Slashdot Mirror
OpenSolaris-based OSes a Threat to Linux?
sunBoy asks: "A number of OpenSolaris-based Operating Systems are popping up on the map. BeleniX (screenshots), SchilliX and Nexenta (screenshots) are a few OSes which have hit the headlines in the past couple of weeks. Some say OpenSolaris has a leg up on Linux - 'For Linux, we're trying to push many distributions through to compress them into a standard. With OpenSolaris, we are already at the small end of standardization. What will follow is more OpenSolaris distributions spreading out from that core.' Is OpenSolaris really a threat to Linux?" Less of a threat and more of an alternative. Would more Unix-based alternatives on the market really be a bad thing?
Companies can do the competing over money.
--dave (who works for a conpany and definitely likes money (:-)) c-b
davecb@spamcop.net
Is there anyone who honestly believes that OSDir.com provides any service of any use whatsoever? Christ, it's the same set of 60-80 screenshots of the same window managers and office apps, just using different themes.
They could just make up the names of the themes and distros used and no one would notice the frigging difference...
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Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
In evolution there is no winner.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Lets just wait till there's a major distributor (besides Sun) that offers support for OpenSolaris...
What you say? Sun won't even offer commercial support for OpenSolaris?
So, you can't get support for any OpenSolaris distro from a major vendor...yea, I can see how it may have the upper hand here...
Till I can find at least 2 major distributors that offer commercial support for OpenSolaris, I wouldn't count on it being anymore than an interesting project.
You can bet that Sun is gonna make sure that any commecrial support from other companies comes through Solaris and not OpenSolaris...
The immediate problem is a sad lack of drivers for very common hardware that Sun has never shipped, like wireless networking (an Atheros driver just went into their tree a few weeks back; I believe that's the only one so far), ACPI power management, etc... Solaris has always been an OS for servers and managed workstations, so there are big holes in the coverage for "consumer" devices and laptop hardware.
Note that Sun itself has no "OpenSolaris" distribution you can download, only a source tree. The void has been filled heretofore by hand-cooked distros like SchilliX and BeleniX, which are roughly analagous to early linux distros like SLS and Slackware -- no (or minimal) package management, no exhaustive software selection, etc... Just a bare machine with a userspace into which you can compile your own stuff.
Nexenta looks promising, being an attempt to port the Debian (i.e. GNU, not Solaris) userspace onto the OpenSolaris kernel. I haven't tried it so I'll withhold judgement. But honestly, it's got a long way to go. Note that the existing linux desktops tend to rely on the hotplug/udev/hal/dbus architecture for much of their hardware interface, and none of this exists on Solaris to my knowlege. Someone will have to port it.
Honestly, at the moment OpenSolaris advocates would be better advised to spend time writing drivers and packaging a distro than submitting flame wars to slashdot. The world has lots of space for another free unix, but it needs to catch up before puffing about itself as "Linux killer".
The fact that there are losers doesn't mean there are winners.
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.