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OpenSolaris Code Released
njcoder writes "C|net's news.com.com has reported that Sun Microsystems is releasing parts of the OpenSolaris code today licensed under the OSI-approved CDDL . The release consistes of over 5 million lines of code for the base system OS/Net (kernel and networking). OpenSolaris is based on Solaris 10, the current version of Sun's Unix Operating System. Back in January, Sun released the code for DTrace, a dynamic tracing tool for analyzing and debugging kernel and userland events. DTrace is one of the big features in Solaris 10. Some other highlights include the GRUB bootloader, SMF (Service Management Facility) which replaces init.d scripts, it starts up processes in parallel for faster boots (7 second boot on a dual opteron workstation I think that was the setup) as well as providing features for automatically restarting. OpenSolaris provides support for x86/x86-64 processors as well as Sparc. The Blastware guys are working on Polaris which is an OpenSolaris port to PowerPC. Sun has been working on opening Solaris for over a year now. The OpenSolaris project started with a pilot group of Sun and non-Sun users. During the pilot program a lot of info including screenshots could be found on various OpenSolaris member blogs. (My favorite is Ben Rockwood's blog). Teamware is the source code management system Sun uses for Solaris and OpenSolaris. Which was designed by Larry McVoy (now of BitKeeper) while he was at sun. No word yet on if Teamware will be available for OpenSolaris developers or not. Sun also uses CollabNet for it's Open Source project websites so that might be a possibility as well."
Actually, soon enough you can run all the Linux applications via project Janus. So then, who cares about this so called 'Linux kernel'?
I've recently been tasked with setting up a Solaris server and I haven't touched Solaris in a long time. I've been happily using Linux for my server stuff and OS X for desktop stuff. After using Solaris for the last few days, even though I'm the one who feels used, I wonder why people are so excited about this news. I mean, I just don't see how this is better than linux, and if I were a Solaris admin I'd be running to Linux with arms wide open. I mean, `apropos` isn't working out of the box, but the man page for it hasn't been updated since Dec 20th 1996 and doesn't contain any information that I hadn't already deduced. `dhcpconfig` returned a Java library error. The text interface name is referred to countless times in the 1500+ pages of pdf manuals I have here, but nowhere did it tell me that interfaces are named bge#... or was it ie#? or le#? Honestly, the text "bge" shows up twice in the manauls in the context of the `prtdiag` command in the manual for the hardware, not Solaris itself. Commands are helpless, for instance, needing you to explicitly issue an interface name with `ifconfig` or it would just return the standard help dialog. `ifconfig -a` was no help, it also needs an explicit interface name. The manuals are awful, giving no examples and reiterating the obvious. ("2. Type the host name of the machine in the file /etc/nodename. For example, if the name of the host is tenere, type tenere in the file."... duh) The commands are not helpful and neither are the man pages, but the hardware is awesome. It just makes me wonder, why would anybody choose Solaris over Linux?