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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!"
Don't get me wrong, but I don't think this is worthwhile. This is almost as stupid as the debian/freebsd thing. If you want to get the full power from freebsd, use freebsd. If you want to get the full power from solaris, use solaris. If you want to get the full power from linux, use....well....ubuntu? redhat? suse? :P
This is an interesting project: developers will have the power of opensolaris tools, like DTrace (a very powerful tool to study the behaviour of programs - and optimize them) available for all debian packages...
Actually, the naming story is more complicated than that.
The SunOS 4.x series was just "SunOS", and it was more BSD-based.
The SunOS 5.x series has always also been called Solaris. In the SunOS 5.x series, SunOS is the name of either just the kernel, or the kernel plus the very basics of the operating system, depending on who you listen to, whereas the Solaris brand name refers to the entire "Operating Environment", including SunOS 5.x and a lot of other add-ons like NIS+, LDAP services, CDE, etc, etc. I don't think they have ever sold a stripped down SunOS 5.x, only a Solaris Operating Environment 2.x which happens to contain SunOS 5.x.
And then with the release of Solaris 2.7 (SunOS 5.7) they began marketing it as "Solaris 7", presumably for some dumb marketing reason. Since then that's been the case, so for any given release from 2.7 onwards, the possible alternate namings are:
Solaris 2.X = SunOS 5.X = "Solaris X"
2.7 of course turned out to be an absymal failure of an operating environment, so it's quite fitting that it was the launching point of a marketing-driven renaming policy. Whereas 2.6 was a solid stable platform for many years, building on the successes of 2.4 and 2.5.1, the 2.7 release is where they introduced transitional 64-bit support, and poorly. It wasn't until 2.8 that things settled down again. Many customers unfortunately still have "Solaris 7" installed here and there in production, and it's a nightmare to support. What we can learn from this is never buy/install the first release of an OS right after a major overhaul of its guts to support a new architecture.
11*43+456^2
If they can keep virtually everything outside the kernel consistent with Debian, and replace only the kernel and drivers with Solaris versions, this would prove to be an interesting system for benchmarking and contrasting the two kernels.
As it is right now, you can benchmark entire systems, but it is difficult to do any meaningful kernel benchmarks.
If there is a significant difference in any particular area in either direction, I can forsee future server administrators choosing their kernel based on how well it performs in certain tasks. Perhaps the Linux kernels memory management is better, but the Solaris kernel's SMP scales better. Now you don't have to worry about changing your user or administrative environment, package management tools, or applications -- you can run the same on both, and just change the kernel architecture underneath in order to gain a benefit in an area important to you.
Heck, I can forsee a day when what kernel you want to use is queried as part of the install process, and where you might have a mix of machines that all appear to be running Debian, but which may be using different kernels based on the needs of the system.
We have competing web browsers that (generally) conform to the same interface standards (in terms of HTML rendering) -- why not have a choice in kernels, without having to sacrifice your user and administrative environment (or Open Source ideals)?
Yaz.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Why shouldn't Debian run on various kernels - Linux, Hurd, Solaris, Interix... the list goes on. I'd personally like to see Debian running on Microsoft's Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications (Interix), which will be included with Windows 2003 Server R2 and apparently also future operating systems like Vista. Here's my post to debian-win32 from last week:
) .
To: debian-win32@lists.debian.org
Subject: Debian GNU/Interix (Windows 2003 Server R2)?
From: Sam Johnston
Date: Mon, 31 Oct 2005 14:55:31 +0000
Afternoon all,
Windows 2003 Server R2 is to ship shortly with a POSIX subsystem
(Interix 5.2 of Services for Unix fame) which "includes more than 300
UNIX utilities and tools that behave as they would on UNIX systems,
plus a software development kit (SDK) that supports more than 1,900
UNIX APIs and migration tools, including make, rcs, yacc, lex, cc,
c89, nm, strip, gbd, as well as the gcc, g++, and g77 compilers.".
Apparently future versions of Windows (eg Vista) will follow suit.
With a tweak of config.guess I have had no problems compiling
bash-3.0, wget, etc. on Windows 2003 and am now interested in tacking
some more interesting packages, like dpkg and apt, with a view to
getting a full port of Debian running on it. The problem is that I
have limited time and porting experience, and the fact that this was
previously attempted under Cygwin is disconcerting; the debian-win32
mailing list has been around for years and yet there there has only
been one non-spam post in the last 18 months according to the
archives.
According to http://www.interix.com/ many interesting packages have
already been ported over and are currently available for download for
$30 as 'Interop Toolworks 2.2'
(http://www.interix.com/InteropToolworks.htm). Presumably source is
provided/available - I have posted the question in their Unix Tools
forum as I figure this would be a good starting point.
While there's no X server included, the X libraries are and the new
release opens up the Win32 API which should pave the way for someone
to build one. In the mean time Starnet Software do ship a free 'LX'
version which will accept localhost connections only
(http://www.starnet.com/xwin32LX/get_xwin32LX.htm
At this stage I'm looking for feedback about the viability of such a
project, information about why the last one appears to have failed and
any suggestions about what the procedure would be (eg build dpkg, then
debootstrap etc.), how best to ensure its success, and so on. I would
like to think it will be possible to bootstrap a base Debian
installation (Debian GNU/Interix?) from an installer executable, or
possibly even deliver it via ActiveX, eventually getting to the point
where one can log into Windows and get a full Debian desktop complete
with your favourite window manager.
For the time being I'll be happy with bash, OpenSSH, etc. but it's
interesting to consider what is possible... SFU/SUA was meant as a
migration path *to* Windows, but there's nothing stopping it from
being a two way street.
Sam