OpenSolaris 2008.11 – Year of the Laptop?

Ahmed Kamal writes "Is Linux getting too old for you? Are you interested to see what other systems such as OpenSolaris have to offer? OpenSolaris has some great features, such as ZFS and dtrace, which make it a great server OS — but how do you think it will fare on a laptop? Let's take an initial look at the most recent OpenSolaris 2008.11 pre-release on recentish laptop hardware."

Comments

Why?

[drhank1980]

I know it is cool to try out different OSes from time to time, but is there really any solid technical reason why anyone would choose solaris on a laptop over linux?

Re:Why?

[Skinkie]

Now the fun of ZFS is that next to RAID-Z* it also has some nice snapshot send and receive features. So you could plugin your laptop and upon leaving, leave a snapshot of your work at another ZFS system has has many drives. Now that seems quite cool :) Another reason could be just using the features of the filesystem such as quickly sharing an NFS export for a presentation. Or making a snapshot of your latest work. ZFS like for example GIT as versioning system bring very interesting 'offline/on-the-road' use-cases. The integration that ZFS has to offer with xVM/Zones just proves the point that virtualisation is also available if you want it to. So yes you can use KVM/VirtualBox/Xen/VMware on your laptop, but as far from integration with the base OS, OpenSolaris has nifty features. Personally I run Linux on all but one system. That one system runs my cluster storage on OpenSolaris.

Re:Why?

[armanox]

Sun's License vs. GPL? Solaris comes with multimedia codecs (such as MP3) that Linux distro's don't ship out of the box. Solaris (and maybe OpenSolaris) also comes with the proprietary nVidia video driver already installed for use.

Re:Why?

[jhol13]

Binary drivers.

I am, at the very moment, trying desparately to get EeePC to work with Ubuntu.

If Linux had binary drivers I would just copy them from the original distro. Now it is huge PITA.

Re:Why?

[flosofl]

I have a 900 (the one with the 900MHz Intel Mobile) and use it mostly for pentesting. I got it because it was a) cheap ($299) and b) has an atheros chipset (for monitor mode and packet injection). I usually spend most of my time on it in Backtrack on a 4GB SDHC --1.5GB for Backtrack proper, 2.5GB for results and persistent config changes. However, I carry the thing around with me to quickly check my IMAP accounts or do a little browsing and I found Ubuntu-EEE. It's 8.04.1 with the array.org changes and the Ubuntu netbook remix on the desktop. I haven't run into any problems with it.

Another great resource is the EEEuser Wiki.

Re:Why?

[pablomme]

what is the compelling reason for choosing Linux over OpenSolaris or, say, PC-BSD, on a laptop?

Frequency scaling support for the processor to save power? Hardware support in general? I tried OpenSolaris 2008.5 on my laptop, and this was the main issue.

The userspace is a bit archaic - it's classic System V, which makes even a GNU userland look nice.

I was interested in trying OpenSolaris for this very reason, since I wanted to see e.g. if I could build Makefiles that worked with GNU make, Sun make and BSD make, and that type of stuff. But to my surprise the userland tools I tried were all GNU.

Re:Why?

[oakgrove]

An interesting thing happened while I was visiting my girlfriend's work last night. She's a project coordinator at a call center here in Atlanta that handles tech support for hotel guests' wi-fi connections. I happened to be loitering by one woman's cubicle as she was taking a call. The word "Xandros" uttered by her immediately got my attention. I quickly concluded that someone had an Eee PC and was trying to get it connected. Now, ordinarily, you would think, a call center would just say something like, "We don't support the Linux." and hang up but she gave it a go. She went through her menus on her tech support screen to pull up the right script and as I was watching, lo and behold, a screenshot of Fedora came up with some text talking about opening the terminal and using ifconfig, etc. So, she asks the guy to open the terminal. Then my heart sunk. I realized that Xandros on the Eee PC hides the terminal by default. The person she was talking to was a newb so he wouldn't be able to figure out, just open the file manager and navigate to /usr/bin to find xterm or whatever. (My way after 2 minutes in Best Buy playing with an Eee, I'm sure there are better ones.) And of course the call just went downhill from there. As badly as I wanted to, I couldn't say a word. When I couldn't take anymore, I just walked away.

The takeaway is, as you have intimated, why do we need so many different distro's with so many ways of doing things? If Asus had just left well enough alone and hadn't tried to hide things like the terminal, that customer might have gotten his wifi working and been happy. Now, they are probably asking themselves, why they bought this non-functional Linux crap when they could have just gotten good old Windows instead. That's just a real world concrete example of the consequences of reinventing a perfectly functional wheel and alienating new Linux users.

Re:Why?

[badkarmadayaccount]

Nice kernel for a frankenstien - a vanilla bsd would have been infinatly better. The userland I have no qualms with. And why do you think XDarwin sucks eggs? Because devs would make portable X apps that run on any UNIX, and apple doesn't want that. It's either OS X proper, or generic UNIX proper, not both. Thats why I dream of an open replacement for the Quartz graphics server. The rest of the stack is pretty much covered, just bridge that bitch to our beloved X11!

"Server" vs "Desktop" OS

[Drinking Bleach]

I've never quite gotten what people mean by classifying operating systems in these two categories. Okay, it runs GNOME, office programs, and Firefox, isn't that enough to make it a desktop operating system? Hey look, it can run apache, sendmail, and bind, it's a server operating system too!

Seems to me it's just an operating system well-rounded for any task, and such vague categories don't really apply to it.

Re:"Server" vs "Desktop" OS

[DeadInSpace]

For example, a desktop OS will have a scheduler optimised for latency while a server OS will have one optimised for throughput.

Linus Torvalds seems to disagree with that notion:

When it comes to schedulers, "performance" *is* pretty damn well-defined, and has effectively universal meaning.

The arguments that "servers" have a different profile than "desktop" is pure and utter garbage, and is perpetuated by people who don't know what they are talking about. The whole notion of "server" and "desktop" scheduling being different is nothing but crap.

I don't know who came up with it, or why people continue to feed the insane ideas. Why do people think that servers don't care about latency? Why do people believe that desktop doesn't have multiple processors or through-put intensive loads? Why are people continuing this *idiotic* scheduler discussion?

Re:"Server" vs "Desktop" OS

[TheRaven64]

With respect to Linus, he's wrong there. People running servers care about how many of their clients they can service without interruption. Scheduling latency often doesn't matter because it is dwarfed by network latency.

In any scheduler, throughput and latency are at odds. You get the best throughput from cooperative multitasking. Each context switch has a fixed cost, and the more context switches you do the lower your throughput, but you improve the responsiveness of each process. A UI process has much higher latency constraints than a server process. A desktop user cares more about dropped frames in their video than CPU utilisation. If the CPU is at 60% usage instead of 50% then the user won't care, but if the are getting stuttering in their audio playback then they will. In contrast, a server operator is less likely to care if requests take 60ms instead of 50ms, because the network latency is adding 100ms or 200ms to each one anyway.

Now, a good scheduler can be tuned to favour either throughput-sensitive or latency-sensitive workloads, and can run multiple tasks with both requirements (see HP-UX for some inspiration), but that doesn't mean that the requirements are the same.

Senseless

[nulled]

Sorry, but what in the hell does openSolaris have to do with 'Year of the Laptop'?

Re:Count me

[mritunjai]

Uh is it a new SCO meme ? Are you done with enough of FUD already ?

Solaris (and previously SunOS) were Sun's implementation of UNIX. Right, just like Linux and FreeBSD. As such Sun owns the copyright to it. Sun got it UNIX 'certified'. Thats right, just like OSX, Tru64, HPUX and AIX. There is no UNIX. It is a trademark of the Open Group, and they certify various implementations of it. Ever heard of SUS ? SYS V ?

Now onto SCO fiasco. Sun licensed some x86 drivers from SCO for Solaris 8 (yeah that old... Its like 10 years now). SCO's SCO UNIX was x86 based. Those drivers have long since disappeared! They dont even matter!

Whats all this infighting among Open Source group ? What is that makes some fanbois do thing and spread FUD that is most anti-Open Source ?

Guess some people just can never live happily with others!

Zealotry?

[symbolset]

This is zealotry:

The world is a bridge; pass over it; but build not your dwelling there.

Look. We live in a litigious world. Although it's good guidance to tell programmers to avoid getting involved in discussions of, or reading, patents and their applications, it's a different thing to choose to be ignorant of your field, its history and the decisions surrounding it. The law is the law and it's a waste of time to develop applications that have been obviated by lawyers.

God bless the lawyers. Gently may they swing.

Re:It's a trap

[lokedhs]

I have also followed Groklaw basically since they started, and you are basically scaremongering for the purpose of getting attention.

You know full well that no one is going to read through all of those documents unless they're getting paid for it. I'm pretty sure you didn't read them either, but base everything off of people's comments on the blog. Esp. given the fact that PJ never said that Solaris was illegally open sourced. In fact, I believe she said that Sun already had that right, regardless of whether or not SCO had the right to sign the contract with them.

Re:Wow. OpenSolaris is a rough ride.

[dfn_deux]

any OS that locks up solid so you have to ssh in remotely and kill your login session so you can log in

If you can log in via ssh and have enough process control to kill a session then your OS didn't "lock up solid".

that makes compilation of something as simple as Quake practically impossible--installed GNU toolchain or not

A compiler toolchain isn't even part of an Operating system, but even if it was... I would hardly say that your inability to compile a game on a given OS has much to say about the valid uses for that OS especially when you follow that sentiment with your experience using it as "desktop work machines" which I wouldn't suppose would gain much additional usability from being able to easily and cleanly compile game software (unless of course your job is "quake developer"). Just my .02

For the sake of completeness I'll point out that I admin a LARGE cluster of solaris servers, but split my desktop usage mostly between various flavors of linux (general use) and windows (gaming and DRM media playback). I don't have any real desire to use solaris on any of my desktop machines until/if it supports full root ZFS on raw disk (not on parts/slices as it is currently implemented) and has a stable and recent enough hypervisor that I can reliably virtualize a windows or linux domu and have pci passthrough for my video, raid, and/or network cards.

Firefox and Suspend makes not a year of the laptop

[SkullOne]

So this guy tests the Install process, running Firefox and navigating to Youtube, to find out he has to manually install Flash.
He then puts the laptop into suspend, with a successful resume.
Then he declares OpenSolaris the year of the laptop.

Am I missing something? Any additional unit testing? Benchmarks? Usability? Application availability?

Nice Slashvertisement.

Warning: I use OpenSolaris a lot as well, love it for the sake of some serious faults, but it does its job well. That job is NOT running on a laptop however. Good luck to the poor souls who try to use it as a daily driver.