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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."
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.
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!