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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.
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.
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.
The plagues called Java and C# are their fault, but I don't think that's the reason.
Regarding Unix, Sun was Unix in the 1980s to the mid-1990s, at least for many of us. High-resolution, diskless workstations, networking, all the cool free software availableI feel personally indebted to SunOS and Solaris -- I might have been running Windows right now, if we didn't have such a great Solaris environment at University and my first few jobs!
Solaris is a pretty nice system overall. Sun's biggest failing from a user experience is their adherence to obsolete versions of the standard *NIX applications. Most of the stuff in /bin has none of the useful features added by POSIX. The POSIX stuff is all sequestered in /usr/xpg4/bin. This is a PITA when you want to write portable shell scripts that aren't restricted to a 25-year old subset of UNIX.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
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
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.
e dia/sunstrategy1.gif
No need to try to reverse engineer their strategy, it's openly published:
http://media.arstechnica.com/journals/microsoft.m
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.
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.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
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.
Yeah ignoring the fact that Java is actually a fairly good language and that all the negative conceptions of it are based on older versions from 10 years ago. Java isn't the slow, annoying language it may have once been to some extent. It is a very good cross-platform language and it is also object orientated and well structured, and it runs a million times faster than it used to; it runs fast enough to the point that it is pretty much indistinguishable from a regular system code OS-specific compiled program for most things. The only hangup I have with Java is the installation which seems to be very nice for developers but not so nice for end-users who don't care about version numbers, SDKs and the like.
Anyway the point is that dissing Java shows that your knowledge of current tech affairs dates back to 2001 and before. Also, C# while more of a VB sort of language is not necessarily bad (in fact VB these days is getting better and supports OO and a bunch of other things and even if C# and VB are more non-programmer languages to some extent, they are underestimated a lot).
If Sun is copying IBM, where is "OpenAIX"?
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.
"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.