Ian Murdock Joins Sun

RLiegh sends us the second piece of news today featuring Debian founder Ian Murdock. In an entry on his blog, Murdock announced that he is joining Sun Microsystems as their chief operating platforms officer. As he put it in his opensolaris post, this "...basically means I'll be in charge of Sun's operating system strategy, spanning Solaris and Linux." In all likelihood one of his first priorities will be "closing the usability gap" between Solaris and Linux.

Comments

What usability gap?

[Creepy Crawler]

Im not sure where Murdoch is coming from here.

GNU tools are on one of the CS's that Sun ships, and I install gnu tools anyways. It's there and easy to use. Sun supports its SunOS well.

Unless Murdoch is reffering to the wonderful "usability" of old and haphazardly done Debian packages, well erm.. let Sun take care of themselves. I like relatively new user-based programs (like, not from the early 90's).

Typed on a Debian Testing machine. Debating to go with Ubuntu..

Re:What usability gap?

[good soldier svejk]

I presume he is talking about package management. Do the current SunOS/Solaris versions ship with modern package management? Because the stuff that came with 2.8 and was crap.

Re:What usability gap?

[McFadden]

Maybe I'm just a cynic, but when I read "In all likelihood one of his first priorities will be "closing the usability gap" between Solaris and Linux." - I genuinely wasn't sure which one was supposed to be ahead of the other,

Re:What usability gap?

[Tiro]

That's exactly what I was thinking. I downloaded Solaris last summer and set it up for fun on a quad boot machine. Solaris systems administration definitely has a steep learning curve for nonprofessional Linux users like me. Murdock should try to catch up with OpenBSD. In oBSD the user isn't coddled as much as with say Ubuntu's gui admin tools, but the answers are always on hand with the great documentation. I'm sure Solaris is nearly well-documented, but not in an easily accessible form like OpenBSD. Just visit Solaris.com and see how many things are in PDF.

Re:What usability gap?

[AaronW]

I am running KDE 3.5.6 on Solaris at work. It was painful to compile due to all the missing libraries, but I have most stuff working, including sound (video doesn't work well since the Ultrasparc system is way too slow). There are binary versions available for download for Solaris which are actively maintained.

The Solaris kernel needs a *lot* of work. It has some cool features like D-trace, but don't expect anybody to be able to jump in and write stuff for it since it is very poorly documented. I don't think most Sun engineers know what comments are for. Also, device driver support is poor at best. Opensolaris kernel development looks like it is moving very slowly, with little traffic on their mailing lists. ZFS also sounds like it needs work and may be a bit overhyped. The ZFS code is rather difficult to follow, again due to the lack of any comments or meaningful variable or function names.

With the Linux kernel, I can easily jump in and find what I'm looking for and can easily make changes. The code is fairly well organized and generally well documented.

The command-line tools often are missing many of the features one finds in the Linux tools, like decent help. Manytimes very useful features are just plain missing.

Sun's X Windows also leaves a lot to be desired. At least on Sparc, Xorg is not supported and Sun doesn't have proper working render support as far as I can tell, let alone font support. Also, any open source libraries that Sun does provide are often years out of date, and they don't make it easy to download various source packages. If you want just the kernel code, good luck. Everything is in one huge repository.

For servers, Solaris is generally rock solid. For a desktop system, it sucks badly. Linux generally works, unless you're stuck, like I am, with a POS ATI card on a POS HP desktop computer. The desktop computer only has PCI-e 1x and the only cards that will fit it and drive two monitors are ATI and Matrox. I'd throw it off a cliff if I could and replace it with a computer half the speed with an nVidia card any day. This is better than Solaris, though, which has much worse driver support than Linux.

Re:Shooting too low, again.

[Anonymous Coward]

He probably forgot that Apple still makes computers and operating systems.

Like 97 percent of the rest of the computing world.

Re:Shooting too low, again.

[kad77]

They "rest of the computing world" would sure wake up to a cold shower if Apple Computer licensed a few reference designs and developed an "Office Suite" as high quality as OS X.

Re:Shooting too low, again.

[Ilgaz]

He wants to make Solaris as useable as Linux? Um, what about shooting for the best usability in the industry, champ?

-jcr Does Solaris userbase (real ones, the ones paying millions to Sun hardware or running mission critical) want "Usability enhancements" or do they want to race with Ubuntu or OS X? I know a genetic engineer who spends her life on Solaris, I didn't see her complaining about usability at all. In fact she lives actual problems on Windows XP desktop since she is not used to it.

Same went for Debian, some actual admins spoke their mind saying they want peace of mind and a stable OS instead of Ubuntu racing, Digg headlining Desktop.

Re:Shooting too low, again.

[cheshire_cqx]

Real apt-get with dist-upgrade for Solaris would be great. Blastwave seems like a stop-gap in comparison. Reinstalling from the DVD every time is a pain, and BFU isn't as comprehensive. In this respect OpenSolaris can learn usability from Debian, and I'd love to see it.

Re:Replacement Gap

[Kymermosst]

Yeah, except I'd pick Solaris to run a mission-critical app over Linux any day.

I started off as a Linux admin. Today I am a Solaris admin and I like it that way. Yeah, some of the user-land utilities could be improved, but overall Solaris is a solid operating system that handles some of our hefty applications admirably. Sun also has the best support money can buy. Our x86 vendor is a pain in the ass and there is nothing quite like your Linux vendor and your hardware vendor blaming each other while you wait to get your problem sorted out.

Shoot for the stars

[Graham J - XVI]

How about closing the usability gap between Solaris and OSX instead? ;)

Re:Debian on Solaris?

[Anonymous Coward]

> If not that, then at least an upgrade of the current Solaris userland to make it more > Linux-like.

That's an "upgrade" the world can do without. Why does everything have to end up looking like linux? If you want linux, use linux. --if --you --like --Solaris --with --all --those-annoyingly-long-gnuish-options take a look at nexenta. It's got a solaris kernel,
but they've managed to wrap the linux unusability 'features' around it for a really, all around, horrid experience.

Re:Ian Murdock doesn't like democracy

[Valar]

In other words, democracy has given people exactly what they want. Oh no, boo hoo, the largest portion of the population is comfortable and happy.

Who are you to say a football player is less important than a programmer? Typical geek chauvinism. Only our kind of talent counts. The world should bow to OUR agenda (witness the "you shouldn't be licensed to use a PC until you understand how one works crowd). And DAMN IT, Dr. Who is better than other TV, even if everyone else says otherwise. I say so, and I am so smart that I must be right.

You know what though? History has shown that dictatorships and eugenics don't advance the best and brightest, they advance the middle and average. Why? Because every dictator needs the support of a mob. Mobs only support people like them. And by definition, every mob member is on average,well, average.

Re:Shooting too low, again.

[jcr]

I think Sun should buy Apple and rename themselves as Apple.

You're a couple of years late with that idea. Sun's worth $22.4 billion Apple's worth 78.54 billion.

It would be a clear win for both companies.

Nope. Sun's not what it used to be. If they have anything left that Apple wants, Apple can buy it for a lot less than 22 billion dollars.

-jcr