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OpenSolaris vs. Linux, For Linux Users
An anonymous reader writes "With Sun busy being swallowed up by Oracle, should Linux geeks pay any interest to OpenSolaris? TuxRadar put together a guide to OpenSolaris's most interesting features from a Linux user's perspective, covering how to get started with ZFS and virtualisation alongside more consumer-friendly topics such as hardware and Flash support."
I tried to dualboot OpenSolaris with Linux on a new computer and all it did was drag ass.
At home I love to use Ubuntu, I've long given up on Windows. I've tried out OpenSolaris a few times, mainly to get use to the subtle differences between Linux and Solaris. As part of my job heavily involves using Solaris its nice to use the OpenSolaris system to learn what I can in my spare time. I know there are many differences between Solaris and OpenSolaris, but the gap isn't as large as from Linux. That said, personally I think the icon theme in Gnome for OpenSolaris is pretty nice looking. Gnome has a very polished look in OpenSolaris. It would be a shame to see Oracle kill this project, I think OpenSolaris has a lot of potential. If anything, they should invest more in OpenSolaris. If I had a home server, I would definitely consider using it.
Anyone who likes Linux and wants to try OpenSolaris should give Nexenta a look. It's basically Ubuntu using the OpenSolaris kernel instead of Linux (so GNU/Solaris?). All the fun of Solaris, all the ease of apt. I can't find builds for anything except x86 though.
OpenSolaris looks polished in many areas, but I see Linux as ahead of it as a Desktop OS. I hope that Desktop Linux distributions (and Linux kernel hackers) take note of what OpenSolaris does right (easy snapshot support - sure Linux doesn't have ZFS, but it has LVM which appears to be able to do snapshots) and play a bit of catch-up. And who knows, maybe OpenSolaris will do the same and try to catch up to Linux.
You could say the same about Linux. Doesn't mean it's a bad idea to try it.
In fact, I quite like the fact that there are enterprise-grade features lying around my system, just in case I ever happen to need them. As long as they don't get in the way of day-to-day tasks, what's the harm?
(A good current example of this is ZFS. Although casual users won't have a use for this, I find ZFS's awesome filesystem-creation and pooling features to be a godsend for managing my central backup repository and media store. If I need more space, I add another drive, type a short line into the console, and the space is available instantly to use with my existing filesystems with full-redundancy built in. Removing an old/small/broken drive from the pool is just as easy.)
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Isn't that what people have said about Linux?
Why try to hack it on to a desktop?
Who said anything about using it for a desktop?? I use OpenSolaris at home to run my NAS for one reason: ZFS. I strongly considered using BSD, but figured OpenSolaris was a better choice for my needs. So far I have had zero issues with it. It just sits in a room and quietly does what it was supposed to do. I am sure I would never try to use it for a desktop OS, but then again I'd never use Linux, BSD or Windows either. For that matter, why try and hack Linux on to a desktop??
I do not consider OpenSolaris future safe until we get a few forks. Now there is The OpenSolaris and it's future depends on just one (evil) corporation. If one GNU/Linux distribution dies a horrible death then it is of no importance since there are dozens of other BNU/Binux (with a B) distributions. If Bubuntu dies then that does not stop Bedora or Bentoo from carrying forward. I'll take a look at OpenSolaris when there's at minimum 3 variants of it being developed.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
Having DTrace on a development platform would be nice. That alone is worth the trouble.
I especially welcome different flavours of OpenSolaris. Having worked with Solaris 10 on numerous servers, I have to say that it has a fantastic feature set, but an absolutely insane implementation. Poor man pages, terrible defaults and horrible package management.
Well not exactly, Linux wasen't written with servers in mind, Solaris was, but anyway thats by-the-by now. Im not against Solaris, I think its great also, infact ive even been toying with the idea of putting it on my home server for the exact same reason you just stated regarding ZFS. I just think that at the moment, the only Open Source OS thats even nearly practical for typical day-to-day desktop use is Linux. OSS is pretty thinly spread as it is, I think as a community, we need to just concentrate on getting at least 1 OS totally practical for desktop use before we start peddeling others.
it's also a good workstation OS. I know of places using it that way...
Opensolaris is just as desktop-ready as Linux. Open source desktops are the same in Linux, Opensolaris and BSD: Gnome, KDE, Openoffice, Firefox, X.org, dbus, etc. They all use the same code. From the user POV they are the same.
The one real difference is the hardware support (where Linux is the king). But once you have hardware support in Opensolaris and BSD, the rest of the software stack is identical (and the same applies for servers, BTW).If Linux is desktop ready, opensolaris is also desktop ready.
I've wanted to use ZFS for years, but my current customers aren't interested in supporting another OS. Previous customers were addicted to ZFS. They loved it on Solaris.
I know ZFS was released under CDDL, which is open source, but not compatible with the GPL or LGPL.
That means I either don't use ZFS or I need to convince my customers the worth of ZFS overrides the issues of having another OS (Solaris or OpenSolaris) to support. Doubtful.
BTW, I grabbed a OpenSolaris a month ago and it was incompatible with my hardware. It didn't like the IDE controller nor the ethernet chips, so you definitely want to check the "supported hardware list" before going too far. Don't get me wrong, this isn't like VMware's **very short** AHL, but it isn't like Linux or cough, that MS-OS.
Having had a few EXT3 filesystems go tits up because they've been quietly borking themselves on a 24/7/365 server being able to do a weekly "zpool scrub" in a 4TB array without the downtime is a beautiful thing. Kernel CIFS with proper ACLs and integration with ZFS snapshots is pretty great as well. When btrfs is released and gets a few miles on it I may switch back. But for now my file server stays OpenSolaris.
Because developers use desktops and write server software?
There has been a massive amount of work going on with improving the desktop experience in OpenSolaris over the last two years.
The sound system in place now for example has greatly expanded hardware support, and even has native features that GNU/Linux distributions have to rely on PulseAudio for.
Compiz works out of the box and is enabled by default for nVidia users.
This is not true. Most applications that run on Linux compile just as well on a variety of platforms. Gnome and KDE4 both have packages for FreeBSD for example. If you really want something simple and portable run Fluxbox or Openbox.
A lot of things are written in Java as well, which means you even have binary compatibility. Things written in Python and other scripting languages are also portable.
You miss my point. Thats user ready for US - me and you - who are interested in computers and are happy to take the time to learn all about it. Most people are too damn lazy (i refuse to accept stupid to be the case given personal experience, its pure laziness) to learn a new OS. Setup Ubuntu on a laptop, then show someone how to open Firefox and thats it; their sorted.
Thats really not the case for OpenSolaris; nowhere near it.
But anyway, Im on the side as you here, anything that gets more people off Windows, the better. Personally im a hypocrite in that as both my laptop and Desktop are running Windows 7 but those are the only computers I own which do. At the moment, I have such a huge number of Windows-only programs that its simply impractical to switch. But given good reason - whether that be a bad new mistake in windows or something new in linux - I wouldn't hesitate to.
It still has some real rough edges.
1. If your pool does fail, good luck recovering data from it.
2. There's no way in hell you'll get predictable, deterministic performance from it. This one really sucks, because I really don't care if 99 times it serves file faster than any other file system (and really, it *doesn't*!), but then on the 100th time it takes three orders of magnitude LONGER (and ZFS sure as hell does exactly THAT!). Along the same lines, the way ZFS batches writes is a performance KILLER. What's faster? Writing to your disks continuously, or batching everything up for ten to twenty seconds and then bringing the entire disk system to its knees for a few seconds by flooding it with writes, in between which the drives are idle. (And yes, that's DISK SYSTEM, as in Sun StorageTek 6140 fully-populated with 112 drives...).
That is why Linux is practical and others aren't. Most isn't good enough. Only ALL is satisfactory.
Hmm... OS/2?
OpenSolaris is perfectly practical for the desktop, just maybe not EVERY desktop.
This really depends on what you want to do with your computer. If it's a gaming rig, neither OpenSolaris nor Linux will be perfect for that. If you're looking for maximum software compatibility within the Unix-y realm, Linux is your answer.
If your desktop is a part time file or mail server, OpenSolaris has some features you might like. ZFS and fault management are big ones in that. DTrace also goes way beyond what is available on Linux, that I am aware of. I heard DTrace is available on Linux now, although with varying levels of success.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
Same here? What Operating System do you use Sir?
OpenSolaris 2009.06 has some excellent new desktop features,
TimeSlider which is similar to Apples Time Capsule
Image - GUI Package Mangement
AutoMagic - Network Configuration Wizards including wifi
Multimedia Codecs and Support
Improved OpenSolaris CIFS for interoprability with Windows networking.
I've been using it at home for a month or so and I'm enjoying it. I've also just gone to Windows 7 which I'm loving so its becoming a bit of a hard choice what I want to run on my notebook.
No. What gave you the idea? Linux always was a "everything" OS. From the smallest portable and embedded devices capable of 32 bit, to the biggest supercomputers on the world.
But I agree on the enterprise-grade features. We're professionals. Professional craftsmen wouldn't use tools from the local DIY store. They use tools like this: http://www.us.hilti.com/holus/modules/prcat/prca_main.jsp
Besides: I use ZFS on my small Linux server via FUSE, which unfortunately makes it a crazy resources hog, with using up 600 MB of RAM, and one of the two cores of hat thing. But the scrubbing — which I absolutely need — makes it worth it. I wonder how much resources it takes under OpenSolaris, and if a OpenSolaris virtual server, just for the ZFS, would make sense...
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
That's just stupid.
OpenSolaris is likely your better option for your netbook. Its likely that all you'll do on a netbook, is... well... the net. And OpenSolaris is certainly better for that purpose than Windows 7.
linux has been my desktop os for nearly a decade now.. Its the best desktop i have used with the exception of Workbench3.1
For now it's OS X. On the desktop and for my needs, nothing else even comes close in terms of reliability, ease of use and looking pretty. It's all about the right tool for the job. Every OS, even (ugh) Windows has it's specific strengths and weaknesses. All depends on what your needs are. I really don't think OpenSolaris's strengths and weaknesses make it a very logical choice for most people as a desktop OS, but for someone to write it off for that reason is stupid.
Why try to hack it into a filesystem?
You could say that a walrus is a taco, doesn't mean you're right. Linux is already a server and desktop OS. Works fantastically for many as a desktop right now.
Agreed. Personally I'd never use OSX as I absolutely refuse on principal to use an OS I can't run on my own custom built PC, but thats another story. I still only see Solaris as being particularly practical in a server enviroment.
One of the lovely things about linux is this: I have my HTC Hero sitting next to me, One the box it says Android but I know that under the hood (and a very thin one at that) its still running a standard linux kernel. Aswell as running on my phone, the exact same Operating system is also running on a couple of servers I run my buisness from. That is the true greatness of linux. Although as the saying goes: Jack of all trades, Master of none.
Seems to be the reason givem by a lot of people who are not moving away from Windows when they want to... "If Photoshop were available on Linux, I'd ditch Windows for good" seems to be a recurring theme.
Really, so there are no programs that support something else and not Linux? That's funny, because I could swear there were somethings that hadn't yet been ported to Linux.
Linux will always have a larger number of packages available than pretty much anybody else due to the decision to not actually have a base system. You get a kernel and the rest you have to add via third party developers. On top of that, there isn't any particular reason for a number of the other packages to be available as most people will gravitate towards the best anyways, requiring a third tier program is silly.
It's nice to have choices, but there isn't any inherent reason why say FreeBSD needs to have Ice Weasel, we're perfectly happy with Firefox and the other ones we can install. We don't really need a dozen different multimedia applications when there's just a couple that fill the niche that people are looking for.
Its not quite that easy to add more space. RAIDZ and RAIDZ2 pools don't support expansion yet, so you have to be using mirroring to achieve expandability. And when you are using mirroring you have to add 2 more drives to expand an existing pool. Even when using mirroring I don't think you can remove drives like you say.
Why try to hack it onto a server?
considering Photoshops runs just fine under wine...
Seriously, "apt-get". Tut-tut. Other issues I see: KDE 4.0 doesn't run on OpenS yet. Virtualization options listed in the article sound uncompelling. Should I choose the option with mediocre performance or the one that is currently being ruined by Citrix? I want me some KVM. Also, ZFS does sound great, but its treatment of extended partitions sounds barbaric, and many of those features are available using LVM in Linux. AFAIK Ubuntu still doesn't implement LVM, but Fedora does. Firewalling doesn't look fun, and AFAIK OpenS currently has no equivalent to SELinux. It sounds to me like it might be great for running your NAS, but it certainly doesn't sounds to me like it fits for desktop use yet, nor like it fits the jack-of-all-trades role Linux does.
I was recently tasked with doing an inventory and repurposing of a stack of older Sun machines (Sunfire, Netra, etc).
What I discovered is that OpenSolaris won't even install on some of the models. Install from CD? Nope. Install remotely via a network install? Nope, and let me go on record as saying that the network install process is *absurdly* complex.
On the other hand, I popped a Debian CD in, and it installed beautifully once I booted into expert mode and loaded fdisk (parted blows when dealing with Sun tables).
That's right, Linux was easier to work with on these Sun servers than OpenSolaris. OSOL has some really cool features (ZFS and DTrace, for example), and I've mucked around in it on my x86 boxes before, but overall Linux is still easier to work with in my experience, even on Sun servers.
I always keep an OSOL VM in VirtualBox, but it doesn't see much use. I'd rather use Linux or BSD.
A huge problem is that Flash doesn't run on FreeBSD. Unfortunately, Flash is something that most people expect to just work.
All the hatred I hear is from the Linux crew bitching about how Solaris and Sun should just die. I guess they feel personally slighted that Solaris exists.
That means I either don't use ZFS or I need to convince my customers the worth of ZFS overrides the issues of having another OS (Solaris or OpenSolaris) to support. Doubtful.
FreeBSD?
Then Linux fails too, by your own definition it can only run *most* windows programs (via hardware emulation or Wine).
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
That's a fantastic feature... I'm trying to think of another OS that has that.
I am a long time Linux user (RedHat and now Ubuntu) and I gave it a try 3 weeks ago to Open Solaris.
It crashed 3 times in an hour and finding software packages for it, is a pain in the eyes...
The ZFS filesystem is awesome but it sucks RAM like a thirsty camel would suck water after the Sahara crossing.
The only positive is that it comes with a huge amount of drivers for every kind of device.
I think that SUN were too in a hurry and released an inmature system.
With all the abuse of Flash for ads and storing shared objects for cross site cookie tracking, maybe it is a plus for the OS that Flash doesn't work on it.
I've got photoshop on UNIX (IRIX)...
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
Linux is not desktop OS either.
+1. Moreover, Solaris was desktop OS for years in specific, professional niche. Maybe not as cool & pimp as OSX is, but certainly enough to run some industrial stuff (plants, banks etc).
I just think that at the moment, the only Open Source OS thats even nearly practical for typical day-to-day desktop use is Linux.
I am sorry for saying that, but please don't say a BS to the public. There is also PC-BSD, if you know it. And it is quite decent stuff for desktop. Besides, filesystem there is way more stable and rock solid, although not very modern. And TCP stack is also faster.
Is BSD is open source enough for you?
Now, PC-BSD is also has ZFS running. Linux does not have ZFS, only through FUSE, which is... fun, but it is userland layer, so not really you want run entire OS on top of it.
That's GNU/Solaris, you schmucks! Solaris with all the GNU goodness in userland without all that fancy hardware support you get with the Linux kernel. Oh, and you get dtrace instead of systemtap, and zfs or ufs instead of xfs, ext4, jfs ocfs2, btrfs, ...
Lets see here, I use flash to:
/etc/hosts file can eliminate 95% of ads, and Adblock plus or noscript can eliminate all the others.
A) Use YouTube and a multitude of other video sites
B) Play Flash games
C) Use parts of Google Maps
D) View some sites with webmasters who sought fit to put the navigation in 100% Flash
Just setting up a decent
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
yes, he has kissed them......kissed them goodbye.....hahhahahhahaa...get it?
Linux is great and all, but after using various other UNIX for a number of years, its just "different" in many ways for no good reason at all. Sure, if you've come from a windows background its probably a godsend, but if you're from a unix background, linux probably pisses you off in many ways due to the "different for no good reason" stuff everywhere...
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
I did a review of OpenSolaris this past summer. It's come a long way on the desktop and worth a look. It's not just a server OS anymore.
As I have already commented here SUN was fixated in repeating all DEC's strategic mistakes, so while Open Solaris might have been interesting in 1995, it is now just a footnote to OS history, and much of what is said about it is just false. To try to hype it up now is the clasic case of trying to 'polish a turd'. There are two major threads here, and the outlook is complicated by tools, eg GCC, and semi-conductor development.
... and picks a biased group of responders, current customers, biggest first, _always_ gets the wrong answers, the company ceases to innovate and be the market leader and better engineered and more economic competitors start to eat their lunch, and further depress profitability eg Linux/86_64.
(1) SUN repeated DEC's mistake of giving the company to Marketing when revenue began its long fall. This never works and has been responsible for the demise of so.o.o much US industry eg GM. Marketing, since it works with Focus Groups, suveys
(2) A consequence of (1) is the best leave. When second rank management & engineers gain control, often driving out the best eg Rob Gingell, the former Solaris Development manager, they begin to behave like politicians and develop 'talking points' which are exactly like emperors cloths. In spite of the fanbois that is exactly what Dprobes, ZFS and Java are. They are a money sewer, and if that were not bad enough, a combination of political correctness and stupidity quickly stifles any real innovation or rational business analysis while the sacred ideas continue unquestioned.
SUN's undoing is entirely its own fault, and no-one should waste any more time on Solaris, open or otherwise. Both Solaris and Java were born and grew up in the Cathederal and their arrogant mid-wives (Dr. James Gosling) do not want their children in the grubby Bazar making money.
Solaris, overmanaged like MySql and OOO can never catch Linux, because of weight of GOOD developers and mindset.
I'll throw in that Open Solaris has the best accessibility software for the blind, in Sun's Orca project. It works in Linux, but not as well as where it's developed... in Solaris. This is a key indicator of just how ready an OS is for the desktop, IMO.
Anyway, the whole Windows vs Linux flame war is pointless. Linux is the best OS ever developed for hackers, period. I couldn't be happier with it (unless it ran cool software like Orca stably). Windows is for Joe Sixpack who needs games and porn. Joe will always outnumber the hackers. It's ok. Just learn to live with it.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
Gnash can handle most Flash navigation, as well as YouTube. And you're aware that Flash wasn't available for 64 bit Linux users until recently right? Even now I think only an alpha release is available.
Horror. You actually iterate through a list of hundreds of blocked domains every time you do a domain lookup?
One Linux to rule them all, One Linux to find them, One Linux to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.
Where, exactly, doesn't Linux threaten every other OS?
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
Actually, you can just create a new RAIDZ[2] and append it to the pool. At least I think you can.
Since a pool can include multiple RAID sets, it would seem that you could just add another one to it.
I wonder how much resources it takes under OpenSolaris, and if a OpenSolaris virtual server, just for the ZFS, would make sense...
ZFS will always try to take up as much RAM as it can for the ARC (Adaptive Replacement Cache).
While ZFS on FUSE probably works fine, it will always make me a bit scared. But kudos if it works for you!
P.S. I like your Hilti analogy. The average do-it-yourselfer does not (and has no need to) know who Hilti is or what kind of products they make. Those who need to know, do.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
I would look into btrfs. Red Hat are pushing hard to get it into RHEL6/Fedora 12 so it should be pretty close to out the door.
This sig has been distributed under the Creative Commons license.
Did you have any issues with your laptop's touchpad with Opensolaris? It didn't recognize mine at all.
Which is the exact same reason people stick to Windows.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
The /etc/hosts file will be cached. Besides, the time lost parsing /etc/hosts is far less than the time lost to loading a bunch of irrelevant ads.
I don't, the computer does. Doesn't seem to complain, either.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
Dunno, I've found plenty of Linux-compatible porn.
Just maybe...
you're doing it wrong.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
You couldn't because Linux wasn't started as a server OS but as a desktop OS (and before that a terminal emulator), it just happens some server people liked it enough to work on it.
Set up Ubuntu on a laptop, then show someone how to open Firefox and thats it; their sorted.
Thats really not the case for OpenSolaris; nowhere near it.
What about Nexenta?
I haven't installed it on my laptop yet(Dell XPS M1330), but plan to once I get a 400GB HDD so I can dual boot it with Windows 7.
I have it running on a HP WX4000 series workstation at home.
One thing I thing the Linux community could take from OpenSolaris is its concentration on the approval and standardization of applications, so long as you stay on the OpenSolaris repositories. There is pretty much one tool for each job. That's it -- generally speaking of course.
It is exactly why the Linux community shun it (cannot find binaries of specific software). When I use a Linux based OS, I feel the ADD in me kick in; too many options. I cannot imagine I am alone.
Anyhow, I think OpenSolaris is rock solid and a powerful option for people to try. It may not have all the bells/whistles of Ubuntu, but it aids me in getting my work done very efficiently.
FWIW, I purchased the Fluendo codec pack, which made a huge impact on usability -- I need my tunes while working. Well worth the money IMO.
Opensolaris simply won't give you the same hardware support.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
I've used that HOSTS file on Windows as well as Linux, to speed up browsing. Reading the HOSTS file might take me a couple minutes, but the computer does it in an instant or two. Why should I download all the trash the ad servers offer, when the content I want makes up only a fraction of the entire page? With limited bandwidth, HOSTS can make browsing a lot more enjoyable, as well as making a browser hijack somewhat less likely. Ever been Rick Rolled? Are you always aware of cross site scripting as your page loads? HOSTS is your friend, in more ways than one.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
I'm running Flash on FreeBSD/amd64, by way of the Linux emulation layer. It's documented in the handbook, and it's pretty easy to get going. As much as I despise Flash's abused ubiquity, I've found it worthwhile to have it installed for guilty pleasures like Pandora, Hulu, and RagDoll Cannon. In fact, it runs more smoothly on my machine than natively on the OpenSUSE box in the living room.
Method of processing duck feet
...release it under GPL 3 and I'll give it a go.
Until it's at least compatible with GPL licensing, forget it.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
I saw what you did there! You linked to some Macho-man Pr0n to distract the simple minded!! Don't worry, I'm reporting you for spamming the forum!! You're really a Hilti marketing agent, right?
I'll make you a deal. You come to my house, renew my card, and leave a few boxes of studs for the powder actuated gun, and I won't report you. Fair enough? ;^)
More seriously - no, I don't have my own gun. I sure wish I had invested in one. The people I work with now have this stupid, ancient remington brand thing that you have to hit with a hammer. It's a little better than worthless, but not much. There's seldom a need for it, until you are in a confined space - then there's no room to swing a hammer!! DUHHHH!! But, the plus side is, the manager who bought the blasted thing saved 50 bucks all those years ago.....
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
If you're depending on a static blacklist of bad sites to protect yourself from bad scripts then you're doing it wrong.
Just don't run scripts without your explicit approval, require a click to enable flash/java objects, and use a secure browser (chromium, konqueror, probably kazehakase over firefox if you're in GTK+).
Well, I could never understand why people consider Windows an OS, period.
It's sort of true... Solaris isn't that snappy to begin with, but it doesn't get bogged down easily either. It says at a pretty consistent speed from my experience.
Amusingly, this hasn't really helped the hardware support much for Solaris, when you compare all the hardware Linux supports with it's unstable ABIs.
Which, is great if you're doing kernel development - it really is. But if you're not doing kernel development - Not much use in that.
Yes, like. Not using initd for daemons but using some assine svcadm thing that uses XML files for that pure basic Unix roo.. Wait what?
I come from a unixish background and I have to say, the way Solaris just kind of stunted in growth the past decade in the userland itself. As an example, take the system utilities. Compared to GNU is getting pathetic. GNU's toolchain doesn't exactly have that many changes over the years, but when Solaris lacks features like compression in tar, less defined regular expressions in grep, crontab not supporting options like */2, @reboot etc. It makes it look quite backwards.
On top of that, the reliance on starting giant java runtimes to just display simple configuration utilities that take forever to load for this reason just seems a bit assine.
This is really no different from the BSDs, the different Solaris-based distributions.
That said, unlike older Unix admins, I have a tendency to actually learn the reason why things are done differently. I find the philosophies of different Unix, BSD, Linux systems quite fascinating.
You know -- if I wanted to promote Solaris, I'd discuss the less known features like containers or zones and just to what extent they can be used, setup to do etc.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
I've tried OpenSolaris, and also NexentaOS/StormOS, which is Ubuntu running on the OpenSolaris kernel instead of Linux.
I found that there was a lack of good documentation, and incompatibilities with certain hardware (for example, the hardware emulated by VirtualBox). Also, it seems to be hard to get ZFS to play nicely with other filesystems on the same hard disk.
Ubuntu already does everything I need it to. Persisting with OpenSolaris would be a bit masochistic.
Other people may be able to tell you a happier story
You should give Belenix a spin. Pretty damned desktop-friendly for an alpha.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I'm a hacker that needs games and porn, you insensitive clod!
Why don't they just run flash in a virtualized Linux box if they want to run it in *BSD? Sure, it's a bit of a hack, but any OS that can't show a kitten playing guitar is not, in my opinion, feature complete.
I still can't see the point of using yet another OS with less HW support.
Solaris have been always pain to maintain compared to Linux, it's not bad as HP-UX, but still.
Solaris is nice if you need to run Sun specific applications like Sun Ldap, because you know that it will run next 10 years without problems.
But using Solaris kernel and full GNU binary OS is quite interesting, if applications work without recompile.
/thread
"P.S. I like your Hilti analogy. The average do-it-yourselfer does not (and has no need to) know who Hilti is or what kind of products they make. Those who need to know, do."
I'm a gearhead you insensitive clod!!!!
Damn, I was just feeling secure with my toolset. Now it'll be at least another year and half before I'm happy.
ooohh, cordless combo packages... (drools)
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
Do you use this on Linux/ZFS/Fuse or OpenSolaris? If you are doing it on Linux, I am curious on how that stacks up to ... say OpenFiler.
My Experience as an OpenSolaris desktop user is that it's not entirely done. My first try was 2008.06 which was very fast, but had a serious bug in the repository that made it dangerous to upgrade. My next try was now with 2009.06, which was significantly slower in every way. Netbeans also wanted do a independent update that rendered it unable to start afterwards. It reminds me of GNU/Linux in the late 90s early 00s, with a lot of potential, but with serious issues that demands the user to spend a lot of time troubleshooting. One of the benefits with GNU/Linux today is that you don't have to do this any more.
I am not an OS guru but it seemed to me that Solaris is by far the most powerfull kernel available for the x86 platform. Good kernel don't mean good and user friendly OSs, but Solaris has, IIRC, virtualisation and filesystem features that linux and windows could only dream of. It's Unix firepower for your home.
With Oracle swalowing Sun I'm afraid we'll live the same situation as with DEC back in the days: a decade from now, we will look back at Solaris and Java technologies and say 'man, they really invented everything'.
On a side comment I wonder how such companies manage to remain largely unprofitable with such good technologies in their portfolio.
Yeah, you say that now but wait until you've had it on there for a little while. The Vista will start showing through that shiny new paint job and the little quirks and slow downs that start out relatively small will get magnified larger and larger until it dawns on you one day how little has really changed and how much the suck has remained.
Are you quite sure about zfs working that way? When I bought my drobo a year ago it was not the case, zfs could not be expanded a disk a the time while maintaining redundancy (ie. expanding a zraid pool with a single disk). From everything I've read that feature will be added once the BPR (block pointer something) rewrite is done.
So again, have you actually done this, or have you (as I first did) concluded that it is possible from the feature list?
I ran vista since 2007 with no problems. If you can actually maintain a computer properly and don't try running it on 7+ year old hardware, with no RAM its fine. Windows 7 is the same but a little more responsive due to the improved scheduler changes.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
OpenSolaris is perfectly practical for the desktop, just maybe not EVERY desktop.
I agree, but I'd like to add another point. Your desktop may have unsupported devices. If you were using Linux about 2-3 years ago you would have a hard time supporting most wireless drivers out of the box with many distros. I would imagine OpenSolaris having similar problems. Many desktops have wireless cards. I'm sure it's similar with many other peripherals.
It basically took 4 days of virtualization with the RC before I reached that point - I went from "nice, a new version of windows that doesn't suck as much" to "stupid piece of shit" - who's in to figure out where the fuck you can get a copy of miniwin, hack a shell, utilities and a graphics layer and make a new os - we'll call it WINX, package it with an Ada Lovelace figurine, and market it to crusty old geeks and teen girls with an inquisitive mind (and those boys who'd never admit it) ;)
There's far too much different for the sake of being different in the Linux environment - ranging from command line switches, through to command outputs, to non-adoption of freely available, well tested code (eg, not adopting DTrace).
By the way, Dtrace isn't kernel only - its also the basis of "instruments" in OS X - and "instruments" rocks - even for general purpose app development using Xcode.
Anyway.. meh. I don't particularly care if people use OpenSolaris or not. Just that there are plenty of reasons Linux pisses me off, yet people are always crapping on about how its the greatest thing since sliced bread. Its a decent OS sure, but it could be so much better if many of the people developing for it stopped reinventing the wheel for the sake of reinventing the wheel...
And yeah, never claimed solaris was quick. Its not - but it does scale, and you get a pretty decent level of consistency even when the load climbs. FreeBSD is similar in that regard. Linux is not.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
I too verify that porn runs fine on Linux.
o hai
I agree this feature is great and dragged me into trying OSOL and Nexenta. I just couldn't face starting again with a new OS just for this, I'd much rather see ZFS implemented in Linux ASAP.
If you think someone isn't free to have a different definition of "freedom" you may be a tyrant.
This article doesn't make me feel comfortable for some reason....
"Linux has no ZFS support in the kernel because the Free Software Foundation doesn't consider it free enough to be bundled with GPL software, ..."
Yeah, everyone knows the FSF is in charge of the linux kernel and Linus Torvalds is just another puppet controlled by the FSF. Also, FSF decides about freedom - copyright laws and Sun choosing a GPL-incompatible license for ZFS has nothing to do with this! That Linux already contains the fundamental components equal to ZFS but lacks the polish Solaris has received is also totally irrelevant.
"Linux has a big advantage over OpenSolaris in that it supports a lot more hardware, but OpenSolaris makes up for this by having a fixed device driver interface. Where the Linux kernel developers give priority to adding features even when they break compatibility with hardware drivers (which creates more work for the distro makers) OpenSolaris keeps the driver interface static, so if your printer worked with OpenSolaris 2008.05 it'll work with 2009.6 - users can even run 10-year-old drivers written for the original Solaris platform."
Summary: Linux sucks even though it supports more hardware because your 10yo printer which has broken down long time ago "works" in OpenSolaris. OpenSolaris restores that warm fuzzy feeling from the Windows days where you get to waste hours (days? weeks?) installing 3rd party proprietary drivers and feeling like a computer expert instead of things "just working" out of the box.
[ Yet another nice demo of the GNOME integration with ZFS - points to Sun for doing something right! ]
[ Short demo of Solaris "zones" ]
"Because OpenSolaris is advertised as a desktop distribution, it's fair to compare it with current Linux distributions. However, the first thing you notice is that the operating system is much slower than Ubuntu on the same hardware, so don't think about installing it on older hardware. For the rest it looks like a fairly standard Gnome desktop, although NetworkManager is replaced by an application called Network Auto Magic, which does more or less the same thing but has fewer features."
Summary: The conclusion here is that even though OpenSolaris sucks, it still rocks.
[ Demo of flash installation ]
Translation: Look! You can even install proprietary software! Eat that FSF!
What next, an Indie OS?
Try Haiku or Aros.
(based on BeOS R5 and Amiga OS 3.1, respectively)
But then the WWW came along and the only OSes up to the task were Unix based or Unix like. And, "Windows" certainly never was a "server OS", but it's good for spreadsheets, so in certain types of people's minds "It's a Server OS".
Thanks for the info (I'm all of 24yo and was almost a toddler when the current-gen *nix OS were born, so yeah) - but
Unix was conceived as an interactive environment for programming, and is sill the only OS worth using for a programmer
I appreciate your courage, you'd have been taken apart by the dotnet lovers in that other article (and maybe by those who still think Basic in any form is a programming language and not a "what not to do" guide)
Setup Ubuntu on a laptop, then show someone how to open Firefox and thats it; their sorted.
And how much more difficult is it to open FF in Solaris?
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
I stopped doing development on OS X when having to deal with buggy graphics drivers and OpenGL being broken, this was before dtrace was available on the OS. So you have me at a disadvantage there.
I have only ever used dtrace on Solaris and did not really find a very practical use for it outside of kernel development. For general userland applications, it's not very useful.
Such as?
Can I get a comparison with something?
If this is that tried argument on different Linux distributions, where by they are reinventing things or doing different things on different distributions - This is no different from the BSDs, Unix systems and hell, even going more specific, the Solaris-based distributions.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
You can run the flash plugin via nspluginwrapper on FreeBSD. The plugin itself runs in the Linux ABI layer and the plugin wrapper reparents its window into the browser. As a nice side effect, you get some process isolation for free; bugs in flash won't crash FireFox. It's not quite trivial to set up for novice users, but novice users should be running something like PC-BSD, rather than a vanilla FreeBSD install, and PC-BSD includes Flash in the default install.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Linux containers provide similar functionality to Solaris Zones: http://lxc.sourceforge.net/ They're a younger project but the support for them is in mainline Linux and you can do some pretty cool stuff with them. One thing that's nice (and I don't know if Zones can do this) is that you don't have to virtualise every aspect of a container, so for instance you can just isolate at the filesystem level if that's all you needed. Solaris Zones is capable of running apps for another OS within a Zone, using their system call compatibility layer. Linux has a system call compatibility layer but I don't know if it can run a complete other-OS userspace as Zones can (e.g. Zones can run CentOS or RHEL userland in a Zone, on top of the Solaris kernel).
Most everyone here is going to have heard of Btrfs but here it is again anyhow: http://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page It gives you similar stuff (checksumming, RAID-in-filesystem, writeable snapshots) to ZFS but again is a younger project. It's also in mainline Linux so you can play with it if you have a recent kernel (don't trust it with critical data, yet).
System Tap is one (of a number) DTrace-ish system for Linux: http://sourceware.org/systemtap/ I understand it'll run on basically any non-stoneage kernel but to get all of the juicy features you would (I *think*) need to patch your kernel. This is the only one of these projects for which full functionality appears not to be completely in mainline. Various distributions include it, so you can probably install a package and try it out (at least in a limited form, depending on your kernel).
A notable feature here is that none of these sound quite as mature as the Solaris equivalents. Not all of them constitute "copying", however - for instance, container-like solutions for Linux predate Solaris Zones by years (and BSD Jails, a similar concept, are almost certainly even older). I'm not sure on the dates of the others.
TimeSlider which is similar to Apples Time Capsule
I think you mean Time Machine (Time Capsule is Apple's NAS product). Saying TimeSlider is similar to Time Machine is doing TimeSlider a gross injustice. Time Slider works how Time Machine should. It uses the ZFS O(1) snapshot feature, making it very cheap to use and very robust. Time Machine creates a tree of hard links, which are not created atomically. The fact that it works at all is impressive, but it's very fragile. From an end-user perspective they are similar, but TimeSlider is a much cleaner implementation.
I'm not sure if it made it into the main OpenSolaris tree, but Nexenta also uses ZFS snapshots for package management with a wrapper around apt. When you do an update, it snapshots the system first, so if something went wrong (e.g. one package didn't update cleanly, or had regressions) you can revert trivially. Once you're happy, you can discard the snapshot. This is really great for testing experimental code; you can install the development version and revert it trivially if it broke anything.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The problem you may have is the license and terms of use. Read this before downloading the code. I did this just after it was first released, and declined the terms. IANAL, but the way I read it was that if I even looked at their stuff, there was no "clean" way to do Linux kernel development without potentially opening myself (and Linux) up to a law suit.
I was compiling kernels at the time and wanted to make some contribution there, but got too busy at work (15-18 hour days), so it became a non-issue anyway.
Read the terms FIRST...
Well not exactly, Linux wasen't written with servers in mind.
Yes it was.
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
Windows is for Joe Sixpack who needs games and porn. Joe will always outnumber the hackers.
I think you just converted the hackers to Windows with that comment.
Some of the biggest differences, nay, benefits to Solaris/OpenSolaris come when you move away from one system into a network of systems that start to work together. When people compare their single desktop Linux systems to a single OpenSolaris installation, they miss a bit of the boat, and some don't like the parts they miss.
Sun marketed Soalris with the slogan "the network is the computer" for a reason. When you look at their systems, they distribute storage and even processing when they can. They want to help you run everything in a cloud. They want to aggregate storage across systems into single file systems and mount points. They try make it simple to segregate and duplicate applications on the same system using zones.
It isn't just supposed to be a replacement for your desktop where you word process or even play video games, where everyone gets a lot of hot, new, big CPUs and stacks of RAM on or under their desks. OpenSolaris/Solaris (both of which are free as in beer) is meant to be used on a network of systems, not just the one desktop, where the whole of the system is rocking, not necessarily each little bit.
End the FUD
So use your hacker skills to hack together your own games and porn!
Well not exactly, Linux wasen't written with servers in mind, Solaris was, but anyway thats by-the-by now.
This is not a bad thing. Desktops today rely largely on technologies that were being used on the servers of yesteryear. Multiple processors, virtualization, highly-threaded programs, journaled file systems, 64-bit processors, etc. are all things that were traditionally for "server" OSes at some point or another. Also, what kind of geek wouldn't want ZFS on their home PC?
Likely OSX. It's rapidly becoming my preferred desktop OS as well. 10.6 is very nice for desktops. My old server is Linux, the new one is OpenSolaris. ext4 is nice, but ZFS trounces it. Some other features like Zones are really nice when you're trying for max reliability. You can run apps in their own space and install any needed libraries and support apps over there as well so they don't conflict with the main OS. If you want even better separation, there's xVM.
I want to know my data is correct, ZFS can do that, ext4 can't. BTRFS is vapourware for now. I'll evaluate BTR when it's available and stable. Add in various features like near-zero overhead snapshots, and nothing on Linux can compete in my mind for a large file server.
Hmmm... I just started using OpenSolaris and I think svcadm is significantly easier to deal with than the old init.d stuff. Init scripts are probably easier for the more Unix experienced though.
I totally agree with the userland. They really need to just use the gnu stuff and add the new commands for their special stuff like ACL management. I use the GNU tools OpenSolaris installed along with a few extras I dropped in 90% of the time. They just work better for me.
I don't mind the Java stuff, my server box is quite powerful, and has 8GB of RAM. Java is memory hungry, if you have enough RAM it works as well as anything else. I find the anti-Java stuff amusing as I remember the same complaints when C++ came out, and now most people don't think twice about using C++ but complain about Java. :) I do think that programmers in general have gotten lazy though, the demo scene gives me some hope. Those guys are awesome.
Overall, I really like OpenSolaris as a server OS. Zones and ZFS are the big things I'm really digging on right now.
but can you watch it Fullscreen and Hardware-Accelerated?
I was pretending to be one of those Unix administrators that don't like anything different and want a pure original Unix model in that response - As the original poster said:
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Not that RAM makes much of a difference at starting the runtime. I mean, it's not like I'm using it on a system with less than 4GB of RAM to begin with. I don't think the differences between 4GB RAM (which is mostly unused) and 8GB are really going to effect the start up performance of java application by that much.
C++ doesn't randomly decide to take 15 seconds (I don't really care about what is to blame as much as the fact it just is) to start what seems to be a very simple application to begin with.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
I gave opensolaris a try on a P4 2.8, it was running fine however still far from linux distro such like arch. I'm very interested about ZFS performances and features.I'll be following
Since now Oracle owns Sun, and Oracle has their own Linux distro, could they make ZFS GPL so they can offer it with their Linux distro??
What's the battery life like on laptops? Is it any better than Linux?
Saying "I'll probably get modded down for this" in a post is the best way to get it modded up.
[...]I think as a community, we need to just concentrate on getting at least 1 OS totally practical for desktop use before we start peddeling others.
If by that 1 totally practical OS you mean: mother Debian, father Fedora, child Ubuntu, edgy Gentoo, trusty CentOS, puritan Arch, ... why not then add to that list of 1 OS also: server-with-desktop-feel SunOS?
Yeah I could never understand why some people call "PC" a MAC either.. oh wait
Its not quite that easy to add more space. RAIDZ and RAIDZ2 pools don't support expansion yet, so you have to be using mirroring to achieve expandability. And when you are using mirroring you have to add 2 more drives to expand an existing pool. Even when using mirroring I don't think you can remove drives like you say.
RAIDZ/RAIDZ2 pools are just as expandable as mirror pools in exactly the same way. Either:
A. Add an additional RAIDZ/RAIDZ2/Mirror VDEV to the pool at which point the pool automatically expands and you automatically get striping across all VDEVs in the pool.
B. Replace all devices that comprise a single VDEV with larger devices one at a time, waiting for a resilver between each device replacement, once all devices are replaced the pool automatically expands.
I could say the same for Linux with respect to "most Windows applications run well in Linux via wine".
In reality, it isn't even most of course.
The reason other apps don't compile well on other Unix systems is because a lot of people don't use other platforms and they are bad at making cross-platform code, which normally isn't hard.
I tried OpenSolaris multiple times, only to be met with no sound support and a screen running at 800x600. Linux creams OpenSolaris.
I've not yet used the latest OpenSolaris, but if memory serves, a good deal of GNU utilities were the default in OpenSolaris instead of the native Solaris ones.
On the installations I've had, not a single one had GNU utilities as default. GNU ulities were named things like ggrep in the default path. If you wanted to make them default you had to override the path settings for /usr/gnu/bin/ over /usr/bin.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
SunOS? Isn't that a tad old?
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
You're right. I said SunOS but meant OpenSolaris.