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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.
As the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD project has shown, it is possible to port the Debian userland (including the excellent apt-get package management system) to other kernels besides Linux. I would like to see Debian/Solaris project come out of Ian's endeavors. If not that, then at least an upgrade of the current Solaris userland to make it more Linux-like.
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If I'm going to run my company's mission-critical code on Solaris, I need to have the developers running Solaris too, which means I have to have a nice desktop environment they will want to use. If Solaris gives me that, my life is much easier. If I have to spend a lot of time making gnome-whatever, all the Java tools they love, etc, run on Solaris, then my life is much harder. If the tools aren't shipped for Solaris, I'm SOL.
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I think Sun should buy Apple and rename themselves as Apple. Then Mac OS X gets a much better kernel, and Sun gets all of Apple's nice unix userspace (Solaris 10's userspace is awful). Mac OS X server becomes Solaris 11 and all of apple's good ideas like OpenDirectory, their management GUIs for open source apps, etc become a part of solaris. Already technology transfer is happening. My local Apple rep said a lot of core technologies are being licensed from Sun including ZFS.
It would be a clear win for both companies. Apple gets instant access to the enterprise, and Sun will make sure the acquisition means that Apple's technologies will get the enterprise-level support they deserve. Currently Apple's so-called enterprise offerings are really not very serious, although they have improved their support with Tiger. Sun can finally sell desktop machines sporting an amazing OS and desktop (under the Apple Macintosh brand) and have a server OS that's powerful and easy to setup and administer and with the better BSD userspace that Apple has.
I don't know too much about solaris 10 (although I don't think it's improved much), but whenever I
get stuck on a solaris 8 machine, I get annoyed by some of the commands. tar xvzf does not work,
I have to gunzip -c | tar xvf -. Why can't I "du -sh", or "df -sh", and what is wrong with bash?
Bash is a great shell and it should certainly be the default over csh! Well I guess Solaris is rock
solid and has a lot going over Linux (like easy ACL support over NFS), and certainly bash and other free
software can be installed on Solaris machines, but I do recall having to compile LOTS of software by hand
and recompiling it all when certain zlib vulnerabilities were made known.
However, from my limited experience after using an easy-to-use distro like Debian GNU/Linux, working on a
Solaris system can be incredibly frustrating and maddening. If Debian/openSolaris solved all these problems
would I switch to Solaris x86? Maybe. It would certainly occupy a virtual machine image!
As an experienced admin with both OSes, I'll sum up what I think the biggest abstract difference is between the two.
Solaris assumes you know what you're doing. Linux, to a much lesser degree.
Linux has been open source since its inception, but as an admin on a Solaris box, the system definitely feels more 'open' to you. More is possible, more data is gatherable, more settings are tunable. A Solaris admin generally has more power over the system without digging into source code than the Linux counterpart. That's the major difference I've always seen. If you want both flexibility and stability, it's hard to beat.
I will say though that Solaris' defaults are generally less reasonable than the enterprise linux distributions' are. There is more tuning and such to do before you'll have your Solaris system running the way you want it to. At least there's Jumpstart.
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I really hope Sun takes advantage of the work Nexenta has done. It's Ubuntu on OpenSolaris. Hopefully Ian will do something very similar with Solaris.