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Take A Look At Solaris 10
SilentBob4 writes "There haven't been many reviews of the recent Solaris 10 release from Sun Microsytems, and even those which are available are thin at best... until now. Mad Penguin, normally a Linux-only site, has release the most comprehensive and well-written review of the OS to date."
Enterprise computing. The names "Oracle" and "Solaris" are often spoted together, usually in the same sentance. Oracle may have made Linux a supported platform, hell it might even be their prefered platform, but dyed in the wool DBA's still tend to stick with Solaris.
Yup, I'm sure he thinks Linux is the real Unix.
Google:
Results 1 - 10 of about 3,780 for "solaris 10 review".
------- Code to try when you're bored: qsort( 0, UINT_MAX, sizeof( int* ), IntCompare );
Say no to software patents.
Actually, there are many (mostly-legacy) applications that will ONLY run on the "older" Unicies.
I worked for a number of years doing SysAdmin/Infrastructure-Architectural work for various global banks. The majority of the niche applications used to provide complex financial services are STILL not ported to "modern" unix-like OS's.
As an example, DST International's (http://www.dstinternational.com) HiPortfolio product will only run on IBM's AIX and Sun's Solaris as it's Unix OS platform. The reason for this is the product is so damned old and ingrained into that specific industry, the company can afford to ignore their customers demands and not re-invest potential profit in expensive porting exercises... You can get away with murder by holding a monopoly on most of the large Asset-Management businesses.
If a bunch of clever programmers got together and wrote some clean, horizontally-scaling, easily intergrated applications to destroy the hold of these monopolistic "niche" software products, they could really make some money (and the world would be better off with one less monopoly market).
A Man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties -- Albert Einstein
Hey, wouldn't they tend to stick with DB/2 on IBM mainframes? At least in the financial sector they do. They wouldn't touch such newfangled technology as Solaris and Oracle with a ten-foot pole ;-)
Say no to software patents.
Sun Microsystems has recently released Solaris 10. It is currently free, as in beer, and most of it is promised to be released under an OSI approved license in the second quarter of 2005. Most everyone reading this probably knows all of that. The release and subsequent open sourcing of Solaris 10 has caused quite an uproar in the Open Source community and the IT industry as a whole. Linux advocates have been fighting Solaris advocates on forums across the Internet. The zealotry and misrepresentation from both sides has been really quite impressive. However, I am a BSD user. I am not on either side and will do my best to allow neither zealotry nor misrepresentation into this review.
Please continue reading after you have stopped laughing.
All political issues aside, Solaris 10 is a very impressive OS. It has some features no other operating system can claim and some that are not necessarily new, but have been implemented in an excellent way. This is not to say it is perfect. There are definitely things I dislike and areas that seem quite unpolished.
One of those aforementioned unpolished areas is the installation routine. It can be assumed that Solaris will not be installed by a novice. Even so, the Solaris install is painful and brings with it memories of Windows 2000 installs of old. This is not because its difficult, it is not. The installation is simply unwieldy. My main complaints are the following:
* You must partition, install a small base system and reboot to finish the install. I expect an OS to be installable without a reboot.
* For the first section of the install there is a web browser in the background, but for unknown reasons there is no browser in the second section.
* You have to switch CD's during the install, which is fine, but you can't just switch and walk away. You have to wait for it to read the CD and display another screen and then press next. There is probably a reason for this, but I just find it annoying.
Issues like these make the installation routine seem unfinished and just don't fit with the overall quality of the OS.
Upon booting Solaris for the first time, you are greeted by dtlogin. This is the default graphical login manager for Solaris and plainly has CDE roots. At this point, there is a drop-down menu in which you can choose to go back to a console login or choose which wm/dm to enter, both CDE and JDS3 are options. I am sure CDE has many great features and I know that some people love it. However, I am not one of them. JDS3 on the other hand is a nicely polished GNOME desktop. The theme and general feel is much improved over Sun's earlier versions. Nothing is very remarkable about JDS3, except network browsing. I have never seen any GNOME desktop do as well with windows and NIX network browsing.
There are things I dislike about JDS. As a media player, Sun has chosen the "Java Media Player." This program has no redeeming factors. XMMS or Rhythmbox would be much better choices. They also tapped Mozilla to be the web browser, not Firefox. With FF gaining more and more attention, this choice makes very little sense to me. However, those are my only complaints about JDS3 and they are small ones.
Nobody is considering Solaris 10 because of JDS3 or its installation routine. They are looking at it because of new features like DTrace, Zones and the new Service Management Framework. Indeed, it has been quite awhile since we have seen a release of any OS with as many large features as Solaris 10.
DTrace
One of the main new features in Solaris 10 is DTrace, a dynamic instrumentation system. DTrace consists of a scripting language, named D (not to be confused with the fledgling D Programming Language), and loadable kernel modules named "providers." When called upon, these "providers" track and report system information. DTrace has several features that separate it from other similar systems:
* It is dynamic. DTrace has no effect on system performance when not in use. Only those providers t
Ah, Solaris 10, the rootkit writers friend.
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Which makes it even more astonishing that it is so hard to get out of it. No Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to zap the X-server, no Ctrl-Alt-F1 to switch virtual consoles, etc. The only straightforward way is the "console login" drop down menu, which is kind of useless in the case the screen is so messed-up that you don't see it...
Fortunately there is another way: if you are a fast typer, and manage to log in on the console before X would start, you stay in text mode.
Say no to software patents.
My own background: Written linux and Windows NT/XP drivers, and I have set up many linux (mostly debian) and windows workstatiosn
/etc/default. but that doesn't work. And i didn't feel like going like going through cartwheels changing the large number of files required to do this manually.
/bin/sh to bash. I tried this using the SMC, but that gave me an error, so I ended up having to do this from /etc/passwd.
... to work, you have to set up the PATHs manually. I did this via /etc/profile, although I was surprised that none of this was already done. As there was no word on what the proper PATH should be I had to guess a bit, and finally found what I wanted:b in:/usr/c cs/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
/opt/sfw/bin/ /usr/ccs/bin/ /usr/sfw/bin/ /opt/csw/bin/pkg-get
i have been assigned the job of writing my company's pci card driver for solaris 9, and for this purpose i was given an old ultrasparc IIe sparc workstation with solaris 9. After a bit of frustration with trying to setup paths for root, and login shells, and patches, and packages. I decided to just clean install solaris 10. After downloading 5 cds (not including documentation cd) from solaris, I proceeded to install the system.
Installation:
partitioning wizard sucks. defaults are fine, but if you want to change it, then it is just unpleasant.
network setup : it doesn't request a Hostname, and for the life of my system, I have hostname unknown. No big deal, except for a few errors that it prints. I have looked at sun's site, and the recommended way of changing this is sys-unconfig - with a few changes to dhcpagent in
Configuration:
I loaded up root's profile using the Java Desktop Environment (JDE). Nice looking. But it has no link to the Sun Management Console (SMC). I looked through all the menus and I couldn't figure out how to graphically (in the solaris way) add users. Of course I could've used useradd, but i really wanted to configure the system in the solaris prescribed manner. If you use Common Desktop Environment (CDE), then you do have a link to SMC. I had to run smc from console, and then I was able to set up users.
I wanted to change root's shell from
I installed the solaris 10 with a full (COMPLETE) install. Yet when I look for emacs either in the JDE menus or via the a call to emacs from the terminal, i get nothing. to get emacs and a large number of the other programs including gcc ld vim
PATH=/opt/sfw/bin:/usr/sfw/bin:/opt/csw/
emacs and gcc are in
ld is in
wget is in
i installed the package pkg-get, and that went into
If you run the SMC, and you try to add patches, it won't work, it says something about installing patch pro manager. You can't install that b/c it is not on the website, it only lists patch pro for solaris 8 and 9. I finally found that in Solaris 10, the patch manager comes built in, not that there is some easy way to know this. you must run pprosvc.
Driver writing:
I did a full install of solaris, yet I didn't get the program cc, and since all of their driver tutorials refer to using cc, this created some issues for me. (cc is installed with Sun Studio). I switched to gcc, but gcc doesn't accept the same parameters as cc, but i found out after lots of wasted time, that cc -xarch=v9 is equivalent to gcc -m64 -mcpu=v9. of course you can't use the ld from gnu, you have to use solaris's ld to link.
I am now struggling to get some automatic dev links to be created in solaris, and as with everything else that I have encountered under this OS, it is being extremely painful.
I can say one thing for Solaris 10, and that is that the JDE look great. (although it doesn't have links to the apps that I installed, and is missing the SMC). Visually wise it is nicer looking than some other windowing environments I have seen, as is much better looking than CDE
nachum
The reviewer miss in his zones explanation the part about Resource Manager. This is simply a zSeries like WorkLoad Manager tool. It allows to assign processing power per process and per zone, and also physical and virtual memory per user. Simply put, if you have 3 process running, you can assign each process 1/3rd of the processing power of the system, 1/3rd of the physical memory to each process (so no process force a page-out for all the others), and the same amount of virtual memory as the hole system memory (as long as the working set for each process fits in) to avoid memory leak problems.
Other point is that the installer have a bug and although it asks if you want the 1st CD to auto pop-up, it wont work, you need to take it out before it starts the installation all over again. Some bouilds have a message reporting this error (instead of fixing it...).
Binary compatibility is withit the ABI for the same platform (obviously, you can't move a SPARC binary to an Opteron box). The good part is that source files will written using the standar ABI will recompily straight.
The main-point with any other OS than Linux is that rigth-now companies seems more likely to die than the hole Linux movement (or however you want to call it).
Compare the install process for Oracle 9i on Redhat Enterprise 2 or 3 against that for Solaris 9 (on Sparc) and you'll see why Solaris still has a real future. To get Oracle to install on Redhat you have to downgrade libraries so that Oracle can link its executables and during this stage your machine is in an unbootable state until you upgrade your libraries.
I've programmed professionally on Unix since the late 80's and been an admin on Solaris since the mid 90's. During this time I have seen the evolution of Linux and been a Linux user/admin since 1994 so I feel that I speak about both Operating systems from real experience.
My conclusion is this: In a professional environment run Solaris unless you have a compelling reason to run Linux. Quite simply Solaris is industrial strength OS and Redhat (I can't speak about other distros) is not there yet.
At home I run Linux because a couple of emulators (hercules and qemu) are only available on Linux (my compelling reason) and there is better device support.
My prediction is that Linux will be a major force in the low end of the market but pentration into the higher end of the market will be limited because factors other then the cost of the OS become more important to the decision making process.
Many Linux users have a PC-centric view of computing that leads to the rather naive question that started this thread.