Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

OpenSolaris 2008.11 – Year of the Laptop?

Posted by timothy on from the appealing dept.

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."

3 of 223 comments (clear)

  1. Count me by symbolset · · Score: 0, Troll

    Count me among those who don't care.

    It's Open Solaris. It will be a decade before Sun settles with Novell to grant the right to open Solaris, which right Sun previously bought from SCO, who didn't actually own it. In the mean time if you code for this your output's ownership will always be in doubt. It is better to code on a platform where the exegenesis is more certain.

    --
    Help stamp out iliturcy.
  2. It's a trap by symbolset · · Score: 0, Troll

    SCO did not have the right to grant Sun the right to open Solaris. This is a proven legal fact. Novell owns that right, and they have not yet granted it.

    Open Solaris is and will be in doubt until Novell endorses it. Until then it's pirate software and no more legal than "Hot XP SP3 Warezz NOKEY" from TPB.

    --
    Help stamp out iliturcy.
  3. Oh gawd no, not more Solaris by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    Speaking as a software developer, Solaris is one of the worst platforms. Solaris issues occupy a far greater amount of my support burden than its share of the customer base.

    SUN regularly changes the API in incompatible ways, all the while denying that they do such thing. In almost every new release of Solaris, something breaks because SUN made an "improvement" and intentionally broke the "unimproved" means.

    When you point out specific examples, they say "that wasn't documented". When you point out the specific text in the man page that documents it, they say "man pages are internal documentation, you aren't supposed to use those."

    I am relatively neutral on the Linux vs *BSD wars. I use and like both. They do the assigned task, and things which worked yesterday still work today and are likely to continue working tomorrow.

    I can't say that about Solaris. It's bad enough being SysV (a horror unto itself) but SUN adds that extra special bit to make it a true nightmare.

    SUN is dying as a company. The sooner they die and take Solaris with it, the happier I will be.