Slashdot Mirror
Sun to Make Solaris More Linux Like
ramboando writes "In an effort to spur adoption of Solaris, Sun Microsystems has begun a project code-named Indiana to try to give its operating system some of Linux's success.
Sun has been trying for years to restore the luster of Solaris, but that since has faced a strong challenge chiefly from Linux. Sun wants to embrace some Linux elements so "we make Solaris a better Linux than Linux," said Ian Murdock, Sun's chief operating systems officer, quoting Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, whose latest start-up, Ning, uses Solaris.
But it's a tricky balance to adopt elements of Linux while preserving Solaris technology and advantages such as the promise of backward compatibility. "As we make Solaris more familiar to Linux users, we don't [want to] lose what makes it more compelling and competitive.""
ZFS? DTrace? Zones?
Solaris is open source and free. http://www.opensolaris.org/os/
Also consider that some of the better solaris features have been added to FreeBSD recently. dtrace and zfs are available for FreeBSD 7 current.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
I'm currently struggling to implement a Solaris server right now. The user space is archaic, obscure, and seems to be difficult for the sake of being difficult. Things like updates are still done the way they were done 15 years ago, often requiring a drop to single user mode (as bad as a reboot in my opinion), and often require a system reconfigure. Solaris' kernel is cutting edge and, in some ways, way ahead of Linux. But in the ways that count, Solaris lags far behind.
/usr/bin, usr/local/bin, /opt/sfw/bin, /usr/sfw/bin, /usr/ucp, etc. I frequently find that I have to compile things from source just to get basic functionality. For example, Sun ships Samba with solaris, but it doesn't support LDAP. They also ship some hacked kerberos libraries, based on MIT, but if you need to build anything that depends on kerberos, you have to compile and install a separate set of MIT Kerberos libraries. Some apps are available in package form (solaris packages) from sunfreeware.com that you can pkgadd. But PKGs don't seem to be a complete packaging system like deb or rpm is. The pkg-get utility from the aforementioned site is very useful, though.
Just to make the system usable requires a ton of third-party software that sun does not ship nor support. In the end my path has nearly half a dozen bin folders in it, by the time you could
The init system is currently in a disorganized state. Most things are migrating to svcadm, which under the hood is very much like launchd. But there are still init.d scripts, but they don't always work right. Maybe Linux should move away from init.d, but at least on redhat, they are very full-featured and quite easy to work with.
Sun's biggest strengths right now are zones, zfs, and dtrace. However, if you don't specifically need these features, Linux is a better choice in many circumstances. And Linux is gaining features in these areas. xen can do a lot of what zones do, albeit much less efficiently. dtrace functionality is coming, I hear. ZFS, well the kernel developers seem to be suffering a bad case of NIH syndrome. The only reason I'm using solaris right now is ZFS. But I'm taking a big risk deploying it on a 12 TB disk. I have yet to hear of a failure, and Sun assures me that it's enterprise-ready. Sun's assurances do carry a lot of weight; they've had a lot of experience in these things. But I'm only a silver-level support customer. It's taken two weeks and some 20 phone calls to get issues sorted out with our sunsolve account and updatemanager. Our assigned support group only wants to talk over e-mail, which is annoying. Turnaround time on trying out their suggestions is hours if not days. This certainly isn't quite the same Sun as in the olden days.
Anyway, talk to any Sun jocky and he'll tell you that none of my complaints about Solaris are weaknesses. They are strengths. Cryptic commands are second nature. Besides, they separate the real sysadmins from the wannabes. Sound familiar? I think I've talked the same way about Linux to my Windows friends. I'm glad that Ian is going to work to improve Solaris' user space (which is what he means when he says make Solaris more like Linux, right?). On the other hand, Solaris reminds me not to get complacent with the state of linux. Every complaint I have about Solaris could easily be echoed by a Windows refugee trying to make sense of Linux. Both Linux and Solaris are powerful, cryptic, and archaic OSes. They both have a lot of room for improvement. We'll have to see. I told my RedHat friend the other day that his company has nothing to worry about from Solaris. Hopefully Ian will change that.
I have recently been engaged in a serious effort to learn about Solaris 10, and have been very pleasantly surprised at what I have found. While there may be valid reasons that some Linux users may dislike Solaris, I cannot agree that the criticism you cite about the userland tools being "basically unmodified from the early 1990s" is one of the valid reasons. Most of the GNU userland tools that you describe as missing are actually installed under /usr/sfw/bin in the *default* Solaris 10 install that you get right from the standard DVD. This is in addition to the same non-GNU tools being present in other locations on the default install. You simply need to adjust your PATH accordingly if you want the GNU tools to be found first.
If you want to prefer Linux over Solaris that's fine, but make sure that what you are criticizing is actually true. Otherwise you are misleading yourself and possibly missing out on some really cool technology. You point out the cool technology in ZFS and DTrace, and I agree that they are really fantastic reasons to use Solaris. In fact, I am right now thinking that Solaris offers a lot of technologies that Linux can't touch without giving up a lot of the characteristics that make Linux useful. Give it an honest chance and you might be surprised at what Solaris 10 can do!
But here you are talking hardware, not software. The parent article is about Solaris, not sun Boxes, which are close enough to other enterprise boxes. Yes, they are different. But so are others in their own ways.
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
May I add: Fault Management Framework [1], Crossbow [2], pNFS [3], stable device driver interface (one of the biggest point driver developers complain about in Linux). Clearly the GP has no idea about the number of technological advances Sun is pushing in OpenSolaris.
[1] http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/fm[2] http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/crossbow
[3] http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/nfsv41/pnfs
I have to laugh at your comment.
Just the other day, I saw Solbourne. That was the company that was created in Colorado to sell sparc systems. They were the ONLY takers of this at a time when Sparcs were not doing so good. Well, as soon as Sparcs came on a bit, McNeally cut them off. It turned out that it had a funky clause in there, that ultimately allowed them to cut Solbourne's OEM access to the chips. IOW, he pulled a bill gates.
But keep in mind that was with McNeally in control. This is a wew era. So lets give them a bit of time to see if they are as flaky as ever or if they have truly turned a new leaf. While I have been very harsh on Sun, I remain hopeful. Besides, if Sun adopts Linux API and makes it possible to simply slip in a new OS, that will not hurt OSS. In fact, I think that it will help push Linux everywhere.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The #1 thing that turns me off is the lack of colors in ls, and that 'ps ax' doesn't work, i have to reach for the stupid dash key.
I thought they are transitioning off from cde to gnome. All our dev and production boxes already run on gnome as default wm(we are on Solaris 9).
I have always thought of Solaris as an awesome kernel paired with a userland that was only an afterthought. Kernel features are nice (low latency, scalability, etc), and the trend continues with ZFS and DTrace, but I wish they wouldn't neglect the userland. After all, where does a user spend his time?
BrandZ isn't for Linux... it is Linux, running in a Solaris Zone.
If you want a GNU-like system for Solaris, try out Nexenta
FreeBSD current has ZFS and DTrace now! Why wait? Run, don't walk, to your nearest FreeBSD dealer ( ftp.freebsd.org ). Let's face it, Sun just hasn't been the same since AT&T strong-armed them away from BSD into the void of System V.
Disclaimer: Your mileage may vary. May cause increased bandwidth charges. Offer not valid in Lichtenstein on odd days of even months during leap years.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Sorry you had a disappointing experience. Mine turned out much happier.
I wanted to see what Solaris 10 was like so I put it on an AthlonXP 2400 machine I had. The motherboard has onboard audio and network. I spent a few minutes trying to figure out if Solaris could detect the network adapter and it didn't seem to be able to do so, so I put in an Intel EtherExpress Pro adapter I had in a box and it immediately recognized this. As for audio, I did a Google search for "Solaris 10 audio" and found a site that had drivers that I downloaded, installed with one or two commands that were pretty clearly indicated, and rebooted. Audio worked then.
My video card is a 2D Matrox card which was immediately recognized and configured by the X11 server used by Solaris 10 (this is called Xorg and is probably the same X11 server you use on Linux). I have seen people using accelerated NVidia video on Solaris 10 but I have not personally tried this. I know that there ARE drivers available from NVidia, so I am assuming that if I can follow the instructions to get them to work with Linux that I can probably also do so with Solaris. One advantage that Solaris has here (as far as I know) is that you don't have to keep relinking the driver to deal with ABI issues that Linux has when you upgrade your Linux kernel. I appreciate that because it makes my life simpler.
I don't have a SATA controller in my Athlon, so I cannot speak to that. However I believe that the machines coming from Sun have SATA so I assume that it must work.
I do not believe that Solaris 10 is supported on notebook computers, so I do not believe that wireless cards are typical hardware for Solaris. That said, during my Googling around I did see that someone has some experimental wireless drivers, but I have not looked at them in detail nor have I attempted to use them, so I cannot speak to how well they work.
I don't think my AthlonXP 2400+, EtherExpress, and Matrox card are too atypical to expect geeks to be able to easily get if someone was determined to try Solaris 10. It was certainly nowhere near as difficult for me to put together this system for experimenting as it was for me to put together my first Linux systems in the mid-1990's that required things like SCSI adapters to really work well.
My experience, Asus A8V motherboard. Solaris did not (do not?) support the (Marvel) gigabit controller out of box but it was easy to find (alas binary only) drivers for it. Similarly it was easy to download and install NVidia drivers.
...
The only problems I encountered:
1. No support for my scanner (Epson - Avasys makes binary-only drivers for Linux).
2. No support (back then) for virtual consoles. I *need* them.
3. Mouse stutt-tters. Horribly. A show stopper. Either GeForce FX5200 is not properly supported by the driver or there is something broken. I have not heard anybody else having this problem
I have heard there is support for the VCs now, so I might try again. Besides, I probably will upgrade the display adapter to 6600 or like.
BTW, ZFS was *excellent*, nothing I have used before comes close.
Solaris grep in particular is horrible.
vi breaks every time you expand your console beyond 132 characters, and quite a few of the tools on the default PATH don't conform to any modern standard - including POSIX.
Windows with SFU provides a more compatible UNIX environment than what you get out of the box with Solaris.
Coming from a BSD background, the thing I dislike the most about Solaris is that it refuses to have a 'minimal install' that is actually usable. I can install *BSD in a few tens of MBs, and then add the packages I want easily. This makes it easy to secure and run the machine, because I know exactly what's on it. Last time I installed Solaris, the base system seemed to be about 4GB.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Most UNIX systems allow a multiple usernames to have the same user ID, but different shells (and even home directories). The convention on BSD machines is to have a 'toor' user for GNU people that is UID 0 but runs bash as the default shell. This allows things that run as root to get the shell they expect, and people from GNU-land to get the shell they expect.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Last time I checked, solaris tar did not have the compression flags either.
The machine I was working with back then (until about a year ago) had backspace and del do the same (IIRC delete char to the right) and nobody could find out how to change that. And that just scratches on the surface. It didn't help that the admins were assholes, so I only had CDE as a "window manager".
It sucked. Big. I ended up working on my machine at home using tightvnc, because that solaris box was absolutely unbearable.
Bullshit. Solbourne weren't the only people making Sun compatible kit, nor where they the first - Axil were. Meanwhile Tadpole and RDI were making Sparc based portables (I hesitate to call them laptops as the weight would cut the blood flow off from your legs) which were basically SS5s with an LCD screen. Tadpole later acquired RDI. Compatibles came in two forms, those with licensed mainboard designs from Sun, and those with mainboards designed in house. The reason for the demise of most of these companies was not down to licensing shenanigans but the simple fact that few of these machines offered benefits over the Suns own kit. The exception was the portables, and that's most likely why Tadpole are still around.
Sun is hemmoraging cash.
I've never heard of a company that's making a profit described in those terms.
Who cares? Do they work?
I expect vi to be the same from platform to platform. grep as well. Make????
hah. I take it you don't actually spend a lot of time administering many different boxes. I hate doing anything with old Unix boxes, Solaris included. You don't realize how nice it is to be able to have something as simple as command history until you lose it. Or what about always being stuck in INS mode? Case insensitive searches with 'find'? Syntax highlighting with Vim? grep -r? A consistant filesystem? (cat
I could go on all day. It's not that I can't handle a box without modern Gnu tools, it's that it takes me much longer to do a simple task. That's the whole reason most of these features were added in the first place. A programmer decided it takes longer than it needs to for a task and fixed it. Not just for pure feature bloat purposes.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
Before you take the plunge and install Solaris, you can run this handy tool to give you some idea of how well your hardware might be supported.
it's just a pain in the ass after using almost any Linux distro.
I know that's a troll comment. I don't mean to be a troll about it, but if I were to distill all of my experiences with Solaris, it really would come down to that. More than anything, it seems like Solaris consistently excelled at wasting large amounts of my time. And I don't think it was just because I was unfamiliar with it. I became familiar with it. I tweaked it until it almost looked and felt like Linux, and still it was a pain to use.
While ZFS is incredible, and DTrace amazing, there are so many other aspects of the system that are just horrendous. The package system, the userland, the complete (and intentional) lack of virtual terminals, the installer (this is a whole new world of pain). The installer is singularly the worst computing experience I've ever had, bar none. And don't lecture me about jumpstart. New users don't use jumpstart, they use that crappy-ass installer that is enough to put even the most devoted fanboy off Solaris. And this really tells the story about Solaris. While it has an amazing kernel, Sun has just completely ignored the critical features needed to recruit and retain new users.
Solaris needs community support, yet Solaris, even OpenSolaris, is still not self-hosting. Solaris is not open source in the way Linux is. The source is there, but for all practical purposes it is useless. There is no official OpenSolaris distro. You have to install Solaris Express, muck around with things, and then if you are lucky enough to get things compiled, you have this kind of hybrid, non-redistributable thing that sits in a legal gray area. Furthermore, even if you get this far, your "open" system is liable to be completely out of date in a month because there is no way to incrementally upgrade the kernel source. On "flag" days, you have to use a utility which is little more than a "this works in most cases but don't use it production" hack to install the new source and utilities. So to even get a system with the kernel source, you will not be able to reliably keep it up to date, or have any assurance that is even stable. Contrast this with having the source to the stable Linux kernel as a standard part of the OS. Forget the idea of having anything like 'make menuconfig.' So in many respects, Solaris being "open" is more marketing than practical reality.
And while there is Nexenta (Ubuntu with a Solaris kernel), which is an amazing feat, and already about as close to a Linux system running a Solaris kernel that you can get, they receive almost no support from Sun. As wonderful as Nexenta is, it still suffers from the fact that not all of OpenSolaris being completely open. That last I looked, it had no man pages, b/c Sun had not released them. They had to hack libm, as it was not available for a long time, and they had to hack their libc because Solaris' libc had strange dependencies on their (long broken) ksh implementation, which was not released as well. Furthermore, it, like every OpenSolaris distro is not self-hosting. And, rather than just embracing Nexenta's fabulous work in this area, Sun massive NIH complex demands that it make Solaris more Linux-like things it's own way.
There is little doubt in my mind that the Solaris kernel is one of the finest operating system kernels in existence, and is far superior to the Linux kernel. Sun's problem is that not only is everything surrounding that kernel stagnant, but that it really hasn't done the basic things needed to build a real community. Until OpenSolaris really is an open Solaris, with a stable, compilable kernel which can be incrementally upgraded and maintained by users, Solaris simply will not gain the support of the open source community. And that is what really matters today. I can Google "Ubuntu kidney" and find some informative post on how somebody configured Edgy to run a dialysis machine. That is, if I have a problem, I can get answers. Community support is more powerful than Sun support. I know, I've used both. And withou
http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/User:Steve_Ballmer
The power of a command line is far superior to the initial difficulty one might face in learning to use it.
To give an analogy -- the difference between a GUI-interface and a Cmd-line interface is like knowing how to drive a car and knowing how to make it really fast or super-efficient by knowing the internals (basically automobile engineering).
A cmdline use is like the automobile engineer, the gui-user is like a joe-blow driver. If you are satisfied with what you can do from the GUI, you can perhaps stay satisfied with almost any GUI interface post CDE in the UNIX world (best I've seen is the Aqua interface on Macs).
If you want to learn to tap the potential and step up to the mantle of a productive computer user, you'd do well to learn the cmd-line.
Check out apple's upcoming XAR file format (released for download at opendarwin, but the site is down). The format 1. keeps metadata about the files in a separate file, so you can know about the file without uncompressing it. and 2. compresses each file separately.