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OpenSolaris From a Linux Admin and User Perspective
MSa writes "How does OpenSolaris, Sun's effort to free its big-iron OS, fare from a Linux user's point of view? Is it merely a passable curiosity right now, or is it truly worth installing? Linux Format takes OpenSolaris for a test drive, examining the similarities and differences between the OS and a typical Linux distro. If you want to sample the mighty ZFS filesystem, OpenSolaris is definitely the way to go."
I'd try Nexenta, except I don't really want to use the Ubuntu repositories for my Linux packages. I'd prefer something with a good KDE desktop.
I'd consider it for a web-server box to test how the kernel handles I/O.
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Stay away from Solaris, unless you have to use it.
That being said, I have never seen a large shop without 'some' SUN/Solaris machines.
Solaris isn't bad. There are just 'linux' OS's that do most of the same jobs w/o you getting tied to Solaris.
I love that Sun open sourced it, however I think that the greatest benifit is not that it's open but that the technologies it offers are available to be reproduced on other nix os's.
Except the small detail that the CDDL is incompatible with the GPL, so you won't see things like Linux kernel-based ZFS. From what I've understood running it through FUSE (userspace) isn't all that great. I do understand why Sun doesn't want Linux to take all its crown jewels, but it's still annoying.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
If your main concern is whether or not it runs KDE? Then stick with Linux.
Awesome!
He said 'other nix os's' not 'Linux'. The GPL may be incompatible with the CDDL, but the BSDL isn't, and bits of Solaris, such as ZFS and DTrace, have found their way into FreeBSD.
Saying the CDDL is incompatible with the GPL is misleading - the CDDL doesn't say anything about code not explicitly released under it. It is the GPL which imposes constraints on third-party code. If Linux used a more permissive license then it would be able to use OpenSolaris code, and OpenSolaris would be able to use Linux code just as it used to use a lot of BSD code back in the SunOS days.
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I find quite interesting that the coool features are finding their way into FreeBSD but not linux. Makes you think which users really have more freedom.
All spoken as if by a really naive person. You seem to think that Linux is not in competition with BSD, as if it were above BSD (and OpenSolaris). That's a strange position to take. Do you think that Linux' progress is a result of competition with itself or with Windows alone?
Both BSD and OpenSolaris are technically equivalent to Linux in many areas and superior in some others. By the way, Linux is also superior to the other two in some areas, too. You would be a fool to discount any of these operating systems, as each has pros and cons associated with different projects and needs.
Furthermore, if your hypothesis is that OpenSolaris won't be able to compete with Linux because of the "community" aspect, then why would you suggest that it may be able to compete with BSD which also is developed by the "community." That reeks of Linux fanboyism and illogical thinking.
Microsoft also replaced the BSD TCP stack, but they kept the same userland commands. They already had a different config command (ipconfig instead of ifconfig)... probably because they had to rewrite that to cooperate with their netbios and other stacks, but ...
I've been bitten too many times by companies killing off products. Also, my experience in the past has been that the first thing you need to do with a Solaris box is install all the GNU tools anyway, to replace the broken awk, broken sed, etc. So really, why would I want the non-GNU licensed tools available if I'm not going to use them?
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
You've run ZFS in production, yet you can't see the improvement on Linux's model? You mean the fact that md is completely broken and LVM is unreliable and slow by comparison?
- oZ
// i am here.
Cause anything which isn't GPL isn't open source, amirite?
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
I gave Solaris 10 more than a fair shake a few months ago (with an eye on its ZFS support) when I had a hard drive fail. I worked pretty hard at getting it to run and really didn't get very far. Note: I've been using Debian for almost 10 years now -- so I'm pretty biased.
.tar.gz package system (excusable for the rare unpackaged Perl module, but unacceptable for the whole damn system). I'm quite admittedly not very knowledgeable about BSD and Unix, but damn those systems seem like a bitch to maintain. And Nexenta simply wasn't there yet.
From what I remember there was an astroturfed Sun-staff-only developer community, little information available online, slow as hell boot time, ZFS boot partition complications, and a broken KDE (the X server didn't work correctly; I have absolutely ZERO problems, even with 3D here in Linux).
And when I looked ahead to maintaining the system (the VAST BULK of where overhead is spent) I didn't see anything that looked as sane or easy as Debian. No incremental updates, just some arcane BSD-esque 'port' or
Solaris 10: pass.
"Would be nice if this was more geared towards the server end of things"
in that case what you want is Solaris 10, not OpenSolaris