Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Sun to Make Solaris More Linux Like

Posted by samzenpus on from the imitation-is-the-sincerest-form-of-flattery dept.

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.""

3 of 400 comments (clear)

  1. Re:First Java open-sourced, now this... go Sun! by Greg+Koenig · · Score: 5, Informative

    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!

  2. Re:Err.... by this+great+guy · · Score: 5, Informative

    ZFS? DTrace? Zones?

    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/pnfsd emos/basics
  3. Re:First Java open-sourced, now this... go Sun! by SnowZero · · Score: 5, Informative

    Who cares? Do they work? In a 100% Solaris environment, sure. In a multi-platform environment with several *nix systems, with user account portability between machines, it most definitely does not work. At my university I used Linux, Solaris, IRIX, Tru64, and HP-UX. Linux and IRIX were nice to use Tru64 was decent, but Solaris required much tweaking to keep scripts running. The compiler was also a piece of crap in the 96-99 timeframe, though eventually it caught up. Admittedly, HP-UX was much worse, so I avoided it like the plague. Sun started beating out other vendors, so it was impossible to avoid using Sun boxes.

    I expect vi to be the same from platform to platform. grep as well. Make???? grep, and many other programs, would be missing lots of options, or have incompatible options. The shell would have lots of subtle differences requiring many "if solaris" options in my setup. I consider make unusable if it doesn't support gmake's extensions. If you don't have gmake, you need to use things like automake, but if you are going to install those why not just make gmake the default? Sun's cc was terrible when compared to the MIPS or Alpha compilers that came with their respective unices. On the bright side, the man pages were far and away the best IMO.

    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?