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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.""
Have you used old versions of vi? There's a reason that linux old timers used to argue over who's text editor was better (i.e. emacs versus vi). I personally am a fan of vim, but once in a while run into using some crufty old version of vi that is just painful to use. I can't speak to changes in grep or make, but there have certainly been significant improvements in userland tools since the 90s. I remember first trying to install and use linux on a machine in the 90s and found using it to be a most painful experience. Today, I use linux all the time and fine that all the software tools have improved significantly.
Excuse me?
/home and /usr/local, and a few other directories, and copied the relevant entries from /etc/passwd and /etc/group. Copied whole applications, their environments, etc.
I just migrated an entire system from Solaris 7 to a Solaris 10 Zone - How? I tarred up
Solaris 7 is from 1999, and this is 2007. Try that on an 8 year old redhat box and see what happens. Good luck with that.
I'm using Solaris because the data mining application I'm building (in Lisp) brings the Linux kernel absolutely to its knees. Solaris runs it just fine on the same hardware. (We're talking 30+ GB of heap -- Linux is dead meat after 3 to 4 GB.)
A friend of mine says this is because the Linux kernel hackers optimize for the common case, not for extreme cases. I suspect this is correct. To put it another way, they are more into cycle shaving than analyzing the time and space complexity of their algorithms -- just as one might expect from smart hackers with a relatively weak computer science background.
The result is a kernel that does great on normal workloads, but just falls over when subjected to unusual stresses. Unless and until this is corrected, there will be a need for Solaris.
Your god may be dead, but mine aren't!
Ha ha. That "don't add child directories' disk usage to the parents'" option in the Solaris "du"? Yeah. Um, I wrote that when I worked at Sun. Along with a bunch of other things, e.g. the first CD player app (WorkMan) that could pull track listings over the network. That existed on Solaris years before anyone ported it to Linux. I think I've earned my opinion on Solaris, thank you very much.
Although you're right that one can install the companion disc (and then go to sunfreeware.com to pick up the stuff that's missing or out of date) it still remains the case that, e.g., if I log in as root on one of the random Solaris systems at work (where I have superuser privileges but not unilateral control over what root's environment looks like) I get a nasty old Bourne shell with no history, no completion, etc. If I were to change root's shell to bash or zsh, I'd run the risk of breaking system admin scripts that assume I'm using the default shell.
If in your book it makes me a Linux fanboy to want Solaris to improve in the areas where it's currently behind Linux, then so be it, I don't really care what name you put to that. My interest is in seeing Solaris improve because I think it's fundamentally a pretty good piece of software.