Sun Says Project Indiana is Not a Linux Copy

eldavojohn writes "Ian Murdock (Debian author & Sun's OS Chief) made some comments about Project Indiana that many have said is an attempt to make Solaris simply "more Linux-like." But Murdock quashes any concerns that this is just another Linux clone — muddying up the waters of distribution selection. He says that it's more a 'best of both worlds' attempt to make an OS that appeals to a broader audience. From the article, "Project Indiana will include a revamped package management system, which should prove popular with developers unaccustomed to Solaris. The OS has some clunky, archaic aspects, and Murdock thinks the new package system will modernize Solaris.""

Comments

Re:Bummer...

[wellingj]

Yes you are indeed a troll. But mostly because you are talking out your ass.
In 1996, Bruce Perens replaced Ian Murdock as the project leader.

Re:Good Gnus?

[AaronW]

I remember reading a discussion by the Opensolaris folks claiming how much better their tools were than the Gnu tools. They were singling out Solaris TAR and saying what a mess the Gnu version is. As a user, Solaris TAR is crap to use compared to GnuTAR. It can't even handle tar files over 2GB, for example, and I've had several tar files it can't handle that GnuTAR can. I also like the built-in support for bzip2 and gzip in GnuTAR. Now granted, I haven't tried Solaris 10, but I suspect the problems remain. That isn't to say that GnuTAR is perfect... I was running an older version that would truncate some filenames.

Another one that caused me endless frustration was Solaris newgrp did not allow you to specify a command line like the Linux one did. I ended up porting over the Gnu version just so I could do my job without having to manually type in a command as part of a build procedure.

At my job I've been maintaining KDE for Solaris for a bunch of Sun users. When I migrated my desktop to Linux I'm still having to support KDE for them (and that's not my job, I'm not in IT). None of the developers like Sun's Gnome 2.0 that's included with Solaris 9, and newer versions have problems compiling because Sun still does not support the X render extension (on Sparc). Trying to compile KDE was difficult, since Sun's libraries and tools are often broken or so out of date. I also have had to compile GCC for Solaris to do it, since Sun's C++ compiler we have barfs on a lot of open source packages. I've also hit a number of problems because numerous features are missing in Sun's libc, even though they've been part of the posix or ISO standard for many years (i.e. missing stdint.h), including some parts of stdio.h. (stdint.h is part of the ISO C99 standard, well before Solaris 9 came out).

I remember having tons of problems with Sun's sed because it would silently truncate after 4-8KB of input.

-Aaron