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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.""
Apart from being an official Sun project, how is this project different from NexentaOS? http://www.gnusolaris.org/ Any explanation is appreciated!
The morphing of Solaris into a Linux clone is best described by the well-known pithy aphorism: "If you cannot beat them, join them."
Oh yea, It looks like Ian Murdock is making Solaris more like Debian/Ubuntu, RedHat/Fedora and SLED/OpenSUSE.
If it has worked for other distributions, it will probably work well for Solaris, especially since they don't
have to bicker over what goes into upstream or not. Not that debate is a bad thing... not by any stretch.
Money is the root of all evil?
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.
Money is the root of all evil?
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.
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.
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.
Good idea. I'm almost tempted to give you an "insightful" for that suggestion, but it'd rather detract from the "troll" rating.
Out of curiousity have you ever even used Solaris (http://www.infiltrated.net/sunDesk.jpg) I have do and have for the past 8+ years. Did it occur that maybe Sun is trying to woo Linux users over. One can get into the whole "Linux/BSD/Solaris" penis envy arguments about the pros and cons of each so here goes:
j pg (linux (Backtrack screen))
... Look there are certain things that should not be left to Linux at least in my shops and that's what counts to me not what you think or someone's distorted benchmarkings, and no I will not get into zealotry here. Stating facts.
http://www.infiltrated.net/openpimp.jpg (my openbsd screen)
http://www.infiltrated.net/currentPentestDesktop.
http://www.infiltrated.net/sunDesk.jpg (Solaris Nevada)
I could go on with Scientific Linux, FreeBSD and NetBSD screens if you'd like, I use most on a daily basis. Linux for a lot of Asterisk use (professionally), OpenBSD for firewalls and security (professionally), Solaris for DB stuff (professionally), and so on. Anyhow, perhaps Sun is trying to simply trying woo Linux users over to using Sun nothing more nothing less.. Highly doubtful Sun is aiming to be Linux. Sorry to inform the zealots before you come along posting a "but my Linux penis does x recursive foo bar zip zilch sequencing faster that..."
Infiltrated dot Net
What the world really needs is more OS players. Welcome SUN!
HTTP/1.1 400
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.
Since they removed sun4(c/d/m) support and defended that decision, there's no doubt that anything current in Solaris is not a copy.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
They copyied the GPL code from linux kernel and did put it as CDDL code.
They copyied > 1 KLOC.
"...muddying up the waters of distribution selection..."
I think at this point, adding a single new distribution isn't really muddying. When the list of distributions is as long as your leg, one more doesn't really make things that hairy.
D'oh! I guess I was inadvertantly talking out my ass, but it's a sleepy Sunday morning here and I was confused Perens with Murdock.
Caveat Utilitor
I'd want to see references. If it's just some header lines, I doubt anyone much cares.
What you do with a computer does not constitute the whole of computing.
No it was good ass talking... I enjoyed it.
But that still doesn't change the fact that you think Debian is full of bloat...
You should try a minimal net-install and only apt-get what you want then...
Money is the root of all evil?
Download the free developer edition. It's included.
Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
Contrary to the opinion of some people, it is possible to have both principles and an income.
What you do with a computer does not constitute the whole of computing.
There seems to be a lot of sun bashing on slashdot, but I've got to say I have no understanding of why. I haven't used solaris yet, but everything I've heard about what they're doing with it has been good.
D-trace sounds pretty sexy, apparently sexy enough that the next OSX version is going to include a port. Binary drivers that don't break compatibility across versions are pretty nice, although I've heard they still don't support as much hardware as linux.
Really, lack of good profilers and the need to compile drivers every time you need to install them is a nuisance on linux and I'm hoping that if solaris does nothing else it will put pressure on linux to improve.
That's the way I do install it, but (and now we're getting way off-topic, but what the hell, I've already been modded troll over not being awake before posting) it's not that I feel Debian is full of unavoidable bloat -- it isn't. It's just all the resources that have been spent on useless things like the GUI installer have spread the project too thin and it really shows in that there are so many broken packages now, more than ever before I believe. Or maybe they're just the ones I was accutomed to using. Anyway, I still find use for it on some machines but it is no longer my desktop OS because of that.
Caveat Utilitor
I hate to feed the trolls, but last time I installed Solaris, it came with Sun's C compiler and GCC.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Of course there have been absolutely no developments since 1980 and as a result Gnu/Linux hasn't produced anything. AFAIK no commercial Unix has anything like apt.
Just thought that I'd note that for years IBM has been trying to make AIX's administration more Linux-like so SystemP administrators can use overlaping skillsets for the 2 OSs that run on SystemP. Whats the 'L' in AIX5L stand for... thats right "Linux"
I dont understand how Sun can be seen as innovative anymore. They just lurch this way and that, never following any kind of coherant strategy.
Make it a malt liquor. I want to be as clever and handsome as possible.
You know, through the magic of apt you can forgo the installation of that "user-friendly GUI crap" and have all the functionality and stability you want.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Stop Computers/Cars Analogies on S
Sun has been groping for a way to compete with Microsoft for over 10 years. Well, "groping" might be too harsh, considering the strategy consisted mainly of denial about the fact that Windows on commodity hardware could run serious applications.
Ubuntu showed the way in both how to do it and the right business model, and Sun has done absolutely the right thing by directly imitating the Ubuntu way by becoming, effectively, a downstream Debian distro. Heck, they hired Ian Murdock to make sure you get it right. At Sun, this is probably necessary because corporate conservatism about cannibalizing revenues would have watered down a purely internal initiative.
Sun could still screw it up. There are plenty of weasel words like "two tier" in this article. But if Sun gets it right and "dissolves" Solaris into a number of userland projects and a kernel alternative to Linux (the way GNU Hurd theoretically is), and executes an a la carte support model like Canonical, they deserve to win a big slice of the business.
I wrote parts of this stuff
Solaris does a lot of things very nicely. ZFS and DTrace spring to mind - and unlike Linux, Solaris AIUI can boot off ZFS.
A former lecturer when I was at university back in 2002 reckoned commercial Unix had 5-10 years left to live. Looks like he may not have been far off the mark - where they're not dying, commercial unixes are being made to look more like Linux and less commercial (witness OpenSolaris) by the month.
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?
What you do with a computer does not constitute the whole of computing.
Can you please explain why your links point to a file called "spybotsd14.exe" instead of the announced jpeg images?
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
I can understand that viewpoint. I'm benefitting from it even as we speak.
/usr/include/linux/limits.h contains a line reading: /* # chars in a file name */
But if it's just some header lines, this will have no affect on you. That's *why* I doubt anyone will care very much. In some respects, particularly where there's some push for a move to GPL, as is the case with OpenSolaris, header commonality might even be regarded as desireable.
Some people, for instance, do small-scale systems administration. One source of information on some of the limits of their systems, such as how many characters can be used in a filename, are defined in a header file called, appropriately enough, limits.h. So, say,
#define NAME_MAX 255
It's probably better that users of different systems didn't have to keep track of different naming conventions, especially
as comments may not be provided. In a system I'm looking at right now, for instance, there's another line:
#define RTSIG_MAX 32
That's the maximum number of realtime signals supported. But there's no comment--you just have to know it. Standardization has it's points. Ideally, you learn this once, for one Unixy OS, and it's portable knowledge. It's a far cry from a wholesale rippoff, including algorithms and their implementations, such as SCO implied in the SCO-IBM insanity.
I seriously doubt very much that more than a tiny percentage Linux kernel developers would have a problem with a few header lines. I'm far from certain that copyright law should be pushed that far, lest developers have to use values with names like THIS_NAME_SO_WE_DO_NOT_INFRINGE. That's not in *anyone's* best interest.
What you do with a computer does not constitute the whole of computing.
Good grief, you even KNEW I was trolling, and yet you still answered.
I know. I'm a Solaris bigot, actually. I do believe that only child molestors use Linux, so I do know that there are compilers included in Solaris.
No weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men.-Ronald Reagan
Must be because on his site, network security is handled by FreeBSD, instead of Linux or Solaris.
Jokes aside, I 100% agree with GP. Each of these unixy OSes have their own strength. And in a professional environment, you should use them where they have the best fit.
Browsers shouldn't have a back button!! It's all about going forward...
I don't see how he's doing anything at the 'expense' of Debian or GNU folk. Without a specific reference, I don't see how he's 'exploiting' anything. The FSF, with the GPL3 changes made in response to the SuSE imbroglio, have proven that they can and will react to exploitation. But I've not seen anything done in response to any of Murdoch's or Sun's actions.
Is the man considered to be somehow ensnared in Debian his entire life, just because he created the project? In '93, as a student? Lives evolve. Responsibilities change. For all I know, he's trying to put children through college, and a Debian relationship just wasn't making that possible. I'm a *long* way from willing to brand the man a some sort of traitor to the cause. Did he, or did he not, create something valuable to many people, which is being built upon to this day, 14 years later? At what point do you decide, "Yeah, he's been an overall force for good," and cut the man some slack?
I know that Sun have contributed to a lot of open standards, etc., over the years. I'm not claiming that they are 100% knights in shining armor. But they are slowly moving in good directions. Given Murdoch's early environment, I'd expect him to be rather more a force for long-term good than some sort of Dark Lord of the Sith.
Our differences here (if you're one poster) are about religion. I value free (as in freedom) software as well. But I don't think I'm willing to be nearly as rigid as you. Quoting a manifesto is a far cry from evidence, and I simply don't see how he has harmed Debian, or GNU.
What you do with a computer does not constitute the whole of computing.
The hell with the full C compiler, when are they going to, by default, a full Cobol compiler??? Or a Pascal Compiler (especially one with MS-Pascal and Turbo-Pascal emulation???If you're going to feed the trolls, you might as well go hog wild...
A horse can't be sick, you know, even if he wants to.
If and when Solaris goes GPLv3 I'd hope many people take notice. It's a bit historical considering where UNIX has been license wise over the last 35 years.
Not that there is much (any?) code left in Solaris from the early UNIX days. Imagine the shock of the UNIX camps 20 years ago if a traveler from the future came back and told them that eventually Solaris would be re-licensed under the FSF's GPL.
They probably would of laughed pretty hard and said "riiiiiight"
As long as all the tools work fundamentally the same, does it matter? Isn't the whole point of Open Source to have "freedom"? Just like there is more than one open source database, more than one open source window manager, who cares if there are several kernels, each designed with specific goals in mind? As long as they're all conforming to POSIX standards, there really shouldn't be an issue.
All excellent suggestions, I agree completely. Sun, are you listening?
No weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men.-Ronald Reagan
They call me the wookie man, I guess that's what I am
There goes the idiotic penis OS envy zealotry. I use OSX too. Does nothing for me considering the majority of time I spend at a machine I have about 10+ shells opened logged into various machines. OSX will do what... Nothing that any other distro I have won't do. I'm gonna place you at around the age of 16-22 for that comment. And its likely you've been using ANYTHING nix related for more than 5 years.
Infiltrated dot Net
Yeah, I had a similair thought, why can't they just ship it with all of them and let the user choose whatever they want when compiling the kernel or thru some tool? Solaris let you switch between various schedulers, why can't Linux (if it can't that is, I have no idea if Linux ships with various schedulers or not?)
I wanted to use and learn Solaris, I really did, but I don't have a work and even less at a huge company with lots of Sun machines (please mail me if you want to get me one ;D) and I only had a 64-bit machine which I could play around more with ZFS in and so on so I installed it as desktop.
But that failed completely for me and I found myself booting Windows XP all the time which I only had installed to be able to play Warcraft III, why is that? Where did Solaris fail on me?
1) Desktop performance.
This might be 50% because of the fact that I have a VIA-based motherboard (MSI MS-6702 with Via K8T800 chipset to be precise) but probably also 50% because of Sun since the motherboard works decent with other OSes.
Anyway, when I ran torrent which put just a little network or disk load on the system, or connected my digital camera thru USB, the system become dog slow and was a major pain to use. I have no idea if this is because of some OS design, bug in the drivers for my system or hardware issues, but it made me so fucking angry about everything that it was unusable to me.
2) Package management.
Sure there are sun freeware, blastwave, netbsds pkgsrc and so on, Sun even ships a companion CD, but all the options suck! Blastwaves package manager are decent but all the packages you want aren't there, so then you might have to get some from sun freeware which isn't as convenient, and you end up with multiple versions of stuff you already had. Also Blastwave didn't hosted the patches/source code which where used so you didn't got any help or advice from old ports on how to get a new one running.
Solaris needs a unified package manager which works and where all the developers/porters can focus their effort and the user find whatever they need.
3) Open Sound System support.
Sun uses "sunaudio", sure it might be decent on a Sun machine, not so decent on my Creative Audigy. There is sunaudio drivers for it downloadable from the web but they didn't offered all the functionallity of the card and I never got Ekiga to work good with it (that is I got it to compile but it where unusable as a telephone.)
The packages need to be built with OSS support so that they will work if you choose to install it. It's free now aswell isn't it? Maybe even open source? What are the excuse?
4) Ekiga didn't worked.
I read that this would be fixed, was fixed, and whatever, but it never WORKED. And I only use SIP for my home telephony, I don't wanna live without telephone, another show stopper.
5) No up to date KDE port.
IMHO KDE is the best desktop environment there is out there, I don't want to run Gnome. Some german made a KDE port which where linked from Sun freeware but it seems like he stopped and since then there haven't been a KDE 3.5 port. I hate to be forced to use Gnome, why does so many commercial dists/oses seem to like it so much? KDE is far superior. Sun needs to make sure that KDE runs.
6) Various versions of tools.
This have already been mentioned among others, so you want to compile something and it expect another version of the shell, install, compiler or whatever, sure you can change your PATH settings to something else but what about the other things which want Suns versions or whatever? Another major pain in the ass.
7) Somehow blindfolded community.
When you point some of these things out, such as the package management issues, the old school users will want to just forget about it and tell you that hey! You can compile and install the software yourself! I don't want to, it takes time, I'm sorta lame so I can't figure out all the troubles, it takes time again, why do the same work over and over again and finally it takes a lot of time!
What I did like about Solaris:
Stable kernel.
Stable environment (code and binary compatiblitity).
ZFS for server environments, not as much needed for desktop but still nice.
Zones! Those are awesome and so easy to use.
The very friendly people in #opensolaris at freenode.
Free
You seemed quite sane and reasonable until I got to the sig. It's in the courts - let them work it out before calling somebody a murderer.
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.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
idiot!
"my understanding is that they're not copyrightable"
OK, a derived work, even with the nonstandard bits. Good! I thought I'd heard something intimating that part of IBM being sued by SCO was about header files. But I'd gotten numb and quit following a lot of that, so maybe I misheard, and that was part of why the suit was bogus. Or maybe I heard a bunch of bull.
What you do with a computer does not constitute the whole of computing.
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.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Regarding OpenSolaris: GPL3 or STFU.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
funniest Slashdot post I've read in months... even if you were serious...
Why wait? It's entirely possible that OpenSolaris may never adopt the GPL. Most of the current community members are very happy with CDDL license and some even making "over my dead body" comments regarding adopting the GPL.
OpenSolaris is a nice friendly OS with a nice friendly community and a nice friendly open source license. So unless you're RMS and insist on waiting for GPLv3 to get on board the best time to start with OpenSolaris is probably now!
-- "Most people prefer a popular myth to an unpopular truth"
Out of curiousity have you ever even used Solaris (http://www.infiltrated.net/sunDesk.jpg) I have do and have for the past 8+ years. Did it occur that maybe Sun is trying to woo Linux users over.
I used Solaris for about 8 minutes. It took me that long to figure out that pressing the TAB key at the CLI did not complete my command. The next 15 minutes was spent reinstalling Linux.
I was going to see if there is some way to get command line completion enabled, but it didn't seem worth it once I saw that I was unable to utilize my history by pressing the UP arrow. Come on! Even DOS had Doskey! Oh, and the DOS style 80 column display...
Sorry, BASh has spoiled me. Maybe Solaris is the greatest OS on earth, but out of the box... it kinda sucked.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Solaris and Mac are very similar I would suggest buying Sun's hardware if you are going to use Solaris professionally, the desktop, running on desktop hardware, is probably at best a hobby system unless you start with the HCL.
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
Yeah, right. It's so easy to get spyware on 64-bit Mandriva.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Murdock's the package-manager man. Sources inside Sun say his office whiteboard has details of the project plan. Its three features: port Apt to OpenSolaris, adopt "it's ready when it's done" for milestone releases and start a set of mailing-lists for flamewars...
Sure, initially. Then they started going off on their own and making it better. I work with Solaris boxes every day, and I always wind up trying to make them work as closely as possible to Linux. There are still a lot of things that frustrate the hell out of me on Solaris that I simply take for granted on Linux. Maybe that's just because I'm used to Linux and how it operates, but Solaris just seems so arcane it's ridiculous.
Why doesn't this work yet: 'tar jxvf meh.tar.bz2' ? That's just one silly example, but it requires me to stop and remember how Solaris does it, which interrupts my train of thought. It's not even like the Solaris way has some great advantage that's gained at the expense of that feature. It simply doesn't have a feature that would take less than ten minutes to write in, including compile time. Take that idea, and apply it to almost every userland tool they have.
I understand that Solaris isn't Linux, but geeze, I wish they'd at least steal the good ideas. GNU and Linux have come a long way in the direction of user and developer friendliness, even at the CLI level. Solaris and other proprietary Unixes (HP/UX, AIX in particular) just feel like I'm constantly pounding my head against a wall.
Oddly enough, when dealing with Solaris, it's the CLI user friendliness that I'm worried about, because I'm always accessing it via SSH. I wouldn't give a rats ass about about Sun's GUI because I'd never use it. At my last job, I got around that by having an Ubuntu desktop where I did most of my work and just NFS mounted key filesystems to copy stuff to Solaris, but now I have to use Windows, which kills even that advantage.
A slightly off-topic plea to IT managers out there: PLEASE consider giving developers Linux desktops. They make life so much easier for Unix developers. It used to be standard to have a Sun workstation at least, but they've taken those away in preference to Windows with 3rd-party X servers, SSH clients, and other unixy stuff bolted on that doesn't integrate well, and certainly could never replace a real unix workstation. It's like trying to hammer a nail with a badger.
Yeah, I remember reading that eventually the Via chipsets couldn't do that many interupts or something and that it might had been because of that or whatever =P, anyway might be a combo of shitty chipset and therefor also bad drivers from Sun. I bought the case, psu, motherboard, cpu, 256MB ram and 52x cd-rom for 500 sek so I can't complain so much on the hardware even thought I know the motherboard (and CPU) is shit and I wouldn't have bought these things if I would buy anything new.
Novell tried to do something like this, too.1 99507/ai_n8727330)
Back when Novell's wallet was a big as their head they bought out UNIX (yes, the REAL code), told everybody that they wanted to merge NetWare and Unix together and have ONE OS code-named: Gemini. (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3649/is_
The announcement angered Netware and Unix people alike, Both vowing to not learn the other stuff. Novell saved face by calling the thing "UnixWare" and limiting the scope of the OS merger.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
No, I wasn't serious. I was just really bored on a Sunday afternoon. I just find all these OS wars silly, and I was just taking this article as seriously as it deserved to be taken.
No weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men.-Ronald Reagan
I suspect that is an artifact of where you cut your teeth. I'm always beating my head against the wall with Linux. The fact that there really is no clear distinction between system and userland or between core system and optional add-ons on Linux drives me batty. What numbskull decided it was a good idea to put static webpages in /var or to put configuration files for optional software in /etc/opt?
The fact that Sun seems to be drinking the Linux Kool-Aid, or caving to the non-technical business types on Wall Street that seem to think that in order to be a success you must have a Linux solution, is not good thing in my mind. Don't get me wrong, there are certainly areas where Sun could improve, and many of them are areas where Linux shines - mainly in the GUI and package management - but if what I was looking for was Linux, I wouldn't be buying Sun.
Sun had the solution to "the Linux Problem" as well as "the Microsoft Problem" in hand more than a decade ago and screwed it up by repeatedly burning adopters of Solaris x86 and by not using the opportunity provided by the purchase of Cobalt to split the hardware lines while maintaining a cohesive OS on top. Combined with the SunRays and StarOffice, they could have easily provided a single provider solution from the call center and home office to the office desktop through the server room.
The problem is that Sun ignored Linux for too long while wasting time and energy on Microsoft instead of using their assets and innovation to move the fight onto ground of their choosing. They let the snowball build too big and are now chasing it down the hill trying to get in front of it to stop it. Only time will tell if they are going to be able to pull it off.
> is an attempt to make Solaris simply "more Linux-like."
Which is to say, more Unix-like-like.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Ok, so as long as we are being OT and friendly about it, what packages were broken and what did you move to?
Money is the root of all evil?