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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."
Why try to hack it on to a desktop?
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.
yes it is
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.
Sun doesn't suck.
Solaris doesn't suck.
What does suck?
"Chasing after an open version of Solaris" sucks. (Remember the statement they made, as a reason for not supporting an OS so very similar to theirs?
They've made good (though expensive) hardware. They have top-notch utility programs- everyone says so. I'm just not inclined to persue something that's already declared it's hatred of the OS I call 'home'. :)
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
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.
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
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.
Fr,eebSD is already
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...).
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.
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.
Why try to hack it into a filesystem?
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.
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?
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.
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, ...
yes, he has kissed them......kissed them goodbye.....hahhahahhahaa...get it?
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.
I'm so damn glad glad I moved on from Linux. (But you still have my subscription Pat. You're the man, and you're on the right path.)
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.
Did you have any issues with your laptop's touchpad with Opensolaris? It didn't recognize mine at all.
UBUNTU R0X0RS AND ALL OTHER OSes ARE THE SUX0RS!!!
No need to evaluate the OS.
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.
...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'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
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.
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.
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.
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) ;)
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)
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...
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
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 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.