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."

Comments

Re:OpenSolaris

[larry bagina]

how long did it take you to copy a 17 meg file from one folder to another?

I really like OpenSolaris

[hilather]

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.

My Hope for OpenSolaris

[Agent ME]

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.

Re:Its a Server OS...

[moosesocks]

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.)

Re:Where are the forks?

[Vardamir]

OSOL's own site lists several different distributions. There's also auroraux, which aims to have its own kernel source repository and freedom from any remaining binary bits: http://www.auroraux.org/index.php/Main_Page

/tmp and /var/tmp

[foorilious]

There's a lot of little things you'll notice over the years about Solaris / OpenSolaris that are unique, cool, neat, or useful -- too many to list in an article like this, of course. One example I was reminded of by the "differences" table -- the authors note that the Solaris equivalent of Linux's "/tmp" is "/var/tmp" -- but they failed to point out that Solaris also has a /tmp, and that, by default /tmp is actually partially backed by RAM, which is extremely convenient and useful from time to time, when you want a little piece of lightning-fast filesystem space, or want to eliminate disk as a variable in some sort of timing test. Of course, linux also has ramdisks, but this is generally far more convenient.

$ time dd if=/dev/zero of=/var/tmp/foo bs=1024k count=128
128+0 records in
128+0 records out
dd if=/dev/zero of=/var/tmp/foo bs=1024k count=128 0.00s user 0.71s system 24% cpu 2.910 total

$ time dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/foo bs=1024k count=128
128+0 records in
128+0 records out
dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/foo bs=1024k count=128 0.00s user 0.43s system 98% cpu 0.438 total