Slashdot Mirror
OpenSolaris Or FreeBSD?
Norsefire writes "I am in quite a predicament. I decided a while back to branch out and use a new operating system (currently running Debian). After a bit of searching (trying Gentoo, Gobo and Arch along the way), I decided to use something that isn't Linux. Long story short: I narrowed the choices down to OpenSolaris and FreeBSD, but now I'm stuck. OpenSolaris is commercially backed by Sun, has nice enterprise-y tools in the default install, and best of all, a mature implementation of ZFS. FreeBSD is backed by a foundation, has a minimal default install and a rather new (but recently improved in the 8.0 release) implementation of ZFS, however it offers the Ports Collection (I quite like the performance boost due to compiling from source, no matter how small it might be) and a bigger community than OpenSolaris. That is just a minimal mention of the differences. I would be interested to see what the Slashdot community thinks of these two operating systems."
Those are commie Operating Systems you have there. Get some Windows 7 and be a good patriot.
Just think about what you're saying in the future.
Dual boot and use them both. Any other world endingly difficult questions you need answered for?
Rather than playing with just another un*x clone, try something like Haiku or FreeVMS or my personal favourite Plan 9
Andy Warhol got it right / Everybody gets the limelight
Andy Warhol got it wrong / Fifteen minutes is too long.
For instance, why are you switching from an OS with more support to ones with less support?
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
If you just have to pick one, I would wait on this decision until the Oracle-Sun deal is through and see what Oracle does. I don't think either is likely to go away any time soon, though, and if OpenSolaris is really open source it *would* be forked if Oracle tried to close it.
Given that you've already tried three different Linux distros, though, why not try both? You're going to be the best judge of what your requirements are.
Disclaimer: I'm an ex-FreeBSD-committer, so I have a dog in the hunt.
If you're looking to learn something new, OpenSolaris is the way I'd go. Lots of commercial enterprises use Solaris, so you're learning a skill that is of direct to a great many businesses.
Of course, that's not to say that Solaris is the only Unix out there - I'm certain that FreeBSD is used in commercial enterprises as well, just not at as high a level as Solaris is. And, ultimately, learning the idiosyncrasies of more than one Unix environment means that you're well placed to adapt if (for example) you find yourself maintaining an AIX or HP-UX host - you've already had the pain of dealing with the differences between FreeBSD/Solaris and Linux, so the next step won't be quite so difficult.
Is there an operating system under it?
I am always surprised when people make this claim about compiling from source giving a performance boost. Why would code compiled on your system run any faster than the same code on someone else's system?
Unless you know how to tweak the compiler flags for this particular app (and know them better than the developer who distributes the binaries), the binary delivered with the distribution will be just as quick as the one you compile yourself.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
When it comes to things like flash, acroread, nvidia drivers, fluendo (multimedia plugins, DVD Player), skype etc being supported, having the commercial entity behind OpenSolaris does seem to help...I think behind the scenes Sun offer some sort of incentive to these companies to support OpenSolaris. I do like that FreeBSD is backed by a foundation though, it is much more reassuring to an open source project to know that its backing entity wont dump them the next day.
You didn't say what's your specific need. If you are just testing out different systems and doing some studying, then the correct answer is probably "Both". If you have specific need then would have been nice if you outlined that. FreeBSD is more towards a desktop, Solaris is more for servers, but you already know that. So if you aren't just doing this out of academic interest, would sure help to know your requirements (and why didn't the Linux flavors work out?).
because you forgot to write down the most important part of your question: for which purpose is this server intended.
Goddamnit, is this /g/?
> gentoo, gobo, arch
You have been trolled.
> compiling from source no matter how little performance boost it gives
Still trolled by gentoo -O flag weenies, aren't we?
> using Debian
This is a good choice
> Switch to OpenSolaris
No, just no, not unless you have a specific reason to. As a desktop? They don't call it Slowaris for nothing, y'know.
> Mature ZFS
Well, it is Sun, after all. They did write the bloody thing. But don't forget that ZFS has its own overhead, so if you don't have a use for it, you're wasting your time and your system resources.
> FreeBSD
Why? Not unless you have a specific reason to. You're already running a stable operating system that works on your hardware. Have you looked to see if the drivers you want are available? If it supports your hardware, go for it. If not, why put yourself through hell?
> Corporation vs not-for-profit
Doesn't make any difference, bro, unless you are trying to start a flamewar. It either does what you want or it's crap.
8/10, would rage again.
--
BMO
I assume you are looking for a server. If it's for a desktop, more users and software help a lot. Although BSD and Solaris are more reliable indeed, the intricately, meticulously designed user-oriented design interface of Linux provides details and config files enough to entertain for generations. I have never tried out GnuStep, however an open source nextstep-like interface seems promising.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Make a VM of each system and see what you like. The other question is what do you want to do with your system? Run it on your laptop? Use it as a web server? A directory server? Or something else?
This is question is like being asked by a computer illiterate user "What kind of computer should I get?" I always ask "Well what do you want to do? If you want to surf the web, maybe type a paper or two, get a netbook, if you want to play games, get a desktop, if you need to carry it to school or work..." It all depends on what will best preform the functions you're looking for.
If your goal is to learn, try both.
I've been using FreeBSD since somewhere around 1999-2000 and I've also played around a bit with various versions of Solaris and the way I look at it is:
If you want to learn something that you can put on your resumé then Solaris is probably the better choice, likewise if you want mature ZFS support, other than that I'd have to say that FreeBSD is the better choice for most people but as a long time FreeBSD user I suspect I'm quite biased, FreeBSD has always made a lot of sense to me, it's well-organized and I just happen to like the simplicity and sane layout that it has. But yeah, neither OS is Debian/Ubuntu and you'll have to learn their little peculiarities (and there's no point fighting it, trying to dump all software into /usr and making /usr/local a symlink to /usr because that's how your Linux distro of choice did it isn't going to fly with FreeBSD, just accept that when you install software it goes in /usr/local and be happy with it :).
(Yes, I once (1998-ish) saw what was a large Linux distro at the time pull that stunt)
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Whilst I don't agree with the profanity, I agree with the sentiment.
This site used to be such a haven for trolls and geeks, now it's full of wannabes for both :(
I quite like the performance boost due to compiling from source, no matter how small it might be.
While I generally agree... (I use Gentoo for years on multiple systems and love/hate it.)
What if the boost is smaller than the resources it takes to compile it in the first place?
If you once compiled gcc, glibc, kdelibs (or all of gnome) java (se) and ghc (with vmem requirements up to 8GB!) in a row, just to go from x.x.x.2 to x.x.x.3, you know what I am talking about. Here that can take a good day. And the gain from not simply keeping the old version is next to nothing, but often still required because of a security hole.
Here, a weekly update can consist of over 50 packages wanting to be re-compiled. For shit like going from -rc1 to -rc2, or a changed use flag (compile option).
I wonder if it wouldn’t be simpler, to just compile every combination of configure setup / architecture once, and put the binaries on a giant (and I mean bigger-than-google-by-some-magnitudes giant) server. ;)
(At least if you have multiple similar servers, you can save time by using ccache and "binpkg"es.)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I've used both as my primary desktop (each for a few months) and if you want to try something new, go with FreeBSD. OpenSolaris felt like GNU/Solaris, which it mostly is, with a few Sun coded things (I think it was libc and a few more of the libraries). FreeBSD was all about fine control: I found myself wanting to recompile the kernel and playing with rc scripts and asking my OpenBSD-using friend so many questions he demanded I switch to Linux:-D
Plus, when you've spent a whole night figuring out why KDE won't compile correctly on FreeBSD....it feels good, like you've accomplished something.
Does ZFS on FreeBSD still suffer from random kernel panics when it gets low on memory?
I'm particularly referring to this bit of documentation:
To use ZFS, at least 1GB of memory is recommended (for all architectures) but more is helpful as ZFS needs *lots* of memory. Depending on your workload, it may be possible to use ZFS on systems with less memory, but it requires careful tuning to avoid panics from memory exhaustion in the kernel.
Yeah, kernel infrastructure that can't cope with running out of memory. That fills me with confidence. Particularly I've run ZFS on OpenSolaris on a 48MB Pentium laptop and it coped fine.
Unfortunately the FreeBSD ZFS pages are a wiki, which means they're badly organised and out of date. I have no idea when the above was written or whether it's still valid. Does anyone know?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XOR_swap_algorithm
This maybe wasn't the best example since XOR swaps are rarely useful anyway. I suspect that other things like word (mis)alignment and varying cache miss costs may be a factor for different processors.
Gentoo claims that picking e.g. core2 over nocona can boost performance by 15% (which seems a bit much to me), so picking the right x86_64 variant is still something that is considered. Not something I worry about though, unless I am compiling from source anyway.
OpenSolaris is Sun's desperate attempt to keep up with Linux. Sun had a great history but they just aren't as relevant anymore, there is little they have that redhat ( for example ) don't. Solaris just isn't in a position to make any kind of comeback at this point.
It's pretty sad that Linux has taken market share from good companies like Sun at least as much as Microsoft.
IMHO for server CentOS for desktop Ubuntu for workstaion Fedora (otherwise i had of sayd for home Mac for office Win everything else Linux) The rest isnt serious (maybe even practical is what i mean) enough. :)
hf
You could try using pkgsrc (http://www.pkgsrc.org/) on opensolaris for third party applications. There are a lot of packages for opensolaris already but I think that pkgsrc beats them. Alternatively, you could try your hand at sourcejuicer and feed the apps you want into the opensolaris pool.
You are used to Debian ? Then try Debian GNU/kFreeBSD.
The Debian distro on top of a FreeBSD kernel.
Gentoo claims that picking e.g. core2 over nocona can boost performance by 15% (which seems a bit much to me), so picking the right x86_64 variant is still something that is considered. Not something I worry about though, unless I am compiling from source anyway.
Gentoo makes all sorts of outlandish claims which seldom stack up, in exchange for which you get an OS which if you don't keep it up to date religiously will ultimately suffer bitrot. Over time, emerge <package> becomes less and less reliable.
(Yes, I have used Gentoo. For several years. I concluded at the end that the amount of work was greater than the benefit.)
...is a good lightweight text editor.
From reading your post, it looks like you are looking to use a desktop OS (I may be wrong). Also it seems to me that you have tried various distros of linux but are rejecting them because it doesn't hhave ZFS.
Therefore if we are to restrict our options to OpenBSD and FreeBSD i would lean towards FreeBSD simply due to the large no. of apps available through ports.Also i believe driver compatibility is a little better in FreeBSD, especially recently with nvidia cards.
However as another poster said, the best judge is you. therefore install each and try them out and see which works best with your hardware. you may also want to compare desktop responsiveness with Linux, as I believe that recent linux kernels have received further optimizations for desktop performance.
If its a server OS you are looking for then it depends on what you are using it for (LAMP, file server, DB host etc.). If you are looking to run commercial DBs like Oracle on it, a certified OS like RHEL/Solaris may be a better bet if u plan to ask for support. Thats a totally different ball game all together and is something on which one can write pages on.
Good luck on whatever you choose to use.
How about GNU Hurd, that's something really different.
I am in quite a predicament. My boss hired me because I bullshitted my way through an interview, but really I don't know shit from shinola when it comes to servers and operating systems and such. I can play WoW... HELP ME PLEASE.
Although I always enjoy the opportunity to recommend FreeBSD to somebody, I didn't really get an explanation of your needs. Are you going to be running servers? Desktop? Or just having fun? I imagine that you're just going to have some fun since you just want to learn something new. In that case I'd definitely go with FreeBSD. It is a great "learning" OS and is well documented thanks to the Handbook. The /usr/ports collection has the source code for just about any piece of software you'd ever need, and the dependencies are all taken care of for you. You get some pretty awesome hardware support, server daemons are incredibly easy to configure, it is robust as all hell, doesn't use a lot of resources, can also make a great desktop OS, lots of smart people on IRC you can get help from, and countless amounts of other things. Additionally I'd go with FreeBSD because there are a large percentage of servers on the internet use this OS. If IT is your profession, it definitely won't hurt to learn FreeBSD. All you need to know is, /etc/rc.conf and /usr/ports. Then you just move on from there :-) Good luck!
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
(Yes, I have used Gentoo. For several years. I concluded at the end that the amount of work was greater than the benefit.)
Me too. I love Gentoo, and think it's pretty much as close to my perfect distro as possible. Gentoo Hardened is brilliant.
However, if you do what I do, and only update packages that have security issues, you'll find that suddenly one day, your profile has expired, and packages you need to bring it up to date have entered and left portage, meaning that you have to jump through hoops just to get Python working enough to update.
Say anything about this, and you get the statement "Just do emerge world every night", which is stupid for a production server.
I much prefer Gentoo to Ubuntu or Debian (and nothing to do with speed (claimed or otherwise)), but my current host? Ubuntu 9.04.
Get your own free personal location tracker
>> Corporation vs not-for-profit
>Doesn't make any difference, bro, unless you are trying to start a flamewar. It either does what you want or it's crap.
There speaks a man who believes that is on the winning team and has a bigger slice of the cake. Technical questions are just one part of the equation bro. Ethical considerations are important to some people y'know.
Chill out dude.
(Ethical: look it up in the dictionary)
Instead of FreeVMS which isn't ready for prime time... Get the OpenVMS hobbiest edition, load up SimH and run OpenVMS on a real emulated Vax. For fun you could boot OpenBSD, NetBSD or BSD4.x on the emulated Vax.
As far as Solaris vs. BSD -- I run 'em both here. Solaris mostly on Sparc and BSD on x86. I've done Solaris x86
and it's ok, but it's really fun to set up a jumpstart server and load up some old Sparcs.
I've even got SunOS 4.1.4 up...
Take a look at the software available on the http://www.openvmshobbyist.com/ site. A ton of VMS languages including C, ADA, Pascal, Macro32... TCP/IP and Clustering.
http://simh.trailing-edge.com/
Also... take a look at the early Unix varients for PDP11 for SimH. You wouldn't recognize it.
Restrictive (copyleft) licensed software like the Linux kernel and the GNU toolchain indeed follows a communist philosophy that fails to see the value of free market competition, and instead relies on government force (see gpl-violations.org).
Public domain software is ideal, but the most permissive (least restrictive) FLOSS software stack you can get today would be based on minimalist "cover our legal butts" licenses like BSD. Other great permissive software includes Apache, PostgreSQL, Python, LLVM, X, vim, libtorrent, the Xiph codecs, and so on. Major kudos to Google for releasing Chromium under the BSD license, which for the first time in history finally makes a decent 100% free software desktop possible!
The Windows Interix subsystem could have evolved into a great UNIX server platform, but socialist governments (especially in Europe) place severe restrictions on what Microsoft can include in their products, which is the only thing holding them back. There has been some effort to get Gentoo's portage or NetBSD's pkgsrc working on it, but it never got off the ground. It seems like the open source community is ostracising Interix for purely irrational anti-capitalist reasons, and that's really a shame - it could have brought the power of UNIX to the >90% of users who run Windows! (Yes, there's also Cygwin, but it's embarrassingly slow, buggy, and incomplete.)
As Stallman's economic fallacies become ever more evident, I expect ever-more developer time to shift to 100% free (non-copyleft) software, which means there's a very bright long-term future ahead for platforms like FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, NewForkBSD, and even MINIX 4!
I'm using Debian stable right now as the solution for my particular requirements (development desktop that's a good Xen Dom0), but I'd much rather be using a BSD (the first machine I bare metaled was BSD 2.x onto a PDP-11/44 in 1981 (sic)) or Solaris (it took me most of a decade, but I eventually got over their switch to AT&T :-).
The big problems with FreeBSD when I made my decision were no Dom0 support and an immature ZFS, and the problem I've always had with Solaris is solid mass storage device driver support, at least for vaguely affordable controllers that don't require a PCI-X bus. E.g. when I last checked nVidia SATA chipset support was iffy (which was odd since a classic workstation they shipped had a rebadged Tyan motherboard with a nVidia chipset; I've got two of those Tyans in prodution and they're rock solid ... with Windows XP :-( hey, I'm not willing to put my parents on Linux or whatever quite yet )).
This may have improved since then, but be sure to check for problems in the field.
Without that information, all you'll get is a bunch of people suggesting their own pet projects.
Even if you just want to learn and play you might want to have a goal. Do you want to learn to administer ZFS? You seem to be fixated on it.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
What makes you want to blow away something you're already running & comfortable with? You give no reason for switching away from Debian.
Suggestions:
- For Linux, Debian is pretty much the granddaddy, and can likely be wrangled to do whatever you want. You seem the explorative type. If you're comfortable with Debian, figure out how to do whatever it is you're interested in on Debian and get on with it. Changing distros won't change your life.
- For other OSs, you're blessed to live in the age where you can just grab virtualbox, fire up a VM of whatever it is you wan to play with, and fiddle with it. When I was messing with all this I had 5 crappy old noisy minitower PCs around my desk (and a NeXT on top of it, which was what I actually used as my workstation becuase it Just Worked). If you're really really impressed by something that you've monkeyed with in your VMs for a while, switch to it if you really want to, but honestly in ISP and hosting type shops Debian is what I see most.
- It sounds like you want slowlaris or FreeBSD just to get ZFS, presumably because you have an ever-expanding collection of media, pr0n, und w4r3z and want to be able to just add disks to your storage pool on the fly and all the other spiffy stuff that ZFS does. If you want to kick the tires on a new filesystem technology, may I suggest that you grab the latest iso release of DragonFlyBSD and check out HAMMER? It's really a lot simpler to use than ZFS, and personally I feel it's really designed The Right Way.
- If you really want a challenge, get a Mac (or buy yourself Snow Leopard and make yourself a hackintosh) and learn how to use the powerful and complicated tools that make Mac OS X Server work. Things are very different from the way other unixen do things, and I find messing with them and learning how they work to be very satisfying.
I came from a SunOS background but used Linux based distributions at home (Slaskware was the easiest at the time).
I the tried NetBSD and FreeBSD and they were okay, I found general responsiveness felt good, not necessarily faster, but more consistant, this was years before low lateny linux kernel.
After about 9-12 months, I realised I was spending a lot of my time just trying to get iBCS, Wine and Linux compatibility working so I could be productive. I realised I wasn't gaining anything from running FreeBSD
and was struggling to make it work like a Linux based desktop OS. As a server I favoured Solaris anyway.
I'm quite happy with both OpenSolaris and FreeBSD as desktops, as well as servers.
You didn't specify what your primary goals are for the system in question-- if you're looking for a general purpose web surfing/light development machine, OpenSolaris should be fine for you-- as long as you have at least a gigabyte of memory and a moderately fast processor.
FreeBSD's a lot less resource intensive in my experience-- I'm currently supporting two sites that still have Pentium III/600-based servers with uptimes approaching a year each. (Last reboot for each was due to a multi-day power outage.)
If you have VirtualBox installed, give both FreeBSD and OpenSolaris a whirl, see what you think.
Since you're not telling us what you're actually planning to do with the OS, might as well advice some random OS based on no reason whatsoever.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Ran 8, ran 9 for 10 years, now I am running Solaris 10. Server with SunRays.
If you need the features (or paid sun support) though, go for it - but FreeBSD has most of the feature set these days and is much faster. Ports are also way easier than obtaining package X from source and then running into whatever undiscovered bugs exist in that particular package under opensolaris becuase you happen to be the first one to actually run it on that platform.
It REALLY depends on your intended purpose as to which OS is best - the only one who can really answer that, whilst taking into account your previous history, skillset andn willingness to learn/fiddle is you.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
You have that backwards.ATT&T Bell Labs invented C, and then used it to write Unix, which was a play on the name of the OS called Multics, which was also AT&T Bell Lab's baby (along with MIT and General Electric.)
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Mafia theft... err... "taxes" don't "pay for civilization", civilization comes from voluntary cooperation between self-interested individuals that occurs in the free market! Read Murray Rothbard, David Friendman, and other free market philosophers. The government is a violent and effectively unaccountable monopoly that has clipped the wings of human civilization, and may bring it to a screeching dystopian halt if not debunked and dismantled by the end of this century!
What a treat to even be able to have this discussion: which of the many capable, mature, free options to adopt. Thank you, open source movement!
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
Wouldn't it be useful to explain what you want the machine for?
With Oracle trying to take control, you cant be assured of its future. With FreeBSD, you can. I would worry less about the performance differences and think about the long term stability and true openness. Don't want your eggs in a leaky basket. You can buy commercial FreeBSD support, if that is a business requirement.
Also, I agree ports are great ( unless its close to a new release.. they tend to get stale and out of sync ), but i don't see an issue with the 'minimal default install'. You want bloat off the line? You can create custom 'install sets' if you really think you need the extras at install time, and not 'admin time'.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Maybe we need a -1 FAIL!!! modération.
(\__/) This is Lapinator
(='.'=) copy it in your sig
(")_(") so it can take over the world
Remeber that you don't get any free security updates for OpenSolaris. That means you are stuck with the security problems and bugs until the next release,
Of course you can buy support from Sun.
However, if you do what I do, and only update packages that have security issues, you'll find that suddenly one day, your profile has expired, and packages you need to bring it up to date have entered and left portage, meaning that you have to jump through hoops just to get Python working enough to update.
It was exactly this that drove to to Debian. You don't generally make changes to a production server unless you really can't help it because every change has a risk of something going wrong and suddenly your production server is in need of serious work to get it back up. You certainly don't want to find that patching one item introduces a raft of new dependencies which require you to re-emerge half the software. Debian understands this. Gentoo doesn't.
I'm currently running Slackware64 13.0, and have been a huge Slack fan since around 3.3. Currently I run a handful of vm's under kvm. Including ubuntu, debian, centos, vista, xp, a few Win7's (two betas, rc1 and the final enterprise), opensolaris and now I'm thinking of freebsd 8.0. Some of my favorites are ubuntu and Win7. I have about 16 of them all told but only use abour 2-3 at a time. It's a fantastic way to learn several different things at once. Run two VMs, focus on OpenSolaris for a week/month then switch to FreeBSD 8.0. Then run them both at the same time when you're comfortable.
FLR
I've been playing with Nexenta (www.nexenta.org) for a while with some success. It calls itself GNU/Solaris in the same way that Debian is GNU/Linux. They put an OpenSolaris kernel under a GNU software stack using recompiled Ubuntu packages. Last time I checked they were using Hardy.
Packaged software support isn't as large as with FreeBSD (not all Ubuntu packages are converted), but larger than OpenSolaris (it includes the OpenSolaris packages through apt).
Its main appeal is in combining the power of Solaris with the ease of apt and adds a cool feature called apt-clone that takes a ZFS snapshot before doing any package maintenance allowing clean, trivial rollbacks for testing and error correction. It also supports switching between GNU and Solaris contexts in case you prefer your tar without a -z option.
It's not completely mature at this point so I wouldn't use it in my datacenter, but it's fine for a home server. I haven't tested it on the desktop yet.
I love Solaris (particularly DTrace) but OpenSolaris requires too much memory. That's my main peeve with it. I think you can't install on anything that has less than 512MB. Since I usually play with old hardware, I would probably pick FreeBSD for this one reason.
I've read the GPL and I haven't seen anything relating to the redistribution of wealth or any quote from Das Kapital. You just throw buzzwords like "communist philosophy" out there because a) you're american (yours is the only country where anyone would take you seriously with rubbish like that, due to a cultural meme that has no base in reality) and b) you're hoping to excite the masses, i.e. troll the forums. I don't have mod points today, but you would get a -1 Troll if I did.
No, you're trying to troll the forums, and you're succeeding too. There's a famous argument that is used to defend Microsoft's OS costs: No one is forcing you to use it. The same applies to the GPL. You are free to choose whatever license you want for your software. Forcing you to choose a certain license would, however, not necessarily be communist, since communism entails forced redistribution of property. It would be tyrannical, but the American cultural meme is that communism=authoritarianism. Police states like that which Argentina and Chile used to be were just as tyrannical as Cuba or modern Venezuela.
For the community. I hear they have pot luck dinners every Sunday afternoon.
This reminds me of an insightful observation, I saw in a Slashdot signature years ago: BSD developers do it, because they love Unix. Linux ones do it, because they hate Microsoft.
Don't get married — nor pick anything less important either — out of dislike for something (or someone) else to spite them.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I would go with FreeBSD. FreeBSD is known for its high reliability and some of the root DNS servers use it. But, I would not use ZFS. ZFS has an achilles heal as we discovered. If you loose a volume in a ZFS setup, you cannot remove the volume. This caused us to scrap its use. I really like the BSDs. FreeBSD by itself, addressed 95% of our computing needs. For the remainder, we use OpenBSD. These two operating systems, when combined, give use a powerful platform.
I use Solaris 10 x64 for production, on Sun hardware. On the desktop I use OS X, and to a lesser extent Windows 7 and OpenSolaris. I've tried various Linux distributions and OpenBSD. I used Solaris 9 and older on SPARC, but my recent experience is with Solaris 10 on x64. That's a rather different and more interesting OS than Solaris 6 - 8, particularly the old x86 port.
I don't see the performance issues with current versions of Solaris. A couple of years ago when we were setting up I looked at published Java benchmarks, and found Solaris a couple of percent better than Linux. Not enough to matter. It is probably true that OpenSolaris on the desktop is not a good fit for small memory. This is particularly true now that the default install uses ZFS. The design of ZFS assumes a fair amount of memory, because by default it uses a large cache. It's fine on my old 1 GB laptop, and I've used smaller virtual machines, but it's not what I'd choose for a 256 MB Pentium. I should note that ZFS is still under active development. A lot of it involves performance.
You don't know what you're talking about. FreeBSD has been a traditional server OS for a long time. For many years, it blew Linux out of the water (Linux has come a long way though and overcome many of its well-noted shortcomings) and gave Microsoft a run for its money. FreeBSD powers a lot of important websites (such as Hotmail, until Microsoft bought it and insisted it be replaced).
Although OpenSolaris is built from Solaris, a traditional back-office server OS, there has been a lot of work making it into a usable desktop OS (and this is what distinguishes it from its Solaris counterpart).
and if you want it more so, there is PC-BSD (Free BSD with (good) lipstick).
Or even Solaris proper. Solaris 10 changed the game from the ground up, much to the point where it's Unix on roids. Run levels have been replaced with milestones, init.d has been replaced with SMF and the contract file system. Dtrace makes life worth living. Look, vmstat is great; but with Dtrace you can recreate vmstat/iostat/mpstat from the ground up! Get the picture of what this tool can do for you?!?! Containers/Zones for virtual hosts. OpenCluster for building and working with an HA cluster. Crossbow, for building whole networks inside your machine.
I think my only complaint about OpenSolaris is packages. After 8 years of Debian apt calls I find *Solaris to be a little too retro-RedHat (before YUM) for dependencies and new software.
I've been in the same boat, trying to find a good OS that has ZFS (without having to take such a huge performance hit from zfs-fuse).
FreeBSD would freeze under heavy load; from what research I did on it, it seemed like a zfs bug with FreeBSD 8.
OpenSolaris on the other hand is a pretty nice desktop (Gnome is pretty much the same everywhere...) and it has a lot of useful packages in it's repository. Flash was installed out of the box, and installing Songbird and Eclipse took only three mouse clicks.
Give OpenSolaris a try (assuming it has support for your hardware).
Massive parallelism.
Automatic clustering.
Fault tolerance.
Single system image.
Unix was designed on and for a single minicomputer system, and it shows. It simply isn't a very good operating system for managing the resources of the networks of commodity systems we all have now.
A good system would let me switch on a new system/pc and it would automatically share all it's resources (storage, ram, cpu, I/O) with a defined cluster of other systems/PCs. It would handle the sharing out of tasks across the cluster in an efficient, redundant/fault tolerant manner and it would appear to the user to be a single system in every respect.
I don't expect any of the existing Unix/Linux codebases ever to reach this point. Unfortunately it's quite a hard problem and there really isn't anyone out there who is capable of pulling it off, so, we simply get the wheel re-invented again and again.
Deleted
I can't make a recommendation because you have not clarified your end use. If you are using it personally, I'd recommend BSD. It is a good too to learn the basics of UNIX, and build a great OS from. If you are going to use it in a business desktop, the amount of configuration and upkeep becomes prohibitive. Given your choices, I would use Solaris because of ease of use and support for business. If used in a business server role, it depends on the expected services and the organization, but I'd probably deploy BSD.
... at least in its current form.
The new packaging format combined with a relatively new installer team (that appears to have no enterprise experience whatsoever) has mostly guaranteed that a lot of companies are going to be making an exodus away from Solaris. With Sun killing Nevada and providing no way to upgrade existing systems to OpenSolaris, businesses running Solaris are, IMHO, much more likely just to migrate away. If I'm going to be forced to re-install, I might as well install something else.
As an added bonus, AI (the 'new' OpenSolaris network install) takes all the best features of Jumpstart and throws them away. AI looks fantastic for blades, desktops, and other really simple configurations but that's about it. Want to configure more than one disk? Gotta wait for that to get added. Want to configure naming services? Gotta wait for that to get added. Want to set eeprom or bios settings before installing? Sorry, the team doesn't believe in begin/pre scripts. Want to use a finish/post script to flip a flag? Sorry, the team doesn't believe in those either.
At this point, I simply in good conscious recommend anyone to consider using OpenSolaris on anything but hobby gear. Sun has lost the plot.
Nexenta is basically the OpenSolaris kernel and the Debian/Ubuntu userland.
Jag pratar lite svenska.
I've been using FreeBSD for quite a while. I decided to jump ship to Opensolaris for ZFS when I brought up a new NAS server. Welp, with FreeBSD 8.0 out now, I'm jumping back. I've had a heck of a time getting apps to work on Opensolaris, the file system is impressive and works great, but if I can't run the apps I want to access the data, it's pointless for me.
I haven't read the article, so you may have answered this; still it seems silly that you haven't considered virtualization to try them both.
I have hardware running Fedora 12, Windows 7, and OS X 10.6. But that's not enough for me personally. Just for keeping tabs on whats going on with the different operating systems and each ones nuances I like to have several more installed.
In my case, I use VMware Fusion on my Macbook to run desktop environments on various OS's; Fedora, Windows, Solaris, FreeBSD, and whatever else I can shove on its undersized hard drive... hell building OpenOffice.org 3.1 on my new FreeBSD 8.0 vm, just finished up at some gawd aweful hour this morning completing its setup.
Not only that you can set up multiple systems to run at the same time and allow them to interact in server/client environments and see each shine in its own right.
Since my mac is too underpowered to be running multiple VM's I use KVM to launch servers to connect them to as I see fit... hell I have DNS, DHCP, Kerberos, 389 Directory Server, etc. etc. It's a lot to keep in your head, and fiddling with it until your comfortable with it more than most admins is your key to success. I have lists of other things I want to build up when lulls in personal and work life hit; puppet, ruby, cobbler, more nagios, and so on... By virtue of using virtualization you also become familiar with those technologies... sometimes I'll even download an eval license of Windows Server and go through the effort of promoting it to a DC setting up RIS and another service or two just so I can remember how to do so. I don't even admin windows anymore, but it's still good to know.
And in the end I can keep the two or three real systems quite clean and problem free, because if I want to try something I do it in a vm, rather than blowing up one of my host/base operating systems...
That's my two cents; like I said you may have already answered the question, but it just seems silly not to take an approach like this.
The choice of one over the other depends on the application. For a desktop environment, OpenSolaris is not very user friendly as it is derived from System V. FreeBSD, especially with the ports collection, can be used to create a very customizable desktop experience on par with Linux, and the BSD flavor of the OS interface provides for a much more navigable filesystem and user interface than OpenSolaris. If ZFS is key to your application, then OpenSolaris is the way to go, I doubt that even recent forks of FreeBSD have the most recent capabilities that have been integrated into the ZFS project (real time storage deduplication, pluggable storage modules for iSCSI, FCoE, FC etc). You would be hard pressed to find anything that can rival OpenSolaris on the storage backend, FreeBSD (or any other OS for that matter) doesn't get close in the storage realm. Performance between the two is probably negligible given recent performance enhancements to FreeBSD. With OpenSolaris you have Zones for virtualization, in FreeBSD jails - both similar concepts but implemented differently. Licensing would be something to look at as well. The BSD license is truly open source, meaning that you could create derivative works from the FreeBSD OS and rebrand it as your own product with no attribution back to the FreeBSD project. OpenSolaris has a more restrictive license than BSD so if the final product is say an appliance or a turnkey VM that includes the OS, the BSD license would be much more amenable to redistribution and rebranding as opposed to pretty much everything else out there.
"FreeBSD is more towards a desktop"
No it isn't. Freebsd's primary focus is and always has been for servers. The motto, "Freebsd, the power to serve". Freebsd is actually working in various directions like most operating systems including Opensolaris.
I'd say go for OpenSolaris.
The plus to learning OpenSolaris is that Solaris has a massive business market share compared to FreeBSD, working as a tech supporting an "enterprise" monitoring application which supports Solaris, FreeBSD, and others I can say this confidently. The most common use of Solaris right now is NFS file servers and Oracle database servers. Working with OpenSolaris will make it easy to get experience in both.
If your looking for something to replace your Debian box... don't do it, OpenSolaris is not Linux and you will find the learning curve and lack of software too much to handle on your primary box. If you are looking to learn a new non-linux os and have an extra moderately powered system to play with which is not your primary rig.. go for OpenSolaris. If you find bugs, be sure to report them to Sun.. they will usually respond within 2 days! I recommend using the latest and greatest image from genunix.org.
"civilization comes from voluntary cooperation between self-interested individuals that occurs in the free market"
The co-operation may start all market-egalitarian, peer-to-peer, but thermodynamically, co-operation will pretty much always morph into hierarchical command and control (with varying degrees of semi-autonomy allowed the parts in the whole.)
The underlying reason for this is that it is more feasible to coordinate things in a hierarchical structure. The information flows are limited in scope and complexity at each level of communication between a supervisor and multiple but not many controlled elements. Also the incentive structures tend to morph toward increasing reward for controlling (via hierarchy) a larger and larger sized co-operating organization.
So if we accept that hierarchy formation in society and economy is inevitable, our moral/ethical question is what technical form such hierarchy should take. Should it be representative democracy, mafia oligarchy, totalitarian dictatorship etc. But taxation is just an inevitable artifact of hierarchically co-ordinated co-operation.
In the thermodynamically efficient hierarchical form of (semi-willing, semi-imposed) co-operation, the controlling agents at the top of each level of the hierarchy (of each sub-unit of the economy), demand, and have the power to enforce, the extraction of "taxes", defined as a portion of the work-product of each unit further down the hierarchy. This portion of work dedicated to the more global unit's needs provides the resources necessary to the control and centralized or semi-centralized co-ordination of the co-operation.
There is no difference in essence between taxation and monopoly price-raising in a formerly free market that has evolved toward a small number of monopolies. The only substantial difference may be in how much democratic adjustment there may be to what uses the accumulated, concentrated funds are put to. In the market monopoly situation, the control can only be overthrown by the arising of another competing corporate hierarchy. In a democracy, the control (and directed dispersement of the funds) can theoretically be guided to some extent by the will of the people in a one-person-one-vote power-leveling manner.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
This is going to be a difficult question that entirely depends on what you are planning to do.
If you plan to learn business based programs I would suggest OpenSolaris. It is more in line with big business than any *BSD will ever be. You will find that fortune 500 companies use Oracle, Symantec Veritas products (cluster service, Volume manager, NetBackup etc..), or require Solaris for other business applications. The only other major *nix flavors in big business is HP-UX, AIX, and Linux. For the most part HP-UX and AIX are going bye bye and being replaced by big Linux boxes.
On the other hand, if you like the Web and want to learn to program, Try out FreeBSD. It has a much more open structure and an open user base that is more than willing to help solve complex problems.
Hope this helps.
Use a virtual machine -- it is really much easier once it is set up. If we could start the OS wars from scratch, but with modern hardware, I would argue for a very simple layer that sits just above BIOS, that reads the file system, and lunches different OSes running in virtual machines. If that were standard, then every OS would seamlessly work with the system.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Stick to Debian.
The OP claims that compiling from source optimizes things. Well, years ago, maybe, when we had everything compiled for 386 and when we had p4 with mmx instructions not used. But since everyone switched to 64 bits, exactly what optimization are we talking about here? Unless I really missed something, the only new instructions since the move to 64 bits are the ones for virtualization, which is nothing that concerns packages here. So what's the (enormous) loss of time to compile everything benefits here?
Since I found libtool broken once in FreeBSD for a period of 4 days in the ports, I decided it was a totally broken distribution that didn't deserve any attention at all. Maybe I was unlucky, someone would say? Nah... there can't be such thing, it only means that ports are NOT tested in FreeBSD, that is it: you can't have something as important as libtool entering BROKEN in ANY distribution without some serious questioning on the quality. And that's just an example here...
You probably want Nexenta. Only slightly behind OpenSolaris in terms of the Solaris kernel. Ubuntu userland, ZFS/GRUB-integrated apt.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
FreeBSD is more towards a desktop, Solaris is more for servers, but you already know that.
Not sure why you think that. FreeBSD's tagline is "The Power to Serve."
If, like me, what you didn't like about Linux was the often shallow and generic help documentation and the constant sense of being a beta tester, despite running "stable" releases, then IMHO you may not like FreeBSD. Disclaimer: I stopped using FreeBSD shortly after the 4.8 to 5.0 upgrade. Disclaimer2: I run the commercial release of Solaris 10, having only run OpenSolaris for a few weeks. But if you are primarily concerned with performance and uptime then FreeBSD might be for you. As for the ports system, while it seems to have more apps than most Linuxes, not all the apps in the ports system install as seamlessly as others. You'll also encounter some ports that are behind the current rev of that app. If you want to install many apps for learning and experimentation then, in my experience most app install systems (Linux's RPM, Debian's aptget, FreeBSD's ports) require you to retreat to installing from source about 25% of the time. And finally, I've found nothing else quite as solid and well designed as Solaris' Service Management Facility tools (svcadm, svccfg, svcs, etc). It really gives you a lot of visibility into, and control over, the various dependencies an app needs and the various states a daemon can be in. Good luck.
--tcpiplab
Rats. My "arrows" made up of equal sign and greater than symbols didn't work. Please consider the headline of my original post to be "Re:Why my path too was Linux to FreeBSD to Solaris".
--tcpiplab
For me OpenSolaris is great, i ran it for a few months but I have always gone back to FreeBSD in the end. I like the ports tree a lot, its fast and simple to use and very straight forward on location of config files and it always stays that way. Upgrades and port updating is very painless 99% of the time. I personally just like FreeBSD better.
OpenSolaris is a great OS for a number of uses (and since I don't know exactly what yours is, I can't be more specific).
However, if you are coming from Debian, then OpenSolaris will probably disappoint you considerably in terms of the available packages in the repos. As you know, the OpenSolaris community is not very mature, and there are very few packages available compared to a popular GNU/Linux like Debian. Also, unless you pay Sun for a support subscription, there are NO package updates (not even security) in the stable repositories, except once every 6 months according to the release cycle.
BSD has a bit more of a community behind it, and probably makes a better desktop OS for someone used to Linux. For a server dedicated to a particular task, OpenSolaris might be ideal, though. Again, it boils down to what your intended usage scenario is.
It's not entirely hopeless though: things like AFS, various distributed shared memory systems with a good API, task and process migration and so on have been around for quite some time.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
SunOS 4 that reminds me of installing it on 386 hardware long ago. Most people think that Opensolaris were the first X86 version but it was not. We did install SunOS 4 in 1989 or 1990.
"I quite like the performance boost due to compiling from source"
Just compiling from source and applying a few more compiler optimizations won't give you a performance improvement most of the time. You can get improvement on some high-performance math applications, rendering, transcoding and such.
Although, you can get a good improvement on memory footprint of your system and load times by compiling with minimal dependencies. The problem is... unless your distro has a good system in place to manage such customizations on compilations, there's no benefit. So, AFAIK, ports (either FreeBSD or NetBSD) doesn't provide the necessary customization capabilities and convenience tools to really improve performance by compiling your software.
In short, unless you really care about performance boost for specific applications and you want to spend time optimizing them... just forget about "compiling from source" when choosing a distro. When you choose, if it has ports supports, then great, if not... you don't lose too much,
I've used (and am using) both OpenSolaris and FreeBSD (with OpenBSD in an appliance role). Both are exceptionally good OS's, and there is a lot of "sharing" between them--ZFS, DTrace, jails/zones, etc. As for which one I'd choose in a pinch, it would depend upon the requirements. FreeBSD has a much better community via ports at this time. OpenSolaris--while there--just doesn't seem to be as handy, complete or easy. If one is coming from the Solaris world, OpenSolaris would have a much lower learning curve, but FreeBSD isn't that far behind. FreeBSD also does have Linux binary compatability, and am not certain about OpenSolaris.
Commercial software will probably be a wash, with OpenSolaris winning by a nose. Desktop--haven't used OpenSolaris in such a role, but have FreeBSD and don't really like it as much.
For those concerned about Oracle's position on OpenSolaris post-merger, my guess is that Oracle will keep it and begin a migration away from Linux as their core open source OS. After all, much better to be gatekeeper for the kernel than one of hundreds in Linux.
I love running DOS15 on PDP-15 SIMH emulator; the installation was almost an adventure, but eventually got there. As far as the OpenVMS goes, I run it from time to time on a OpenSolaris host (two dual Opterons) and it is faster emulated than on any real hardware I have ever run it on (well, the fastest VAX m/c i've ever used was an 8700, started on a 730...).
Gone are the days...
OpenSolaris is a pain to run on hardware which requires drivers not present in the base system. Their mechanism for adding drivers at boot time is arcane. Nevertheless I built a huge ZFS tank on a Tyan mobo and ran OpenSolaris on it (had to add Broadcom ethernet and Areca RAID card drivers to the mix).
When I recently tried to upgrade, the latest OpenSolaris flat-out refused to run on that motherboard. Something had happened in the development of the OS that collided violently with the motherboard BIOS, and upgrading to the latest BIOS didn't help a bit (though Tyan's release notes said it had introduced BIOS changes to support Solaris u1, u2 and u3, Solaris is now up to u8).
After a week of struggling I gave up. The box now runs FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE, which came up out of the box with no problems whatsoever. I just hope the ZFS is as stable as they claim it now is.
Moral: You can try to boot OpenSolaris. If and when that doesn't work, FreeBSD is your only other stable ZFS option right now.
Look. OK. I haven't posted on slashdot for about three years.
This topic gets me off the fence. Please more topics like this. K'Thanx.
With OpenSolaris, what do you get?
With FreeBSD what do you get?
I started my unix-life about 13 years ago with FreeBSD. It was the 2.x.x era. It was young but super stable and used by many Internet power houses like Yahoo. Long story short, I eventually migrated mainly to Linux on my personal servers. I've been using Gentoo for about 5 years now. Now, I want a file-system to store all my stuff on my home server that is superior to ext3.
This quest has brought me back full circle to FreeBSD 8. I've used ZFS professionally for many years now and is my preference. So my first thought was to use OpenSolaris. Unfortunately, I was saddened to see that my old but still perfectly working 3ware 8xxx SATA cards are unsupported in Solaris. That left me with FreeBSD which had 3ware support and happily stable ZFS support.
Moral of the story is that while OpenSolaris has expanded hardware support here and there, it's still woefully short of "anything you might have laying around" type of support which is essential for the home hobbyist. Interestingly, while I'm sure there have been many under-the-hood changes over the years, FreeBSD from a user's perspective is still near identical to how it was all those years ago. That is somewhat disappointing because the menu-interface should've been drastically improved years ago. Seriously, why would I want to hit "Cancel" to move to the next menu?
But it gets the job done.
I just wasted your mod points! HA!
I'm a professional UNIX admin. I've worked extensively with both FreeBSD and Solaris for years. Most of my recent work experience has been with Solaris 10, but I've run FreeBSD at home for years.
I recently needed to stand up a new application server at home. I considered using Linux, using OpenSolaris, or using FreeBSD.
I considered Fedora because the handwriting is on the wall where I work: the company will not permit new Solaris installations, in large part because it's not clear that Sun will still be a viable concern in a year or two. The corporate direction is to move to Red Hat. However, I quickly became infuriated with the poor quality of Fedora's documentation. I couldn't find clear answers to setup questions. This wasn't a problem with either FreeBSD or OpenSolaris. This took Fedora out of the running for me.
I decided to try OpenSolaris, because I know Solaris 10 and it might be useful to have the extra practice system at home. But OpenSolaris isn't Solaris 10. It doesn't have the driver support.
What really caused me to wipe out my OpenSolaris install and go with FreeBSD, however, was learning that Sun doesn't even supply security patches for OpenSolaris. If a security issue arises, you either have to wait for the next OpenSolaris release, or go about rebuilding from source. If you want prompt security patches, you have to pay for a Sun support contract -- and pay just as much as you'd pay for the "commercially supported" Solaris 10.
This astounded me. On Solaris 10, Sun provides critical security patches free of charge. Why does the "commerical" package provide free security patches, but the "open source" package doesn't?
There are features in OpenSolaris and Solaris 10 that FreeBSD doesn't have. But, speaking as a certified Solaris admin, I have to say that FreeBSD is more supportable if you can't afford the Sun support contract.
So, I would, and did, go with FreeBSD. It works great, it's solid, it's well supported, it runs well on all sorts of hardware, and it's likely to be around for a while. If the European Union drags out the Oracle/Sun deal much longer, I don't know that Sun will be able to avoid liquidation. Even if the deal goes through, Sun has a big challenge; a lot of their best customers have pulled away because of the uncertainty -- and the decline in support quality over the past year or two. I don't think that Solaris experience means quite as much as it used to on a resume.
Among *nixes, operating system is irrelevant-- that's kind of the point. You might need to figure out where startup scripts and config files are. Go with whatever has the most toys for whatever it is that floateth ye boat and ignore all the religion...they all have GCC, don't they?
regards,
too lazy to sign in
You certainly don't want to find that patching one item introduces a raft of new dependencies which require you to re-emerge half the software. Debian understands this. Gentoo doesn't.
Indeed, some time ago I got onto Gentoo's IRC channel asking for some help sorting out some serious mess I got myself into with expired profiles and no longer updateable packages. I got all sorts of weird recommendations and all they did was hose my system even more.
My complaints that this *sucked* where not welcome.
Choice is wonderful. ;) I went back to Debian, of course. There is something to said for stability.
I've worked with SPARC Solaris 9, NetBSD and FreeBSD. (I realize that's not quite what you're choosing between, it's just background information.) And of course various Linuxes and Windows. Um, and OS X. Well, actually, TRSDOS and some clones, and CP/M, and I think I'll stop there before I start naming 35-year-old mainframe OSes. :) My own personal preference is FreeBSD, given your choices. I just find it friendlier, and the ports system has a lot to do with it. Though frankly I don't have a clue what OpenSolaris might have in the way of package distribution systems, I'm pretty far behind on that.
So yeah, lots of qualifiers. But you asked for opinions. I like FreeBSD and would choose it over OpenSolaris.
For whatever that's worth, there it is. :)
Cleverly disguised as a responsible adult.
Of these two choices FreeBSD is more towards desktop even if it makes a fine server OS. Personally I prefer to run OpenBSD on my servers. Solaris is for running Oracle.
Depends. If you want something to do with TCP/IP stack, maybe FreeBSD is more convenient. Speed is same, after you tuned Solaris TCP/IP stack from conservative-soft-and-slow to aggressive, as it is by default in FreeBSD. As of OS itself, it is very cool that FreeBSD finally got 13th version of ZFS, working through kernel mapping, but I prefer *native* ZFS Pool version of 22 that does not hangs with kernel panic, faster Java (I do need it) and better memory management... :-) In fact, may folks forgive me, but BSD is too old and great candidate for museum. I would bet on Solaris, since it is much more advanced than FreeBSD (look for COMSTAR or Crossbow projects, for example). Additionally, if you need Java, then it has problems with threads on FreeBSD -- hence Yahoo! was decided to go with PHP instead Java (although they do really wanted Java, but all FreeBSD's won't allow that go smoothly). I also think that FreeBSD is quite good for routers (again: pf is somewhat more advanced than ipf, and OpenSolaris is using older Quagga). But there is no much way to port pf to OpenSolaris due to kernel differences. But I would think twice if I need application server[s] or mail -- Solaris is better here.
Both systems are stable.
Also I do like OpenSolaris release is scheduled each 6 months, while I really hate FreeBSD release depends on Moon phase, Solar interference waves and an atmosphere speed on Jupiter...
Get Xen or VMWare or whatever you like.
Run them both. Use them both. One will win.
By the time you find answers to your initial questions, or come up with round two, you will be know about Oracle.
Hey, there's also Darwin if you love ports so much.
My experience with OpenSolaris has been great. I set up an OpenSolaris NFS server with a RAID 1 array using two 300G drives under ZFS, and it's been rock solid.
A few months ago (I'm not that great of a SysAdmin) I decided I'd better check the health of the server, and discovered that my Secondary IDE channel was gonzo, and that OpenSolaris was reporting that my RAID 1 array was 'degraded', and running on only one drive. (Each drive is on a different IDE channel for redundancy -- guess that was the right decision.)
I now have a new chassis that I'll be putting that system's three drives into .. Real Soon Now.
opensolaris does have a packaging system but last I checked it did not have a whole lot of different software packages. The ports collection has everything you could want. If you are going to go with opensolaris check whether the software you plan on using is there or be willing
to compile and/or package your own.
The freebsd zfs implentation is pretty mature now in 8.0 but it's not the newest version and it doesn't have all the latest features that opensolaris does. This isn't neccessarily a bad thing though, look at the differences and see if you actually need those newer features now.
What are you going to use this box for? Overall it really comes down to looking at what requirements you have for the box and looking at which of the 2 meets those requirements the best. If you can't decide then just try them both and see which one you like better. Thats what I did and I settled on freebsd.
I don't want to start a religious war, but why not Linux?
Well, that my friend, was why Haskell was invented.
Massive parallelism? Check. (by being a lazy functional programming language)
Automatic clustering! Check. (The language can easily do it. The compiler just isn’t there yet. But you can already do it with a bit of code in a library.)
Fault tolerance? Check. (Haskell goes further, but not allowing compilation when it could fail. Of course, since the other parts of the system are not that reliable, the IO still can fail.)
Single system image? Isn’t that the same thing as automatic clustering? Oh, and I would NOT want my desktop os, to automatically “cluster” to all my other PCs in the network. Just no.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.