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Sun Says OpenSolaris Will Challenge Linux
E5Rebel writes "Sun Microsystems has ambitious plans for the commercial and open source versions of its Solaris operating system. The company hopes to achieve for Solaris the kind of widespread uptake already enjoyed by Java. This means challenging Linux. 'There's an enormous momentum building behind Solaris,' according to Ian Murdock, chief operating platforms officer at Sun, who was chief technology officer of the Linux Foundation and creator of the Debian Linux distribution. Isn't it all a bit late?"
OpenSolaris
Won't a new one tear us,
Unless they first
Have Ballmer chair us,
Great documentation--
Now that could scare us.
Burma Shave
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
What's the point of an operating system when you've got Java running on top of whatever is there? The OS is just a bootloader for the Java VM.
Sun's interest in pushing two separate platforms is baffling.
I admit that I don't know much about Solaris, but is their community comparable to those in the Linux camps?
Linux and Solaris look about the same anyway - Gnome (or whatever), Firefox, Thuderbird (or whatever), Apache ...
The kind of Solaris penetration sun really wants is at the corporate
level. There are a lot of Sun Servers out there so they'd like to increase
that further in companies who want cheaper hardware than the sparcs.
From a TCO point of view, add Solaris X86 to your existing Sparcs isn't
that big of a deal and Sun has made pretty good progress in making Solaris
10 much more on equal footing with Sparc based Solaris so now you only
need admins who are expert at one OS, you've got easier compatibility
with your software etc. Then from there I see a push to companies who
don't use Sparc hardware.
I don't think so, but then again, I'm still holding out for an Amiga comeback.
Consider MS with IE and then Mozilla with Firefox.
MS Word vs WordPerfect 5.1
What about Linux, itself was probably considered "too late" or such at the time "Everything's been invented/done".
What about when Redhat was top dog - who'd have thought that Ubuntu would come along and change a lot of things.
The point is, it's [almost] never too late, just sometimes you have a harder job ahead of you.
unix, unique, union... nothing more detached from the truth: Unix companies are always fighting each other, building conflicting standards, and letting the real enemy safely escape...
I don't feel like it...
What can Sun Micro Systems bring to the table that rest of the Linux could not? Its name, some kind of relationships with corporations and provide "not a bunch of amateurs in their spare time, this OS is backed by professionals" kind of sales talk. But that niche is already occupied by IBM. As for SUNW's vaunted professionalism, they fumbled the lead they had in unix and are struggling to keep up. As for their corporate vision, these guys never realized until it was too late, that Windows OS was the loss leader, in grocery store parlance, and the real deal is the vendor lock in office documents, email addresses and calender applicaions. MSFT might have fumbled many balls and lacked vision on the technical side of the market, but when it comes to business side, MSFT has been nothing less than visionary in gunning for monopoly and achieving it. Now SUNW is going to take on Linux? yawn. Nothing to see here, move along, folks.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
That is the right spirit. I like to have a choice and i think linux can only get better by being in a more direct comparison with solaris. However, since i am conservative i will run linux on my laptop for some more years and i believe many other will do the same.
I was first going to write a blurb saying "Great! How can we lose! Let the best OS win!"
But on second thought, I can think of one bad scenario: OpenSolaris and Linux end up with different groups of users, where-as they previously would have mostly used Linux. This makes it harder for *either* open-source OS to get enough market share to attract ISVs, manufacturers writing device drivers, etc.
I guess the best of both worlds is if Linux and OpenSolaris kind of merge, resulting in a single OS with the strengths of both (for example, the goodness of getting dtrace into Linux).
No, I don't think it's too late at all. If it's a decent operating system and has certain advantages over Linux (regardless as to whether or not Linux in turn has certain other advantages over it), then it will eventually catch on. In the world of software, it's never too late to introduce competing technologies.
(Just missed the FP, but still)
this chance was missed a few times. The last one was when Nexenta was treated like a mother-in-law.
If SUN wanted acceptance instead of l33t, GPL(v3) would have been the order of the day.
As long as they dangle about with CDDL, they might as well pass away. Don't get me wrong, CDDL ('cuddle') is quite a good FOSS licence. But it has its problems with a coexistence side-by-side to GPL. And GNU is, love it or hate it, thousands of great applications; and moreover a licence accepted by the majority of FOSS developers.
I hope(d) Ian would have the power to apt-ing Solaris, but he doesn't seem to. And when you read the OpenSolaris lists, you find as much ego-tripping as on OpenBSD or Mac. They rather sink with pkgadd.
And I cry for them, yes, because SunOS is the greatest kernel around, with limited hardware support. Back to licencing and square one.
It would mean so much more if someone outside of Sun said that.
I remember when Solaris was going open source and everybody was saying how they would over take Linux... well, it hasn't happened... not even close. So why the optimism from Sun now?
Meh.
Not too late. IMO, the real important thing here is that a company is willing to spend money and time to develope a product and that they are not using a fragmented Open Source model, that in my opinion, does more bad than good. Concentrating in a product will often lead to better results (OSX, BeOS, Windows) are examples of closed source OS that are in many fields superior to almost every Linuzz distro out there. The key, IMO is non-fragmented Open Source approach. Many will here disagree with me, and that's OK, I'm a BIG Open Source skeptic.
Java? Wide uptake? Surely, you jest.
.NET in the core OS. Java is quite widely used as a scripting language for web servers, but this doesn't make it any more important than PHP (bleh), ASP (bleh*2) or anything of the kind -- everyone uses what he feels most comfortable with, and Sun invested quite a lot into pushing Java into schools.
/bin/sh
I see how much Sun loves Java -- they rename everything to "Java This" or "Java That", like, an ancient version of Gnome they ship suddenly became "Java Desktop", their stock ticker is now JAVA instead of SUNW, but this doesn't mean Java means anything more than another pet language of choice. Python, Tcl, Ruby, etc, etc -- they do have their use, have their own niche following, but neither is well-fit for a client language.
Java tried this, and failed. It's quite rare now to see any client programs written in Java; it's a bad idea to install a huge framework just for a single program (yeah, Azureus, but that's pretty much the only big one), and Sun doesn't have as much clout as Microsoft, so there's no pushing
For Solaris, they slept for the last ~10 years, I'm afraid. Having met a couple of Solaris servers then, and having taken a look at their much-hyped gratis mailings, I hardly see any difference. On the other hand, getting used to a new version of a Linux or even BSD distribution makes you feel like the older one is all musty, obsolete and unusable.
Oh, and Sun still didn't put a POSIX-compatible shell as
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Try this on yer a-ver-age Linux system:
/zpool1
bash-3.2$ df
Filesystem kbytes used avail capacity Mounted on
zpool1 17193093120 39 17193092990 1%
As long as ZFS is a feature of Open Solaris, count me in!
The game.
Java is popular... let's check out that 64-bit Sun Java plug-in for Firefox on Linux, oh wait, it doesn't exist.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
I thought it said "OpenSolaris Will Change Linux" first. But then again, that may also be true.
Why, yes! I AM new here.
oh, please do. ZFS still has issues (mostly minor, but issues, none the less), like anything that is fairly new. With that said, do you believe that Linux is not working on new FS's that take it on? Since you do, please jump.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
"Well yes, in the same way an infant may challenge Muhammed Ali!"
Subject: The Worst Job in the World
From: Michael Tiemann <tiemann@cygnus.com>
Date: A long time ago in a galaxy far far away...
I have a friend who has to have the worst job in the world: he is a Unix system administrator. But it's worse than that, as I will soon tell.
Being a Unix system administrator is like being a tech in a biological warfare laboratory, except that none of the substances are labeled consistently, any of the compounds are just as likely to kill you by themselves as they are when mixed with one another, and it is never clear what distinction is made between a catastrophic failure in the lab and a successful test in the field.
But I don't want to tell you about biological warfare, I want to tell you about what makes my friend's job so terrible. First, some context.
The training for Unix system administration is a frightening process. When machines start dying, users start screaming, and everything grinds to a halt, the novice feels the cold fingers of terror clutching about his heart.
#!/bin/sh
# this doesn't work, but no time to fix it -- hope nothing crashes
progname=$0
But if one stays the course, one might some day achieve the dubious satisfaction of being able to mutter "at least I know why it broke!".
#!/bin/sh
# This works...I wonder if it will get me laid
progname="`echo $0 | sed 's:^\./\./:\./:'`"
But there are many who must dwell in this miasma both day and night. What makes my friend's job so ugly is that he doesn't only work with just any strain of Unix -- he works with Solaris. And he doesn't just deal with just any braindead users -- his users are the executives at Sun Microsystems.
Let me tell you about Sun Microsystems. At Sun, there's a long history of executives playing pranks on one another. For April Fools, these rowdies would play tricks like putting a golf course (complete with putting green) in Scott McNealy's office, or floating Bill Joy's Ferrari in one of the landscaped ponds. Things have come a long way since then. Now every day is April Fools, and my friend doesn't like it one bit.
VP: "Admin!! What the fuck is this thing running on my machine?"
Admin: "It's Solaris, sir."
VP: "Get it off of my machine at once!"
Admin: "But sir, Ed Zander told me that you should be running Solaris now."
VP: "Zander, huh? I'll fix him. Is he running Solaris?"
Admin: "No sir."
VP: "Why not?"
Admin: "If he ran Solaris, he wouldn't be able to get any work done."
VP: "Very well, restore my machine to SunOS, and put this Solaris crap on Zander's machine."
Admin: "But sir..."
VP: "That's an order! And tell him Scott gave you the directive himself!"
Admin: "Yes, sir."
Zander: "Admin!! What the fuck is this thing running on my machine?"
Admin: "It's Solaris, sir."
Zander: "Get it off of my machine at once!"
Admin: "But sir, Scott McNealy told me that you should be running Solaris now."
Zander: "McNealy, huh? I'll fix him. Is he running Solaris?"
The only thing worse that being a Unix system administrator is doing the job for ungrateful users.
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
Deleted
as long as Linux distros and Solaris play nice together. An open source solaris can only be good for the OSS community as a whole and will hopefully guarentee compatibility
Solaris has known stability in certain supportable configurations. Linux supposedly does too. I know that statement will get a lot of hackles raised but just hold on. I am a continuous Linux user since 0.99pl8 and I love it. But, as time moves on I see some instabilities creeping in as complexity rises and hardware moves on.
One of my boxes downstairs, a recent machine (less than 6 months old) running stock Debian (amd64) without a mod to the sources.lst has a slight instability (almost certainly in a driver) and crashes every week or so.
Now, one could say that I should replace the hardware which has the suspect driver (always seems to be on a disk access). Or I should get on the Debian lists and report it. If it was a Sun Solaris box I would know that the hardware I had was (or was not) supported. The word 'Supported' in the Linux world really (I am sorry) does not mean as much as it does to Sun.
Now I have other Linux boxen, (a little older) which have uptimes of over a year. No problems. But on odd occasions as this I would like to have stability and I can't find it. (Read, maybe don't have the time at the moment). And I need the box UP. I can't rebuild it AGAIN! I am on the 6th distro in an attempt to gain stability. That's an aside.
In Sun's world. You pay a little more for your hardware and 'Know' it is going to work.
...or *BSD, or Linux. I am working with Linux, I am developing under Linux. My programs compile for *BSD and for Linux. I am pretty sure they would compile and run as fine under Solaris. So why am I using Linux? It has the best driver support, the best documentation, the best software support. Would I change when *BSD or Solaris get the same quality of support? No, why should I? They have to be better and solve at least one problem, I have with Linux. Currently I have no problems with it. Would I change if there was a problem, which one of the others solve? At once. As I said, I could not care less, which one of the three I use.
So please could anyone tell me, what are the USP's of Solaris?
After looking at newer Solaris offerings, one thing that struck me as a good option is to use Solaris as my Host/Hypervisor OS, and use Linux within Xen VMs on top of Solaris. You get Solaris advantages at the root { ZFS, Solaris Zones, Stable Unix platform, good management tools } while still running any instances of Linux I want, enclosing my services in lightweight Linux VMs.
Last time I checked, Xen was not fully ready for prime time on Solaris. But, that was quite a while ago. If it's Xen is stable, and has good management tools, Solaris would make a good hypervisor. For security reasons, I think it's also nice to have different OS's in the hypervisor and VMs -- making it less likely a single exploit can rip through all layers.
I dont see Solaris having much of an impact, and here is why. Sun Micro makes most of their money by selling hardware, whereas their services market is quite low and I do not see this changing. If they are to push OpenSolaris onto average low cost machines and were successful, it would no doubt hurt their bottom line. Because of this, they will be forced to play both sides by saying that there is "Solaris" and then "OpenSolaris" essentually implying to the end user that one is inferior to the other. In the early days they probably will try to say that they are the same, but eventually it would seem that they would be forced to seperate them to create the perception of added value.
This to me seems obvious, but am I missing something here??
Ha ha, that's why I read Slashdot, for the humor. There's room enough for a lot of OSes, that's why Windows is still everywhere, why people aren't interested in installing somethng over the top of it.
Got to go, I have a client who wants me to tattoo "Ubuntu" on his ass. Thinks it's gonna get him laid.
There's an enormous momentum building behind Solaris
And where's that? In the Sun break room? Look out! It's a Solaris Tsunami!
Don't think so.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I can do XFS too (I know you made a mistake, and mean ZFS). However, I will point out: /mnt/t/something 16T 1.1M 16T 1% /mnt/t/t /mnt/t/something 17100669952 1056 17100668896 1% /mnt/t/t
s ystems). I just have a hard time having enough storage to build such a filesystem. The biggest real block device (not sparse) I have readily available not on GPFS is an 8 TB ext3 filesystem.
$df -h .
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
$df -k .
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
I just ran this on my laptop (an 'average' system, though I assume your system with 16 TB of storage is not really 'average'. I too can have big block devices with a single filesystem, big deal. Go commercial, ala GPFS and you can do bigger (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_
ZFS's power is not the filesystem size. It unifies a lot of things historically in different layers. I.e. software raid, storage pools, dynamic new filesystems, long term snapshotting. Most of these can be done without ZFS, but the creating filesystems and long-term snapshotting can be done with such ease and efficiency when all the 'layers' work together, and that is what ZFS brings to the table. I will say ext3cow would give me the single feature that most appeals to me about ZFS, and the rest I can do using LVM and such.
In the end, ZFS is the single point that tempts me in general about Solaris, but I'm not about to jump platforms when I know enough 'tricks' to get 'good enough' out of my existing platform.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Nobdy expects the Spanish INQUISITION!
I think the author of the article needs to reread what he wrote. He is the one thinking that Solaris is set to take on Linux. I believe that is not correct nor do I believe that it is Sun's direction. In several key places in the article, they are offering Solaris as an "alternative" to Linux. Sun offers Linux and Windows on their servers. I did not read anywhere that they are setting up to take on Linux directly and I am betting they hope to do things as well as Linux has done them. They are way too late to take on Linux.
The embedded space is where Linux is most widely accepted but with the (harmless in reality) anti-Tivoization clauses in the GPLv3, and the amazing levels of FUD that IP lawyers are dumping on CTOs everywhere to get more billable hours, embedded device makers are getting more and more scared of anything GPL. If the kernel goes GPLv3, Linux will lose a majority of that market whether the worries are well-founded or not. If Sun plays it's cards right (there's a first time for everything), they could pick up a lot of that market.
Windows + .NET
Open Solaris + Java
Linux + ????
Basically leaves Linux as the bastard step-child with no framework of their own. They kind of have MONO...and they DO have java....but how long til "incompatibilities" start popping up, now that Sun is pushing into the OS market?
Sun has done an excellent job of astroturfing. I know a lot of technical people who have tried it once again, and got the 'neat' factor of ZFS, was not that impressed with DTrace (we know how to do most of this sort of stuff in linux already), and containers, well, are nothing unique to the platform. So ZFS remains the cool thing that, while Linux has facilities to kinda-sorta get there, can't get there as smoothly and flexibly. Meanwhile, they were bitten by a distinct lack of drivers, and their random whitebox platform they used to evaluate was being strangely flaky in the face of Solaris when it seemed solid with Linux.
So on the technical front, there remain kinks to work out. In the meantime, Linux has incredible momentum, incredible talent in the market, and from a business standpoint, is in an advantageous position. Linux has more corporate backing (you want serious software support for Solaris, you have only Sun to choose really, while in Linux, well, at least Novell and RedHat are serious software support contenders, and more hardware vendors embrace Linux than Solaris).
The other sad thing was the Solaris platform package management. Nexenta was a refreshing thing to evaluate, but looking at the community at large it seems Nexenta gets the shaft. It's all up to Indiana to see if they can pull off a well-accepted, decent package/repository system. I have to admit, this is by *far* the biggest thing Linux platforms have going for it (apt/yum) and very much outweighs the benefits of ZFS (it's like apples and oranges, true, but when you have to pick one or the other...). Of course, the Nexenta situation points to them not pursuing the other thing they need to be a Linux contender, they'd have to allow other companies to have control and be able to provide software support on their own without any help or money exchange with Sun themselves. The question is if they did that, would Sun's share of the Solaris market still be more than the current Solaris market in the face of a dominant Linux market, and I really have no idea. They might just have to lose out on Solaris to make it have a chance, and that really gets them nowhere. It's a fine line to walk and it wil be interesting to see what they do to try to pull it off.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Back when linus released linux as open/free software, there were no other choices for a free operating system:
- Minix had switched policy to 160$ for the diskettes.
- The BSDs said that they were going to go free, but the board of directors didn't want to lose potential profits and that was constantly delayed.
- MS-DOS is not an operating system.
We were in a deadend. Linux was the right thing at the time.
*After* linux took off, the others got scared and as a *reaction* to linux, started giving out open/free operating systems. The BSD alliance in fact went for "totally free -- you can rip it off and sell it and never give back".
But the thing is, all these moved happened in REACTION to linux. We wasted a lot of time and money hacking device drivers for linux without any documentation. Now that our efforts have succeeded they want us to give it up and go fix Solaris bugs and write device drivers for it? Or fragment the community of hackers?
Sorry. Been there, done that. Too late now.
Given their haphazard application of their HCL (sun4m - need I say more) and the cutting out of perfectly usable sparcstations (no dtrace and crippled KCF is fine enough tyvm), it's left a sour bit in more than just a few.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
It works sure, but it is no where close to a Windows desktop, and far behind Linux Desktops. You would think they would have solved printing in some nice way but not even that is available.
Though their Sun Ray clients are easy on the administrator and the best on the market, you just got to love a thin client with two monitors at 1920x1200 (Sun Ray 2FS). They are also pretty ceap $200 - $600.
So that means they'll create a successful product that's bloated, overly strict, and was open-sourced too late? Perhaps OpenSolaris has the advantage being that it has had a decent amount of attention since its source opening, but the comparison to Java should stop there.
Personally, I already think Java's becoming obsolete, but I don't see the same fate for OpenSolaris.
ilovegeorgebush
There's something that Linux, and some of the BSD's have that Sun insists on not having - a wide range of hardware support. Sure, it's not going to run on the Sun3 easily, but non-Ultra sun4's that can take the load aren't beholden to bmc giving them the HCL blessing.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
...After years of migrating most of our datacenter operations from Solaris & IRIX environment to Linux, we have pretty much migrated everything back to Solaris. Reasons? Cost - Solaris licenses are free. Support is good, and also relatively inexpensive. Cheaper than RedHat Enterprise. Stability - We're talking interface stability, backwards compatability, etc. Storage - Linux's storage subsystems are still a joke. A hodgepodge of filesystems, and don't even get started on enterprise storage technologies such as fibre channel & multipathing, where the linux solution requires a spool of duct tape, a pack of chewing gum, and some string. Compatibility - Solarisx86 has had no problems running on any enterprise-grade server hardware (Dell, IBM, Sun). Many complain about Solaris not having the "driver base" of Linux -- but the question is, would you really want to run that hardware in your enterprise?
Wake me up when Sun has:
* Has as much open drivers as Linux has;
* When it has ALSA (I know, it sucks sorta, but it works at least);
* When it has very vibrant and lively developer and user community;
* And when you don't have to release such PR to say 'momentum is building behind OpenSolaris'. I know hyping is sometimes quite cool, but it is just sick.
People hype about ZFS. But do really there are mass defection to OpenSolaris because of that? I don't.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
1.) Ditch the inhouse CLI tools - they suck and will never catch up with GNU. Maintaining them is pointless. Use the full spectrum of GNU CLI tools.
2.) Use a pimped zshell as shell with a prime quality default setup and some good-looking, neat tutorials to get the Bash crowd in line for it.
3.) De-suckify the entire grafical desktop stack, unifing GTK and QT with the same, one and only default theme that looks good.
4.) Use APT as distribution system.
5.) GPL Solaris and remove the distinction between Solaris and OpenSolaris.
6.) Build a marketing army to push Solaris as "Mac OS X" for all non-Apple computers and 'the better open Unix variant / the better Linux' at the same time.
There's only one big problem in all this: Sun. They are a technology driven company. Gigs like Apple or Canonical (Ubuntu) are vision driven and have a single boss who's considered king. They have a vision and they convey it to any opinion leader in the industry they care about.
Suns staff wouldn't know a well designed desktop or a constently marketed brand if you showed it in their face. Just look at the video presentations from JavaOne. Anyone delivering such a presentation at Apples MacWorld would lose his job the next day. Sun is putting out CEO computable marketing babble and if at all they will only come through half way.
Mind you, Solaris overtaking Linux is possible. Theoretically. Solaris has the prime advantage of not having an image torn to tiny bits and pieces by a thousand distributions - if Sun would do all the things mentioned above they could seriously capitalize on this distinction to Linux. But as I mentioned allready, they lack the vision and conceptual consitency to really pull through with it. That's my experience anyway.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
It's been two years and still there is no self-hosting OpenSolaris distribution. Again, there is no self-hosting OpenSolaris distribution. Again, there is yet to be ANY self-hosting OpenSolaris distribution. Not Nexenta, not Belenix, not Schillix, and sorry but Solaris Express is not open nor freely redistributable.
Source or no source, if that damn thing can't even be made to be self-hosting, and the resulting product freely-redistributable, then it can't even be compared with Linux, much less overtake it. Enough with the smoke and mirrors already
I fell for this hype two years ago when all the rage about Solaris 10 came out. Here's the deal: ZFS - great. DTrace - amazing. The Solaris kernel - truly exceptional. The userland, installer, package system, and general feel of the OS - horrendously bad ... so awful that it sent all of us who tried it screaming back to Linux and BSD. And they are still going to stick with that awful package system -- even after Nexenta has done all the work to get Apt working, even after hiring Ian Murdock. And that's the amazing thing: Nexenta is a shining example of a budding community that has filled in almost every glaring gap that Solaris was lacking and rather than gobble it up, Sun has basically patted it on the head like a good little wannabe and marched right on by drunk in its typical, massive, NIH syndrome.
Not a chance. Keep the press releases coming, hire all the Linux people you want, but at the end of the day, I have at least two choices for a self-hosting, community-driven operating system with package systems, installers, and userlands that work now, not in years to come.
And Sun, please stop with the "we're gonna beat Linux" crap. Haven't you learned by now that that doesn't help you. The whole "us verses them" mentality has no place in the community, and just makes you look like an ass. Linux earned its place. Earn yours, with action, not press releases.
http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/User:Steve_Ballmer
If all the obvious reasons to pick Linux over Solaris go away, it will be very interesting to see which OS people choose.
[To be read in that barely restrained anticipatory baritone half-growl so favored by TV and movie ad voice-overs]:
SATURDAYsaturday, at the WORLD SOFTWARE FEDERATION'S OPEN SOURCE WARS, see Son of Java take on the Mighty Herd of Penguins in a STEEL CAGE GRUDGE MATCH!
Watch as the up and coming challenger ROARS its defiance and CHARGES! Watch as the hoard of cute little defenders mass together TRANSFORMER-LIKE into the implacable foe we know and love!
Will OpenSolaris be able to take the away the WSF crown away from Tux?
Will the Penguin bide its time and then DESTROY the challenger with righteousness like it did with last week's challenger SCO?
Will the lumbering, slumbering giant from Redmond wake up and SPEW OLD CODE to join the fight or will it continue to snooze and pretend NOT TO NOTICE?
SATURDAYsaturday, see the UNMOVABLE FORCE take on the UNSTOPPABLE OBJECT at the OPEN SOFTWARE WARS from the WSF, where YOU the VIEWER are in... connnTROOOLLLLLLLL.........
(Offer not valid in any country according to Microsoft; side effects may include multiple reformattings, several competing discussion groups, too many vaporware announcements on Slashdot, flamewars, and paying different prices for different versions of free software; for external use only, your mileage may vary, do not taunt Happy Fun Ball).
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
...with Sun support, I can safely say that Linux has one BIG thing over on them. If you make the right choice in distro (along with the associated community) for your needs, you can get support at your level of need. I choose Gentoo because I like to have a system that is tailored to exactly what I want/need and outperforms other distros. I acknowledge that Gentoo needs a bit more knowhow than some of the "easy to use distros", but frankly the only distro that's better than Gentoo is Linux from Scratch. The Gentoo community on the Gentoo forums is generally quite knowledgeable and for every question I've ever run into, there's been someone who's given me an answer in less than a day. The same can't be said for the CentOS forums where it seems that it's mostly former Windows admins looking for an MS replacement instead of a new way of working. That's not a slam against CentOS or it's community. It's just an honest assessment of the situation. I went to that forum looking for help on using multipath fiber channel controllers for redundancy and NO ONE responded. I posted the same question on the unix.com forums and someone pointed me in a good direction (LVM multipath) which led me to the final answer (RAID multipath) for what I needed. I then went back to the CentOS forum and posted the solution that worked for me. The same thing happened with questions about Xen virtualization. My needs exceed the support that the CentOS community is capable of providing. They also exceed what is supportable by RedHat (I want something other than ext3 for example). So Gentoo is a great fit since it allows me to do whatever I want. Ubuntu is a non-starter since most of their forums are populated by "me too"-ers. Again, that's not a slam against Ubuntu or it's community. It's simply a true statement of fact that Ubuntu doesn't meet my needs.
So where commercial enterprise OSes are concerned, I think I'd stick with Windows before I'd ever choose a Sun product. I recommended that my supervisors stay away from Sun because of their (at the time) horrid update path for the OS. Things may have improved at that time, but as the article indicates, it may be a little too little a little too late. My shop went with HP-UX and haven't looked back. The quality of support is excellent and the knowledge of the techs is amazing. When I dealt with Sun support, I'd say that one out of every ten techs actually seemed to know what they were talking about. I'd ask a simple question about the issue at hand and give them plenty of info and description only to hear them say they'd get back to me. Then three days, maybe a week later I'd get a call back. This was typical, even though our level of service was supposed to provide is with response in 24 hours. It was just mind numbingly annoying how stupid some of the techs were. For commercial Unix, my take is, "ANYTHING OTHER THAN SLOWLARIS". The slow being applied to support response times for the most part. HP-UX has it's own issues, but at least support isn't one of them.
So much like the Linux argument I made above, the best way to choose a commercial OS is to see if it fits YOUR needs and then weigh that with the depth of knowledge and response times that their support offers. However, in reality, if you have talented staff, support is generally not necessary outside of the hardware realm these days.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
It's nice to see another opensource contender and I'm impressed with the progress nexenta is doing. However all of my tests have only been under vmware emulation. Why? Because I can't even install it on any my machines. I don't believe my machines are built with any rare or special hardware and I can only conclude that solaris is lacking good driver support atleast on the x86 platform.
I've NEVER seen a installation CD that didn't freeze and If I can't install it how can I comment on it on slashdot?
"If a show of teeth is not enough, bite
I've been doing sysadmin type work for a decade. Smaller shops, I grant. But I have in the past been around a few SunOS/Solaris boxes - which worked just fine (if you consider the lack of GNU tools by default "fine").
But.... So what?
Really, why would I want to use Solaris over Linux? I guess to answer myself, there may be some very specific enterprisey things that Linux falls down on, but I think that with everything from SysV init to YaST, to no-broken tar(1) leading Linux distros just makes normal things easier.
Or am I missing something?
32-bit browsers work just fine on 64-bit operating systems. And you can't plug a 64-bit plugin into a 32-bit browser.
You're either a troll, or you've just demonstrated significant misunderstanding of how 32- and 64-bit apps work.
If they go GPL3 and make it easier to access this can happen, in facxt it probably would, but leavbing stuff cddl it won't happen. their call. Linux is going to fragment anyway because of the new liocense, this is perfect timing to get the interest of those who really like the gpl 3 over version 2.. An even cheaper entry level machine pre loaded would be cool as well. And if Sun approaches device makers, maybe they will listen on drivers.
I don't think .NET is more reliable than Java. Where did you get the figures for reliability?
.NET does not run on Unix/Linux, and a lot of companies run their servers on Unix/Linux.
.NET does not have a comparable open-source support like jakarta.apache.org for libraries, frameworks, unit testing tools etc. .NET versions of popular java libraries/frameworks/tools are sub-par or non-existent or commercial.
.NET ties you to a single vendor that is hostile to its customers. Can you run ASP.NET web applications on other servers than Microsoft IIS?
.NET might be better for Windows GUI programming than Java, but that's it.
Java is still improving rapidly.
Java is not going anywhere anytime soon.
--Coder
Was the code base written by a bunch of boneheads who just knew that a size_t was really an unsigned int, for just one example?
Been there, done that. It's amazing how such idiots can fuck up even an app that was developed entirely as a 64-bit app.
Java runs just fine under Linux. I have been using it extensively for last 6 years under Linux and had very little trouble.
.NET/Windows/MSSQL or Websphere/Solaris/Oracle platforms. There are cases when you need more powerful solutions, but they are few and far between, and for 95% of problems Linux/PostgreSQL/Java is more than enough.
And especially now, when Java is GPL, and GCJ is maturing, there will be even less incompatibilities, and ones that arise will be fixed. If not by Sun, then by Linux community.
So I vote for Linux + PostgreSQL + Java. Rock solid application platform, uses real database, can be made lightning fast for web applications and doesn't cost a dime. Comparable in capabilities to any
And why should Sun be interested in screwing up Linux java implementation? That would only hurt their business and drive people away from Java. They can offer added value with Solaris and they can offer added value with Sun hardware and they can offer support and make money that way.
--Coder
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
...I'd give him a raise!
I see absolutely nothing wrong with that code, other than you have to be a decent programmer to hack on it...and understand many details about TCP implementation.
Which is totally reasonable, considering what it does! It's a not a recipe database, it's a freakin' protocol stack!
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
Sell ... now ...
I know other people have shared this pain, but if you have real "real time" applications, shared memory mapped files for example, this is a great thing. POSIX memory is good.
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
still haven't recieved those opensolaris discs they promised to send out. :/
it's been months now. I wanted to try out ZFS and solaris in general and compare it to my linux installations.
I wanted the discs due to being on an crap ISP (Elisa) with crap lines.
m10
If you've ever worked with the brilliant engineers at Sun you know that some of them are top notch. Some very brilliant people there.
However, we also know that Sun likes to sit on their hands. They like to bask in their past accomplishments, sometimes for a VERY, very long time. Also, historically, Sun tends to drop things like a hot potato. Some example of these kinds of things are Solaris, which until 10, was pretty stagnant.... showing no signs of real functional growth, definitely NOT pursuing the desktop in any way. Also consider their Opteron workstations. For example, the w2100z, which is only a few years old, yet over a year ago, Sun pretty much dropped total support for the platform. Also, remember Sun's track record of support x86. 3rd time's a charm?? We'll see.
Sun is brilliant, inconsistent, unreliable, cocky, idle... there are a lot of bad qualities within the Sun culture. Unlike people in the Linux community, Sun engineers are more likely to live inside of a box. Yes, they develop some really neat things inside of that box... BUT because they can NEVER look outside of the box, they are totally unaware of what is happening around them. Up until a year or two ago, I'd say that >90% of all Sun engineers experience with Linux was with Red Hat 5.0. With that said, Sun seems to be interested in their platform again, and they SEEM to moving in the right direction. Will it last? History says no.
Internally, a lot of the brilliant engineers at Sun are very tied to the long standing Sun goal of global domination. If you remember the late eighties when Sun made their bid to capture all of Unix (and fortunately failed), then you know that this is a company that believes they are the ONLY player. This hinders Sun somewhat in that their platform isn't the best one for integrating with a whole lot of disparate technologies and platforms. Again, Sun is pretty clueless about systems outside of their realm. Sun's best friend is Sun. Their best partner is Sun. All is Sun at Sun. Very similar to another company located in the NW of the USA.
Sun likes to TALK. They will SAY just about anything at anytime... often contradicting what they said only a few months earlier. So... beware. Sun is a company of promises, but not highly valued promises.... cheap promises that aren't worth much.
Will OpenSolaris compete against Linux. Certainly. Do they have the technical know-how to pull it off? Certainly. Are they more technically savvy than Linux developers? I'd say yes. Are they lazy? Yes. Are the unreliable? Yes. Are they untrustworthy? Yes.
This is how I see Sun. I love them... but I love some of the Microsoft engineers as well (and IMHO, there's more to fear from Sun than from Microsoft... fear Microsoft's money, but fear Sun's tactics).
Contact Theo de Raadt, and get the top 5 targetted pieces of hardware for which the manufacturers will not provide documentation.
Reverse engineer drivers for this unsupported hardware, both for OpenSolaris and a generic BSD (under a BSD license).
And, yes, when you talk to Theo, you will learn that YOU are in the top 5 list. Fix that.
If you bring your guns to the OpenBSD driver crusade, you will get all the PR that you want.
"Isn't it all a bit late?"
So you assume the wold is closer to it's end than it's beginning? No, there are thousands of years still to go. we are only just beginning with computers. It is hardly "late".
Most end users could not tell the difference between Solaris and Linux. Users interact with the graphical desktops system, web browsers and text editors. Most sys admins deal with the server software, like Apache or the shell. All of this is exactly the same on both Linux and Solaris. The differences are closer to the kernel and how each handles virtualization and the file systems. Thinks most users don't know much about.
Today I think your hardware drives the choice between Linuux and Solaris. If you need high end SPARC hardware Solaris is the way to go but Linux runs better on commodity PC hardware. And Linux has been ported to embedded processors and I doubt Solaris ever will reach for the low end
>...widespread uptake already enjoyed by Java...
Widespread uptake? Did I miss something? Java is:
- Slow for desktop GUI apps
- Slow and not always supported for client-side web apps
- Fast but uselessly complicated for J2EE server apps and used primarily by large companies "sold" on the technology (PHP, Rails, Perl.. those have widespread update)
The best thing about Java is the language itself. It's what C++ should have been and it's great when you want a strongly-typed language. Too bad they crippled it with that stupid byte code crap. Platform independence is nice, but they could have achieved the same thing by developing a JDE for all those platforms that produced fast, native executables.
I'm not saying Java was ignored. Clearly it wasn't. But the bytecode thing made the development model too complicated. J2EE has some nice features and scalability, but "Hello World" is so complicated that J2EE is only really competitive for very large scale apps. And they couldn't even decide what a fricking Java Bean is (is it an ORM, is it a UI component, what the heck is it?) If they had followed the KISS principle, the very good language could have given it true "widespread update" instead of leaving so much room in the market for PHP and Rails.
Your first two examples are Microsoft products. Microsoft has huge resources to draw upon when it decides to enter a market, and can afford to sell at a loss for a long time. Sun does not and cannot.
Linux was not at all "too late". In fact, it was invented at just the right moment. The Internet was exploding, and lots of people wanted to run Unix servers on commodity hardware. Proprietary Unixes were expensive and in many cases hard to get a hold of. (At the time, there were many complaints from Sun customers that they couldn't find anybody to sell them a license to Solaris/x86; Sun was still in its SPARC Uber Alles mode.) Besides, as an Open Source OS, Linux could evolve quickly to meet people's needs. Indeed, Linux's success is not so much a vindication of Linux itself as it is of the open source development model.
I don't know what figures you're looking at, but from where I sit Red Hat is still top dog. It's true that more people download free copies of Ubuntu workstation than free copies of Red Hat workstation (mainly because Red Hat abandoned workstation products for a while). But in the server marketplace, which is where companies like Red Hat and Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) actually make their living, the server version of Ubuntu doesn't even come close to RHEL or SUSE. I'm not even sure they're third.
That said, Solaris does have a tiny chance to overtake Linux. The trick is to make it easy for Linux developers and administrators to make the switch. That means a lot of work porting tools and libraries. If Sun does that, they'll have no problem getting folks to give Solaris a try — at which point the OS will sell itself, with its superior performance and features. But getting past the "why doesn't X work the way I'm used to" stage is key.
I have some personal experience in this area. A few months ago, I implemented a TWiki for my group. For that, I needed Perl. Not just the basic Perl runtime, but tons of Perl modules to support all the TWiki plugins I planned to run.
My hardware was a Sun V20z, an x64 box that already had Solaris on it. I really wanted to give Solaris a fair shot. (Guess where I work?) Now, Solaris comes with a nice solid Perl implementation. But I soon found that many of the Perl modules I needed had never been tested on Solaris. (Not surprising, since module contributers typically have access to Linux, and maybe Windows.) In many cases, I couldn't even get the install scripts to work. OK, it's not that hard to install a Perl module by hand. (Tedious, though.) But finally I came to a Perl module that had a dependency on an obscure feature of an obscure C compiler. Solaris has the compiler, but not the feature! This is where I gave up. Removed the Solaris partition and installed Fedora. Installing the Perl modules I needed, with the CPAN module managing dependencies for me, was a matter of minutes.
So if I were in charge of the Solaris-beats-Linux effort, the first thing I'd do is go to CPAN and start QAing popular modules on Solaris. Perl, after all, is the duct tape of the Internet. And who would use a tool that's incompatible with duct tape?
What shared/global filesystem and clustering solution will Sun be providing to compete with Linux' free and relatively-mature clustering?
http://sources.redhat.com/cluster/
Granted, ZFS could be superior to EXT3 over CLVM, though last I heard ZFS still needs performance optimization..
... on big servers but not on just about anything else. Solaris is the flat-bed 18 wheeler of OSs. It scales well are machines with a lot of processors, it has good supported drivers for "big" hardware like fiber drive arrays, there's good support from Sun and third party providers and, most importantly from a Linux prespecitive, it will be easy to GNU-ize the system to get "GNU/Solaris". But it will be very hard to supplant Linux on Pee-Cees. If you think you have problems with wireless and suspending on your laptop you can forget running Solaris on it. With Solaris you have to buy the hardware to fit the OS whereas Linux is the best *nix for commodity hardware.
Isn't it all a bit late?
No. It's never too late for a better operating system than Linux, which Solaris is in just about every respect that matters.
Let me go kinda off-topic, I find it odd that when people talk of the wonders of Linux they are rarely talking about the kernle itself.
Take ubuntu for example, all what makes it "Linux for human beings" are actually things outside the kernel.
More and more the user experiences less of the kernel and more of other things like X or a DE
Everybody (In the linux world) seems to have an inclination about gnome or KDE or another de over windows' and name the advantage
Another big group prefers it for open source in general and not really for the Linux kernel itself.
I like "Linux" for most of these reasons, open source, gnome being customizable in a way I like, the unix file system structure and symlinks. None of this is specific to the kernel itself.
And solaris got symlinks, and is unix like, and can run gnome. This said if it gets a GPL license it will get more attention from the world and if it gets a GPLv3 license I might even consider switching.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
But it just may be slowing it down:
they mandate it NOT be used on ANY
I have seen this comment twice now from an AC in the last couple of weeks, probably the same one. I'll ask again for your sources to this statement.
If you are not willing to share sources, then you are making it up and I'll just assume you are a shill.
If and WHEN Solaris becomes GPL (v2 or v3) in it's entirety I'll pay attention.
Until then it's not going anwyere fast.
More generally, I think Solaris's only real chance is to merge or semi-merge with Debian/Ubuntu. Their kernel could become another supported platform, and they'd gain the 20000+ existing packages--the lack of which currently make Solaris a non-starter. If they did this, I would seriously look at their stuff.
More realistically, I think they'll do with Solaris what they did with Java, which is basically slow death.
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
The application is well known and widely distributed.
Solaris is the WORST platform to run this application, even worse than other flavors of SVR4 UNIX (which are also pretty bad). A site that switches from Solaris to Linux on identical hardware for our application is rewarded with better reliability and much better performance.
BSD is our preferred platform. But we recognized reality and invested considerable resources to make our Linux support be as good. Linux isn't all that bad. It has a couple of annoyances but we were able to overcome those without much difficulty.
Solaris, on the other hand, is a never-ending support nightmare. Being SVR4, it lacks important facilities that are in BSD and Linux. It has bizarre incompatibilities from its own earlier versions. These incompatibilities are even worse than Microsoft's XP to Vista, because on Solaris it is impossible to build a binary that will run on both versions (forget about compiling without lots of #ifdefs).
I am uneasy about the demise of the PowerPC coalition and the hegemony of x86. I would also be inclined toward any non-Intel open source solution (e.g. Linux on IBM Power or Solaris on Sun hardware) - but that would necessarily take a back seat to cost. Part of the cost at this point would be relearning the Solaris/AIX environments after so many years using RedHat derived Linux almost exclusively. Both of these considerations are why Open Solaris on generic Intel is not an obvious winner.
It depends of one's definition of "documented". For Microsoft it means several thousands pages of papers covered with entries " spacingLikeWin95 = bool : when set to true, emulates Word 95 on Windows 95 word spacing ".
Such marvel won't be that easy to implement in non-Microsoft products.
And Joe 6-packs users will be fast to shift the blame on the 3rd party programmers : It's not Microsoft's fault if OOo folks aren't able to implement OOXML properly, after all MS did their part of the job and released a doc, isn'it ? At 6000 pages, that must be well documented !
Now add patents problems in the mix and you see that OOXML could still bring lots of problems.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Trust me : Drivers, sloppily coded buy underpaid Asian contractors, with Windows-grade "My printer drivers makes the whole system crash" or "my computer got hacked and Zombie-BotNeted because of an exploit in my webcam driver" quality, is the last thing you want to have running inside you kernel space.
OpenBSD's "No B.L.OB. at any cost" and the current trend in Linux with project like Nouveau *ARE* the most important stuff.
Otherwise you're just promising a whole new world of driver-induced core dumps to opensolaris.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Jokes aside, I've gotten Opensolaris to install on only one machine out of five that I tried. The Sparc version of Opensolaris wouldn't get past the initial root password screen, and the i386 version wouldn't work with SATA drives.
Ian Murdock seems to have forgotten that we all left Solaris behind for a number of good reasons (most of which have not yet been addressed), and most of us did not leave it on amiable terms. I'm in no hurry to even try it again, either, as neither I nor my company have any kind of niche need for it to fill.
Linux supplanted Solaris throughout our enterprise years ago, and we're happy with it.
BSDs said they were going to be free? What drugs are you on? They were free, and there were already 2 ports to the 386. Making up nonsense doesn't exactly make you look smart, especially considering Linus himself has said that he wouldn't have started linux if he had known about BSD.
Idealistic crap? Whoa, you need to put the computer down and go find a hobby. People use lower-10% software all the time because it has a feature they need, or they like it, or because the maker of the 90% software package is unethical. I wouldn't call a software package a winner just because it's used by the masses. That's the type of brain-dead marketing tactic used by proprietary software companies and media corporations.
... and it'll completely transform Linux.
Get your facts straight buster, OpenSolaris was released with a GPL-incompatible license on purpose.
That was the will of the engineers. Those little wankers.
I agree. Another thing: Bill Joy wrote the original BSD TCP stack.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Why shouldn't OpenSolaris should embrace and extend with Linux?
Slashdot = Sarcasm
I second this. This code is great. It's not for newbies, but the OP's whining is totally unfounded. It is well engineered, well documented, highly readable, and doesn't do stupid things. This is what highly professional code looks like.
creating something like apt for Solaris to deal with installation problems once and for all?
Tech Public Policy stuff
Solaris is solid enough that if Sun is now committed to x86 I have no hesitation to try it in a Production situation.
The noises Sun has been making in this regards are the correct ones, and me being familiar with Solaris rather than Linux in a datacentre (I use Linux at home, but that is clearly not the same) I wil be more willing to try SOlaris than to introduce more Linux.
Having one OS less to support has many advantages, so one ship may have left, but that does not mean there are no others leaving port soon.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
The code appears at first glance fine. I do however question the wisdom of sticking well over 25000 lines of code all into a single gigantic file. It'd probably be better organized and easier to get an overview over if it was split up more than that.
I believe that it will overtake that blue screen of death software called Vista, or XP, or whatever name they give it.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
Contracted for Sun for a while - and found they are just another bi-polar corporation, like MS or Sony. Wouldn't hang my dreams on them.
There are things that are a matter of principle (what you , disingenuously call "zealotry", that old, beaten to death horse).
If others do not have principles, principled people don't get jealous or angry about them, people with principles do not uphold them as part of a popularity contest or a drive for market share.
You don't believe in those principles? Fine. But to wish that our accessibility to better, open software, could be hindered just to please your revengeful sentiments (what people supporting FOSS have done to you apart of ensuring you gain access to software that doesn't put you at the mercy of your providers?) speaks volumes about the kind of individual you are.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I will let you believe Sun doesn't count anymore. Since most likely you work in a place or industry where this is true, dislodging you from your lack of understanding of where Sun is king will not help you much.
I will just utter two words: Finance, Oil.
Enough said frankly.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
IBM and SUN (of course) amongst many others are behind Java.
.Net studies are completed ( when was .Net, the MS rip off of Java, launched? Not enough time for feasibility studies?)
So which mysterious mainframes could not handle Java (give me a fucking break frankly, Java is running in many guises in medium powered servers to support heavy applications), and which big iron developers are going back to C (I will give this as plausible) or COBOL (you are fucking trolling now).
Your last sentence is telling, if Java is tomorrow's legacy language, that surely means it is today's language, and since one one can live on the present, well, wake me up when all those feasibility
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Otherwise you would not say something so uninformed about it.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
As for the userland part of the system, what is stopping you to get GNOME or KDE if you don't like what is in offering?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
1) Cost, and the ability to use gray boxes (AMD + SuperMicro rocks!).
Fair point. You get what you pay for though.
2) Sun's hardware failings. The more they outsourced the less stable the hardware got, to the point that we were replacing a piece of hardware at least every 4 days in a 2-year old block of 1,100 Sun boxes. It was most often failed RAM sticks but we ran the whole gauntlet of failures many times.
This is completely and utterly ludicrous.
So you have 1100 machines, this is 2200 disks (you do mirror in all your machines, right?), lets say around 2000 memory modules, thereabout power supplies (because you would expect to have redundant ones in some of the servers), so a conservative estimate is that you had around 6000 components and you are whining about instability for changing one every week?
Sorry, but your expectations are completely unrealistic. I have been in no computing shop of a similar size where you did not have a dedicated team to address hardware failures, independently of the platform and OS.
How is your AMD stuff faring? I would be surprised that in a similarly sized datacentre you don't have the same or more failures.
3) Linux provides much more modern and complete shells and tools. Trying to use things like BASH (especially the little things like using the up arrow to scroll your console history) and VI (instead of VIM) on Solaris is painful. I often found myself trying to use utilities that weren't present, as well... the kinds of things we SysAdmins use every day in Linux. I know a lot of these things can be added to Solaris, but Linux "just has them" out of the box.
Where is your alternate universe? Really, bash is in Solaris as standard, I do not know if the damned arrow works because I don't use bash (memory hog if there ever was one), I prefer a lighter shell (ksh) and at least there the arrow works fine. Like vim? What is stopping you to install it and make it part of your corporate installation server? Which utilities are not available in Solaris? For dogs years Sun provided GNU utilities in their downloads area plus the ones provided elsewhere. This is a lame excuse to switch to Linux, somebody coming to me with this as a reason to migrate would pretty much become a candidate for the next round of redundancies frankly.
4) Ease of administration. From the openness of everything to the ability to easily identify network interfaces on Solaris it's always, "Hey - is that bge0 on the board, the quad Ethernet or the fiber?!") to the more logical naming of disk partitions to Webmin to advanced grep'ing and standardized PERL available to the shell, Linux is much faster and easier to navigate, troubleshoot and make changes to (at least for my team and I).
The bge0 is the first one in the main board, if there are no bgs in the board then the slots are scanned in a very precise order at boot time and interfaces names are assigned accordingly. You only get confused if you don't know what you are doing. My personnel doesn't, but they are knowledgeable and RTFM.
/dev/sda1 to /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 ???
More logical name of partitions? Is that a reason for switching OS??? So why is any better
So you are using Webmin. How are you securing the connection to the tool?
egrep is as good as any other grep incarnation out there, perl has been standard part of Solaris for dogs years, and you can always install the latest and greatest if you must. I still do not see reasons for switching OS.
As I mentioned before, much of Linux and GNU was born out of people's long-running frustrations with Solaris' shortcomings, and moving back and forth between the two highlights this in the most unflattering way.
This is complete nonsense. you will have to mention which parts of GNU where born as you claim. This is not the case with the most important GNU tools (compilers, utilities), so I am really curious whic
IANAL but write like a drunk one.