Slashdot Mirror
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."
does not an open source project make. Sun best get their act together and encourage active open development of their platform if they ever want to catch up to the momentum of Linux. Of course, maybe they're going the way of the BSD operating systems and think they can get by with a closed team of developers.
How we know is more important than what we know.
While Solaris x86 is a supported platform from Sun, the bread and butter for Solaris has always been the Sparc platforms, so I'm not surprised the x86 version is not as polished.
What does Solaris get you?
- Guaranteed binary compatibility from the smallest SunFire V100 to the largest 96-CPU capable StarFire boxes.
- Excellent platform stability and predictiability. I have never had to recompile my Solaris kernel to support a memory upgrade. Happened to me with RHEL 2.1 on a production site.
- Excellent and consistent hardware quality
- Reasonable price/performance for some situations. Last I checked, a 4-way SunFire V440 was cheaper than an equivalent Intel box, and far far cheaper than anything from IBM.
I've worked with all flavors of Unix from AIX to Solaris, to HP-UX, to Linux, and I've been running Linux since 1998 in one form or another. My favorite production-grade Unix is still Solaris.
*That* was a comprehensive and well-written review? Bah!
Perhaps timothy should have read it before taking the poster's word.
Mind the gap...
RE: both posts;
sounds like Solaris is more trouble than its worth, i will stick with Linux...
BS. You've obviously got a big chip on your shoulder. Sun is far more responsive than any of their main competitors/"partners" in the data center space.
With Sun you are lost if your problem is not one of their priorities.
And this is different from getting a bug fixed in firefox or Gnome how?
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Very fragile install process (pop in the wrong CD just once, and start over from scratch...)
/usr/ccs/bin/make, /usr/sfw/bin/gcc. Find is your friend, but locate has left you stranded... /usr/sfw -- sunfreeware. It's a pity that Solaris isn't set up exactly like Linux, isn't it? What's stopping you from installing your own Gnu Make (which is better than sun make) somewhere that you'd like?
That's funny, I install Solaris from a Jumpstart server, and it installs fine every time. What are these CDs you mention?
Refuses to create a Solaris partition if a Linux Swap partition is present (... because both share the same partition id 82, but other OS'es at least give you the option of "ignore this partition, and create a new one instead!"
Once again, I never had this problem installing Solaris on top of linux on my Sun Blade 100, Ultra 60, or Ultra 5/10.
Poor dependancy management in the installer (the Solaris installer does flag broken dependancies, but unlike most Linux distros does not have a button to "resolve" these automatically)
Do you really feel comfortable having a program automatically installing packages for you on an ENTERPRISE system? I know exactly what packages I want, and when I want them installed. Having a package manager 'know better' than me would be a huge mistake when people actually rely on your services.
No straightforward way to configure a Swiss-German keyboard
These people would probably beg to differ. Also, I think Java Desktop works wonders. Honestly, I know nothing about internationalization, so I'll shutup now.
On one of my two laptops, X Display was all messed up after install. Fortunately, there was still an xf86config-like script lying around.
Good for you! Where's the problem here?
poor hardware support (on both laptops, I had to download extra drivers from the net to get Ethernet... and the only way to get these drivers on the Laptop in the first place was to burn a CD.... One of the two Ethernet cards was a via-rhine, not exactly uncommon hardware!)
A laptop is obviously not the intended installation target machine for Solaris. Please stand by while I cry you a river that you had to install drivers. Don't like it? Use MacOSX or something.
Unobvious paths for some sundry utils
They make sense to me.
I'm glad we've come to the same conclusion -- Solaris IS NOT Linux. You're not using it in the way it was intended, so it seems clunky and difficult to manage. Your complaints mostly revolve around the fact that since Solaris is not set up exactly the same, and is not as easy to administer than Linux, that it's unusable. Solaris is a really crummy desktop system. I would say that if you went from Linux to Solaris with no training, reading, or prior preparation, you would probably find it quite unusable.
Solaris is ornery on Intel hardware. Linux was pretty ornery too in its first few years on x86. I run a fairly large Solaris setup (15k+ users) and when we've looked at Linux, it takes a lot more work on the part of the sysadmin to ensure that the system doesn't flake out. Solaris on Sun hardware kicks ass for us. It may not kick ass for you. That doesn't mean it's unusable. I bet a tractor trailer would be unusable at first to your everyday SUV driver!
In other words, you do not know what you are doing. And you are writing drivers.
Great!
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
which is why they "open-sourced" 10
The way that Solaris 10 is to be open sourced was approved by the OSI under the CDDL license, so no need for those "quotes". If you don't approve, complain about the OSI. Just because it is not GPL, does not mean it is not open source.
Horseshit. "Setting up paths, shells and patches" is the idiot work of system administration. It is the stuff you learn on the first day or two of the job. Redefining system administration to even include trivial crap like figuring out $PATH dumbs down the profession.
A programmer should know how to administer his own machine.
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
well played troll... i'll bite.
/usr/sfw.
/opt/sfw.
...
No need to be a dick. He ran into reasonable problems with some of Solaris' rough edges.
next, don't trust solaris x86 on any hardware that doesn't say sun on the outside
Bull. S10 is humming along just fine on my 2 CPU Dell, my Thinkpad T42 (modulo the Centrino-based Wifi), my homebrewed Epia file server, and my homebrewed 2-way Opteron system. Solaris doesn't have the driver support of Linux, but it still runs on a ton of different hardware.
Solaris x86 is basically a direct port from sparc
No. Solaris is Solaris. The Solaris running on your x86 machine is exactly the same as the Solaris running on your SPARC. Obviously there is some platform-specific code, but it is _not_ a port. They are built from the exact same source tree.
All non-sun software goes to
Or
Welcome to Solaris, if you don't like it, leave and keep preaching for
Again, don't be a dick. He was trying to use Solaris and ran into trouble. It happens. If you look at the rest of the thread, it's obvious that he is looking for suggestions, and is willing to try them out. Do you actually think your semi-informed arrogance is going to make anybody more interested in using Solaris?
- Old Man of the Mountain ---- "I want to disturb my neighbor"
And they play movies and music just fine too. Heck, you can even get a USB player/drive fob for solaris at nextcomeurope
We installed SMTPd, and *shock horror*, the machine accepts connections on port 25!!
We installed fingerd, and *shock horror*, it works!
What an insecure, buggy OS Solaris must be!
Many ports a listed as a vulnerability on the grounds that some old versions of these servers had vulnerabilities. Others are listed simply because they're open, and accepting connections as they should. What on Earth did you expect?
Say Nessus found no ports open whatsoever. What use do you think that box is going to be? Sure you'll think it's uber 1337 secure, because you can't connect to it, but in most Solaris installations, the ability to actually connect to the machine is actually of some use.
Attitude indeed. If you want to bash Solaris, then please do so. If you want to bash McNealy, then send email to scooter@sun.com. Please refrain from confusing the two.
I wrote some code on a SS2 about 12 years ago and found it recently when I was cleaning up things - just as a joke I pushed it onto a SPARC Solaris 10 system I was testing and it *ran*. It didn't whine about libc, or piss and moan about the kernel version, it just ran. That's stability.
Solaris 10 suffers from comparison with linux only in that it's not linux. It stands on it's own as a world-class platform with incredible stability and longevity. Folks, use the right tool for the job and leave the religious arguments for the trolls.
Have we all grown so polarized we can't accept a decent OS that's a bit different?
P.S.
BTW - the "review" left out most of the nicer Solaris 10 features - go read some other reviews to get a better scope of that's there, or just pull it down and play with it.
Organization? You must be joking..