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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!
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.
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
"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
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!
That 512 CPU setup is a custom fork of Linux made by SGI. Also, measuring scalability in number of CPUs is like measuring speed in MHz.
....and most of it is already in 2.6, and the rest is being integrated, so what's your point?
See all the benchmarks done during the 2.5 development to decide if linux "scales" or not.
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?
Tell that to the *BSD folks :-)
Stick Men
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"
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 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.
No live CD - it doesn't make sense to offer one... Solaris is a Business OS, not a neat way to re-purpose older PCs with outdated version of Windows - invest in a Harddrive - 80+ gig HDs are less than $50 after rebate at many big box retailers (CompUSA, BestBuy, etc.).
If you want to see how your hardware will work, you could download the first CD image and run that - no fear of clobbering your present OS install, but you will see if your video card is supported, etc.
Ken
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
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
You mean Sun hardware uses strange refresh rates, which was really only true in regards to Sun's in-house designs. Unless you're using some of their really high-end visualisation hardware, most Sun graphics chipsets are standard PC fare, and you can get almost any "standard" refresh rate by setting it in OFW.
Remember that on most Sun workstations, the default resolution and refresh rate is 1152x864@60hz. If your flat panel doesn't support that resolution, sorry. Consult the Sun Framebuffer FAQ to see what resolutions your workstation supports, and how to set them.
As for the older framebuffers, I haven't found a PC monitor that hasn't worked with my old SBus machines with cg6 and tcx framebuffers.
hello dear sirs my name is jamesh i are india (bihar) can u guide me install red had linux 9?