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."

Comments

maybe I should go and play around with this!

[jacquesm]

Ever since the demise of SGI I haven't looked at anything but Linux / BSD, but this makes me wonder if there is maybe life for Solaris after all.

Would be nice if this was more geared towards the server end of things, which is where I would expect you'd deploy solaris much sooner than on the desktop.

Re:Nexenta

[Enderandrew]

Someone asked me this question recently. And for the sixth time I answered with a laundry list of things I didn't like about it. Agian, I was modded Troll for stating I don't like Ubuntu/Kubuntu, and then people got all in a huff.

Like I always say, it is marketed at a certain target audience, and it isn't me.

I suggest that you try out a really good KDE desktop (Arch's KDEMod, Sabayon, openSUSE 11, etc) and the differences should be immediately apparent to you.

As far as whether or not the KDE packages are available in Nexenta, I'm not sure actually.

Re:md broken?

[outZider]

No offense taken, but your first line is a typical response from most linux users -- anything that goes wrong is either an admin issue or a hardware issue.

First, md forgetting drives is not a hardware issue. Linux sees the drive, the serial number of the drive is the same, the hardware does not change, the hardware works. Sometimes, you will boot, and it just loses the configuration, so you reconfigure the array, and wait for it to check everything out. For two hours. At 3am.

Wiping out configuration during upgrades happened for two consecutive releases of the master distribution. Everything is backed up, but 3/4's of the machines didn't boot properly after md was upgraded. Turned out this was a pretty known issue. No one ever thought that people would want things migrated. Everyone seems to have a few hours to manually move arrays over.

Look, I'm all for great, open, free technology. The problem is, most people don't think about the big picture. LVM and MD are fine for personal machines that don't do much more than serve up files, or play music, or what have you. Technology like ZFS is designed to be bulletproof, documented, and it has to be supported. Not only that, but given the right amount of RAM, ZFS can outperform many off the shelf RAID systems, and give you flexibility in mirroring, snapshots, and drive support that LVM cannot possibly compare to.

The only reason ZFS hasn't had much news in Linux land is that it 'wasn't invented here' and it isn't GPL. Last I heard, there was a movement underway to reimplement ZFS under the GPL. I would imagine we'll see something in five years or so.