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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!"
GNAA Claims Responsibility for Killing 3000 Blogs
GNAUK (the UK branch of the GNAA) consultant rolloffle stood ecstatically in front of the massive GNAUK London office skyscraper. Waving his massive nigger hands for silence, he smiled and announced with glee that the GNAA was the cause of the 3000 blogs outage.
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Having concluded with these statements, the crowd burst into an ambivalent mix of outraged and delighted argument. rolloffle then unzipped his trousers and started to beat back the hordes of angry webloggers and journalists with his gigantic nigger cock, fleeing into a side alley. The massive conglomeration of people then enjoyed a spectacular fireworks display, sending the massive office building of glass and steel smashing to the ground and burying the suckers present.
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If you are having trouble locating #GNAA, the official GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA irc channel, you might be on a wrong irc network. The correct network is NiggerNET, and you can connect to irc.gnaa.us as our official server. Follow this link if you are using an irc client such as mIRC.
If you have mod points and would like to support GNAA, please moderate this post up.
| ______________________________________._a,____ | Press contact:
| _______a_._______a_______aj#0s_____aWY!400.___ | Gary Niger
| __ad#7!!*P____a.d#0a____#!-_#0i___.#!__W#0#___ | gary_niger@gnaa.us
| _j#'_.00#,___4#dP_"#,__j#,__0#Wi___*00P!_"#L,_ | GNAA Cor
GNU/SunOS, surely?
Onward, Debian soldiers!
--AC
I had some contact with AIX, Linux is running at home but other than some minimal stuff I have no idea what makes Solaris different from the other systems. GNU/Solaris sounds like only the kernel is not linux.
Can someone give me a hint why I should consider looking at it or switching my router/server/notebook to it?
What is the point of this project? To show it can be done, like the Debian/BSD stuff? I thought Debian were trying to deliver more consistent quality on a smaller number of architectures rather than spread themselves too thinly. This endless scooting off in new directions isn't necessarily A Good Thing. After all, Sun have opened up Solaris and then done precious little to foster a community around it, a hint that they may just be playing games and chasing publicity as usual rather than showing a serious commitment to f/oss.
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
Could someone translate this into English?
Much thanks.
The opposite of progress is congress
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
that *BSD 0wned.
I would say free as free speech , but opensolaris isnt that free. I would say free beer , but i doubth i could get a free copy by legal means. By the way im a great fan of RMS and the Gnu project (i am one of those who say Gnu/Linux instead of just Linux) , but face it , without the penguim the OS isnt that cool , what is the fun in use it if i cant spell things like : Hello Mr Gates , i will be tour server today :evil:
def greetings(x): return {'friend': 'Howdy', 'enemy': 'Dye [sic]'}.get(x, 'g0 4w4y, l4m0r')
IIRC CDDL was considered non-free by debian-legal, so I guess Debian people won't be very interested in it..
Before people comment on why Debian is doing this i suggest reading Debains core statement of what they are all about http://www.debian.org/intro/about
Esspecially this bit:
Debian systems currently use the Linux kernel. Linux is a piece of software started by Linus Torvalds and supported by thousands of programmers worldwide.
However, work is in progress to provide Debian for other kernels, primarily for the Hurd. The Hurd is a collection of servers that run on top of a microkernel (such as Mach) to implement different features. The Hurd is free software produced by the GNU project.
Does anyone know if I'll be able to use sun ray clients with this? This could be the best news ever.
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...
I should point out that Sun themselves aren't porting DTrace to FreeBSD. But they are offering a huge amount of assistance to the folk who are. You can meet various Sun staff and the FreeBSD DTrace porter in #opensolaris on FreeNode. Before making assumptions that Sun are merely "chasing publicity" you could drop in and have a chat about the project. #opensolaris is reasonably active most of the time.
LeftWing
Why?
It's just what I've always wanted... the kludginess of Solaris combined with the user-friendliness of Debian.
So when do we see Debian GNU/Minix?
About damn time!
While I'm mostly happy with Solaris 10 running on my Sparc system, I must confess that the Solaris userland could certainly use a little TLC before its my "primary" desktop (which Id like it to be).
With any luck, the combo of a solaris kernel/core and a debian/ubuntu userland will provide some much needed juice to the solaris userland. Even if this does nothing more than get some more userland/"desktop" developers working on solaris, I cant see how this is anything but great news.
http://www.debian.org/ports/index#nonlinux
For some reason this does not sound like a good idea. The words "bloated" and "unfocused" come to my mind. I think this kind of blending is somehow illustrative for the Linux community; it does not have to be a bad thing, but I think I'll stick with freeBSD. Then I know what I have.
i wish people would just fess up to the fact that debian is horribly out of date and lacking as a desktop linux solution. I have to work with Debian on a few servers in our park. Why this distro has been chosen over anything else, I don't know...
I prefer to see either FreeBSD or Gentoo. Both of these, FreeBSD being a UNIX and Gentoo being Linux, have an excellent package management system.
In my opinion, the success of package management system, or anything else for that matter, depends on logic. If the used system, doesn't have an ounce of logic, it tends to annoy the user.
Is this the end of recursive humor?
****
"I'd never want to join a club that would have me as a member" - G. Marx
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.
> Which we did...created a new Debian based GNU/Solaris distribution with (the latest bits of) Solaris kernel & core userland inside.
So if it is a Solaris kernel replacing the Linux kernel and a Solaris userland replacing the GNU userland what is the justification for calling it GNU/Solaris again?
Rich
The reason why I love Debian is exactly for its user-friendlyness. It does demand some knowledge, but as soon as you know how to use the package tools' full functionality, you can do everything. The old satirical troll was actually quite insightful in many of his comment.
I've been daydreaming about as OpenBSD system (kernel and userland) with Debian package management. Imagine the security of OpenBSD merged with the package collection, quality, and ease of use of Debian!
One of the things that plagues me about OpenBSD is that the base system is one large package, making it difficult to, say, only upgrade the kernel or sendmail if a security flaw is fixed in one of them. Another thing that has bugged me is that upgrading to a new release is difficult and error-prone, to the point that it's easier to just do a clean install of the new release and reinstall all packages. Plus the package manager isn't nearly as nice as apt-get.
On the other hand, Debian doesn't incorporate all the great pro-active security measures that OpenBSD has, and I believe these are very important in the modern world. The OpenBSD userland also feels a lot lighter and cleaner than the GNU userland Debian uses.
This situation leaves me in a split situation, where I run OpenBSD on the server where security is paramount, and Debian (actually, Ubuntu these days) on my laptop where easy installation, deinstallation, and upgrading are more important. When working on the server, I sometimes wish it were Debian, but when working with Debian I wish it were OpenBSD so I could worry less about buffer overflows and other vulnerabilities I _know_ are in the software I use.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
GNU's Now UNIX
So you can choose to stick with majority of users by using Ubuntu with only the default applications (wich I am doing personally but not sticking with the defaults...) or you can choose to try new applications, kernels and window managers and define your personal way of interacting with a computer. There you go, again you have to choose... freedom of choice will really hunt you as soon as you use OSS.
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?
After all, the main difference between this and Debian's linux distribution is that this one doesn't include Linus's kernel.
Does it run Linux?
In facts : Linux distributions. Which are nothing more than a small Linux Kernel, plus a bunch of GNU userland (gcc, bash...), some BSD (some part of the network apps, don't remember exactly) userland, some other useful userland apps (Gnome, KDE, OpenOffice.org).
Basically GNU/Solaris, is just the same, with only the tiny kernel part replaced with another kernel (OpenSolaris instead of Linux).
No way. Because what the 99% these projects share is the user apps, which is what users benefits most of.
I mean, look... OpenOffice.org, GIMP, FireFox, all these are even developped on Windows. And it *definitly* doesn't hurt Linux. On the contrary, it brings good apps for Linux.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
They're still having some problems before releasing it to the public, like the Phantom port.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Two, Two, Two great tastes in one!!
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
I once fancied I tried to set up a completely Free userland on Solaris, starting with glibc, but discovered that glibc wouldn't build on Solaris and efforts to make it build anywhere but Linux and HURD had pretty much stopped.
If this means they have built a complete Debian userland including glibc on Open Solaris then it is a spectacular accomplishment! If they had to continue to use pieces of Solaris userland like the Solaris libc it is still an impressive accomplishment but not quite the same as just building the exact same Debian packages on Solaris.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
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
God love 'em the Deb folks have always over-promised and under-delivered w.r.t. schedule. Granted when they did deliver it was good solid work so long as you didn't need any unpstream changes made in the prior 18 months. Maybe that's not as important now as it was when I last used debian (1999?). But in the late 90's core application functionality was actively changing -- whereas many of those app's are now evolving more slowly.
Back to the point: Debian has always been short on volunteers, how will adding a whole Sun-ish fork help that?
It can go two ways: 1) Sun puts in quite a bit of pro-bono work on the project and the linux section of deb gradually withers over the years or 2) the Sun kernel fork will be still-born.
Who is Nexenta Systems, Inc. (gleaned from the HTML title attribute of http://www.nexenta.com/ anyway, and why do they feel the need to hide their identity (http://whois.sc/nexenta.com)? They're referring to this Debian port as 'Nexenta OS', but then using the domain gnusolaris.org (where they have also hidden their details behind a Domains by Proxy registration). They have this to say on 'the future': "We do hope that at some point, sooner rather than later, our changes (so far for the most part just cleanups to build the DEBs in the new Solaris-like environment) will be integrated with the upstream. At the end of the day - this would be the right thing to do." - presumably they mean that they intend for this to become an official Debian port (eg Debian GNU/Solaris)?
Registrant:
Domains by Proxy, Inc.
DomainsByProxy.com
15111 N. Hayden Rd., Ste 160, PMB 353
Scottsdale, Arizona 85260
United States
Registered through: GoDaddy.com
Domain Name: NEXENTA.COM
Created on: 15-Jul-05
Expires on: 15-Jul-08
Last Updated on: 11-Oct-05
How about GNU/TrustedSolaris?
--
make install -not war
And when will Debian start a Debian GNU/MINIX project? There is already a Debian GNU/Hurd project and MINIX is alive, well and ready for production. Now that would be cool.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
Once again it appears "Bruce Perens" has a DSFG-approved license to get away with blatent trolling.
No commitment to floss? Oh dear...that's not good, that's not good at all. Those poor poor people.
Blastwave uses the exact same package management and dependancy system as standard solaris: pkgadd/pkgrm. it just uses a different delivery system: pkg-get.
Furthermore I need a method of doing a simple mass upgrade of packages.
"pkg-get upgrade".
(which covers all non-OS packages, ie: blastwave packages)
Just a question
I like my dinosaurs feathery, and my pterosaurs hairy (or is it pycnofibery?)
why not any open source kernel? how hard is it for the community to port it over to a new kernel?
Reminds me of the Samuel Johnson qoute: "...like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all."
FreeBSD for the impatient.
While that sounds like a very stable way to upgrade, it's worth pointing out that Debian is capable of upgrading continuously without rebooting, or upgrading to new releases without rebooting. The OS of course, not the kernel. But still, it's a very valuable feature, and when upgrading between stable Debian releases, quite reliable.
I would be surprised if SunOS can't do this too, but if it has a dumb package manager -- not hard to imagine, thinking of things like BSD ports compared to Debian's APT -- it's quite possible that Debian provides significant advantages there.
Anyway, I for one am looking forward to trying Debian on another SOLID kernel. Debian GNU/kFreeBSD and is a wonderful thing too, and GNU/Hurd-L4 is definitely on my wishlist :)
It is someone outside of the Debian community doing this port. They are inviting the Ubuntu (because they seem to have lower standards on "freedom") and the Debian community (I have no idea why since because of licensing, it won't be integrated into the main project).
There: Something at a specific location.
Their: Owned by someone.
Please make sure your english compiles.
Since January Gentoo has started the Gentoo/OpenSolaris, began porting its portage package tree on Solaris, calling it Portaris. Something similar was done with FreeBSD creating the Gentoo/FreeBSD project in August 2004.