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.

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.

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

Re:Bummer...

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod me troll if you must

Good idea. I'm almost tempted to give you an "insightful" for that suggestion, but it'd rather detract from the "troll" rating.

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

[kv9]

Otherwise, it's a toy OS, just like that Microsoft thing. what, Xenix?

The sincererest form of flattery

[Zigurd]

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.