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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."
I am interested to see more stories that are not advertising or shout outs develop on laptops reading slashdot. Down with the "Check out my favorite thing" posts.
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?
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.
Sorry, but what in the hell does openSolaris have to do with 'Year of the Laptop'?
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!
- mritunjai
Parent. Read it. Moderate it. And then moderate this post redundant. I don't care for my Karma, but I don't want rational viewpoints to be silenced, nor the moderation system to be abused. And if this gets modded down then that's the way it is, but at least you had a choice.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
If you code on anything besides Linux the evil proprietary companies will steal your code.
Seriously though - if you write something for OpenSolaris - how is the ownership of your code in doubt? Just like an app written for Linux does not have to be GPL'ed, or an app written for Windows is not owned by Microsoft.
Typical Linux zealotry in action.
And by that tone so is all of the installs of Solaris from Solaris 8 onwards. I see no reason to think that Solaris is pirate software any more then Linux, Mac OS X, or *BSD are.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
Kind of like the Year of the Desktop for Linux.
I can't do any better than to point you to a site where this is more completely covered. Go to groklaw and review the legal documents if you would become more informed on this issue. If you can't be bothered, well, then I claim superior knowledge of the subject because I did and have followed the conflict since 2003 (and have followed the products since 1980).
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I guess I'll be having a sitdown at Groklaw this afternoon. I still doubt that SGI's IRIX and Sun's Solaris are effectivly pirateware, otherwise Novell would be taking action against them. (SGI also had some sort of license deal with SCO if you recall)
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
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.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Yes, I recall. It takes a fine reading of the Court's opinions. Novell isn't pushing it yet because they're still in court but the day will come and these findings are definitive.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The year of the Solaris Desktop!
You're doing this on purpose now, it's never the year of anything.
Plus 2008.11 isn't really a year
If you thought the driver situation was bad for Linux, and worse for *BSD, it's even worser fro OpenSolaris. Yes, I said worser. It's worser enough for me to want to use a fake, worse word to describe it. :(
I mean, great idea guys, but in execution, any OS that locks up solid so you have to ssh in remotely and kill your login session so you can log in, or that makes compilation of something as simple as Quake practically impossible--installed GNU toolchain or not--is it really worth it on commodity hardware?
We have OpenSolaris desktop machines installed at work, and the amount of effort the OpenSolaris users go through.. my god, it's herculean. And I'm making this judgement call sitting atop a farm of NetBSD machines. So you fucking know--you KNOW--that when I say something's a rough ride, you better fucking listen.
Not that it's a complete dearth of utility. There's lots of stuff going for it. I'm just saying. Fair warning.
(P.S. Tinkering with it? Good luck.)
Linux is just fine OS. You can build software systems what you want top of it. Now we have over 400 such systems. Some people say that over 400 distributions are too much and those should be limited for 3-5.
Those who like to play with other OS's than just Windows and Linux (Who says two is enought?), they can get then this OpenSolaris or one of three BSD's.
But question is, who would like to get OS from OpenSolaris, when it is not so different of Linux distributions what use Gnome desktop environment?
OpenSolaris is like Ubuntu but the OS is "just" switched from Linux to SunOS. Both systems includes GNU tools and different system configuration tools (package manager etc) depending about Linux-distribution etc.
I have used OpenSolaris as my main system on laptop on last 3 months and problems are that there are few important drivers missing. Now I want to try this new release if at last, OpenSolaris would get sounds working.
So question is, if you are Windows user and Happy for it. Stick with it. If you ain't happy, think do you want to try Linux as your OS and if answer is "yes", then check what Distribution is best for you. Just forget the OpenSolaris and few *BSD OS's if you ain't ready to play the helpdesk for yourself.
The server at http://www.genunix.org/, where this OpenSolaris 2008.11 ISO is hosted, is responding rather slowly right now (indirect Slashdotting?). So I want to point out that if you'd like to download this build and try it for yourself, you can get it as a torrent here.
I hear there's a company that sells laptops with a BSD OS and decent support... named after some kind of fruit or something.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
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.
I understand that the only problem with 2008.11 is that the WiFi support was written by a dyslexic :-)
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
"bad" - wow, way to enlighten us all! Seriously what is wrong with CDDL, i'm all ears
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.
Brent Jones
Some people work with/on Solaris and wouldn't mind taking it with them on the road.
A few nitpicks.
Yes, Unix is a trademark. It's a trademark because it was the name of an OS (System V being the last release of it, IIRC).
There's no such thing as an "implementation of UNIX". Standards are implemented, Unix was an OS, not a standard. Unix was licensed out to various companied, first from AT&T, later from Novell, and it was tweaked to those various parties' needs. AIX for example isn't IBM's "implementation" of System V, it started off as System V. AIX is what IBM did to SYS V. Same goes for the other Unices.
Linux isn't an "implementation" of Unix. Linux isn't Unix, it never was, that's why GNU is called GNU (GNU's Not Unix).
FreeBSD is a full-fledged Unix, but not System V based. It forked from 4.4BSD, which, as a result of the settlements for the AT&T vs. Berkeley case, doesn't contain any System V code.
SunOS was a BSD-dervided OS, forked from the original BSD. Solaris is System V based. Worth pointing out, either way, neither is an "implementation" of Unix, both were forks of Unix.
As far as Sun owning the copyright to Solaris, that's not entirely true. Lots of the innards are licensed to them from elsewhere (such as AT&T), that's why they didn't just open up Solaris, and made OpenSolaris instead. They opened up the parts they own, and are building around that, they can open what they don't own.
It's the same reason IBM will never open up AIX, they can't, part of the codebase isn't theirs (though they did release JFS, which is part of AIX), just like they can't open up OS/2 either, since part of the code isn't theirs. Just like SGI opened up parts of IRIX (XFS and OpenGL) but not IRIX itself, since they don't own all the copyrights associated with it.
OS X, however is different, it's forked from BSD (4.3, I think), post AT&T settlement (at which point BSD and its derivatives were no longer bound by AT&T License restrictions, because it was stripped of System V code), which is why all of Darwin is open.
Yes, GP's post is full of FUD, but not for the reasons you think. System V based Unix vendors have to be very careful about which parts they open up, since the code doesn't all belong to them. They have three choices, they can't either open up the parts they own, and rebuild the parts they don't (like Sun is doing), or try to get permission from Novell.
There are two exceptions, companies like IBM who have grandfather clauses or so to speak, since their licenses were acquired from AT&T and which Novell has no jurisdiction over (this was IBM's best defense in the SCO drama, before it came to light that Novell is the actual owner of System V) and people (like Apple and the free BSDs) who ship forks of post-settlement BSD-Unix, which Novell also has no claim to.
So, yes, the x86 drivers may not be included in Solaris anymore, but the point is the core of Solaris is still System V at its heart, and Novell still owns the related copyrights.
Get the story straight, fighting stupid FUD with even more stupid FUD is like trying to put out a fire with gasoline, it just doesn't work, and you're causing more damage by trying.
Does OpenSolaris have any device drivers for it? I don't mean to be a troll, but, how is OpenSolaris for running things like 3d graphics cards, SATA hard drives, etc. Will it reasonably install on a desktop with something more than a kick ass command line and basic VESA video drivers?
This is my sig.
There's a ton of Linux distributions for sure, but isn't fair to say that many are branches off of some of the biggies?
There's the debian and cousin ubuntu, red hat, and suse...am I missing something?
This is my sig.
No, the right of Sun to write and sell Solaris is not in doubt.
The right to free the code is in doubt, since SCO didn't own all of what Sun opened, and, apparently, Novell owns much of it. Since SCO was ostensibly working for Novell at the time, there very well may be some legal debate about whether Sun had the right to rely on SCO's representations.
Anyway, from a practical matter, the idea that Novell would cause trouble for users of OpenSolaris is dubious at best.
IANAL, etc., so don't rely on my post
SCO's SCO UNIX was x86 based.
Not always - c.1987 I used to administer & do cross platform development on a PDP 11/34 system (w/ removable 14" disk packs - nothing smells less like "victory" than the smell of a disk crash in the morning) running SCO Unix.
Wow, I wonder what year will be "Year of Plan9 on the laptop"
When OP said 'implementation of UNIX' it is possible that he was referring to the Single Unix Specification, which is a bunch of standards. If your OS is certified to follow those standards, you can call your OS 'Unix'.
Is Linux getting too old for you?
Oh right, if Linux is getting too old for you, then clearly what you need to do is pick up a direct genetic (source code) descendant of AT&T System V.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The userspace is a bit archaic - it's classic System V, which makes even a GNU userland look nice.
Make sure /usr/sfw/bin is in your $PATH first, and you'll get all the GNU tool chain in Solaris 10.
You don't have to dig down very far. The relevant Judge's ruling is currently on Groklaw's main page as the top article. In red for ease of locating.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Not Solaris. Open Solaris.
The Court concludes that Sun's 2003 Agreement License, therefore, "concerns" a buy-out, and SCO was required to follow the additional restrictions imposed by Amendment No. 2 on transactions that concern buy-outs. SCO did not comply with these terms. The Court thus concludes and declares that SCO was without authority to enter into the 2003 Sun Agreement under Amendment 2, Section B, of the APA.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Dear Sun, license it under GPL3 and I'll give it a try. Otherwise, I don't see enough advantages over Linux.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Running software, supporting hardware, and suspending well are about all I expect from a laptop OS. I used OS X 10.4 for ages, and it had terrible performance (although better than 10.0 to 10.3. 10.5 is the first release to not be an embarrassment in that regard). It's not a comprehensive test, of course, but it does show that OpenSolaris is a usable option, even if it isn't the best. I was surprised when I saw OpenSolaris running on a laptop a few years ago, but it seemed to do the job.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Okay, you have answered the first part of lokedhs' post. Would you now please answer the second part? I will quote it again for your convenience:
Because if that is correct, then the red-highlighted ruling is completely irrelevant to the question of whether OpenSolaris is legal.
Cool, I am looking forward to this release. Going to be testing it out on my HP dv5000z laptop and if it works well then I will be replacing my Ubuntu 8.10...eh...maybe dual boot, too much of a Ubuntu fanboy! :)
Maybe most of the posters here just haven't been around long enough.
The significance of this achievement is that we're talking about the first major, major commerical UNIX having gone to an open source model. We're talking about Solaris running on a laptop of all things, with close to x86 desktop parallelism with Linux. I can't think of IBM (AIX), HP (HP-UX), SGI (Irix), or anyone else even thinking about doing this.
We're talking an operating system with decades of history, gigantic commerical leverage, and very robust, enterprise-class features.
One that you can run on a dinky laptop.
Enjoy it. Appreciate it. Learn something new.
It is the usual course when companies partner and grant rights that they trumpet the fact on both sides - even if the underlying contract is held in confidence for strategy reasons. Certainly SCO and Sun both announced loudly in the press at the time of the 2003 agreement that the agreement granted the right and Solaris would be open sourced. Novell has not endorsed this position yet.
From the ruling:
The 1994 Sun Agreement had a 20-year confidentiality restriction prohibiting Sun from publicly disclosing the licensed source code. These confidentiality restrictions prevented Sun from publicly releasing or "opensourcing" the Solaris source code.
...
After entering into the 2003 Sun Agreement, Sun released an opensource version of its UNIX-based Solaris product, called "OpenSolaris." As its name suggests, OpenSolaris is based on Sun's Solaris operating system, which is in turn based on Novell's SVRX intellectual property. Absent the removal of the 1994 Sun Agreement's confidentiality restrictions, Sun would not have been licensed to publicly release the OpenSolaris source code.
The evidence presented at trial established that the 2003 Sun Agreement conveyed substantial rights to the SVRX intellectual property retained by Novell because of Sun's ability to open source Solaris.
...
The 2003 Sun Agreement specifically states that it "amends and restates" Sun's 1994 SVRX buy-out agreement with Novell. SCO has no authority to enter such an agreement unless it is incidentally involved in the licensing of UnixWare.
The court concludes that the release of confidentiality requirements in Section 8.1 of the 2003 Sun Agreement is not merely incidental to a UnixWare license. The provision had significant independent value to Sun as it allowed Sun to opensource its Solaris UNIX-based product. While several of the provisions in the Agreement focus on UnixWare and specific device drivers, the amendment with respect to confidentiality relates to the same technology licensed in the 1994 Buy-out Agreement and had significant independent value to Sun apart from a license to the newest versions of UnixWare.
That said, final judgment has not yet been entered. The judge does not propose to "undo" the deal, in recognition that it's not possible to restore the parties to their prior conditions. You really can't unring the bell. Some day we'll have answers to the question and it seems likely that Novell will not try to revoke Sun's deal with respect to Open Solaris.
But that's the future. This is now, and right now the outcome and legality are still in doubt.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
As far as I can see Opensolaris as well as Solaris is not widely used on portable computers yet. TuxMobil provides a Survey of Solaris, OpenSolaris & NexentaOS Installation Guides for Laptops and Notebooks. The survey contains links to around 70 installation guides. The overall number of installation guides for Unix operating systems listed at TuxMobil is almost 8,000.
I've installed Open Solaris on 3 different laptops (hp nc6400, dell inspiron 300m, toshiba u205) and 2 desktops (dell workstation with quad xeon and sun ultra 20) and here's my take: 1) open solaris is a really cool idea and i am happy sun has taken this step forward 2) although it installs really easy, the lack of audio drivers (in particular for standard intel chipset) is upsetting. a tech guy at sun told me they are fixing this in the next release. 3) someone posted that it comes with codecs??? really ... the only way i thought you could play mp3's is to deal with fluendo $$$. i never got mp3's to work.
4) the package manager is REALLY nice, but much much slower than e.g. synaptic.
5) if you're used to linux, some things are really challenging in Open Solaris, for example, devices. In linux, it's easy to find your usb drive (e.g. /dev/sdb2) and mount from command line. pardon my general inexperience with solaris, but i found it impossible to sort through the many many many virtual dev that OS uses. long story short ... my quick and easy linux tricks don't work in solaris which make trouble shooting VERY difficult.
5) wireless was hit or miss ... on some laptops, no problem at all. on others - nightmare (i guess this is the case for linux too)
6) acpi (on laptops) is flaky, but same for linux sometimes too.
PROS) i like that sun is trying to give us a complete open source world: open solaris, open office, open jdk, mysql, netbeans, etc.. THAT in itself is so cool: to have one company trying to give you the whole integrated package. all these things together make for a really great laptop/desktop
CONS) your linux skills might not apply when troubleshooting and given x hours of free time in the day, you may not want to dive into solaris ... also, sun's customer support (even with my free trial of ultra 20) is horrible. be prepared to be tossed around to dozen's of customer support people, each of whom seem to know less than you do.
FINALWORD) give it a whirly-ding. it's a great experience and i think the more people that try/use/comment/fix open solaris, the better it will become. i just wish sun would have thought of open sourcing solaris 10 years ago when it could have grown up to be what linux is right now.
Other OSes have to have those now to be taken seriously (I don't take windows seriously).
Which includes Linux, which I have been a fan of for 17 years, since kernel version 0.11.
But now that Solaris is free and open source, I'm happy to get my Unix from the inovators rather than the copiers.
Solaris (and previously SunOS) were Sun's implementation of UNIX. Right, just like Linux and FreeBSD.
Although, unlike Linux, it was originally based on a lot of AT&T code; whether they replaced, or got the rights to redistribute in source form, as much of that code as CSRG and the Regents of the University of California did is another matter.
(I.e., Sun didn't create SunOS 1.x-4.1.4, or SunOS 5.x, from scratch.)
Ever heard of SUS ? SYS V ?
Yes, I've heard of System V, and a lot of the code in Solaris 2.0, at least, came from it. Of course, a lot of the code in System V Release 4 came from, err, umm, Sun, so Sun presumably had less trouble getting that code open-sourced.
Sun is innovating again and I like it. Not only ZFS but I like the packaging system all around. I have found that both Opensolaris and Linux work well and I simply use both but here is the real kicker for me, I can also get Studio 12. Now gcc is OK but that is about it. I really like having a real compiler and IDE. BTW, gcc is included in the release and Studio 12 is an extra package but it is well worth it. Also, for you Linux fans (includes me as I like both), Studio 12 is available for Linux.
Speaking as a software developer, Solaris is one of the worst platforms. Solaris issues occupy a far greater amount of my support burden
Do you develop or support? You are unclear.
It's one thing if you prefer BSD to SysV, but you make a lot of claims about API changes which you should back up with examples.
Any problem with movie players, or music players?
Seriously, can we have something new already?
I am not interested in ZFS when I already have RAID/LVM (and ZFS if I use FUSE). dtrace, while a interesting debugger doesn't exaclty do enough to encourage me to just dump my current debugging software, operating system, filesystems, vast repositories for Solaris.
What about updating stuff like crontab to support simple things like @reboot, 5/*? The amount of backwards stuff in Solaris just makes administration more difficult.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
I'm a solaris admin, working for a DoD contractor. In my case the "archaic policies that don't relate at all to the systems we run" are not made up by me; those policies are passed down from the DoD bureaucrats. As idiotic as those policies may be, we admins have to enforce them.
NeXTSTEP didn't sell laptops, iirc. And that's a strangely named fruit.
"Is Linux getting too old for you?
Someone else pointed this out..
Are you interested to see what other systems such as OpenSolaris have to offer?
Oooh, what features might those be?
OpenSolaris has some great features, such as ZFS and dtrace, which make it a great server OS â" but how do you think it will fare on a laptop?
ZFS? How about for Linux, or Mac OS X
DTrace? How about:
$ uname
/usr/sbin/dtrace
Darwin
$ which dtrace
Apparently Linux has no equal, but I've been a Linux sysadmin for many years and didn't have dtrace before, and even now that I have it on my Macbook, I still haven't even learned how to use it, but I understand it can require programming in a C-like language. No thanks. I do programming in Shell, Ruby and Perl, usually in that order. I don't want to relearn C, since I never really liked it to begin with.
ZFS and DTrace aren't compelling reasons to use a particular OS on a workstation (laptop OR desktop) anyway. Userland utility is what uh, users want. Mac OS certainly delivers for both the typical user that wants their browser, IM and music, but they're never going to install Solaris anyway. So your target audience can either pick the "newcomer" who isn't that new, or stick with what they're already using, and use it to get some actual work done, instead of screwing around with other OS's.
OpenSolaris 2008.11 is the latest release of the OpenSolaris Operating System, a powerful and complete operating environment for users, developers and deployers. OpenSolaris prides itself on being a secure, stable, and highly scalable system. OpenSolaris OS is open source software, and freely re distributable and provides all the tools users expect from a modern computing environment both installed by default and available on our online network package repositories. -------------- Shakira New Social Bookmarking
Kernel != OS ...and the AC was enlightened.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.