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A Comprehensive Look at Solaris 10
sebFlyte writes "After linking to Mad Penguin's first look all seems to have gone quiet on the Solaris 10 front. ZDNet now has a comprehensive review up, and are cautiously positive about the OS, though, as they say: 'as an alternative to Linux, it doesn't yet deliver.'"
Seems like just yesterday people were saying Linux doesn't yet deliver as an alternative to Solaris.
Anonymous Luddite: "What do you think of the dehumanizing effects of the Internet?"
Andy Grove: "Not Much."
'tis but a few paragraphs long and summarised thus:
- it's not open source
- it's picky about its hardware
- Linux compatibility limited to i686 RHEL3 compatibility
- good docs, pay-for support, bundled stuff
- it's proprietry, stick to Linux
To start with, it's faster than any previous Solaris implementation, with a slick new IP stack just one of many performance enhancements.
What's it like to have a new release of your server operating system that isn't slower?
I'm a big tall mofo.
'as an alternative to Linux, it doesn't yet deliver
Does anyone actually think it will? It looks like a fine upgrade for shops that are already heavily invested in Solaris, but I highly doubt that Solaris 10 (or 11 or 12 or 25 for that matter) will ever really be a 'Linux alternative'. Why would anyone using Linux go for a closed, proprietary Unix flavor? They cattle are stampeding in the other direction and will continue to do so.
Solaris 10 on an ultrasparc is the best thing cince sliced bread. It is the best solaris yet and makes older sun hardware very useable. YES I have gentoo running on ultrasparcs and a sparcstation 5 and those have their place. But if you really need to run sun specific software on sun hardware solaris 10 is certianly a step foreward.
Maybe if a PC mag would stick to their intel and windurs operating systems they might continue to be somewhat knowlegeable...
what's next? SCO magazine going to comment on OSX?
Anyway, the Linux compatibility isn't in the mainstream Solaris distribution yet. That's planned for later this year.
Unfortunately the team that wrote the Linux emlation system got laid off earlier this year...
as an alternative to Linux, it doesn't yet deliver.
Am I the only person who finds this statement insanely hilarious? Maybe it's just my time spent as a sysadmin, but it seems to me that just a few/several years ago Linux was said to not deliver as an alternative to Solaris. A statement like that has got to really sting Sun.
My, my how times change.
Ender-
Nothing to see here
All they did was test out installing on sundry hardware platforms. Thats no real life test because people who use Solaris will match the hardware to the OS, and not the other way around.
They briefly mentioned Janus, ZFS, zones (maybe) and the improved tcp/ip stack.
They said it was faster than previous versions.
Thats it ?
Oh, and its not a good alternative for linux ? On the sole basis that you can't install it on any hardware ? Utter BS! Yes, its a true statement, but probably the worst basis for comparison.
Having worked side-by-side with thousands of CPUs of Linux and Solaris, its still Linux that isn't a good alternative to Solaris.
I remember cutting my teeth on SunOS and Solaris starting back in 93/94. They were amazing innovators and almost single-handedly brought Unix into the enterprise. Here is a short list of technologies that were developed largely by Sun:
o The name service switch (nsswitch)
o Network Information Service (NIS/NIS+)
o Network File System (NFS)
o Pluggable Authentication Module (PAM)
I know we make fun of NIS and NFS today as being old and insecure, but in 1993 it was the only way to provide single-sign-on and meet other enterprise requirements for scalability.
I ask Sun, where are you innovating now? Are you providing leadership in LDAP / Directory Services? Nope. Are you providing leadership in distributed computing? Nope, that would be Linux and Open Source. Are you providing leadership in software development? Well, you developed Java, but it took the Free / Open Source guys to make Ant, Junit, Jmeter and other tools to make it really usable.
If Sun wants to drive, it needs to stop complaining from the back seat. It needs to start acting like it did back in the 1990's by developing solutions to enterprise problems and then showing the rest of the market how its done. Leaders lead and right now Sun is like some crotchity old man complaining about "the damn kids". Well, "the damn kids" are too busy driving right now to care about your CDDL and Solaris 10.
DaGoodBoy
My God! It's full of Voids!
5GB for a minimum install? So much for making a "Schwarz's floppy which has a root filesystem and is also bootable".
At least now we know how many gigabytes the kitchen sink takes up: 2
If thou see a fair woman pay court to her, for thus thou wilt obtain love
Let's face it. You can have the most unbelievable OS on the planet with the most advanced features, but if people can't get a hold of it and can't figure out how to use the features, why bother. As the article stated Solaris 10 is a no-brainer for existing Solaris customers.
.001 % of what one might want to do. Linux is getting better, but it is still severely lacking.
What Linux *represents* (and definitely does not yet provide), is ease of use combined with power. There are very high-end computing companies (like SGI) that are still in business but aren't really relevant to an "end user". But Linux, by virtue of running on commodity hardware, becomes much more available, and has a level of integration with the GUI and hardware that Solaris does not even come close to.
That said, on the point of GUI integration, Solaris->Linux as Linux->Windows. Windows makes everything intuitive and possible from the GUI, with the exception of perhaps
It seems overall that Linux has a GUI just for looks, just so that it doesn't look archaic, but it is not expected to run in entirely in such a manner. The developers need to take responsibility for this and make it a priority. Sit and watch someone try to do something, and then go fix it. Stop scratching their own itch and scratch someone elses for a while.
With Solaris, though, you really can't even begin to manage a system without the command line. It's at least 50 times worse than Linux in this regard. You can't add drivers, configure hardware, configuring networking, or do any of that from the GUI. It's really targeted more at the enterprise, which is fine. But don't represent it as something that I, as a small shop (that runs tons of Java development stuff) would bother with. I have five customers all running SuSE and I won't go near Solaris because it's such a pain to use from the GUI. I have enough to do without getting back into CLI system administration.
... is enough to keep any Linux user away.
:(
But the worst though has to be the bugs present on x86; Isnt the move away from microsoft meant to INCREASE stability.
With these bugs, unfortunately, we are back to block A
Pity, I was looking forward to it.
Yeah, we've been getting a slew of articles these days on Solaris 10 that "review" the product by simply reading the marketing materials. Also, yet another article on Solaris 10 that tries to only look at the x86 version, and then complains when it doesn't measure up. Well guess what? The x86 version of Solaris has NEVER measured up. Sol 10 is Sun's first attempt at changing that, and it truely won't go anywhere (beyond their approved-compatable hardware) until 3rd parties get more invested in development.
/etc files don't do anything," "oh, they use something called NetInfo," "back to babbling")
Solaris 10 is first and foremost an UltraSPARC-based OS. That's where it runs best, supports almost all the hardware, and is all around a good thing. (Though the x86-64 version should be interesting down the line, as I hear Sun is now working on Opteron servers entirely of their own motherboard design.)
I just wish, for once, someone would review the OS by actually USING IT on the proper hardware, and talk about new and interesting features that aren't blabbed about on the shiney sheets thrown around by marketing.
For example, one of the biggest and most obvious new features of Solaris 10 (that doesn't make the list of "Zones! Self-healing! ZFS, when we finish it!" would have to be the Service Management Facility. They've completely redone the entire framework of how services are managed (i.e. "init.d", "inetd", etc.), to even include service dependency tracking and allow non-dependent services to start in parallel (making big systems boot a lot faster).
At least all of the MacOS X articles by journals like this were the result of actually trying to use and explore the OS itself. (Even if they were formulaic, and pretty much involved saying "this is cool", "hey, the
As desktop OS I suppose. As much as I like linux, Solaris IS a good choice for servers - and the download is gratis, and it will be open sourced soon.
I don't think Solaris will beat redhat & cia though. With linux 2.6 scaling to 512 CPUs boxes and huge storage devices, is no longer a toy
Sun had been claiming they will open source all of Solaris using a recognized (OSI approved) license. On and off they've been claiming this for many years. They've been playing the same game with Java. It's prolly just a marketing ploy or stock pumping move.
"Doesn't yet deliver?".
On the basis that *gasp* it's proprietary? When was the last time you saw a ZDNet reviewer lambast Windows because it's proprietary? The reviewer sounds like some childish linux fanboy attempting to take cheap potshots at a sturdy, well-featured, commercial OS with a heck of a lot of new *useful* features (Dtrace, Janus, ZFS, all of which he either fails to mention, or writes some bogus statement showing he doesn't understand them).
Here's a quote from a osnews comment on the story:
Very Funny
By Smartpatrol (IP: ---.galileo.com) - Posted on 2005-04-21 22:34:38
I almost choked when he mentioned Solaris as a Linux alternative....What?
To begin with, it's important to understand that you're still dealing with a proprietary OS here.
So what! spoken like a true Linux zealot! Its a question of usability and picking the best tool to enable business. Not whether or not the product you choose supports the OSS religion or not...what a wanker this guy is.
Speaking of features, his comments are supreficial at best, and show a profound lack of knowledge. He never mentions what this magical hardware that doesn't work with the OS is, he is assumedly too lazy to see the DVD image download on the page he links to, and he whines childishly about the download - can ZDNet somehow not afford cable internet?
Also, last time I checked, many linux distros came on quite a few cds...let's see, Fedora comes on how many discs again? How about Suse? Mandrake? Even my beloved Slackware is two...
How about judging an OS on useability, features, stability, and how it fits the purposes it was designed for? Not some blatant rant on your own fanatical adherence to your pet ideology, and some idiotic statements on a product you probably haven't even actually tested...and reading comments on alt.linux doesn't count as testing it...
cya,
victor
Cons:
...so? People who use Solaris10 on desktop computers are pussies anyway. UFS is still an excellent filesystem, and Solaris10 has a lot of improvements that make it a big step up from Solaris 9/8. Solaris is for Big Servers, not mincy little desktop PC that is made with the cheapest parts on the block. I like linux. Really! I'm even beginning to warm up to Windows (*duck*), but when it comes to heavy computing give me Solaris 10 and a 36 SparcIV E20K! I don't want some home-built willy-nilly hodge-podge linux server.
Compatibility issues on x86 platforms Linux compatibility, ZFS file system and other promised features not yet available.
..to install it on an old Compaq Proliant 1600 and its yet to install, it hangs on copying files or errors on restart.
Slackware is getting ever so closer...
"Sweet llamas of the Bahamas !"
The real power of Solaris 10 is the creation of zones. You can basically setup a VMWare-type environment on the same server.
Think: giving you programmer full root access to program and muck up what he wants on the development zone or giving a Web designer a place to test run a new interation/dev web site without going live. You can basically let your devs play and play without worry to the production side of the system; saving costs for a development environment.
The zone is a fully function Solaris/Unix environment with it's own network connectivity and services. All packages that you want to have installed in that environment derive from the main install.
-> screenshots
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=9865
If you need a GUI to set up a network interface, maybe you need to go back to Windows, because you aren't going to be doing it over a serial link! Solaris was built with Enterprise computing in mind, not "making it easy" for people who don't want to type.And if that is the quality of articles from PC Magazine nowadays, I'm glad I don't read it anymore! Because I thought "yet another whiny Linux zealot bitching about Solaris" article, what bullshit. If PC Magazine is going to review Solaris, do it right or don't do it at all!
The original Solaris movie was great. I didn't realize that it was up to the tenth one already.
I'd have tried Solaris 10 a while ago but Sun bascically refuses to provide a torrent for it(I emailed them and requested one and got the standard reply) and I really don't want to download it from a shady source. So does anyone have a reliable link/source?
If there's anything wrong with Linux, it's that Linux wants to be everything for everybody. On one hand, HP wants to run it on Superdome servers with 64 processors, but other people want to run it in little embedded boxes. Some people want to use it to run servers, while other people want to play 3-d games with the latest graphics cards. (Sounds a bit like Windows, doesn't it?) Solaris 10, on the other hand, is solidly aimed at server applications. You certainly can run it as a desktop, but you're not going to get the kind of hardware support that Linux has. On the other hand, a lot of hardware is junk: for instance, Apache has to disable sendfile() on Linux because sendfile() is unreliable in many configurations of Linux -- if you've got the wrong network card and you're serving out of an NFS mount, sendfile() will send corrupted data. A vendor like Sun or Apple that can control the hardware and software stack from bottom to top can offer better quality and reliability than more open systems where you can plug any piece of trash into your system and expect it to run, sort-of. One concern I have with Sun is that they'll be a battle between the SPARC and Opteron divisions within Sun. Right now, Sun has better control of the SPARC products, which are really solid. Sun's Opteron products give you a lot more computer for the dollar, but I suspect they'll come with more headaches. (We've had our share of headaches with a Xeon-based Sun box.) Linux will continue to the be the OS of choice for people who want Unix on the desktop or who want to run small, informal servers. On the other hand, we've had the worst kind of stability problems with Red Hat 'Enterprise' Linux 3... We solved them by going to an (unsupported) 2.6 kernel, but we're thinking of running Solaris 10 on the next machine.
Solaris is not meant to be a used in the same vein as Linux.
/realistically/ scale in the same fasion as Solaris does on things like the E25K's and other large iron systems.
I'd like to see linux
No doubt solaris scores as "badly" in some areas relative to linux as linux does relative to solaris in others.
Nothing to see here, usual hippie fanatics at work.
Well, maybe not. ;-)
What about a review of its stability, its security, its speed? All they wrote is it doesn't run linux apps well, it doesn't have zfs, and it won't run in a virtual machine. How was this comprehensive?
Much of Solaris' source code (under the CDDL) is GPL incompatible.
It will be hard for them to build a community.
The review is one page long. There are two paragraphs that list new features, with damn close to zero explanation of what they actually are, and absolutely no indication that the author even tried them. There is no discussion of the benefits of those features, how well they work, how easy/hard they are to use, what the performance implications are, what applications the reviewer tried, or anything.
The review states:
Unfortunately it's at this point that the Solaris proposition starts to lose some of it lustre. Yes, you can download and install it just like Red Hat or SuSE Linux, but there the similarities end, making Solaris 10 far less of an obvious choice for companies looking for a Linux alternative.
What does that even mean? What "similarities" between Solaris and Linux is he looking for and what benefits do those similarities deliver to the customer? How does the absence of these unspecified similarities reduce the "lustre" on Solaris "proposition"? This may be the single dumbest sentence I've ever seen in a review of any product.
To begin with, it's important to understand that you're still dealing with a proprietary OS here.
And?
He then goes on to complain about the Linux compatibility feature's poor emulation. It's not clear how he is able to test this, since he admits that it's not even shipped as part of the product yet.
Let's give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he isn't just making shit up, and that he actually does have super-special access to software that Sun hasn't shipped. Maybe there is a reason Sun chose not to ship that code yet? Why is the shipping product being criticized for the quality of code that was deliberately left out of it?
This review is just a shoddy piece of work. ZDnet should be embarrassed to have their name on it and Slashdot should be embarrassed that one of their editors believes that this is a "comprehensive" review.
- Old Man of the Mountain ---- "I want to disturb my neighbor"
Comprehensive as in brief.
Seriously this review is lacking in several areas and only grazes over some features and some lacking.
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
Try this one on for size:
. as p
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1774989,00
It, along with the MadPenguin review, are the best third-party reviews out there on Sun's newest OS.
Steven
I'd like to say that running Solaris 10 on a homegrown AMD XP 1800+ with a VIA chipset is a great advance for the OS. Of course you still need a specific NIC (3Com), but it has made advances in its compatibilty with X86 hardware. Take a look at this http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/ if you are interested in running 10 on a X86 machine. It's still pretty rigourous and you'll more than likely have more success running it on a Dell/HP workstation but 10 has opened the doors for better X86 hardware support.
Why don't you buy a physical media kit from Sun and get them to post it to you?
Stick Men
Parts of Solaris will be entirely closed. And Solaris will have a very restrictive "open" license.
Besides, Sun has been talking about opening solaris for seven years now. Hard to believe it will ever actually happen.
Why would anyone using Linux go for a closed, proprietary Unix flavor?
Because most of what is done on such systems uses the open, non-proprietary features.
Unix (and similar systems such as Linux) has been such a success over the years because they implement open standards: TCP/IP networking, POSIX, X-Windows etc. This use of open standards and APIs explains why it is so much easier to port programs between different versions of Unix than to other OSes.
To say that Solaris is a 'closed, proprietary Unix flavor' is self-contradictory. Unix is a set of open standards. What is proprietary is the implementation. If you use GNU tools on Solaris, you can even avoid most of that. Commercial Unix users usually don't care about whether or not the kernel source is available; all they care about is the quality of implementations and price.
On the basis that *gasp* it's proprietary? When was the last time you saw a ZDNet reviewer lambast Windows because it's proprietary? The reviewer sounds like some childish linux fanboy attempting to take cheap potshots at a sturdy, well-featured, commercial OS with a heck of a lot of new *useful* features (Dtrace, Janus, ZFS, all of which he either fails to mention, or writes some bogus statement showing he doesn't understand them).
I agree with your comments.
It's OK though, we don't come to slashdot for fair and balanced coverage of Solaris.
I didn't see anything about it on Sun's site, but is there a Solaris 10 Live CD? I'd like to give it a shot, but I don't want to nuke a drive or swap in another drive.
Quite obviously nobody here runs enterprise systems! Solaris 10 running on an 6800, or an F15K or F25K is so streets ahead of linux is not even comparable.
Containers, administration, threading model, on-line transfer of CPU betwen containers, healing capability, etc.
Solaris thread "context switching" is far superior to that found in linux. 64 bit support has been around for years.
Solaris might not have support for some dodgy no-brand cd-rom drive, but when you're using SRDF on Symmetrix systems thats not a massive concern.
Dont get me wrong, Linux is great, but for Oracle running on Fujitsu PrimePower, Solaris is where its at.
Similarly, for runing Apache, Weblogic, JBoss etc, Linux is a winner. (You might want to sit them behind a Foundry switch, though, so when the PSU goes your service is still up!).
the real conclusion should have been: 'as an alternative to Solaris 10, Linux doesn't yet deliver.' this review is a joke.
Why does Solaris 10 scare Linux people? Competition is good for everyone but it's obvious Solaris 10 is too much competition on the server side and hence all the Pro-Linux comments.
As for Solaris Intel, Solaris 2.4 Intel was available ~1994 so Solaris on Intel has been around as long as Linux and is rock solid.
And if it's not obvious, Solaris is *not* a desktop OS so why review it as if it is?
i kept searching for the promised comprehensive review. i must be missing somehow: all i find is a page of chatter. this is obviously ok for the average newbie who could not really care less and who needs to be told what to think, but for the opensource/computer science community that prides itself with a through approach to these sorts of things (at least on a good day) it is insulting to even have it on slashdot.
nousIt's not at all hard to transition people off of CDE. The first time you login, Solaris 10 asks which windowing system you prefer to use - CDE or JDS. Either work fine, for both root and ordinary users. In our case, we have a pretty heavy deployment of HP-UX and Solaris engineering desktops, with lots of custom buttons (actions), preinstalled printer queues, etc. Eventually we'll transition those, but it's nice not having to do it right now.
Envy my 5 digit Slashdot User ID!
The article was not comprehensive, give me a break.
How many proprietary UNIX flavors can one run on Sparc hardware besides Solaris?
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
The article on ZDNET is not my idea of comprehensive. It is also very wrong in certain areas. For example it claims that the cryptographic framework came from Trusted Solaris, it didn't [ I know it didn't because I was one of the lead architects and developers for it ] it is a completely new Solaris 10 features.
... I have to go with Linux. I have S10 and Ubuntu at work, and you can guess what I'm typing this on. Java Desktop has made great strides when it comes to a user interface. However, Linux still has better tools and better tool portability.
I've used, administered and done systems programming under Solaris, NeXTSTEP, Irix, FreeBSD and OpenBSD; personally, I don't really care about GNU/Linux, it's just another UNIX-like OS. I run Solaris in a production environment and OpenBSD at home and fail to see any major differences in day to day operation or administration between Solaris and the *BSDs; except that Solaris has a crappy userland which requires tons of upgrades to the GNU version of applications and is a memory and disk hog. You can easily run OpenBSD on a 586 with sixteen megabytes of memory, a 90Mhz processor and a two gig disk.
At this point, just about any of the UNIX variants are going to be able to get the job done. Personally, I'd rather avoid utilizing the vendor specific, non-portable systems that Sun promotes in favor of tools that can be used on any of the system listed above. Why would I want to lock myself into Solaris specific tools when portable versions are available? Honestly, it seems like a lot of these tools are aimed at enabling unqualified people to administer Solaris.
Any one got benchmark results for Linux and Solaris on the same Opteron hardware?
Also remember Oracle recommends Linux on 4 way Intel boxes over 8-way Sparcs running Solaris!
Think Deeply.
I think that with the great support enjoyed by Linux of such reputed companies like IBM, Oracle and Novell, it is only a matter of time before solaris goes the Sco Unix way. ie down the slippery hole so to speak. And their introducing solaris 10 with a new (open ?) licence is fact enough for the above reasoning.
Sun's major products are solaris and java. And java was free from the onset. Now with solaris too becoming free (to download), I really wonder from where they are going to get money to pay their bills.
Linux Help
for all things on Linux
Whoah!!! You're telling me Sun implemented the & (background) command in startup scripts? What innovation! I'm sorry, I've been doing *NIX admin for years and the Sys5 way of handling startup/shutdown scripts works well.
Please tell me why I'd want to use a Solaris specific service like this. It's just going to make it more difficult to manage a heterogenous *NIX environment.
The reviewer is clueless and the article is far from comprehensive. The reviewer doesn't know Solaris 9, which is pretty much required to properly understand Solaris10. Solaris is a Server OS meant to run on server grade HW. It only needs compatibility with server grade hw from tier 1 suppliers. Don't expect to see Solaris on your laptop anytime soon and don't expect support for the latest video cards. Most servers these days are headless, or pretend to be. For one, Solaris isn't installed so much as it's cloned. You create your install image during development, then clone the "gold" drive thousands of times as you ship servers. The author states "compatibility only guaranteed for code written for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3". Such comments only show the authors lack of understanding of Linux. The comments are more interesting and informative than the article itself. http://reviews.zdnet.co.uk/software/os/0,39024183, 39195793,00.htm
As a long time linux user and a full time solaris 2.6 administrator(Don't you dare laugh) I find it sad that a company like sun releases a product which 'as an alternative to Linux, it doesn't yet deliver.'. I mean the company has the know how to build a great OS the fact that they did not just shows a true down hill slide in thier commitment to inovation. If apple can produce one of the greatest operating systems ever based on BSD then sun should be able to at least be comparable with linux.
The perversity of the Universe tends towards a maximum. - O'Toole's Corollary
A stock Linux kernel, as of now, works great on a multitude of platforms. Solaris 10 can't do that.
And, as has been proven, it CAN be altered to run on *any* large SMP systems. Solaris 10 can't do that.
Plus, like the AC said. SUN BUILT THE DAMNED HARDWARE, of course their own kernel will work on it. They did all the alteration already.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
...start a "contributed hardware driver" website. This should allow anyone to contribute a driver (or changes to the driver) with documentation of what it supports or what it fixes.
The website should have a radiobutton for the license chosen by the author (BSD, SCSL or whatever Sun is using, etc.).
Members who have contributed drivers should be able to "mod up/down" other drivers. Sun engineers should then act as "moderators" and include portions of these drivers in the base distribution. dmesg output should list the (outside) authors of active drivers in the kernel.
Actually, they ought to open up the whole OS to this sort of public contribution. Give credit, as this could boost someone's career. (Just being in the AIX faq is occasionally something that raises an eyebrow in a job interview.)
Wow. Although I am a died in the wool linux advocate and user for about 10 years now, I think the Linux community does itself a tremendous disservice when such a "content free" review is put out.
Sun may be the devil, but it seems that at least they are one of the few large corporations making strides toward more open licensing models, if not perhaps GLP. They have also put out quite a bit of software into the open source community. I would like to see reviews based on technical merit and capabilities, not warmed over propaganda (even if Linux friendly).
Technical readers deserve more informative reviews. The review as written is a disservice to the Linux community.
The question becomes, what do you want the computer to be doing. Traditionally, server memory and CPU processing time was too valuable to waste on graphics that were not really needed. This was especially true in the enterprise environment where many users connected to a few servers. Although memory has gone way down in price since then, and servers are more and more powerful, many systems are asked to do more and more. Look at the trend for multi-processor machines and Dual-core CPUs.
At one time the question was "Why waste my server's resources with graphics?" (Which, I admit, is still a valid question.) Now the question is "Is the GUI powerful and flexible enough for me to switch?" Do you want to wade through menus to get to an option that used to be added with a simple -option?
Recently, I was working on a Win2000 server and an option I neeeded in one program was greyed out. I spent days looking for the reason it was not available when all other options said that it should be available. In this instance, it turned out that because of some choices made by a previous admin, this option would not display until I installed something else. (Although the installation was necessary anyway, the instructions on the GUI said to choose the option, then perform the installation.) My point is that the GUI front end limited me and would not let me do what it said it was supposed to do. The command line version in Linux would not have cared which order I performed the tasks.
I guess the big trade off with GUI and CLI is that a CLI I have to learn up front what I am doing and a GUI I can learn by which options are displayed and which are not. If all you are doing is playing games, writing papers, or balancing books (not an easy task!), a GUI works great. I prefer administering a server with a CLI.
Great civilizations have lived and died on false theories. Don't mess up mine with a few facts.
When I went to the 'Full Article' I was totally puzzeled where the rest was!?! This review is incredibly lame. The author was like: "Let's see, Linux is great because it runs on everything from my toaster to my server. Can Solaris run on my toaster? No? It sucks!".
The article spends more time talking about the technology previews for Janus and ZFS then the *real* fully functional features of the OS!! WTF?
Thanks for a crappy review.
DAY-TOOK-ER-CODE!!
To tell you frankly... Two of my friends tried installing Solaris 10 on their hardware... Both went back to their linux distros. Why? 1. It's bloat. More than 4 cds is quite a huge download. 2. One of my friend has his resolution stuck in 640x480 mode, even when he changed the X settings. The other one even can't install the software due to hardware not supported. 3. The thing that has it going is that it is snappy, and fast. 4. Most of my admin friends (of big companies) are switching from solaris to redhat/debian variants. And I'm coming from a developing country. Moral lesson? Folks, if you want to try this baby, use it on supported hardware (which is quite small compared to linux).
Actually, vanilla Linux 2.6 can be used on an Altix, if it's built correctly; I know people who've done it. However, SGI only supports their officially blessed (read: heavily modified) kernel source trees.
"My life's work has been to prompt others... and be forgotten." --Cyrano de Bergerac
BTW, IBM's SAN File System appears to do more or less everything that ZFS does, and it's available for Linux.
"My life's work has been to prompt others... and be forgotten." --Cyrano de Bergerac
In a classroom with 24 relatively new flat-screen monitors we were able to find, maybee 4 that were able to display the output from a solaris box... and they all had an annoying 'out of range' warning on the screen.
I had similar problems last year with regular CRT displays... Not quite so bad, but about 1/2 of the monitors would repeatedly refresh trying to get a proper sync .
I'm guessing that Sun wants to pressure people to buy their own branded monitors. ('works fine for us!').
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
So maybe if you looked at what was claimed for compatability, and tested THE CLAIMS instead of whatever you had lying around, you'd actually get something like real results...
Nah, then you couldn't bash Solaris for not being Linux.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
If that one-pager counts as comprehensive, I'm Bill Gates.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
...just ask Netscape.
i have always wondered how many of the abundant Sun bashers here avail themselves of preemtive excuses ("i don't trust Sun") to hide the fact that they don't really write any code, or contribute in any meanigful way to open source software, under any license.
it is very easy to type up a laundry list of Solaris shortcomings, or to make up and post conspiracy theories about Sun. anyone with a laptop, a dialup number and average English writing skills can do that.
fortunately, everyone will soon have the chance to prove their code writing skills, for a change. once the Solaris source code becomes available, let's see how many here will actually write a driver for OpenSolaris. anyone who's been so busy criticizing Sun and Solaris must have at least some degree of interest in at least one of them. and this hypothetical driver doesn't even have to be released under CDDL, if you don't "trust Sun". the BSD license will do just fine. it is compatible with CDDL.
endlessly debating the merits of "GPL vs. everything else" is not really a meaningful contribution to open source, or the GPL. just as endlessly debating the merits of "Linux vs. everything else" is not really a meaningful contribution to open source, or Linux. it's just hot air.
let's see how cold and thin the air becomes once the Solaris source code becomes available. no more "but it's not really open source" excuses.
to those who will undoubtedly ID me: yes, i hardly ever post here, and for a reason.
--SkipJackDES
--- "Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition"
-Monty Python
Have you been reading the recent slashdot stories about the Linux kernel becoming big and unstable?
Linux is a good OS but
1)Solaris is mature and runs old unix software.
2.) More stable and hell of alot more reliable since Linux is going down
3.) Scalable galore
4.) Has had mature clustering for almost a decade
5.) software for enterprise is still not all ported to Linux
6.) compatiblity games with older versions of Linux and gcc libc5/6/gnulibc is not acceptable for any corporation who does not want to upgrade or can't (closed source apps)
In many situations where *any* downtime is unacceptable, Solaris or IBM as/400/AIX are the only alternatives. Think of a wharehouse?
Windows folks here do not take reliability for granted and it shows.
Solaris is a real OS for any situation where the server can not go down.
Also if your pc is supported (mine is because I buy quality parts) then its a great mature OS with little bugs.
http://saveie6.com/
It's easy to get it down to 1GB, and with work, 500MB. Getting it on a CD, let alone a DVD is not a real problem at all.
For NICs I have the best luck with Intel (e.g., EEPRO 100 or 1000). For video and DVDs, get name-brand stuff, no cheap barely-working on Windows junk.
Personally, I think the best of Solaris 10 are Zones (partitioning sw), a faster TCP/IP stack, 64-bit X86 support (SPARC 64 has been around forever), and DTRACE scripting (useful performance tuning).
ZFS is promising for a filesystem and volume management, but it won't come out until the next update sometime "real soon."
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I just read a product review that had words and paragraphs but no content! No way you say?! Allow me to explain...
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/eric_boutilier/2