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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."
Dual boot and use them both. Any other world endingly difficult questions you need answered for?
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.
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
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
Except that they look outdated for at least a decade, and that their paradigms also are outdated.
I wish someone would come up with something new, that combines all good ideas of all OSes into a new basic architecture, after understanding that, creates some new, modern paradigms, and then re-builds all those good ideas from scratch into those new main paradigms.
Which should in itself already result in a load of new possibilities. But some new functions of top, and you have a certain winner.
The only problem is to get the resources to be able to pull something like that off. Because it is certainly possible. Hell I could do it, if I had the budget to hire the right people.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Or you could use Debian and accept that your distribution hasn't been compiled with -Oevery silly little option for a fraction% improvement.
...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.
I have no mod points, but this is exactly what I was going to suggest... Get the best of both worlds.
There needs to be a Gentoo Stable version of Gentoo, where packages update very infrequently, but people test the ebuilds to make sure that they work even if you're not updating from the version that was issued 15 minutes ago.
Get your own free personal location tracker
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 problems are you trying to solve? Re-writing code for the sake of rewriting code to make it look shiny or do shiny type things is all well and good, but if there is no real world problem to mitigate you're basically putting effort into a non-problem - effort that could be put to better use solving problems we do have - such as improving existing code.
Its easy to look at the current platforms out there and think that you could do better if you had the resources, but you're starting from so far behind. And with coding, you can't always just throw more programming hours at it. This is what Microsoft has done with Windows and look where they're at - it works, but no one knows how exactly (including coders within MS - hence the big project for minwin).
I guess my point is this: re-inventing the wheel for the sake of reinvention (eg, the linux way of "not invented here!" for many things) is wasted effort. Think long and hard before going down that path, but if you do - good luck with it. Many talented and intelligent people have tried and just added yet another fragment to the software universe.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Really? And what kind of hardware does Solaris run on? What kind of hardware does HPUX run on? What kind of hardware does AIX run on?
Now what kind of hardware does Mac OS X run?
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
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).
No it doesn't.
It raises the bar for competition. It allows everyone to start from a more advanced position, the whole "Shoulders of Giants" thing.
We are very lucky to live in a world with GPL software. The GPL has succeeded in allowing real progress to flourish where monopolies have stifled progress in an unregulated "free" market.
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.
The double-speak of a Microsoft apologist.
Stick Men
If this weren't moderated as interesting, I'd be afraid to answer for fear of feeding stupid trols, but since it is, lets go ahead.
There's a certain stupidity in modern "soundbite" thinking that seems to think that by labelling something you thereby make it bad. This leads people to stuipdly stretch those labels as far as they think they can make them stick. Here is a perfect example. The GPL requires certain actions to avoid restrictions in copying. Microsoft's licenses restrict all copying with small exceptions. The FSF occasionally goes to court to try to get organisations to follow their license. The BSA, Microsoft's enforcers, regularly carry out military style raids on their customers searching for violations, let alone what they do to actual pirates. If you believe that this makes the FSF, the free software movement or whatever communist then you must believe that commercial software producers are all ultra communists and Microsoft is Comintern its self. If you really did believe that and weren't just making a debating point, you could easily find yourself being declared clinically insane.
Interix was created solely for the reason of destroying UNIX; I think you will find that the "open source community" is completely rational for not working on it. Your complaint is like a person wanting to know why turkeys don't do volunteer work to spread the thanksgiving message. However, there is nothing they could do to stop the Windows community from doing the port. The reason it's not happening is because Microsoft and Microsoft collaborators aren't interested in becoming helpful collaborating members of the community.
Which leads to the question why didn't Microsoft just go ahead and fix it. Answer; because then it would be difficult to kill it later. Interix might be a sane choice for an organisation which was trying to eliminate old UNIX installs and just had a few applications which were difficult to rewrite at the current time. It's not something anyone sane would base their future on.
This is the funniest and most ironic statement of your entire post. Stallman never claimed to be an economist and from the beginning said "do this because it's the moral thing even though it will lose you money". The irony comes from the fact that he was wrong. In fact the GPL is an excellent choice as part of a commercial strategy. Either dual license model for sofware with narrow developer interest or through the free (as in beer) software + expensive support model.
Some of the other systems you mentioned should be, logically, looking at their design and historical position before Linux really took off and the number of products developed from them which could have contributed to their develomement dominating the market. However they have failed. The reason is simple. Every time someone comes up with a product based on a non copyleft system (OS-X; JunOS, Microsoft's TCP/IP stack, IPSO etc. etc.) the community divides between those working on the product and those working on the OS. This leads to continual weakening of the community. Compare with
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
If ZFS is the main motivation to choose the OS, you should use Opensolaris regardless of what happens in FreeBSD.
"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)." Idiot. Relying on "government force" to enforce contracts isn't "communist". In fact, even among most libertarians, enforcement of contract is considered one of the basic and vary legitimate functions of government. There's nothing "anti-free-market" about a collaborative effort; every pursuit that's not for-profit isn't "anti-capitalist". Communism is *compulsory* sharing of work and work product you own. Taking someone else's and using it on the terms they've placed on it isn't compulsory - you don't have to use it.
anti capitalist? maybe the floss crowd doesn't want to help a for-pay software stack when they themselves don't get a piece o fthe pie. In the floss world, they are 'paid' with the contributions of others. If they were to work with 'interix' they gain nothing except a more powerful competitor who wants to crush open source.
Put down the lynching rope, I'm not a Microsoft apologist! I'm a free market apologist, and my software paradigm of choice is permissively-licensed FLOSS. You're free to use GPL, and I'm free not to.
Old BSD shall rise again! Yee ha!
((Gallops into the sunset.)))
I'm completely with you. And I think there's some truth to the theory that corporations shunning GPL is going to hurt it. Sure, if your goal is to forever be a countercultural niche player, you can always thrive in that narrow space without corporate backing, but the GPL projects that have succeeded in a broader sense have almost invariably done so with *massive* corporate backing.
Take GCC, for example. If you've ever tried to fix bugs in GCC, it's a dauntingly large piece of code, and unless you work for a company that needs a fix, chances are you won't have the time or the inclination to delve into something that large, much less sufficient understanding of compiler concepts. As a result, I suspect if you took the statistics, you'd find that nearly every contribution to GCC in the past year came from someone fixing it as part of his/her job.
Without those contributions, the code would almost certainly stagnate; the "us versus the corporations" mentality is childish and self-destructive.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
False. Most distributions attempt to deal with this problem in this way, but unless the program uses a pluggable (not just dynamically loaded) architecture it can't actually be packaged this way. The UMN mapserver is a prime example; code might not be used if you don't turn on a feature, but there's no loadable module support so you have to build in support for everything you think you might ever use. This is the problem gentoo was truly created to solve, and so far there is no solution whatsoever other than custom compilation. Programs like Apache which permit you to build modules independently and load them are, of course, different; but then, they don't have this problem to begin with.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
Surely the BSD lawsuit had something to do with Linux taking off instead of BSD?
I rather doubt it, the timelines don't fit. "USL v. BSDi was a lawsuit brought in the United States in 1992 [...]. The case was settled out of court in 1993 [...]."
Meanwhile, Linux didn't hit version 1.0 until March, 1994. Yggdrasil, the first distro, was released in November, 1992, and Slackware in June, 1993, but they were strictly for hobbyists. Anyone looking to do something commercial would have wanted to use a more mature OS, and as I recall there were lots of commercial solutions during that time frame that were based off of BSD derivatives.
IMHO, Linux beat the BSDs for the same reason it beat Minux. It provided meaningful work for outside contributors. To be meaningful, work has to provide autonomy, complexity and a connection between effort and reward. The first two are easy, they are practically inherent to the software development process. The last one is the winner. Wikipedia had the same property, and look at how it grew. Now it seems to be getting harder to make meaningful contributions, and participation seems to be falling. It took a while for people to discover that the iPhone App Store never had this property, but now even the commercial developers are leaving. Especially in the early days, Linus accepted other people's contributions with very few strings, so people got rapid positive feedback. As Linux has grown, it has gotten harder to keep doing this, but Linus seems to try harder than his "competitors". This is the core of the success of Linux.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
Wow...
First, GPL software is hardly "communist", nor is it anti-free market. If a commercial software developer can't compete with free, that's just too bad.
Second, it doesn't rely on "government force" either. It uses exactly the same copyright laws that commercial software uses. It just uses them differently - it covers purely redistribution, and imposes no limits at all on use (or modification, if you don't distribute those modifications).
As for Internix... That was never included in anything but the high end business versions of Windows, and typically only the server versions. It was intended to move businesses off of Unix onto Windows NT, and to allow Windows NT to gain FIPS 151-2 certification (which requires a POSIX implementation). It was entirely commercial until 2004, when one version was released for free, but only worked on Windows XP Professional. Subsequent versions only work on the server or high-end business versions of Windows (Ultimate and Enterprise, as of Windows 7). Considering that it relies on an insanely expensive version of Windows that most people won't have access to, required a lot of extra work to install, and until very recently only provided limited capabilities, is it any wonder that hardly anybody pays attention to it?
Microsoft was never prevented from including this in Windows. They just chose not to - it provides absolutely no benefit whatsoever to most of their user base, while providing an incentive to not write native Windows applications - what's the point if the same application could otherwise run on Windows (via the Unix subsystem), Mac OS X (which is Unix), Linux (which is almost Unix), and any commercial Unix system they cared to compile it for?
It also wouldn't have been possible without some GPL-licensed code, most notably GCC.
Except that they look outdated for at least a decade
The upright bicycle has essentially used the same design for over 100 years, and nothing has come close to replacing it. Sometimes you just hit a sweet spot in design, I think UNIX is one of those spots. Sure some places need polish, but the underlying system is very capable and doesn't suffer much for being based on 30 year old ideas.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
You ask as if I was accusing Microsoft of being especially evil. This isn't another big secret like the the way they carefully arrange APIs to disadvantage other companies that develop for Windows. In fact let's just ask them.
from an MS press release>:
It allows users with UNIX environments to take advantage of the benefits of the Windows environment without having to rewrite critical applications. In addition, users can immediately use the full Windows-based application development environment to develop native Win32® API-based applications.
In other words we'd like UNIX customers to move to Windows and abandon UNIX.
from the same MS press release:
Interix 2.2 brings Microsoft customers one step closer to its vision of a single desktop computer for all uses by providing a complete enterprise platform to run all Windows-based, UNIX and Internet applications.
In other words, we'd like you to only use Windows.
In fact there is nothing wrong with this as such. The normal way the free market works is by competition in which one company tries to destroy another companies products by getting people to use their own. What could easily be wrong is if they were, for example, ensuring some of their own software in a market where they had used illegal tactics to become a dominant player were only available on their own platform so that their competitors could not try to do the same to them.
It interests me why the MS astroturfers are so touchy about this topic? Could it be that MS has something to hide on this topic?
People who are neither working for the good of the "Open Source Community" nor Microsoft? Possibly, in part, Useful idiots? People who would be better to spend their time improving Debian or CentOS? Is Microsoft contributing or not? I know little of this and would be honestly interested to analyse it.
Agreed.
That is what many people say. However the SCO probably lawsuit hasn't really had that much influence on Linux. I'm not convinced that it's true. Certainly this doesn't apply to Minix or many of the other BSD situations. It certainly doesn't explain the success of Mozilla (copyleft) over Mosaic (not).
The source they do provide means that any major feature they implement in Linux its self is available to others. That's key. That means that competitors who release features into Linux can do so with the knowledge that major improvements to their features will be available to copy back.
As far as the binary module thing goes; this is an exce
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
I abandoned the moderation system when they replaced the meta-mod system with the current thumbs up or down one. People abuse the moderation system now with impunity. If you criticize an example of piss-poor moderation, they slap you with Off Topic or Troll.
Save yourself the frustration. Just browse at -1 and ignore the troll-mods.
I don't care why you're posting AC
Awesome! Maybe this means the economy is picking up! In the dotcom days tons of guys like you got hired. The problem was that, when the economy fell apart, the places that hired the don't-know-shit guys didn't lay all of them off. So some of those dummies are now in management...and they have an instinct to hire people who know as little, or less, than they know. You gotta love the corporate world. Anyway, if you intend to continue not knowing shit, then you should get into technical sales. You already have some bullshitting skills, you won't have to work as hard, and you'll make a lot of money. Just don't look at yourself in the mirror and you'll be fine.
--tcpiplab
Mafia theft... err... "taxes" don't "pay for civilization", civilization comes from voluntary cooperation between self-interested individuals that occurs in the free market!
Show me an existing or past successful and prospering civilization which is based strictly on voluntary cooperation, with no single organizing entity with an ultimate mandate to use force (i.e. government) and no forced taxation, and then I'll agree with you.
Until then, my political views are guided by the same reasoning as my software choices - "use things proven to work". Which is why I support a society based on regulated capitalist free market, and a "safety net" of a welfare state.
Man, some of you Mac people are annoying twits. First of all, if you did a little Googling yourself, you might find out that NeXTSTEP is based upon BSD. It's not a bad thing, but you're basically carrying forward a bunch of baggage that's decades old. Hardly the redo-from-scratch the OP was talking about.
Secondly, OSX has carried several things forward since the original Mac OS from the 80's. The most obvious thing is the menu bar at the top of the (main) screen, something that worked great on a 9" monitor but doesn't make sense in the days on multiple 20"+ screens. Other annoyances (for me at least) is applications that stay open even when you close all the windows and lack of a maximize feature.
So what I'm saying is that OSX is not something created new, from scratch, under some new paradigm using what we've learned from the past 50 years of computing, despite what you might think. It's actually quite the opposite - Apple turned to some tried-and-true technologies after their attempt to create something new from scratch (aka Copland) didn't work out for them.
Yes, they need indentation on lines with braces and then an extra layer of indentation for the lines after the braces. They also require a mixture of tabs and spaces with the tab width set to 8.
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