris X86 (I have to admit it starts fast on other linux distributions too). The general feel I had was that it's a fast OS. Too bad it wasn't able to use the USB ports.

If they improve their hardware support they could be a very good alternative to Linux for desktops.

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[RangerRick98]

Pointy Haired Boss. It's a Dilbert reference.

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[jack_csk]

Instead of looking for something current not existing on Solaris, why don't you consider FreeBSD?

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[JFitzsimmons]

That really is a decent idea, but it assumes a couple of things (which don't exist in my work environment).

1. Identical hardware, or at least very close
2. Identical software requirements on every server (our mailserver doesn't need X11 support but our grpahical terminal server will)
3. A dedicated fileserver for all those packages. Theoretically, not difficult, but it does mean yet another server in the datacentre, or at least a harddrive in one of our other servers, hosting up via NFS or http.

All that being said, binary distros don't really have many advantages to the situation either. In fact, for a binary distro, if I want apache and php, and php relies on X11, then I guess I'm stuck with X11 on our webserver, even though we'll never use it.

Disclaimer: All software in this comment was used simply as an example and may or may not represent the actual setup we have at work. It also may or may not have the dependencies I say it has.

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[tomstdenis]

Well obviously you won't use the setup of a workstation as the setup for your server. Stop being difficult.

I mean you might as well bitch that your ppc builds don't work on your Itanium servers....

And I don't know where you work but most professional shops maintain IDENTICAL hardware for the servers for the VERY REASON of making sure that ONE SETUP will service them all.

Unless of course you're the type that makes things complicated in a futile attempt at job security.

Tom

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[SQLz]

If you are a PHB and you are not educated on the different flavors of Linux and what they provide, then I would fire you.

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[DarkMantle]

Basically, if something goes wrong it would take too long to get the server back up as you emerge a new world.

Basically, suppose a security vulnerability is discovered in apache, and you don't want to be comprimised, it would take alot longer to emerge, and compile the new apache version, when you can just install the application.

At least this is why my Linux friends don't use gentoo servers.

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[un1xl0ser]

For reasons of uniformity et cetera, I doubt that Gentoo would ever be usable in most Corporate environments.

One thing that they need to work on is a Jumpstart/Ignite/Kickstart/AutoYast like script to script the installation completely. Anaconda is very good in that respect.

If you had that, and a good DistCC setup, you could have a very easy setup of a cluster.

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[MooseGuy529]

The mere idea of a PHB implies that they are your boss, and so you can't fire them.

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[Anonymous Coward]

Quote:
"it is feasable to run a gentoo system with only packages installed from binaries, it isn't what the system was designed for, and therefore doesn't have any particular advantage over any other binary distro."

This is partially true. If you have only one or two production servers with no back-up / testing system then it's a bit tricky using a soley source based distro, and you may as well stick with a generic x86 binary distro. But if you have more then one production server with the same processor type, or a proper back-up / testing system, it's very simple to use one system to create optimized binaries fopr porting onto your production systems.

IE: Running Xeons it doesn't make sense to use binaries for 386 or 586 when you can use binaries built for Xeons.

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[fox8118]

how do you deal with the slowdown from emerge compilation? Do you compile binary packages off production servers? Is this at all a hassle? I'm curious.

I know that there are several options to reduce the overhead on the production platform. Here are two of them that I can think of off the top of my head:

• Using distc to utilize multiple computers during the compiling process
• Setting up a stage platform that is identical to the production platform and then compiling the sources as packages for later deployment

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[tomstdenis]

Your "linux friends" are retarded.

First...

you only do "long complicated builds" on test environments. Not live.

Second ...

If the test fails... YOU DONT ROLL IT INTO ACTION!!!

That's why you have test environments [and backups].

As for home personal servers... you can just unmerge the offending application and re-emerge the older copy. Even things like Apache or MySQL only take a couple minutes to build. So it's not the end of the world.

Of course that rarely happens [I can think of maybe once or twice I had todo that in the last TWO YEARS].

Tom

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[fox8118]

Using distc to utilize multiple computers during the compiling process

Excuse me. Its distcc.

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[Directrix1]

I use gentoo in a corporate environment on servers, and it works quite nicely. I don't believe automated installs are what Gentoo need. What you need to do is create a base system for each particular class of machine on your system (http,imap,dns,kerberos,etc.), and then create an image of it (either on a server or a CD), and script the partition setup, image copy, and tweak a couple configs.

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[vrai]

Setting up a stage platform that is identical to the production platform and then compiling the sources as packages for later deployment

This isn't just an option, it's a necessity. You should never install new software, or a new version of currently installed software, without first testing it on a machine that mirrors the production setup. Only after testing has shown it's stable and doesn't adversly affect other software should it be rolled out on the production machine.

In the case of a source based distribution you should be rolling out the binaries you know work - i.e. the ones you built and tested for your test system.

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[MS_is_the_best]

" Gentoo's not the kind of thing you run on production servers, Solaris is."

Mmm, quick someone tell google and amazon to get rid of linux and install solaris instead.

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[zrail]

There's no real TECHNICAL reason not to. However, since it takes a long time to compile gentoo from source, and since time == money, and since money is the God of Capitalism, I think it would be rather difficult to convince a manager to let you install gentoo on company machines on company time.

It's all about cost-benefit analysis. Who do you go to when your Solaris instalation gets borked? Sun. Who do you go to when your Gentoo installation gets borked? Teh Intarweb, costing even more time and thus more money researching, diagnosing, and repairing the issue than it would cost to call a Sun engineer and have them tell you exactly what's wrong and how to fix it.

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[Anonymous Coward]

All attempts to contradict JFitzsimmons assume a perfect IT landscape. Welcome to the real world. Yes, identical hardware should be something you want, but identical OS-ses are more important. Yes, a local package server is a nice idea (if you have identical hardware and money to set it up). Yes, an understanding PHB would be nice.
The point is, if I get Solaris free on my SUN boxes and I am comfortable with it, why go for Gentoo? Next, If I am comfortable with Solaris, why move to Linux at all? For the open source? Sorry, I do not have the time to browse through code and fix something, I want the company that provided the sw to fix it. Sure, RedHat and Suse do that for me, but they also charge nice sums for it. I Go with the solution _I_ am comfortable with. It is MY head on the block if something goes wrong, not the head of some slashdotter.

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[noblesse oblige]

for a minute there, I thought you were *promoting* Gentoo. Such is the state of craftsmanship in the world today. As Steve Jobs said about Bill Gates and their Windows product, "my biggest complaint is that they simply have no taste".

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[Anonymous Coward]

Our company runs Gentoo on our domain controllers, which handle everything from Directory Services to Email. For a while our file servers ran Gentoo kernels, until Marcello added XFS and a few other items to the main 2.4 kernel.

In that example you have a very crafted and complex server, running some of the latest features Open Source has materialized...

If that is not enough big iron experience with Solaris...

I don't see ANY mention of Solaris at all other than a vendor Lunch and Learn... much less experience with Sun 'big iron'.

And running a 500GB DB on Oracle 9i running on a pair of dual proc P4s is NOT big iron.

Though I admit pkg-add is good, it is only as good as a binary package manager can be.

So, what? RPMs aren't good enough either? How much flamebait can you add to one post?

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[DrSkwid]

That's all very well but I have no idea what point you are trying to make, or even if you are atempting to make one.

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[Anonymous Coward]

"""
GNU's not UNIX. Solaris is.
"""

It soundd like you think that the first statement is bad and that the second statement is good. Why would we want to go backwards and use UNIX? Maybe I'll wipe my Linux servers and install Xenix.

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[noblesse oblige]

Agreed. Compiling times haven't been an issue.

Waiting for X, Gnome, KDE or OOo to compile can be like watching grass grow, and together take more than a day's worth of awake time on high end computers. But for your services, its rare for them to take longer than half an hour. But, c'est vrai, one shouldn't update live servers (binary or compiled) without testing it first.

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[Lord Ender]

You would not want to run Gentoo on a production box simply because Gentoo keeps you up to date with the latest released versions of software. This normally sounds like a good thing, but really isn't for servers because new versions of software often don't work with old config files. On a desktop it is fine, because the world doesn't end when your last "emerge -u world" updated your rsync server to a version which chokes on the old config file version. But in production, a faulty service is a serious issue.

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[timbrown]

I'm quite happily running NetBSD's pkgsrc on Solaris. pkgsrc supports a number of commercial Unix flavours although I believe Solaris was the first to be added. Hell, you can even use it on a Linux distribution. FWIU the Gentoo effort will be along similar lines although this is yet to be seen.

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[tomstdenis]

You sir missed the point.

I never said don't use Solaris. I'm contesting that "Gentoo can't be used professionally" attitude the OP had.

Those are completely different issues. I'm sure Solaris works great, it's stable, etc, etc, yada yada. That's not my point.

Tom

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[noblesse oblige]

I don't see ANY mention of Solaris at all other than a vendor Lunch and Learn

You got me there. And you won't see much mention of Solaris either because we *don't* run it any more -- except for some legacy workstations. If you do want some cheap Sun Hardware we have a pile of it in our office that you'd be doing us a service to take it off our hands.

And running a 500GB DB on Oracle 9i running on a pair of dual proc P4s is NOT big iron.

Which is good because I don't believe I said it was. From what I understand they use Linux on Dell servers because it outperforms Sun "big iron" in the testing they did in developing their facility.

RPMs aren't good enough either? How much flamebait can you add to one post?

Oh how I miss the good old days when a post like mine would be considered arrogant or concieted. In today's drippingly sarcastic world its only considered 'flaimbait'.

RPMs and Debs are fine. Better than package-manager if you ask me. But I don't wish to go back to them either.

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[yokem_55]

This is why you don't blindly run emerge -u world. On a production machine, you would pick the update you want to run out of what is available, and take time and care when updating major services....this applies to ANY distro....

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[noblesse oblige]

Yes, but you will.

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[Lord Ender]

As the theory goes, this should actually be done for you if you use Debian as a server. You can keep up to date with security but config file versions never change (the beauty of backported security patches).

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[SunFan]

You can benefit from Solaris' threading and scheduler implementations, its API stability, its relative maturity and battle-hardened nature.

Of course, you could always bask in the glory that is CDE!

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[whoever57]

That really is a decent idea, but it assumes a couple of things (which don't exist in my work environment).

What's to stop you creating packages in a chrooted environment? You can create any number of different environments (disk space and cpu time permitting) and build binary packages there.

Furthermore, regarding "nearly identical hardware": most vendors don't provide different binary packages for different hardware (I mean differences amongst the x86 family, or differences amongst the sparc family), why should you? Just compile for the lowest common denominator.

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[DrSkwid]

sigh, I doubt it.

Linux is cruft however you compile it.

For amateurs, by amateurs.

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[cuerty]

Yes, in fact there are more useflags and cflags to make the system more secure.

In this particular case, kde can't be compiled without pdf support. There is no useflag for that, but, for example, PHP ebuild allows to ommit pdf support (depends on pdflib, not xpdf).

There're a couple of USE flags for security like PAM, TCP, also for the djb fans a set of scripts that permits to run _ALL_ the services inside daemontools (and tcpserver), and CFLAGS like -fstack-protector to use it with a patched version of GCC for stack protection.

I personally use Gentoo on servers, with good uptimes. Ofcourse, I can broke things, as I can in Debian or Solaris, is just the fact of know what I'm doing. And for the support, Gentoo Forums seems to have informations for all the things that happens me building a desktop or a server.

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[cuerty]

Or have it as a distcc server only and MAKEOPTS to -j2 so just that 'compile farm' is used, saving the packages instead of merge them, that way you can watch (and see if you break anything) then the package is installed and have a historical archive of packages for go back in case something goes bad.

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[tomhudson]

Here we go:

1. Just tell your PHB this:

   OpenSolaris Port? Another open port? Damn security vulnerabilities! You know how we shouldn't be running our servers with more ports open than necessary!

2. Then save the email he posts to everyone about how Solaris is a security risk because it's "all open ports" or whatever bafflegab he comes up with.
3. Profit! (or at least a good laugh)

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[noblesse oblige]

Well, if that is your choice...

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[discogravy]

depends on which pkg-get you use and what you're trying to install. pkg-get from sunfreeware.com doesn't (as far as i can remember,) resolve dependencies, but I believe the one from blastwave.org does -- also note that some packages that have large dependencies (KDE's QT dependency for e.g.,) may have to have those deps installed seperately.

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[cayenne8]

"Compiling from source is something I have the luxury to wait for at home, but work is a different story. "

Why so? I mean, its not like you get a Sun box in, hook it to the network, install all OS and other applications and turn it on in 1 or 2 days...at least not around here. Just figure in compile time in the install schedule....and I don't find we have a 1 day window ever to install or upgrade new software...so, compile time here isn't much of an addition. In fact...if you've got a decent machine..compile times are really pretty quick.

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[aconbere]

The things is, in this case anyways, that the scripted installs really aren't faster, and offer far less fine precission in installation. If you have technicians that have done the install before, and are familiar with the system, they can get a fresh install going in a matter of minutes. Mind you that this fresh install will have a good deal more information in it than... "click... install". Gentoo gets alot of flack from the beginners for it's install process, when in reality it's very simple, well documented and straight forward. Especialy if you even a little bit familiar with editing your own config files (which as a server tech you should be) Anders

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can I run Hurd with Solaris's user-level software. Now that would be one 13317 OS - all the pain of Hurd, and all the pain of Sun's applilcation software.

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[toff]

because Linux does not handle our peak loads gracefully.
Have you ever looked at kernel.org? See how they handle high loads.

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[testing124]

how do you deal with the slowdown from emerge compilation? I don't know how /he/ does it, but what is wrong with "nice -n 19 emerge foo" ?

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[Anonymous Coward]

Me, as a PHB have now heard of Linux.

"Linux... that's IBM's new OS, isn't it... the one that Daimler-Benz(the guys the make my mercedes) is defending in court!..."

It is hard to step into the PHB shoes isn't it?

Not really... I've been a CTO and a director of marketing, and now a VP of Ops.

"Do you want Gentoo (Huh? What's that? It is free you say? What?), or do you want Solaris "

Which provides the better ROI. That's what matters to a PHB. I've hand enough Oracle sales reps take me to nice lunches that Sun's sales guys meager lunches don't impress me much.

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a PHB and I know exactly what Linux is.

• Linux is IBM's new OS, the successor to AIX - and IBM is a healthier company than Sun.
• Linux is used by Daimler-Benz, the guys who make my mercedes - and I like how my mercedes impresses my secretary.

Thank you SCO!

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[Elwood P Dowd]

But... "GNU's not Unix" was a JOKE. They called it "not Unix" because calling it Unix would have been illegal. Aside from the trademark issue, GNU is unix.

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[zzabur]

> Gentoo's not the kind of thing you run on
> production servers, Solaris is.

Hmm.. That must be the reason why Sun is runnign OpenSolaris.org on Linux (not sure about the distro, though). Check from Netcraft if you don't believe me. BTW, not long time ago there was a story on Netcraft mentioning that Gentoo is quickly gainingn popularity as a web server platform. Or do you mean that if it doesn't run Oracle, it's not a production server?

----

http://www.opensolaris.org was running Apache on Linux when last queried at 20-Jan-2005 21:04:07 GMT - refresh now Site Report

OS Server Last changed IP address Netblock Owner
Linux Apache/1.3.27 (Unix) mod_jk/1.2.6 23-Nov-2004 209.249.116.220 SUN MICROSYSTEMS, INC
Linux Apache/1.3.27 (Unix) 30-Jun-2004 216.21.229.197 Register.com, Inc

No uptime is currently available for www.opensolaris.org.

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[lowoddnumber]

Well I run Gentoo on my home system and I don't think I would want to run it on a production server. Maybe it's because I updated my packages too much, but I want to have the latest software with the latest securit fixes. My problem with it is that with some regularity, emerge update tends to break things. I then proceed to search the gentoo forums to find others are having the same problem and that this can be fixed by commenting out a certain line in some /etc/security/pam... file. Is my system still secure after this? Who knows. Or maybe the fix is to run some gentoo specific script as root which will update some etc files or patch a bunch of binaries. It just doesn't seem that stable to me. My point is you have to rely on the forums and be prepared to try different fixes without any explanation. On the other hand, I love being able to play Doom III or watch movies on my Gentoo box. Thanks, Gentoo!

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[PornMaster]

I never said that Linux doesn't belong on production servers.

What's up with being so rabid?

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[wallner]

I would bet it's not Gentoo, though

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[un1xl0ser]

Faster isn't really what I am looking for most of the time. I guess that I am looking for identical.

We need mostly identical installs, especially in the same class of server (DB, Web, et cetera).

I also don't need to be there durring the installation phase. Kickstart has allowed us to script installation.

I'm not sure how long it takes on your average 4-8 way system, because I don't have hardware like that to install it on right now.

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[ArbitraryConstant]

"Why not? Or is this yet another empty "marketting-statement?""

The Gentoo developers do not make any guarantees that the Portage tree will be in a consistent state at any given time.

Anyone that's used Gentoo for any period of time has had breakage. Usually, it's a matter of a quick update or at worst a stop by the forums. However, sometimes the breakage exists for longer or is harder to fix. Businesses cannot afford to take this risk.

I no longer use Gentoo because breakage almost caused me to miss deadlines on more than one occasion. It's my ass when it goes wrong, so I won't put myself in a position where I'm taking responsibility for an OS that doesn't guarantee me that they'll even test something before it's released. One of the instances of breakage (IIRC, the required version of fam was masked for the KDE-3.2 update) would have been caught if anyone had tried it on a stable system before release.

Portage is a very powerfull tool, and if someone would take a snapshot of the portage tree and then spend 6 months working the kinks out of it I'd give it a shot. But that hasn't happened.

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[daEnlitnd1]

what is wrong with "nice -n 19 emerge foo" ?

IIRC it doesn't work. Instead try adding this to your make.conf:
PORTAGE_NICENESS="19"

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[Billly Gates]

I am not in IT and have not been in several years but I am shocked to read this.

Gentoo 1.2 for me would break all the time. Sometimes I could not get KDE installed at for a week until someone fixes the broken port. Sometimes after I update everything kmail would crash or perl would no longer run.

Its about as stable as Windows98 in that it feels untested with no QA is done for a production environment. Maybe Gentoo has improved since I used it back in 2002. I dont know.

But there is a reason corporate users prefer Debian stable with the 2.4 kernel for their production boxes.

If I were an admin I would stay far away from Gentoo as possible and I am supprised your server is even running without constant crashes or bugs.

Linux stability has decreased in recent years with the exception of well tested Debian and Redhat.

I personally would feel hell of alot more comfortable with Solaris still at this point and would not trust my job to any FOSS with the exception of a BSD distro. But I am in no position to recommend that. I just would not want your job out of fear somethign would happen during an emerge. Yikes.

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[AusG4]

Which would be ironic, considering the unacknowledged (beyond that - i'd say closer to rigidly suppressed) intellectual contributions Solaris/SunOS has made to Linux.

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[Anonymous Coward]

thats.....too.....much.....work.....

seriously, you should see someone about that speech problem.

I use gentoo myself, and whilst I like quite a few things about it (the init scripts are brilliant), it is most certainly NOT suitable for corporate server use.

It just takes too much time to install, and disk space is cheap, the optomisations don't really gain you anything tangible, so all in all its much easier to go with a comercially supported binary distribution like RedHat or Suse.

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[noblesse oblige]

there is a reason corporate users prefer Debian stable with the 2.4 kernel for their production boxes. Oh, is that what you think... Let me tell you, trust is a terrible and wonderful thing. It is earned, sought, but in reality only can be produced with practice, trial and error. Its a decision we "corporate users" make all the time. When something works we stick with it. When something looks like it works better we try it out, accumulating into years of experience. As for my experience, we moved over to our first Gentoo production server before Gentoo hit 1.0. We've used RedHat here at work, and I used Debian personally for many years. And until recently what we were doing in Gentoo back in those early days couldn't be in RedHat and Debian in any reasonable or stable manor. But now they can (enough for our purposes) and I'm the one who wonders why we would even try to do that considering how well Gentoo has performed for us. And that, my Billy Gates gruff friend, is experience.

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[ZonaldRumzfeld]

"Its about as stable as Windows98 in that it feels untested with no QA is done for a production environment. Maybe Gentoo has improved since I used it back in 2002. I dont know."

It is? It's about as stable as using Freebsd in my opinion. One of my uptimes on one of my gentoo boxes is at 62 days and holding (They day I've installed Gentoo on that box). No crashes, no bugs except for using Amarok-cvs (but that's pretty obvious why Amarok would crash from time to time) :)

"If I were an admin I would stay far away from Gentoo as possible and I am supprised your server is even running without constant crashes or bugs."

These same bugs and constant crashes are going to be shared over with other distributions, any fixes will obviously be updated in Gentoo just like any other distribution. It's not like Debian or Redhat is going to hide any fixes from anyone using Slack or Gentoo. And there's a reason why Gentoo uses the term "Stable" and "Unstable" in Portage.

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[SCVirus]

Gentoo devs are the kinda people who will try anything just to say they did. That's clearly what they are doing here.

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[Anonymous Coward]

These days it would read... Solaris is not GNU. Linux is. :-)

Re:Why back Sun? Why back Solaris?

[Xabraxas]

My point is you have to rely on the forums and be prepared to try different fixes without any explanation.

No offense, but some of us know what we are doing and are not just blindly cutting and pasting commands from the forums.

No problem with a little competition.

[barryman_5000]

Isn't it all about being free and open anyhow? Solaris will be a great addition and we can try out yet another *nix. Some people cry that solaris is nothing good at all but I'd say its a step up from freebsd on the server side of things. It was the "best" commericial unix anyhow. Idea swapping will be the best thing about the 2 platforms. If only we did the same with bsd's.

Re:No problem with a little competition.

[Anonymous Coward]

If only we did the same with bsd's.

You mean like this ?

Re:No problem with a little competition.

[freemacmini]

I just don't know how much of solaris they can open up legally. Remember Sun paid SCO millions of dollars for the right to use SCO IP in solaris. Buy paying that money they have admitted that the IP in question belongs to SCO.

The question is did Sun get the right to open source that IP in that agreement? My guess is that the didn't. SO what happens when SCO claims that the solaris SMP code actually belongs to them, that sun paid them to use it in solaris but not to open source it and let it be used in linux or freebsd?

Sun should publish that contract so the community can take a look at it.

Re:No problem with a little competition.

[paperclip2003]

No... it's about Sun Solaris using Linux people's hard work to build on its OS and then a few years down the line fight the GPL and close source it again. I know Sun is waiting and "thinks" that people (Microsoft, SCO et..all) will defeat the GPL -- read some of the statements and the actions that the company has taken. I think the same goes for Open Office... it is all about developer man hours. How else can a company on the decline develop software quickly? Yeah it's free... for now...

Re:No problem with a little competition.

[brunogirin]

Exactly. Solaris is the best commercial UNIX out there but to fully appreciate it you need to see it run on one of Sun's Enterprise servers. What other operating system is able to scale from 1 processor to 96; reconfigure itself if it suddenly loses one processor, a network adapter, a memory chip or other vital component; have some of those components replaced live without shutting down the server? Mainframes can do it, I think AIX can as well and I'm convinced Linux will get there one day. But the best and quickest way for all *nix OSes to evolve and stay lightyears in front of Windows is for all of them to share ideas and improve each other.

Linux cannot assume it has nothing to learn from Solaris, this would be extremely arrogant and a big mistake. Sun might not always play fair but they are trying and have a huge amount of experience to bring to the open source table, especially with Solaris.

So seeing Gentoo and Solaris exchange technology is fantastic news. At the end of the day, the winners will be us, the users, the professional IT staff who have to deal with GNU/Linux, BSD, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX et al. on a regular basis. Independently of how the different kernels work, sharing tools and technology between all those OSes will make our job easier and hence make it easier for us to argue the case for UNIX/Linux/BSD against Windows to a PHB.

Portage in Solaris?

[SoTuA]

Well, if you are into uber-customized binaries for solaris, yay! However, I have a question...

Does portage support dependency checking when removing packages yet? That's the reason I stopped using gentoo...

Re:Portage in Solaris?

[halivar]

revdep-rebuild -pv is what you want. Run it before you go uninstalling packages.

Re:Portage in Solaris?

[wkrue1]

Why would you stop using it because there are some stray packages in your system? Yeah, it's a bit sloppy but I guess I just don't see that as an issue important enough to stop using a particular distro.
And yes, this has been addressed with some Gentoo utilities.

Funroll loops

[Anonymous Coward]

How long before someone posts the funroll loops link?

Yes, this is slashdot,
yes, this is gentoo,
yes, we have all seen the link before,

no, we don't care about your funroll loops link.

Re:Funroll loops

[I confirm I'm not a]

no, we don't care about your funroll loops link.

I dunno, I'm a Gentoo ... user (avoid saying you love operating systems, you fool!) and I came across funroll-loops via the Gentoo forums t'other day. Loved it - good for a laugh, if you don't take your gentooing too seriously.

Re:Funroll loops

[Anonymous Coward]

I post that previous one. I thought it was funny too, but it didn't crack me up because, well, the speed increase is a tiny part of what makes gentoo so nice for me. (I'll stop there because it'll turn into a flamewar otherwise :) )

What I do dislike is the constant posting of things we've seen before. "Yeah, seen it before, now go away".

Re:Funroll loops

[I confirm I'm not a]

the speed increase is a tiny part of what makes gentoo so nice for me.

It was a while after I'd installed Gentoo that I became aware of it's reputation as being for "ricers" - I installed it because (a) it worked with my slightly wierd set-up, and (b) I was interested in learning more about Linux than I could with a "regular" distro. That speed increase is nice, though ;)

Re:Funroll loops

[agraupe]

I don't think it actually is for ricers, for the most part. It's just that on the website, it advertises that it is a bit faster. This leads an insane few to try and uncover every possible way of making it so. I'm a Gentoo user, and I can say that it's probably not the fastest. Sure I haven't tried my absolute hardest, but that's not what's important to me. I like Portage. It is robust for adding and removing packages, and it allows amazing control over what does and doesn't go into your compiled software. Do I want amaroK compiled with mysql support? Hmm, why not, I have a mysql database running. All these little things. I think Portage is the biggest thing that gentoo has contributed to the world, and, quite frankly, I'd like to see them port it to Linux at large, before they find other OSs.

Re:Funroll loops

[clymere]

pkgsrc from netbsd is virtually the same, and has long been available on most every flavor of bsd and linux...and unix.

[OT] Re:Portage in Solaris?

[RangerRick98]

You can always run `emerge depclean` to remove packages that aren't in your world file and aren't required by any packages that are. And there's `revdep-rebuild` in the gentoolkit which will rebuild any packages that might end up broken after a depclean. With those two commands, I've never had any problems keeping only the packages I want and need on the system with no extra cruft.

Overambitious Developer?

[EvilGrin666]

Something interesting to look out for, or just more hype from a developer often criticized even by Gentoo people for not looking before he leaps?

No, I don't think so. There's been a installer for Solaris avalible from this self same developer for some time. As this is just an incremental update rather than inventing a whole new wheel I don't think anyone can be seriously worried about him pulling this off.

Re:Overambitious Developer?

[PornMaster]

I don't think anyone can be seriously worried about him pulling this off

I hesitate to ask, but what would there be to be worried about?

Re:Overambitious Developer?

[Anonymous Coward]

Tsunamis!

Re:Overambitious developer?

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that Hemos didn't write that. It was "A reader."

Portage dependency check

[E IS mC(Square)]

>> Does portage support dependency checking when removing packages yet?

I think it still does not support that.

(But then, I may be completely and stupid-ly wrong, as linux is completely new to me [or vice-versa], and I can not even configure why gentoo fails to mount /dev/ROOT after doing it successfully for 3 days!)

Re:Portage dependency check

[Anonymous Coward]

because /dev/ROOT probably isn't your filesystem unless you're using symbolic links or UDEV. Since you didn't already understand that part I'm going to make an assumption that you don't have a raid or scsi, and guess that you need to use /dev/hda3 or something very similar. /dev/ROOT is not a hard drive nor a partition. /dev/hda is your first IDE hard drive. /dev/hda3 is your 3 partition on your first IDE hard drive. If you followed the gentoo install guide, it has you setup /dev/hda3 as your root partition... Try reading the guide really :)

Re:Portage dependency check

[fimbulvetr]

Uhh, cause /dev/ROOT is an example, but the real name of your disk drive (hda, hdb, etc) there, followed by the partition that is root (1,2,3, etc).
Your end result should be something like: /dev/hda2

Re:Portage dependency check

[mtenhagen]

You should change /dev/ROOT to you root partition, in my case that's /dev/hda3

Read the documentation: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/index.xml

Re:Portage dependency check

[Anonymous Coward]

And probably the reason that it worked for 3 days and stopped now is because you did an emerge system or something similar that overwrote your /etc/fstab.

Re:Portage dependency check

[I confirm I'm not a]

I can not even configure why gentoo fails to mount /dev/ROOT after doing it successfully for 3 days!)

Never mine why is doesn't work now (see above in the thread for answers) - I'm curious as to how you got it to work at all! Sir, I bow before your superior luck^Wskill! ;)

Re:Portage dependency check

[mattyrobinson69]

i'd just like to point out to the grandpairent that the gentoo install guide is very usable and very straightforward, its not like your typical manpage.

just thought i'd point that out incase the pairent sounded like a typical RTFM response

Re:Portage dependency check

[tomstdenis]

"Read the documentation" ...

This is slashdot.... Just because the instructions walk you through EVERY DETAIL of a gentoo install doesn't mean we should read them!!!

Tom

Re:Portage dependency check

[RangerRick98]

I can not even configure why gentoo fails to mount /dev/ROOT after doing it successfully for 3 days!

My guess is that /etc/fstab wasn't setup with /dev/ROOT in it while it was working, but you did an etc-update and just let it update all files. Some package (baselayout, methinks) wants to replace your fstab with its default example file. This is why you should review files that you know you have made changes to before telling etc-update to replace everything.

Re:Portage dependency check

[Wiz]

Erm, nope. emerge does not over-write any configuration files in /etc or anywhere else.

If he runs etc-update, then it will prompt him which files it is going to update. So at this point, it would be possible to blindly accept an update to /etc/fstab, although he would have had to accept it.

emerge == safe.

etc-update == be careful!

Re:Portage dependency check

[secretsquirel]

My first emerge world broke the install, but to be fair I had no idea what I was doing and it wasn't exactly gentoo, it was Vidalinux. (redhat installer converted to do a stage3 gentoo install, im lazy) It installed fine (both times) though but I just didn't like it much, I like it polished. Guess maybe it just wasnt meant for me though.

Not vaporware

[sysadmn]

Well, if it's been running for months on Sol 9 and 10, it's more than vaporware. Whether anyone uses it remains to be seen. If it replaces/augments the pre-built packages at Sunfreeware, it'll be a great addition to the OpenSolaris community.

FreeBSD port??

[Anonymous Coward]

When will someone port Gentoo's portage to FreeBSD?

Re:FreeBSD port??

[Anonymous Coward]

We're working on it. It isn't stable yet. You're free to help out...

Gentoo people

[Anonymous Coward]

Are "gentoo people" ones that resequence their DNA every night to get 1% performance gains?

Re:Gentoo people

[Christopheles]

What else are you going to do when you're asleep?

Great Wizzard..?

[E IS mC(Square)]

I knew I was a complete idiot. Got the answeres.

As for how it worked for 3 days, either something overwrote something else, or I indeed have superior luck^Wskill. After all, Rincewind - the Great Wizzard - did survive all of that!

Re:Great Wizzard..?

[Sivar]

You probably did an "emerge sync" "emerge -u world" and some trivial change in /etc/fstab made etc-update decide it should be replaced with a new version, which knows nothing about your partition setup.

It's partially Gentoo's fault for being so stupid as to happily overwrite a critical system file like fstab without so much as a "By the way, if you overwrite your working file with this generic, unconfigured one, none of your partitions will mount at next reboot"

And it's partially your fault since etc-update doesn't overwrite any files unless you specifically tell it to. Still, it's a very error-prone process when etc-update is constantly reporting new, non-working versions of base system files, usually ones which have absolutely no important changes.

opensolaris slashdotted?

[casualgeek]

Can't access http://www.opensolaris.org Connection times out....

Re:opensolaris slashdotted?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's probably not up yet. A few weeks ago connection attempts were cut off by some firewall (ie. you got connection timeout if you waited long enough).

blastwave

[io-waiter]

www.blastwave.org is another, their not as /usr/local fixated as sunfreeware, for good and bad. Add portage to the mix and i might be happy ; )

Re:rather desperate

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a weird attempt to troll. Unless you are sincere. And in that case, why in the HELL did you move to a linux distro? You obviously don't understand the idea of RTFM. Go to Mandrakes site and read all their documentation. If there's somethign you want to know how to do, go to google.com and search for: howto (thing you want to do here) ex: howto rtfm ex: howto troll ex: howto use a computer ex: howto mozilla etc

CRUSHED!

[whitelabrat]

Wow. /.'ed. That was quick. Sure ain't Solaris.

Emerge?

[Zemplar]

Can Sun run 'emerge from debt'?

Perhaps even cron 'profitability'??

Re:Emerge?

[Stevyn]

sh-2.05b$ emerge -pv no-debt
These are the packages that I would merge, in order:

Calculating dependencies ...done!
[ebuild R ] bus-strategy/no-debt-11-r4 -microsoft* +opensource -fud*

Total size of downloads: 5,042 kB
sh-2.05b$

(notice that the microsoft and fud flags are new)

Re:Emerge?

[tesmako]

I guess this might have been funny if they werent making (a tiny granted) profit and have never been in much debt.

Re:Emerge?

[sysadmn]

They have billions in the bank. It's not debt that is the problem - it is declining market share and competition from FOSS alternatives. Still it looks like they're making the right moves.

Re:Emerge?

[lowoddnumber]

Hey Troll, can you run 'emerge from ignorance'? Sun has over seven billion dollars in the bank and was profitable last quarter.

YES:Gentoo people

[whitelabrat]

YES. After 1000 days of 1% increases... my 486 smokes my AthlonXP. And we paint our computers red (cause red makes them faster), and I lean the CPU on a downhill slope with a fan blowing behind it.

Re:YES:Gentoo people

[DrSkwid]

If you want better heat dissipation you should point your fan up not down. If you point it down the hot air's bouyancy in the cooler air will make it decellerate.

That's my guess anyway =)

Re:YES:Gentoo people

[Megaslow]

And we paint our computers red (cause red makes them faster)

No no no!

Yellow = Performance!

See reference material here, here, here, and here.

And a few stickers wouldnt hurt, either!

Re:YES:Gentoo people

[windex]

That depends. Are computers more like cars, or motorcycles? I will agree "Yellow" is the fact CAR color, but Motorcycles, well, "Black" is scientifically proven to be the fastest color.

We must test. Please bring 2 equivilent $3000+ "racing" PC's in beige boxes. We'll paint one yellow, and one black, and drop both of them from the 10th story of an office building. Whatever hits the ground first wins!

Re:YES:Gentoo people

[EnderWiggin99]

-funroll-loops makes a BIG impact on this test. I guarantee that if you include it in the CFLAGS of the yellow one, it will hit the ground first.

Re:YES:Gentoo people

[EnderWiggin99]

I'm serious man, I really am. Just try it!

=)

Irrelevant links?

[Laurentiu]

Something interesting to look out for, or just more hype from a [developer] often [criticized] even by Gentoo people for not looking before he leaps?"

Both the above links are irrelevant. The "developer" link is currently redirected to the Gentoo distribution, while the "criticized" to a web interface to the gentoo-dev mailing list. I've scanned said mailing list and it looks like a normal discussion to me, the so-called "criticism" is just a difference of viewpoints. I am unwilling to read the whole gentoo-dev and/or learn about the finer points of gentoo's portage just to validate the poster's point of view.

IMHO, only the first sentence looks like news; second is just fingerpointing.

Re:Irrelevant links?

[Anonymous Coward]

IMHO, only the first sentence looks like news; second is just fingerpointing.

I agree completely. Why didn't the Slashdot editors omit that needless and obvious flame?

Re:Irrelevant links?

[Anonymous Coward]

What is mentioned by the flame is true. Just ask anyone that was part of the PPC team for Gentoo...

Why waste the time?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why waste the time porting to opensolaris when they could spend the time working on more optimizations for x86? gentoo and the gentoo community can ALWAYS use more optimization so that our binaries are running at 110% speed.

Re:Why waste the time?

[DrunkenPenguin]

Well, I'm not using Gentoo, but it's not just %10. I get _huge_ performance gains on my 3.2GHz Northwood if I use proper compiler optimizations. I'm using this workstation for audio related tasks. Ardour (Digital Audio Workstation software) and several plugin effects / audio encoders are 30-40% faster compared to precompiled i386 binaries.

Re:Why waste the time?

[WillerZ]

My personal record for CPU usage on x86 is 112%. This was on a Pentium IV with a hand-tuned assembler matrix-vector product program. TO get > 100% you need to keep 1 execution unit fully busy while occasionally using others. In my case, the FPU was maxed out, the memory-unit doing prefetchnta's accounted for most of the rest, and the final few % were the integer unit updating loop counters.

It's pretty hard to do this, and I doubt it's possible for many programs. Feel free to try tho...

Phil

Re:Why waste the time?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's becuase you're comparing it to i386 binaries, which have almost no optimization. Most distros release i686 packages, which will give you most of your performance advantage. A kernel compiled for your architecture will give you most of the rest.

Re:Why waste the time?

[Coryoth]

Well, I'm not using Gentoo, but it's not just %10. I get _huge_ performance gains on my 3.2GHz Northwood if I use proper compiler optimizations. I'm using this workstation for audio related tasks. Ardour (Digital Audio Workstation software) and several plugin effects / audio encoders are 30-40% faster compared to precompiled i386 binaries.

See, for my money I much prefer to let the distribution prepackage binaries for the 98% of stuff that makes up the base system and doesn't really require speed gains (and won't really get any) because that's just easier. Then you can compile your own versions of whatever few applications and libraries you're using that desperately need that extra performance gain. So, for example, in your case I'd just use any old distro and then compile my own version of Ardour, and more importantly compile all the plugins as well, using every trick I can to squeeze the extra performance.

Really, do you get 40% speed gains out of KDE and GNOME? No, not really. So why not let them be prepackaged. How about Python, perl, libXML, Firefox, gettext and all those other bits and pieces? Again, for all it matters they may as well be prepackaged.

The truth is, for speed gains from compiler flags it varies from application to application. For some -ffast-math is a gain, for others not. Likewise with every other flag. Trying to set a bunch of flags for everything is as likely to provide inefficiencies in various bits as gains. Besides, for the majority of applications the speed just isn't that important. KDE spends most of its time idle waiting for input..

Jedidiah.

Re:Why waste the time?

[tesmako]

That is exactly my argument against Gentoo. Why bother compiling every single little application and library with tons of optimization when it is really only ever a few specific applications that will really have any effect on performance?

It is the good old 90/10 rule for optimization, 90% of the time is spent in 10% of the code, there is pretty much nothing to be gained from optimizing most stuff since the bottlenecks are always very local.

Re:gentoo is for riceboys....

[Anonymous Coward]

*Yawn*

Surely you can do better than that don't you think?

Sun's Record

[POLAX]

With Sun's record on "opening" products I would have to say that it may be a waste of the Gentoo community's time since it is a source-based distro and requires that it's platform be open...

Re:Sun's Record

[njcoder]

"With Sun's record on "opening" products I would have to say that it may be a waste of the Gentoo community's time since it is a source-based distro and requires that it's platform be open..."

Please, you could at least try to add some substance to your trollish post. Sun has a pretty good record with opening their products overall. Look at nfs, openoffice.org, netbeans, gridengine, plus the work they do with other projects like gnome, mozilla, various apache projects.

They're the first company taking their commercial unix os and making it opensource.

The only problem they've had opening up their products has been with java. And most real java developers don't wannt an open source java.

Re:Sun's Record

[Junta]

The did Gentoo for OSX, which certainly has a significant chunk of proprietary components. Think just like fink.

Re:Sun's Record

[Anonymous Coward]

If I am not mistaken, add: NIS to the list of Sun's deeds.

Re:Sun's Record

[mungtor]

Umm, yeah. That's why all the daemons are yp*. Sun Yellow Pages.

I think they had to drop that naming convention because of legal hassles from the phone company.

Re:Sun's Record

[POLAX]

So that's not really Gentoo for OSX...just portage. As for Sun open-sourcing their OS...I just happen to think it will be a lot like the open-sourcing of Java - very confused.

BTW -> Subjective as this may be: Most Java devs would welcome Java being opened!

A reading from the Book of Linux

[Hognoxious]

But then, I may be completely and stupid-ly wrong, as linux is completely new to me [or vice-versa]

10. And the LORD spake unto the newbies. And he spake thus:
11. First shalt thou try the Knoppix, for verily, it is a piece of cake to install, yea, even that thou intalleth it not.
12. Then shall thou try the RedHat, for it is eay to install, and it is said "In the site of the Amazon, in the city of Linux, are there books without end, and they mostly covereth the Redhat."
13. Or the SuSe, though it is the Devil's very own bugger to get the isos, but that thou payest.
14. Or Mandrake, if thou art French.
16: And the LORD spoke more saying: what happened to 15? Oh, never mind.
17. And when thou hast three score days uptime upone thine Redhat
18. Or SuSE.
19. Or Mandrake, if thou art French
20. Then canst thou try the Gentoo.
21. Or Debian.

Here endeth the lesson.

Re:A reading from the Book of Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

As a Christian, I must say, this is quite funny! Thanks for the laugh ;)

Re:A reading from the Book of Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

"14. Or Mandrake, if thou art French."

You use Mandrake if you want something that's guaranteed to work for desktop-use, after you've found yet another snag in your preferred distro that prevents you from using that

Try Debian... can't get USB key working... back to Mandrake
Try Slackware... can't get X working... back to Mandrake
Try Redhat... find that they hate the desktop... back to Mandrake
Try Debian stable... can't get recent browsers... back to Mandrake
Try Gentoo... can't install from a modem... back to Mandrake
Try Mepis... GRUB doesn't work on any BIOS you have... back to Mandrake

Mandrake has a choice of 60 or so languages though, so it's not just for the French.

Re:A reading from the Book of Linux

[Hognoxious]

Actually, Mandrake 8 wouldn't even install on my desktop ... froze trying to detect the HD if I remember well. I have MDK pro 9 lying around somewhere but as RH is working fine for my needs right now there's no pressure.

Mandrake is of French origin and it seems to be the most popular distro in France.

Unless you need big iron....

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun is a dinosaur. I just don't see the point of fragmenting the free unix market any further. There are a number of production ready free unices available that will run on dirt cheap commodity hardware at speeds that any Sun gear the masses can afford just can't match.

A business with "enterprise" level needs or requirements for big iron will just spring for an E10000 or whatever Sun is hawking these days rather than twiddle with "openslowlaris (or whatever they're going to call it)" on unsupported hardware.

Cheers,

Google is your friend

[Albanach]

Google is your friend in the acronym war.

Just visit google and search for define: phb

Pointy-Haired Boss. A creation of Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame.

Re:Google is your friend

[IdleTime]

emerge wtf && wtf phb

anti-fork()

[4of12]

It seems to me that opening up Solaris might allow the good ideas from Solaris to seep into other open source trees, mainly Linux, but possibly also the BSDs as well.

Likewise, the odd device drivers and binary compatibility with Linux that would be valuable for Solaris/x86 could seep into the Solaris codebase.

In essence, this could reverse the 1980's schism in UNIX where every RISC hardware vendor created their own slightly different flavor of UNIX (SunOS, AIX, HP/UX, Irix, DG/UX, OSF/1, UNICOS, etc.)

But given how late Sun has opened up Solaris (they would have done much better doing this in 1995), I suspect the Linux codebase will be the larger Borg than Solaris.

Re:anti-fork()

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems to me that opening up Solaris might allow the good ideas from Solaris to seep into other open source trees, mainly Linux, but possibly also the BSDs as well.

Yeah, because all the tedious re-coding of things that Sun developed was getting to be a pain. Much easier to take the idea and the source.

Acronym Finder

[UltimateRobotLover]

Acronym finder is your friend! (7th entry)

Dev's a tool...

[hawkeye]

The referred to developer is a tool. I just hope he doesn't come up with similar "solutions" for OpenSolaris.

- Hawkeye

Gen2 Flamage Tangent

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, and it comes complete with the patented Gentoo 3-week "quick install" procedure. (Yeah, like my boss'l go for that timetable on the next project) Of course, that's only a symptom of the eletist mentality that drives the entire project.

I mean spare me the "If they don't know what a u-joint is, they've got no business driving a car". Fact is the only reason Linux even gives the Evil Empire a second thought is the user-friendly features that bring it to the multidues.

Gentoo, despite some brilliant ideas, is sending the reputation of Linux back to the bronze age of useability.

That's not so difficult

[musalmik]

It's easy to use your P4 cpu more than 100% in this meaning. Just participate in the mersenne prime search. The P4 client is highly optimized assembly. When you look inside the source, you find comments like

The FDIV takes 39 clocks and only the last two can overlap with other float instructions. This gives us 37 clocks to do something useful with the integer units.

However, how did you measure your 112% value?

Maik

Re:That's not so difficult

[WillerZ]

With /usr/bin/time -- it's an average over the entire program's runtime. I was trying to write the fastest matrix multiplier I could, not to try and set a usage record. With plain C, optimised by gcc of the time, my n-a-side matrix, n-vector product took just under 2 minutes. With hand-rolled assembler, it took 50 seconds. I forget what n was, but 8*n*(n+1) bytes fit into main memory.

Interestingly, the ratio of times and the ratio of processor usage didn't seem very strongly correllated, so I guess the gcc-generated code was doing executing a lot of unnecessary instructions (that or a stalled load counts as usage).

Phil

GNU /is/ Unix

[shrykk]

"GNU's Not Unix" is a joke, because GNU definitely is a Unix, it's just not Unix(TM).

The whole aim of GNU was to create "a complete Unix-compatible software system", a free system that worked just like commercial Unices. Stallman himself stated something along the lines of innovation being unimportant compared to producing a totally free system. So a large part of early GNU work was replicating common unix utilities.

I'm curious...

[wild_berry]

You implicitly suggest that Amazon runs Gentoo-flavour GNU/Linux on its servers. Can you back that up?

Does anyone know which Linux they have or if Amazon roll their own entirely?

Use dispatch-conf

[Andy Dodd]

Adds version control for the config file replacement system, and lets you see what changes are going to be made.

It's much nicer than etc-update

Re:Use dispatch-conf

[cayenne8]

I did emerge search dispatch-conf, and it returned nothing...is this an app. that is part of another program package?

Bashdot?

[Andy Dodd]

I've been willing to forgive a lot of editorial inconsistencies on the part of the /. editors (dupes, etc)... Overall they've done a good job, it's hard to manage such a large site with so much traffic.

But please, stop posting all this unsubstantiated slander and bashing in the stories. First there was the bashing of Six Apart when they were purchasing LiveJournal, without ANY evidence WHY Six Apart was bad or even why the author didn't like them. (Which directly conflicts with everything I've heard from personal friends on LJ's staff, who were all extremely happy about the buyout - Many of them who were contractors with LJ were promoted to full time when SA purchased LJ.)

Now there is a story directly bashing a person, not just a company, with no real evidence as to why that person would deserve such bashing. The mailing list looks to ME like the developer in question politely handling complaints from a rather whiny user.

Really, it's getting out of hand...

Re:Bashdot?

[j1bb3rj4bb3r]

libel with a heaping side of slander anyone?

Re:Bashdot?

[Anonymous Coward]

Er, you mean UNLIKE every single person that posts a REPLY to /.?!?!?

Of course the story submitters are posters, so uh... that would require a complete change of programmed /. group-think on the part of the submitter to overcome this "problem". Course if they could do that then they should be able to do it while posting too and uh... /. might become a real information site.

We can't have that can we?

No, in the end this IS BashDot after all isn't it? I actually call it "SlagDot" when mentioning it to people. That's what 99% of the posters seem to like and want out of it so why would you expect anything different in the article submissions?

You should probably get out now before your mental health suffers too much. It's already too late for me. :(

Re:Bashdot?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Now there is a story directly bashing a person, not just a company, with no real evidence as to why that person would deserve such bashing. The mailing list looks to ME like the developer in question politely handling complaints from a rather whiny user."

Actually all the complaints were from other Gentoo developers. :)

Re:Bashdot?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention the 'solution' he suggested was a HUGE hack ... as has been a good chunk of the work he's done there. And that solution could have been handled properly a long while ago, but it was 'too much work'. Before you talk about unwarranted bashing you might want to do a little research.

That particular developer has a habit of lurking, announcing things that "he" has done (that other's have done and he took credit for), and for the thngs he's done they are generally quite half assed at best. I don't think any of his work could be called complete by any means, at least nothing I've used (and I used to work with him on a couple of the ports but have since left due to the poor work ethic and QA).

adjacent chip communication

[Anonymous Coward]

This is an extension to Sun's Dr. Robert Drost work on wireless chip to chip communication.

It is posted on /. to make it known and also, most importantly, make it public domain.

These ideas are public domain

Wireless chip to chip communication generalizes into a x by y 2d grid of chips where each chip has 2 functions: a) do its own internal processing and b) route data from adjacent chips to adjacent chips.

This would allow an arbritrary layout of chips, location indepence of each chip, as well as much lower design/manufacturing costs because the circuit board would just be an x by y grid of chip sockets.

Consider using a routing table inside each chip to store the adjacent chip that leads to the shortest path to the destination chip.

This is the ant mound type of network routing.

Redundancy would help here because each chip could be general purpose and therefore take on CPU functionality when more compute power is needed, network routing when needed, graphics processing when needed. This means that the computer could handle multiple chip failures and still function.

NOTE: The article that contains basic information about chip to chip communication is here:
http://www.sun.com/presents/minds/2004-1115 /?biga= 15

pvdabeel's mess

[Tester]

pvd is not only known for the MacOS-X mess (when he brough in a bunch of unexperienced and mostly incompetent developers), but also for the basc problems (which is a statistics client for some website... but was full of security problems and is a never ending source of policy breakage)...

At least, OpenSolaris is Open Source software unlike MacOS-X (There is also a Gentoo/Darwin project... but no one is taking it seriously).

how is this linux related?

[Anonymous Coward]

I see no Linux here.

Standard sloppy editor complaint

[fm6]

According to this week's Gentoo Weekly Newsletter, Gentoo is planning a port to Sun's partially-announced OpenSolaris.

A port of what? I wasted a couple of minutes trying to understand how you can port an OS to an OS. Turns out that they're porting a Gentoo application (Portage). What's an editor for, if they can't clear up ambiguities like this?

Re:Standard sloppy editor complaint

[lachlan76]

Well what do you think Gentoo is, if not portage?

Re:Standard sloppy editor complaint

[fm6]

I thought it was a Linux distro.

Re:Standard sloppy editor complaint

[lachlan76]

The only real difference from anything else is Portage. When you install it, you get a kernel, gcc, glibc. etc. etc, as well as Portage.

Take out portage, and you've have basically got LFS.

Re:Standard sloppy editor complaint

[fm6]

Which is not obvious to somebody who's never used Gentoo.

Re:Standard sloppy editor complaint

[lachlan76]

Fair enough....installing it is a learning experience in itself ;)

Overambitious developer?

[pvdabeel]

I wrote a response to this article in my blog

Cool I got mentioned on Slashdot.

[Stonent1]

That was my idea initially.

Portaris

Re:Cool I got mentioned on Slashdot.

[digifuzz]

*gives you a cookie*

But can you do THIS!?

[insert impossible feat here]

OpenSolaris?

[AstroDrabb]

Has anyone been able to get to the site? It is /.ed for me. I have been wondering just how "open" OpenSolaris is. Could I take the whole code to Solaris and release Bozo-OpenSolaris tomorrow? I have my doubts about that.

Linux and GNU software truly are open. I can go and create foobar-Linux tomorrow if I wanted to. Linus has granted pretty much open access to his trademark on Linux.

I honestly would really like to know just how open OpenSolaris really is. If is is as "open" as Java, well, than that is not very open IMO. I can't go and modify Java and still call it Java. I can't go and enhance Java and still call it Java. I need permission first. I don't really consider that "open".

From my perspective, it looks as if OpenSolaris is really nothing more then a marketing ploy to try to undermine GNU/Linux.

Re:OpenSolaris?

[Anonymous Coward]

Read the CDDL license - it's open... (real open source license...)

It all depends..

[EvilStein]

I worked for some dickhead that said "Gentoo is not a production ready operating system and never will be." This moron also insisted on standardizing on Red Hat. We ended up having more trouble with the Red Hat boxes than the small farm of Gentoo servers that I managed. (web/mail, 500,000 emails per day average)

I wouldn't blame the OS. It's just how to manage it, that's all.

It's been that way

[EvilStein]

It didn't load yesterday either, well before this article was posted. A link to it came out in the Gentoo Newsletter.

OpenSolaris???

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that the latest addition to the oxymoron list, right up there with "military intelligence" and "Microsoft innovation"???

And by the way, didn't Sun give money to SCO, thus indirectly funding their attack on open source?

But does it run Linux?

[Joshua53077]

Oh....crap....forget it

full text?

[ArbitraryConstant]

Google doesn't have those phrases... do you know where I could find the full text?

pkgsrc: works fine on Solaris - today!

[hubertf]

Check out www.pkgsrc.org and http://www.feyrer.de/Texts/Own/21c3-pkgsrc-paper.p df

pkgsrc is a portable packages collection similar to portage, which works on Solaris, Linux, *BSD and some others today, with several thousand applications readily available.

- Hubert