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OpenSolaris Indiana Released
Lally Singh writes "The Linux-friendly OpenSolaris Indiana has been released! A new, modern package manager and all the goodies of Solaris: ZFS, DTrace, SMF, and Xen on a LiveCD that was designed for Linux users. 'Why use the OpenSolaris OS you ask? It's pretty simple, you'll find it full of unique features like the new Image Packaging System (IPS), ZFS as the default filesystem, DTrace enabled packages for extreme observability and performance tuning, and many many more. We think you'll be quite happy to came by to take a look!'"
I'm tempted to tinker with ZFS just for its snapshotting abilities. You don't have to run a server to find that useful.
Show me dtrace or zfs on ubuntu.
As for hardware, the solaris kernel doesn't change its ABI every couple of weeks. Drivers written once continue to work.
Um, what repos do I need to enable to get ZFS or DTrace functionality? Perhaps the ones powered by pony magic, because last time I checked Linux has neither of these very very cool (and useful) technologies available (and ZFS-Fuse most assuredly does not qualify as 'available' yet).
But perhaps your zealotry does not allow you to try new things...
> The solaris kernel is a hack
You were correct up to this point.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
We named the dog Indiana.
I am not even sure I can get worked up about Solaris anymore even for "serious work".
That train already left the station.
It's not just good enough that you make something cool but you should also make it available when people want it rather than 10 years later.
Now Sun has to put on a good showing just to keep from looking silly.
Although this is ultimatey a good thing as it's one of the key benefits of free market competition.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I'm missing g's and e's :(
As a proud LDD touting, LWN gazing, MSc wielding geek; the Solaris kernel is a heck of a lot better coded, structured and organised than the Linux kernel. But alas, it lacks the many new features that have truly driven linux over the last decade.
Naturally my opinions lie with the ease of code readability and ease of initial development - these are not the same as a lkml hardened pro
therefore, it is *not* Linux-friendly
The primary difficulty with OpenSolaris is that is part of a new breed of corporate controlled Open Source.
Much as they might trumpet that it is, it isn't actually proper open source. I can't take it, rip out any bits I want and use them elsewhere. No matter what the license says, if I can't do that, it isn't 'Open', and as you point out, some bits you can't.
Also, it has hardly any developers not already on Suns payroll, and those that are independent are shackled by a lack of proper tools.
Sun doesn't want to engage with the open source community, they want to 'leverage' it, to exploit its advantages, and avoid its more uncomfortable freedoms.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
from a BSD point of view. If good open source software makes into their distribution, good for them and all their users. Goal accomplished.
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
I agree ... it really sux that we can't run it natively (heard you can do it in Userland .. but I am not keen to do so).
Still, it may come to MacOSX at some point.
I am guessing that Sun know ZFS is the draw card. If they GPLd it, why would we even look at OpenSolaris??
Yeah, and you have to fsck that with a traditional filesystem. Plus, zfs takes care of bit rot (which is becoming a problem as HD sizes get larger) volume management (and makes it extremely easy). Well you can make fun of the theoretical limits, when your modern 1GB hard drive crashes or 1.5 tarabyte array crashes you'll be happy when you can boot without having to wait for the filesystem to be checked. Have you had to deal with volume management before? It was a pain in the ass.
Those are just some of the big items that get mentioned. Solaris' resource management and auditing tools are very impressive and I haven't seen anything comparable in linux that can give as much control for as little overhead.
Open Source Java DAO Generator
While ZFS is cool, it will someday be ported to Linux (the market forces are such). The advantages over ext3 etc. are simply not compelling enough for me to abandon an entire universe of software and hardware I have gotten used to with Linux distributions.
I see no use for Dtrace as I use nothing more fancy than Matlab for analyzing my data. No fancy number crunching or developing here. I used to do a lot of heavy duty Fortran 95 programming, but that is history (which will not be repeated).
So, Sun wants me to trial an OS that is about 5 years late, and has major hardware problems while offering no compelling reasons for the switch. Sorry, but Microsoft beat Sun by a year or so. Its called Vista.
I used to be a Solaris user (on Sun hardware) - used it for about 5-6 years. The image of pricey hardware that worked at half the speed of commonly available Intel/AMD hardware running Linux has sort of stayed with me.
Sun dont consider BSD and Apple competitors in whatever market they are going for, that's why they didn't choose a license that is incompatible with BSD.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
They're in FreeBSD.
There's more to free unix then Linux you know..
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
They're not there for licensing reasons. If Solaris had good enough drivers I would run it on my laptop --- but again, for licensing reasons that's not going to happen either. Both the GPL and Solaris's licence have advantages and disadvantages, but this is the reason why all free software should use compatible licences.
Look out!
GNOME is also the default for most mainstream linux distributions that Sun would want to position OpenSolaris against. RHEL, SuSE, CentOS, Ubuntu, Fedora.
You should be able to compile KDE, or you can get a precompiled package on blastwave.org.
Open Source Java DAO Generator
It's not Debian. Debian has had the ability to fully encrypt the root partition during installation since Sarge I think. Etch for sure. Ubuntu can do it too with the alternate installer. OpenSuse and Slackware have excellent docs on how to get / file encryption. Disk Encryption is essential for laptops and removable media in 2008. If Solaris wants to get adopted by government and financial sectors for use on laptops it will need to have some form of serious disk encryption. To be fair to the OpenSolaris people there are two teams working on encryption solutions but I think they lag well behind Linux or even Windows (Truecrypt) solutions. Two in development projects: Crypto in the lofi(7D) driver (a bit like dm-crypt on Linux or FileVault on MacOS X): http://opensolaris.org/os/project/loficc/ due to integrate soon. and ZFS Crypto which is still in development but due to integrate this summer. http://opensolaris.org/os/project/zfs-crypto/ However neither of these provide for an encrypted root filesystem as they aren't full disk encryption solutions. However with ZFS Crypto all of your home directory and other datasets (filesystems) with sensitive data can be encrypted. I for one welcome my Sun Microsystems overlords...actually I am glad to see another alternative to Windows becoming more accessible to the masses. I have my copy in bittorrent now ready to install in my [Sun Microsystems] Virtualbox 1.6.0 Congratulations to the Project Indiana Team!
"Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people's brains..."
In exactly the same way as I can't take Linux, rip out the bits of the kernel and use it in my incompatibly-licenced kernel. Seriously, you're not complaining about it not being open source, you're complaining about them using a non-GPL licence, which is an entirely different thing.
The code has apparently gotten a bit cleaner although BSD still remains more legible.
Still it doesn't change the fact that for the time being Linux is *it* (whatever that is). It's the system that has the mind share (apart from Windows of course). And for the most part it works just fine.
So while there certainly are other more advanced solutions, I don't see them taking Linux's place in the sun (ha ha) any time soon.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
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apt-get is not perfect. In fact, you may call "a hack." I don't think there's any real "theory" behind it. apt-get may even remove a user's kernel package, as one of the 600 traces in this study reveals:
OPIUM: Optimal Package Install/Uninstall Manager
http://pho.ucsd.edu/rjhala/papers/opium.html
Also worth reading are:
Search heuristics and optimisations to solve package
installability problems by constraint programming
http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/report_ingi2800_C.pdf[pdf]
Maintaining large software distributions:
new challenges from the FOSS era
http://pauillac.inria.fr/~xleroy/bibrefs/EDOS-FRCSS06.html
where they mention "Theorem 1 (Package installability is an NP-complete problem). Checking whether a single package
P can be installed, given a repository R, is NP-complete." (result is to be published elsewhere, though).
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts