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Sun Puts its Weight Behind Ubuntu Linux
fak3r writes "Sun today announced that they are putting their weight behind Ubuntu Linux. While Ubuntu has been many people's desktop Linux choice for a few years now, with its Debian heritage, you can see what kind of server it could be. Slap that on the new Sun 1Us with the new Niagra T1's CPU, the one that'll have four, six or eight cores each, and go to town."
As a very happy Ubuntu user, I'm scared.
But it could be worse, it could be "Ubuntu, supported by SGI"
Does this mean that Sun is endorsing the Debian package management system over RPM-based approaches? IMNSHO, it's high-time that an enterprise IT vendor saw value in dpkg.
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
it's Niagara T1 CPU, not Niagra.
#
#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
#
Ubuntu on a server? So what? Ubuntu's strength is that it is a desktop "Linux for Idiots". Ubuntu is great for non-guru's but is nothing special as a server.
I guess it's time for me to revisit Ubuntu. Maybe their prior java "issues" could become a thing of the past?
So why wouldn't you just use Debian if you want a server linux distro? What will Ubuntu provide over Debian for a server?
As long as Ubuntu knows its responsibility to contribute to its parent, Debian, this sounds good. In the meantime, Debian could learn a trick or two about being "fast"...
Remember this quote from Scott Mcnealy a few years back?
There are 2 kinds of people in this world. Those that can keep their train of thought,
I use Ubuntu (actually Kubuntu) on my Linux desktop machine, but I use straight Debian on my headless server.
Can anyone tell me why a person would want to use Ubuntu on a server, as opposed to just using Debian?
It seems to me that most of the advantages of Ubuntu are on the GUI side of things, and this is the way that most of the software that's different for Ubuntu than Debian is aimed towards. Most of the server-type packages you'd probably be pulling from the Debian repositories anyway, so there's not much advantage and some things might not work, because Ubuntu doesn't follow the "Debian way" in everything (there are some file locations and paths that are different, I believe). Plus Debian has always seemed a bit better documented, although I admit that's arguable.
I'm glad to see Sun put its weight behind a Debian-based distro, but I don't quite get why Ubuntu and not just Debian, especially if it's for servers. The only reason I can think is that they don't want to get too close to Debian's leadership and philosophy, and find Ubuntu more palatable from a PR and customer-relations perspective. Still, it seems like an odd choice.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
While Ubuntu has been many people's desktop Linux choice for a few years now,
I find it interesting that a distro only first released slightly over 18 months ago [1] [2], could be "many people's desktop Linux choice for a few years now" (emphasis added).
So if Ubuntu is going to bed with Sun, does this leave Oracle out in the cold? Will they now be forced to look to Red Hat (which is clearly not interested) or Novell (which is probably not the best fit) instead? The Linux-go-round continues to spin.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
You're absolutely right. I love my cornflower blue and would love to see it.
I have this cousin who is really good at colors. She went to a certificate program and got herself some degree interior decor-- you won't believe what great stuff she can get at Ikea! Anyways, she ALWAYS insists on blue. Always. You'll notice in our history of aesthetics that great paintings from that of, what's his name, some Dutch guy or Holland guy (is that a country or a city??) Jan Van Eyck to DaVinci they ALWAYS paint in blue. Always. You won't find any of those fruity so-called 'artists' today using blue. Picasso never used BLUE PERIOD. In the greater art world, they always blue. Never brown, like oh, I don't know, Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights" or something more esoteric like "Mona Lisa."
Yesterday: Microsoft flirts with open source
Today: Sun flirts with Ubuntu (yahoo article title)
This is a good thing for Ubuntu and Open source.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
I've been using Ubuntu for about 2 months and I like it a lot. But instead of SUN backing one distro, why don't they try and work on a better solution, perhaps maybe a unified distro that can compete on on a larger range against Windows? I'm sure if they made it clear they'd support one uber distro, other companies might do the same and help the linux movement. *shrug*
If you are going to town with the Niagara chip I hope your application is appropriate for it. If you need to chew up threads...great. If you have a single threaded application you will have 2X the response time of a Sunfire v440 which is hardly a FAST machine (think medium duty truck). If you are doing any floating point processing the FPU is shared across the 32 processors (8 cores / 4 threads) the application sees.
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
Perhaps we'll see a repository for Java .debs at last, eh?
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
All I see is a lot of vague statements about how cool Ubuntu is and how Schwarz would like to do stuff with it. That's a long way from "putting weight behind Ubuntu". The headline of TFA is more accurate: Sun is flirting with Ubuntu. Or more accurately, their new CEO is — and I'm not convinced he'll be around long enough to push through that kind of strategy.
Plus newer packages?
Enough?
WTF?
Are you on acid or something?
Sun today announced that they are putting their weight behind Ubuntu Linux.
Was that the weight would take the form of an anchor.
Never go to sea with two chronometers; take one or three.
Could Sun be using this to eventually get to the desktop, or at the very least, allowing companies to run a complete linux system. Solaris server, Ubuntu clients for the employees?
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
I've used Ubuntu, installed it, ran it for a few weeks, and went back to Slackware. It's origins and aims are noble, but it's not my favorite distro. Even as a "live" CD, Pro-Mepis and Knoppix have it beat; I keep a copy of Knoppix 4.03 around just in case I have to (or have the opportunity to) use/fix a PC. Java is a better C++, but not by much; C# is better designed and you're not giving up too much in the way of SDK size, available documentation and libraries or ease of use over C++. It's not available as such for non-Windows, as Java is, but Java is still overdesigned and combines the worst of dynamically typed/interpreted languages and more rigidly typed/compiled languages. On Linux/Unix/etc, I use Python, Scheme and C, because you can't spell cilice without C.
As a big proponent of debian, the biggest problem corporate/companies have with debian support options is that is not coming directly from the distributor of the software. So maybe thats one reason for choosing Ubuntu is that they offer support directly.
Its also probably a lot easier for Sun to deal with a company when wanting changes/partnerships, rather than dealing with a fully community based effort. You can't just go to 1-2 guys in Debian and say do this and get it in by next week or else!
If Sun puts too much weight behind Ubuntu, it could explode like a supernova.
The question you asked keeps coming up, but thinking about it I found no reason at all why I should prefer Debian over Ubuntu on the server.
So seeing that Ubuntu has newer packages, will offer support for its next release for 5 years on the server, I seriously have to ask, why should I use Debian instead of Ubuntu?
Just because it seems to be a common (mis)perception that Ubuntu is primarily a desktop distro?
Sun touted java as the end all be all revolution in software development, desktop OS, server software. After that failed, they looked at small "appliance" type applications for java (which I believe it was really designed for). Now, java just isn't what java was supposed to be. Microsoft breaks into markets by embracing a technology and extending it to fit their needs. Sun, embraces a technology and then cripples it with licensing, fees, and general inept business practices. Bye bye Ubuntu
I think Solaris is better. Also that Java and C are better than C# in a previous post here.
That said, go ahead with the different OS versions. We have to appreciate differences.
Peacefully,
Jim
While we're on the subject, does anyone know what "Public key encryption support (RSA)" means, as a feature of a CPU?
Some sort of special on-chip hardware, or is it just a 'marketing feature' with no real relation to anything on the die?
A quick Google found only one reference to it, here, which suggests to me that might be for real, and has something to do with using it for SSL/HTTPS workloads. Anyone (someone who has perhaps read the Architecture Specifications, which I admit I have not) want to clue me in on the straight dope?
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
This is my problem with yum - it is god awful slow.
.deba nd .rpm, or yum vs. apt, but the reoslution of dependancies is orders of magnitude faster with apt-get than with yum install.
Want to install something? 'yum install foobar', wait 30 seconds while it connects to the repository, wait 30 more seconds while it resolves dependancies, wait 30 more seconds for it to think about installing, wait 30 more seconds and it is finally done.
With apt-get this all happens in about 10 seconds or less.
Part of the problem is that *EVERY SINGLE ACTION* causes it to hit the server and verify it's package repository. Any 'yum install' command essentially does a 'yum update' first, even if your database is only 3 minutes old. When you're installing a fair number of packages on a new system, this is very tedious. What is the point of even having 'yum update'? apt-get is much better in this regard, *always* using the local cache unless you explicitly 'apt-get update'.
Also, I don't know if it is because of the differences between
That would be a nice start.
argumentum ad fallacium: Fallacy of defining a fallacy which allows one to dismiss the argument in question.
Sun is endorsing Ubuntu, a Linux-based operating system. There isn't anything indicating that they are favouring any particular software packaging system. Dpkg/apt-get might be the way Ubuntu keeps its own house in order but nothing prevents anyone from installing and maintaining RPM packages on a machine running Ubuntu.
;-)
Merits of dpkg aside, SUN may give standards compliance a high priority in its products, and like it or not in order to comply with ISO23360 the operating system MUST support the installation and management of RPMs (it need not be the native package system of the OS, but ALL ISO23360 compliant applicaitons are distributed as RPM packages). SUN could very likely contribute its resources towards making Ubuntu comply with ISO23360. Mark Shuttleworth himself stated that this was a goal for upcoming Ubuntu releases so they would be on the same page. Therefore if the ISO23360 standard gains traction it could mean that installing RPMs on Ubuntu machines could become more common than you'd think, especially for companies like my employer--large enterprises that salivate over anything with "ISO##### Compliant" on it...and guess what SUN's customer base is?
Oh yeah...perhaps I should explain what this ISO23360 is. Basically it is a standard that specifies a set of requirements for Linux-based OSes (file structures, included shared libraries, software packaging format, etc) to allow compliant application software to be easily deployed and executed on any compliant OS without the need to recompile and/or re-package for each OS as is the case today with Linux systems. It is more commonly known as LSB3.1
I've been using Ubuntu for serverside Java development for over a year now and (although there are some quircks) it has been fine! I think Sun putting some effort in it, and the Ubuntu team putting some effort in Java support could only make it better! Can't wait to see what the outcome is!
20 GB Disk, 1 TB Transfer, Shell
This is like the most terrifying piece of porno I've ever seen on the Internets.
For the love of god, please don't let them kiss. Please, no.
Schwartz
Shuttleworth
How can I sleep now? Thank you, Slashdot.
Linux on Sun boxes also calls their disks sda, sdb, hda, hdb, etc. /dev/rdsk/cXtYdZsQ galore.
Conversly, Solaris 10 on opteron ==
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Wait until Oracle buys Ubuntu!
:-)
And you think I am joking?
About three weeks ago I successfuly got Gentoo loaded onto the Sun T-2000 that I am currently benchmarking with the help of a Gentoo release engineer. Unfortunately there are java issuse still. But hell it was fun watching it run just the same. It is back running Solaris 10 now however.
It's Niagara T1 CPU [sun.com], not Niagra! Can you tell I'm writing an anti-spam HOWTO based on my FreeBSD setup I use?
And it had to be the first time I got a post approved...ah well.
fak3r.com
Just like Debian, Slackware, ${x}BSD, Gentoo, and, uh, what's that other distribution that used to be around.
I just put Ubuntu on my desktop.
:-/
Now I'm gonna have to go and put something else on it because obviously I made a bad choice....
Is Ubuntu going to have selinux support that works at some point? I wonder if this is an attempt to split some of the larger linux community away from RedHat (Solaris 10 and RHEL5 will be fairly nice competitors because they both have MAC policies)...
I love Ubuntu but in the interest of free supersecurity this makes me a little nervous.
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
And yes I know it's a simple backport oversight, but it's damn annoying anyways!
argumentum ad fallacium: Fallacy of defining a fallacy which allows one to dismiss the argument in question.
... with its Debian heritage, you can see what kind of server it could be.
...
What? I am already using Ubuntu on three servers. Breezy Badger 5.10 already has a server install mode right on the CD (just type "server" at the boot prompt). No GUI at all.
Runs like a charm
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
I understand this, but didn't Ian Murdock (founder of Debian) already try this with Progeny? The distro went belly-up and eventually Progeny became just another Linux services and support company. I'm not even sure if they're still around TTT. How is Ubuntu more a more corporate-friendly face for Debian than Progeny was (supposed to be)?
Why would MCSE's primarily use Terminal Services when NTLM authenticated telnet allows you to manage the server through a text based console without a hit on the proc that a gui entails?
Because it's not easy, intuitive or picture based. Different minds, different methods. Ubuntu's biggest advantage is that it's debian based (dpkg, apt etc.) It's secondary advantage of being easy to navigate makes it's possible installbase much broader. Sure a gui will eat up some cycles, but the training time you save is substantial.
Not everyone is a console commando and if they are, they probably already use *nix.
Thanks.
XMCF
Alternative 1 (dirty, two steps):
:-)
$ sudo apt-get install rpm
$ sudo rpm --force-all -ivh PACKAGE.rpm
Alternative 2 (cleaner, four steps):
$ sudo apt-get install rpm alien fakeroot
$ fakeroot alien PACKAGE.rpm
$ sudo dpkg -i package.deb
$ sudo apt-get -f install # will install any dependencies
Alternative 3 (suppose multiverse is in sources.list)
$ sudo apt-get install package ## it is probably there
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
This means one thing to me....another option not provided by Microsoft. Things are coming along nicely.
Dapper Drake is at what, Flight 7 now? It's about high time you apt-get dist-upgrade'd
Orange is the new Brown... and not in a good way. I appreciate the slight deviation from the norm, but let's stick to more traditional corporate colors. I mean, there's a theme switcher for a reason, right?
I use Ubuntu as well as Debian, both on desktops and servers. Here is a couple of advantages Ubuntu has over Debian on servers:
As a Unix guru/developer I also regularly use a couple of other Linux and BSD distros (FreeBSD, Gentoo, OpenBSD, etc) because I like to experiment a lot and like to live on the bleeding edge of technology, but all in all I have realized that Ubuntu plainly rocks and there is a lot of reasons why it is becomming so popular. I think every IT engineer easily understands the advantages of Ubuntu. And somehow it totally makes sense that Sun, "a company built for engineers, by engineers" [1], is interested in Ubuntu :-)
I am a technological perfectionist and Mark Shuttleworth (the man behind Ubuntu) seems to
have created a distro the way I would have done it. It is well engineered and It Just Works (TM).
[1] http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan
a weight of a beached whale?
I'm the first to shy away from distro wars. I use all kinds of distros for different tasks and I see value in most. That being said...
Ubuntu is possibly the worst choice they could have made for endorsing their servers. Ubuntu is true and true a desktop distribution. It's NOT a very good server distro. Debian would have been a much better choice. IMO it would have been the best non-commercial choice. Obviously if they wanted to go the commercial route suse or red hat would have made good choices too. But Ubuntu is a very poor server distribution. Espically for the power of these new servers.
[Insert 50 comments of people using Ubuntu at home or work with success as a server]
Basically, I can run almost any distro as a server. Should you? Are there other's more well suited to the task? Those are the real questions. Not can you but should you.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
that debian announce sun java is now in thier non-free repositry thanks to suns new license for OS distributors.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Simply put: PHP5
I run an Ubuntu Server (which installs a base system by default, no GUI...) and I have Apache 2 and PHP 5 running very quickly and efficiently on a 100% supported OS. At the time of setting up the server, Ubuntu was the only distro offering enterprise support for PHP 5.
I'm still lost as to why some distros still use PHP 4 when PHP 5 is late into its second year of official release, but that's another topic altogether.
"Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed." -C.S. Lewis
This could be interesting. They don't want to lend support to rivals like Red Hat or Ximian, so they go with a more neutral player. Ubuntu seems to have a lot of steam behind it in the community, and it's a fairly well put together system. Sun may be doing something right this time.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Don't worry, Sun isn't sure of the motives either. It was Wednesday, and the cries of "do something!" were reaching a crescendo.
For me, and just me, the added value of SPARC was a reliable sales and support channel, an active and knowledgeable user community, Openboot, the ability to set up enterprise-wide, usable Jumpstart and patch management infrastructures in just a few keystrokes, and above average quality hardware.
One by one, Sun has tossed all those things, or let them slide, while distracting themselves by slinging new stuff at the walls and seeing what sticks.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Or should I say V146R4?
I have tried several Linux Distros on the desktop and have yet to see why people would prefer Ubuntu to Suse. Mandriva, or Xandros.
When it comes to running a server I like Suse or Red Hat.
I don't like Ubuntu on the Desktop and cant see how it would be any better for a server. ( I don't care much for Solaris 10 either)
Sun already tried shipping the Linux-based "Java Desktop System", and then canceled it in favor of Solaris on the desktop.
...with a mass of 2x10^30 kg, that's saying something.
All these reports of flirting going on, aren't there any modest software companies anymore? I'm not asking them to be prudes, but all this flirting in public just seems like they want attention.
"22 astronauts were born in Ohio. What is it about your state that makes people want to flee the Earth?" Stephen Colbert
but I don't quite get why Ubuntu and not just Debian, especially if it's for servers
Perhaps considering that debian has had a slow release cycle, differing from ubuntu where you get fresher software on the desktop and the server.
I used Gentoo for a long time, but I finally switched to Debian when I continually ran into sources that simply wouldn't compile. I got used to taking days to install larger packages, and finally, I tried Ubuntu on my wife's machine because of all the hype on Slashdot. When I saw it install packages and dependencies in seconds, I ditched Gentoo, installed Debian on my machine, and never looked back.
I have to say that I really enjoyed Gentoo, and I thought the idea of Portage was stellar. As a professional programmer, I didn't even mind the compile-time waits too much. What I minded was waiting a couple hours for a compile (wxGTK, anyone??), only to have it break several hours in.
Since I went Debian, I've only a few times been thwarted by broken packages. The difference is that I only wait about 5 seconds to find out that they're broken.
Linux? I want FreeBSD on my Niagra!
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Hasn't anybody else noticed this?
x86 is crap! x86 is great, now that solaris runs on it! Penguin suit McNeally loves Linux! McNeally funds scox to destroy linux. No wait, Linux is great, but only as desktop where it competes with msft, but not with sun. No, wait again, Linux is Java - and sun is proud to offer the only legal version of Linux. Msft is sun's mortal enemy, no wait, msft and sun are biggest, bestest, buddies.
Sun may be a great company is some ways. But when it comes to x86 and/or Linux. Sun is all over the map. I wounldn't make a big fuss over what sun is saying about Linux plans.
worst day in life.
Sorry, I can't get into using a Linux distro called "Ubuntu". It sounds more like an animal skin covered drum with leather ties and feathers than something that runs on computers.
I broadly agree that RPM and DEB are roughly equivalent. Joey Hess's package format comparison remains one of the better documents on this. While there are a few things RPM handles slightly more cleanly (signed packages), the one clear win to DEBs are the fact that they're unpackable with bog-standard shell tools (ar, tar, gzip) while RPM is a binary format strongly favoring use of a library, though some perl hacks can unpack the format, as will dd given the right offset (varying with versions of RPM). RPM itself has changed over the years in incompatible ways.
The real win of Debian is not, however, its package format, but the distribution philosophy, as exemplified through Debian Policy. This is a statement of requirements and restrictions on packages. Failure to comply with Policy is a release-critical bug, meaning that such a package will not be included in a stable Debian release (unstable/testing of course may include same, but it's still a bug). These policies include management of configuration files, preservation of user data, existence of documentation (both manpages and udner /usr/share/doc), and inviolate (that is, locally managed, outside the package management system) parts of the filesystem tree.
These are attributes of a distribution which aren't apparent sometimes even after years of experience, but which once you become aware of them are very notable, usually by their absense, in other platforms, whether other Linux distros, MS Windows, Mac OS X, or proprietary Unices.
That said, APT and tools seem to be generally more coherent and polished than yum, though yum itself is worlds above raw dpkg or being tied to up2date or RHN.
Now where's the Sun Screen / Sun Block when I need it?
Let's hope that they can help improve Ubuntu like they've helped out Staroffice/Openoffice. Let's see
1) Add a couple useful features every 6 yrs
2) Slow down the system by _at least_ five-fold over 6 yrs
3) Incorporate Java like crazy to help point (2)
4) Ignore major user complaints like bug 366 for years
Am I missing anything else?
In the 6 yrs that they've had Openoffice they've done the following,
Promised
a) speed increases by ripping the _huge, superslow, super resource intensive_ package into a bunch of "smaller and quicker" sub-packages
but delivered
b) a package of packages that requires more room, more memory, loads in 10 seconds instead of the original 3 and runs _significantly_ SLOWER than the original monolithic package. If this is progress then send me backwards.
- there's at least one Debian repository not in good shape - even as stable
- many broken packages, missing refs, horked dependencies...
- NOT a good situation, my friend...
They have no focus and they have no direction and its costing them customers. My problem with them is they are throwing away their roots to be buzzword compliant and the making up buzzwords to meet that goal. I've been running sun boxes since the sun 3 days and like their hardware and I had a great respect for their kernel. Then with Soalris 10 they go and add a bunch off new features that I have no need for that break by security auditing procedures. They break core bits of the Unix concept such as init. Their new init requires 800 times more code and libraries than the init for Solaris version 7 and it fills my logs with crud if I choose to remove the smf junk out of initab. Guys its Unix, If I tell it to do something, I want it to do it.
The zones stuff looks cool but it hasn't been tested. If you lock up a pkgadd in a zone, then the root zone can't install patches. What happens in a zone should stay in a zone. I'm getting the feeling that doors cross zones with a bit too much ease. I still don't know why I need a complete operating environment in a zone. I like by BSD jails with just enough stuff in them to start the daemon and thats it.
I still don't know why sun thinks I need a word processor in my base install for a headless server.
We will be a Solaris shop until we can't get Solaris 9 anymore. We are not moving to Solaris 10 and we won't be buying anymore hardware that requires Solaris 10.
you can see what kind of server it could be. Slap that on the new Sun 1Us with the new Niagra T1's CPU, the one that'll have four, six or eight cores each, and go to town.
Correction, all Niagara chips come with 8 cores. Each core can very quickly switch between 4 threads. This makes it seem like 32 threads are running at the same time. Yeah, the box it's sold with costs about $7000. This is however the fastest single processor box (when being used as an application server or webserver) available and is a bargain at that price on a price/performance basis.
No Sigs!
I guess there is nothing Ubuntu can do about being picked by Sun, but this is not a positive development as far as I'm concerned. I hope Sun won't be allowed to meddle or participate in the Ubuntu development process.
I hope their "prior java issues" will remain: Sun Java has no place on Ubuntu. Ubuntu ships with at least two open source Java implementations, and if you don't like either of them, go take a hike.
In fact, Ubuntu's Mono integration is so good that I'm really worried about Sun being allowed to get anywhere near it.
Debian's next stable release, codenamed Etch, is planned for December 2006. It will have newer software than Ubuntu Dapper and it will have four times as many officially supported packages as Ubuntu. It will also support many architectures that Ubuntu won't. Also Debian's Quality Assurance is much better than Ubuntu's.
Every time Ubuntu starts building a new release, it relies on the Debian technologies (package management, debconf, etc.) and it takes the packages developed in Debian as its starting point. Ubuntu couldn't stand on its own, it stands on Debian's shoulders and this is the only reason why Ubuntu appears to be tall. Sadly it seems that many Ubuntu users fail to understand that most of the ease-of-use features that they appreciate in Ubuntu come straight from Debian. Ubuntu makes a nice choice for the fast-moving desktop software (although I personally prefer Debian testing for my desktop) but there's just no way that Ubuntu could compete with Debian on servers.
Sun's rocking motion.
Ubuntu is what Debian Stable should be: it's on a regular release schedule and well tested. If Debian gets their act together and gets Stable out the door every six months, then I'll switch back. Or maybe Debian should just start using Ubuntu as their Stable release.
What will be the next Ubuntu name then? Will they welcome their new industry-overlords? Could the next release sound like one of those:
Solar ScuttleMonkey?
Sunny Sonoran?
What was your suggestion to the spitzfindige ScrabblePlayers at Ubuntu HQ?
;)
Orange is the new Brown... and not in a good way. I appreciate the slight deviation from the norm, but let's stick to more traditional corporate colors. I mean, there's a theme switcher for a reason, right?
Ubuntu's main focus isn't corporate desktops (that's more for SUSE & co.) Home users tend to like a bright, cheerful, non-intimidating look (which Human fulfills). If you want it to look more professional, Industrial and Clearlooks are both included (as well as the myriad of themes available elsewhere)
alien works for me 95% of the cases. works for Oracle, for instance... unless I have strict time constraints, instead of ./configure && make && sudo checkinstall make install I take my time to do dh_make, edit debian/*, and fakeroot debian/rules binary.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Ubuntu improves the desktop presentation of Debian. How is that useful for Sun in the server market?
Ubuntu also gives you a Debian server with time-based stable-releases (so, the need for backports is minimized). Actually, I am running Breezy even on my servers nowadays, because there is some server stuff that I want that is not on Woody... and I did not want to wait 'till 6.12 (etch) for something I had in a nice shape in 5.10 (breezy)
[]s
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Its amazing that people tear into smf like this. UNIX init is a simple system from times long past which is being extended and in some senses replaced by a (while more complex in some regards) more flexible system to represent the age we live in today.
h tml
One of the things the Windows NT world has correct is the way services run and are managed on a system. Service-like tasks should be supervised, not merely fired by scripts and ignored. Status information should be able to be gleaned by monitoring tasks through a standard API, etc etc. Services should be able to depend (specifically and declaratively, not merely through an arbitrary numeric ordering) on other services, services should be able to be restarted upon certain conditions. There really is nothing wrong with innovating and extending systems in such a fashion, as long as you don't break the old way of doing things or make the new way unusable. Sun have done a good job in preserving rc*.d compatibility in Solaris 10, as well as making the new system work well.
Also, attempting to forcefully disable a core part of an operating system and then complaining when it doesn't go as well as you'd hoped is daft too.
And as far as zones go, there's been plenty of testing and there are plenty of uses and reasons why zones are somewhat more secure and flexible than jails. What happens in a zone *does* stay in a zone. If you're root in a zone it doesn't mean you can affect the global package database or filesystem, just the ones within your zone. Look here for some contrasts between Jails, Chroot and Zones if you don't fully understand the concept (which it appears you don't): http://uadmin.blogspot.com/2005/06/zones-vs-jail.
I'm not up for spreading FUD about Linux, but I wish people like you would stop spreading said FUD about Solaris too.
LeftWing
Sun is going to put a line on the Operating section on store.sun.com listing selling a ubuntu disks for a few dollars, and add a section saying if you want support for this OS send us $$$ and we will be happy to support your box running ubuntu. Just like they have done with MS windows, and Red Hat.
Beyond that its business as usual, Sun has allways been about Solaris, Sun Will drop a box or two onto ubuntu's developers its good PR, this whole thing is about PR. If it sells an extra 100 boxes a quarter, and gets some free PR, its all fine with Sun.
Sun isn't embracing Ubutu's anything other than there customers wallets. Hell MS gave Sun 2 billion dollars, and it got basicly the same treatment and couple engineers devoted to the goals of MS's agreement. Unless Ubuntu puts 2billion dollars onto Sun's bottom line dont even expect that much.
I agree. Sun cant seem to figure it. So what if their crap can run Debian. Its a great distor but really who cares? Will it cause anyone to buy more of thier crap? Absolultely not. They have lost touch with thier market and thier hardware is expensive and they constantly go back and forth on Linux which makes me dislike them even more. Does IBM have this problem? I dont think so. Linux makes IBM money something Sun keeps not doing.
SMF doesn't monitor sub task any more than init does. If a sub package dies while the monitoring thing is watching and being overloaded with signals, then it gets missed with either system. Try it... except that init seems to be far more robust getting SIG_TERM signals from odd processes. Go find the sql databases that SMF use and start poking around with a binary editor (hacker style) and see what happens. Add a null into the shutdown record and see what happens when you run the shutdown command. Now how can you audit for that situation? If someone hacks your inittab, its going to show up unless they also hack all your standard tools. Same with RC scripts. I don't like systems that hide so much behind the scenes that I can't tell exactly what's going on.
I've been told the new stuff is there for my own good. SSHd can now depend on having a running name server... oh thats cool but I guess it means that if named dies at boot I can't get into the box can I? I like the old sequential system since I was in control and I knew the order things happened. If I wanted something to happen in parallel I had this cute trick with the magic '&' but I guess that was too hard and now I've got 800x more unauditable code to hope just works and few hours of poking and prodding shows its not up to the standards of Solaris 9. You may call that FUD. I just call it uncertainty, and doubt. I have no fear since this junk isn't going on my secure network.
Your comment about what happens in a zone stays there when I gave you an example that disproves it. Do a package in a zone and kill it. Then go into the global zone and try to start up pkgadd. You can't because something in a zone locks it out. Thats a serious design flaw that I would have expected someone to test and fix before shipping. There also appears to be some problem with doors between zones that I haven't had time to look into yet.
That link you provided claims jail setup requires "Yes, requires complex scripts". Isn't live update just a huge mess of complex scripts? I still haven't seen a way to install just a base install in a zone without pulling in all the tools that a cracker would use against me. My bind jails don't even have a shell in them. That can not be done with zones. The only thing solaris does better is resource control but others are catching up.