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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."
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.
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??
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.
If you want the best of the Solaris and Linux world, install FreeBSD. Stable ZFS support, DTrace, etc. Plus ports and packages, and Linux binary compatibility if you need it.
It still heavily favors the BSD side of things, rather than SysV style... in fact, much more than any Linux distro I've seen... but it still definitely has far more of the nice features of the old commercial Unix systems than Linux.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
As a quick example off the top of my head, I'll take GNU's tar, cron (Solaris' doesn't even have */5 or @reboot), grep over Solaris' default equivalents. From my own experience, I don't find this "standardization" allowing much room for any kind of innovation.
The utilities don't even have the past decade of enhancements we've seen on BSDs and Linux, never mind Ubuntu.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
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.
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