Sun to Make Solaris More Linux Like

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday May 9, 2007 @04:46PM 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.""

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First Java open-sourced, now this... go Sun! by koreth · 2007-05-09 16:48 · Score: 5, Insightful

I've liked many aspects of Solaris for a long time, but the #1 thing that turns me off it is the userland tools.

Yes, I know they ship a DVD with lots of GNU tools, but the fact that the built-in make, vi, grep, etc. are still basically unmodified from the early 1990s (if not longer) is not, to me, a feature. Those hoary old versions should be the ones on a supplementary DVD for those who need perfect backward compatibility with 15-year-old shell scripts and so forth.

It sounds like that's a focus of this project, so I say fabulous. If I can get ZFS and DTrace plus a modern toolset out of the box, Solaris will start to look much more attractive.