Slashdot Mirror
Debian GNU/Solaris
An anonymous reader writes "Today "Nexenta" announced an initial pilot program of GNU/Solaris. Initial trials are limited to "Ubuntu developers and the entire Debian community". From the announcement: "As you might know, Sun Microsystems just opened Solaris kernel under CDDL license, which allows one to build custom Operating Systems. Which we did...created a new Debian based GNU/Solaris distribution with (the latest bits of) Solaris kernel & core userland inside. We'll open Nexenta web developer portal completely for the general public by mid-November. Today we are launching a Pilot Program. Ubuntu developers and the entire Debian community - you are welcome to participate in the Pilot!"
What is the point of having 3k text editors? What is the point of having 20 window managers? Why don't you stick with only one operating system then? I look forward to see a first version of this OS and experiment it as soon as possible. Choice is one of the most valuable things Open Source Software has.
a hint that they may just be playing games and chasing publicity as usual rather than showing a serious commitment to f/oss.
Yes, giving us Open Office and paying many full time developers to work on it, and porting DTrace to BSD is obviously not a commitment. They ought to be ashamed of themselves!
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
Duh. Because you don't have to search all over for packages, then compile everything from source, fix dependencies manually, follow dozens of security mailing lists, ... And of course, Debian's package management isn't only a gigantic repository with automatic dependency checking, it also lets you configure stuff, and in a much more pleasant way than Yast and other centralized tools. Basically, Debian is one of the best distributions of GNU.
Look at it the other way: You want Debian GNU, but may need Solaris' kernel. That's when Debian GNU/Solaris is a good idea.
Did you read yesterdays piece about Redhat wanting Xen in the kernel?
Maybe you'll actually run several kernels, managing different tasks - virtualisation can do this. Are we going to see an explosion of different kernels (similar to distributions now), as it becomes easier to try different ones out?
Well, the answer would be manifold.
1. Linux is just a kernel, nothing more. So for all practical purposes most of the fanboys out there using 'linux' and loving 'linux' are probably ending up loving the latest version of KDE, or gnome or the nifty new GNU tools and not linux. Full power of linux ? So if you consider all the gui stuff and nifty userland tools that you are using, you are hardly getting the 'full power of linux'
2. Getting a different base kernel over the rocking GNU tools and environments for me is always cool. It is choice that I am getting. I will certainly try it out on an x86 machine, and if the kernel source is included, I would love to look through the design of the thing. Everybody loves tearing opening that shrink wrap from the latest gizmo.
3. Sun has been pushing out some great publicity stuff wrt. Solaris 10 and how it 'screams'. I sure would like to check that out. I also would be very interested to see whether my bluetooth dongle or usb mass storage device will work with it or not. If it does not, it is less ready than linux for the desktop.
4. I always thought that the linux kernel was a bit convoluted and unreadable compared to the BSD kernel. ( I have worked in the NetBSD and FreeBSD and Linux kernels ) I would love to have an opportunity to look into a new kernel and see how well it has been written and whether I can consider it a viable OS to suggest to my PHB for my next project, if it fits in there.
So, if someone out there is pushing across the new kernel in a familiar looking distro, I am certainly all for it. To sum it up, I think everybody stands to gain. The developer (choice) the user (choice again) and Sun (publicity).
Hurrah for Open Source !
It's interesting because it's another proof that Debian doesn't need the Linux kernel. Sun is making inroads into BSD's territory. Not Linux territory. Their kernel fills a role similar to the *BSDs in the Open Source world. Technically interesting, used in some projects, and a far second to Linux.
Solaris is still very, very big in the commercial world. This is a sign things are probably going to change in the 'Open Source world' too.
Linux has a huge independent development community and more huge companies than it is easy to count behind it, and nobody can keep up with the pace of development. The GPL is a very important factor. It's the only partnership that would keep it fair for the big guys and the little ones at the same time. What technical lead Solaris has is rapidly diminishing because they can not - and never will - keep up the development team that Linux and the GPL have spawned.
You are confusing the kernel with the software that is available for it. Most of the development into 'Linux' isn't into the kernel, but the software that goes with it. The technical lead that Solaris has is harder for Linux to chase than the lead in x86 drivers that Linux has. It works both ways. A main advantage about the Solaris kernel is that it is very very stable with excellent backwards-compatibility. Looking at the poor quality of 2.6 due to the lack of a 2.7 testing kernel, Linux will not be catching up with this any time soon.
And then there's the deliberately-incompatible licensing, Sun's lack of success at building Open Source communities (OpenOffice should have a community 100 times the size of the one it's got - IMO it's second in importance to the Linux kernel), and Jonathan's tendency to turn any gains that Sun makes in the Open Source community into defeat with his own words. All of these things hold them back.
GPL code can't be integrated into BSD code either. What's your point? CDDL is a certified open-source licence. Quite frankly I don't think I would want the Linux and Solaris kernels to converge into one great big monolith.
Solaris has a few features at which the Linux folks look hungrily, and you know what happens when those folks like features. Linux gets them. These are the folks who replaced Bitkeeper in a month.
Not until they fix the developement model of the 2.6 kernel so that it becomes a lot more stable. The number of bugs in the 2.6 kernel is appalling. This isn't just about features, it's about rock-solid stability.
It would be fun to have a system that booted the same binaries into Linux, BSD, Solaris, and HURD. If someone makes that, it'll be an awesome hack. But at the same time it would demonstrate the futility of having all of those kernels do the same thing technically, while one of them does the community part much better than the others.
Some sort of unified binary format or flawless interoperability would be awesome.
What is your criteria for calling the Solaris kernel a "far second" to Linux? OSS community involvement? x86 hardware support? ISV support on x86? I'll give you those three, but if you've got something else in mind, you'll probably get an argument from me and others who have used both kernels for a long time.
I also don't see Solaris' lead diminishing, let alone rapidly. If anything, it appears to me that Sun further widened the gap with Solaris 10. Sun is regularly releasing very advanced and important OS features, in fully-baked and rock-solid form, and the FOSS community is doing its best to keep up, but even though Solaris 10 shipped nearly a year ago, look at the current state of SystemTap, for example - a project spawned in direct response to Solaris 10 dtrace, that is still nowhere near ready to primetime. Where (for example) also is the modern full-fledged resource management? This is a critical feature for an 'enterprise' kernel, and it's still nowhere in sight, though everyone's known it's been necessary for Linux to achieve for several years.
It's one thing to reimplement BitKeeper in a month - advanced kernel features are something else entirely, and we have a decade to look back on and see Sun's record of innovating and Linux following. What happens when Linux has cannibalized the last true innovator, and there's no one left to follow? Lest you think I'm trolling, I have a serious question: what major kernel innovations in the last decade appeared in Linux *first*? I can think of one, maybe two, but put up against the parade of inventions and innovations that have come from Solaris in the last decade, I don't know.