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

Pithy Aphorism: "If you cannot beat them ..."

[reporter]

The morphing of Solaris into a Linux clone is best described by the well-known pithy aphorism: "If you cannot beat them, join them."

package management

[Peter La Casse]

It would be great to see Solaris become tightly integrated with something like apt. pkg-get is ok, but it isn't currently used for all packages, and a Sun-backed and -improved version would be better. For example, I'd like to see it manage security updates in a way that meets the needs of Solaris sysadmins, with separate actions for downloading, applying and rolling back. I'd also like to see my attempts to install gvim not download 50 megabytes worth of libraries that are already on my system, in a slightly different version number.

Re:package management

[wellingj]

Sounds bizar but, isn't that what Debian avoids with its stable/testing/experimental branches?

Why look at Solaris now?

[delire]

Is there really room for a new player right now? With many years of Linux experience why should I look at Solaris? Curiosity only holds so much water when you just want to get stuff done.

Will it offer me a more productive development environment? Probably not. Will it give me a wider audience? Definitely not.

Re:Why look at Solaris now?

[Zonk (troll)]

Is there really room for a new player right now? With many years of Linux experience why should I look at Solaris? Curiosity only holds so much water when you just want to get stuff done. Solaris is very stable. Also, unlike Linux, large parts of it's kernel are not constantly being rewritten. It also has a stable ABI.

Personally, once OpenSolaris goes GPLv3 I'm switching.

Re:Why look at Solaris now?

[LuSiDe]

You know, one thing that struck me in the scheduler discussion yesterday was that no one said 'WTF? Why are you replacing a (working) core component of the kernel with a more-or-less untested one in a minor release?' With that kind of commitment to stability, I'm glad I don't run Linux anywhere important.

You ehm, can like, still run a version which is well tested and came with your distribution? One which, you know, contains only backported security and reliability fixes? The one ehm... the one your Linux distribution provides you? You know, much like *BSD does? Bravo, you figured it out now. Thanks for flaming. Or, if that doesn't suit you, you use the 2.6.x.[1+]-x revisions e.g. 2.6.20.2 instead of 2.6.20. This process is well documented and pointed out esp when they started to change to this way (Torvalds et all did).

Working component is very relative since it doesn't work well in some situations at all.

The FreeBSD folks are also writing new schedulers for FreeBSD 7 (as you know, since you actually talked a bit about this in the other thread), and finally are including a GEOM based journaling implementation. Neat, but again the 7.0 will also follow revisions quickly (esp if not well tested) just like 2.6.24.1 is more stable than 2.6.24. The Linux kernel follows the 'release early, release often' path and the development goes much faster than other kernels (or cores/bases). Plus, I happen to know some folks simply prefer to stick with FreeBSD 4 or 5 on production servers. Once 7 is out, the same will be true for 6 until 7 has matured a lot. You see this behaviour elsewhere too; e.g. Windows world. New != best to run. Same is true for Linux kernel. Not news, sorry.

Re:Why look at Solaris now?

[ChrisA90278]

Because Solaris can do things Linux can't. First off Solaris scales better.

To make an analogy, You might argue that Toyota makes nice pickup trucks and "Who needs Caterpillar?". Well those 20 foot tall earth moving machines do a different job and are very usfull to some people. But yes Toyota sell __way__ more trucks than Cat. Those 20 foot tall machine are real "clunkers" f you try to use then for every day tasks like driving to work or the store.

If you really need a machine with four dozen CPUs then Solaris is the way to go. It Also wins in terms of reliability. Linux is good but Solaris is about 10X better. (Yes really, one more "9" to the right of the decimal point) Solaris has better fault tolerance. For example Solaris can "boot around" failed CPU cores and bad memory. And then there is D-trace and ZFS. These two alone will make some people go for Solaris. Solaris also has the same advantage as Apple's Mac OS X in that Sun builds the hardware and the OS so you can be pretty sure the two work together. And what about storage and I/O bandwidth? Again Solaris scales better.

Operating costs. Sun's new T1 really does offer the best compute power per watt of any server class machine. At $0.14 per KWH power adds up fast. In fact power and cooling costs more than some machines do over a several year lifetime. So Solaris might save you big $$ per month on power bill if you have a large data center running many light weight processes.

Now, if you have a PC, even a "high end" quad core Xeon based PC and you need to select an OS then Linux may work well but Sun calls a machine like this "entry level"

Many end users could not tell a Solaris system from a Linux system. Both can run the Gnome desktop and both run the same csh and bash shells and so on. The differience is the Kernels

I use Solaris, Linux and Mac OS X. Mission critical stuff goes on Solaris. I develop on a Linux system and use GNU Autotools to make it portable to Solaris. Use the Mac at home for photo/video and so on. One OS is not "better" but each has strengths.

Good Gnus?

[otis wildflower]

Beyond fixing software distribution and pkg mgmt (which is lonnnnngggg overdue!!), how about making GNU utils the default and tossing the archaic Solaris versions of common tools into some compat directory? If the GNU tool doesn't support some Solarisism (like, say, RBAC or extended attributes), hack the GNU tool and release the change as GPL.

Oh, and while you're refactoring, please fix JES. It is a clusterfuck mess, particularly the Delegated Administrator.

more 'compatible' might be better

[Qwavel]

It can hardly be called a Linux clone if it uses a different kernel.

But they can still make the OS more Linux compatible, particularly from the software development perspective.

Re:Bummer...

[VENONA]

Contrary to the opinion of some people, it is possible to have both principles and an income.

Re:Bummer...

[VENONA]

OK, some hand-waving and vague flammage going on. I'm not aware that he's done anything heinous. I'm willing to be corrected. But he's undoubtedly done some Good Things. If you must slander the guy, at least provide a link to something he's done that's so frapping evil. People trash Bill Gates, me included. But in the Gates case I could point to specific things. Given his contributions, don't you think Murdoch deserves as least that much respect?

Re:solaris is starting to sound good

[AaronW]

Exactly. I can't count how many scripts fail on Solaris 9 because of Sun's /bin/sh missing some key functionality (usually replacing it with /bin/bash fixes it). And why should scripts have to hunt around all over the place just to find a working version of very common tools (like Sun's sed which used to be quite broken). And some very useful features are always missing (recursive grep anyone).

Trying to compile GNU software on Solaris 9 is often a painful experience because even their libc and header files are in the dark ages (i.e. many ISO C99 features are missing). I haven't tried Solaris 10 and moved on to Linux at work.

Re:Sun as usual is copying IBM

[allenw]

If Sun is copying IBM, where is "OpenAIX"?

Re:Bummer...

[larry bagina]

POSIX specifies what #include files are available and what macros they #define. (For example, limit.h).

Most operating systems tend to include other nonstandard stuff as well.

Anyhow, header files are inherently open source -- you can read them, you can edit/modify them (assuming you have write permission or can copy them to a local include directory). And more importantly, my understanding is that they're not copyrightable.

Well...

[LWATCDR]

Is there really room for a new player right now? With many years of Windows experience why should I look at Linux? Curiosity only holds so much water when you just want to get stuff done.

Stability, security, and frankly scalability. Solaris has been running on huge SMP systems for many years longer than Linux. It takes security very seriously right up there with Open BSD. And let's face it, Sun has some of the most brilliant Unix developers on the planet.