Submitted by “One reason that people might choose to miss out on OpenSolaris is because we’re (in general) a conservative lot and a lot of people have had bad experiences with Solaris (and, dare we say it, also with Windows and Linux) in the past. No matter how much software and UI improves, it takes ages for the community to accept this. A reputation that took years to build can be lost with one bad release – but won’t be quickly reinstated with one good one. So there will always be people who resist change – and why not, if what they have now works for them. However, various people pointed us at Ubuntu and ‘an OpenSolaris-based distro focused specifically on developers’. So perhaps things have improved for Solaris lately and, as I said in the original article, it’s now worth another look.”
I stopped reading after encountering gems such as these:
Neverending reinventing [of] the wheel: how many times was the scheduler, the MM layer and the modules interface redone totally since kernel 2.0? Each time. Of course, each module providing support for any given piece of HW is obsoleted, and unless it’s redone by some good will, it’s gone for good. That’s the end of any vendor support.
That’s a load of crap.
On the other hand, he recognises that “the fantastic progress of the desktop part (Gnome, Nautilus and all what is behind) is absolutely stunning…and totally portable to Solaris or any Unix. This is the real workhorse of freeware.
This pretty much did it. If a person who confuses the concepts of free software and of freeware gets quoted as an authority in an article, then that article is crap.
The author didn’t write those words, that is why they are in quotation marks.
Learn to read mate!
“The author didn’t write those words, that is why they are in quotation marks.
Learn to read mate! ;-)”
Actually, it’s you who didn’t read Moocha’s comment:
“If a person who confuses the concepts of free software and of freeware gets quoted as an authority in an article, then that article is crap.”
That’s right – the clueless person got quoted as an authority in the article. Good article wouldn’t quote such clueless crap and present is as something insightful.
I know they aren’t, but the person who spoke those words is presented as an “expert” in the matter, which I pointed out above. I’d like to return your advice about learning to read. Please extend it to my post, mate.
solaris really is a fantasic operating system, and with the opensolaris team and sun engeneers working on it theres no real limit as to what can be done. personaly i think (hope) it gets the same support that linux has gooten over teh lsat 5 years. so much optential.
RAH RAH SIS BOOM BAH IT’S ANOTHER SOLARIS STORY ON OSAlert FULL OF CHEERLEADERS!!!
Why is Sun paying for astroturfing this site? Seriously.
mmmm you doesn’t knows nothing.
Go and use Solaris/Sparc for a year or two. Then you can come back and give ur opinion. Seriously.
5 years and still using it. No complaints really.
Dude, this is OSAlert for “OS” news and story is from The Register (who bashes Sun frequently). What is your point again?
Dude, this is OSAlert for “OS” news and story is from The Register (who bashes Sun frequently). What is your point again?
I know I’m going to get modded down for this but I’m in agreement with Shaman about Solaris on OSAlert.
If the register bashes Sun frequently why doesn’t OSAlert post those articles? Why instead does OSAlert always seem to post articles about how Solaris is the best thing since sliced bread? Then all the brainwashed masses of the Solaris cult worship it in their comments to that article. If you’re someone like me who doesn’t really care for Solaris, has had trouble with it in the past, or thinks Linux is a good competitor, be prepared to get shouted down, modded down, and called names. God forbid OSAlert actually posts a negative article about Solaris. You’ve never seen hateful comments until you see the comments on an article like that.
And why do you insist on posting anti-Sun comments in Sun related pieces? What I see more often than not is a nice quiet discussion until the Linux trolls like you who feel it is necessary to tell the world their opinion of what they think of Solaris. If you don’t like Solaris fine, we get it! If your comments were actually on topic and remotely factual I wouldn’t have a problem with them.
If there are that many problems with Solaris, why don’t you write an article for OSAlert showing the superiority of a particluar Linux distro to Solaris?
Now I just wonder what would happen if I trolled Linux articles here the way you troll Solaris pieces?
I have tried a few Solaris versions over the years in VMware and on older computers. Solaris 9 was pretty slow, Solaris 10 is pretty fast and has a good-looking JDS and Solaris Nevada is even better in the driver and end-user department.
I would only like to see desktop performance akin to Slackware Linux and more open source software integrated in a better way than Blastwave today because multiple versions of some package are installed or they break the base system, which is a big no-no in my opinion.
That would do it for me because Solaris has many technical advantages compared to GNU/Linux today.
The problem with Solaris 9 (back to Solaris 7) being slow on what I assume in your case to be systems with IDE disks is that UltraDMA mode is not enabled by default.
I haven’t used Slackware Linux since the late 1990’s, so I have no basis for comparison in desktop performance between Slackware and Solaris.
And which pieces of software are you having problems with from Blastwave? Have you notified any of the maintainers to see if there is a solution to the problems you are having?
I can tell you Slackware 11.0 is faster than Solaris Nevada b54 on the same hardware. I have tried on a Pentium IV laptop and a Pentium III desktop with 512 MB memory. Both are faster than SUSE.
I just did a full install. I didn’t like that Blastwave comes with some servers that are also in Solaris proper.
This messed up the services so the system didn’t boot up properly anymore.
At the moment I don’t have enough knowledge to fix this kind of problems but I have all Sun documentation at hand. It could probably be fixed by entering some kind of rescue console.
No I haven’t. It was really more a kind of test to see if I could get Solaris to a state that it could somewhere in the future replace my current Slackware system.
I think the Blastwave system is kind of flawed in that it replaces system functionality with its own. I build Slackware packages that don’t interfere with the base system and I expect Blastwave to do the same.
What specifically did you install on your machine? Some of the things that are available on Blastwave are also available as part of Solaris 10 if you perform a Full Distribution installation.
That’s what I did. I installed all of Solaris and all of Blastwave because it takes too much time to install all Blastwave packages individually.
I have my own repository of Slackware packages that I can just install in Slackware using “installpkg *.tgz” because I know they won’t interfere with the base system.
Any upgrades to packages included in Slackware proper I keep separate and I do those manually so as to not break the base system.
But why would you need all of the software available on Blastwave? I see three different versions of gcc (2.9.5, 3.4.5 and 4.0.2). This is on top of version 3.4.3 which is installed in /usr/sfw.
Do you get a specific error message when you boot after installing everything, or can you get to a shell prompt? Because the only thing that I can see that would affect an existing Solaris installation is installing KDE, Fluxbox and other GUI’s where the dtlogin integration would take place (I could be wrong here).
To get to a usable complete system as fast as possible so I wouldn’t have to install anything for at least a year anymore.
I don’t remember because I installed it a few months ago. It was probably something like Postgres or something else that’s also provided from Solaris 10 onwards. It probably didn’t help that I installed Solaris Nevada and “unstable” packages from Blastwave but still that shouldn’t interfere with Solaris itself.
Sometimes Solaris feels a little more fragile than Slackware in this respect. I have also created my own rescue system for Slackware and put it into GRUB. When I tried to enable GDM in Solaris it didn’t work very well either. So a small Solaris rescue system that can be run from GRUB would be welcome as well.
But don’t worry I’d much rather run BSD or Solaris than any other Linux distribution so I’ll probably try again at the start of summer. RTFM I will
Edited 2007-04-14 20:40
You might want to consider using JumpStart and Solaris Flash to build your systems, as long as you are willing to dedicate a machine to be your JumpStart server. A Flash Archive is an image of a complete system (including applications and users), just man flarcreate for details.
Thanks I will look into that. It’s the same thing I do with Slackware. The rescue console I have created has fuse and sshfs-fuse and I mostly untar a complete Slackware system over the network onto a hard drive to install.
It’s faster than any other Linux distribution that way. It’s nice that Solaris has such an option as well.
And why do you insist on posting anti-Sun comments in Sun related pieces?
Did you notice the title of the article? “Linux, Solaris Face Off”.
Now I just wonder what would happen if I trolled Linux articles here the way you troll Solaris pieces?
I don’t have to wonder, you already troll Linux articles.
No, I don’t troll Linux articles on this site in the fashion that you and others troll Solaris pieces. The article in question also mentions Solaris or did you forget that in your haste to accuse me of being a troll?
First of all I never claimed this article wasn’t about Solaris yet you claimed it wasn’t about Linux. I see you comment on Linux only articles also:
http://www.osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=17644&comment_id=228503
http://www.osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=16058&comment_id=168210
http://www.osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=16021&comment_id=167257
http://www.osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=15505&comment_id=152659
Pot…meet kettle.
None of those comments in my opinion constitute a troll, regardless of what you might think. If they were trollish, I am sure someone would have modded them down, since I have noticed in a number of articles published here that if someone doesn’t like what you have to say, you are pretty much assured that you are going to get modded down.
How does posting the price of a Lenovo laptop, pointing out the limitations of using F/OSS software in the environment I work in, virtualization in Linux and Windows, and my opinion in the Broadcom driver flamefest constitute troll posts? I am sure a number of OSAlert readers would be very interested in what consititutes a troll post based on your opinion.
Now let’s look at your comment that started this:
” know I’m going to get modded down for this but I’m in agreement with Shaman about Solaris on OSAlert.
If the register bashes Sun frequently why doesn’t OSAlert post those articles? Why instead does OSAlert always seem to post articles about how Solaris is the best thing since sliced bread? Then all the brainwashed masses of the Solaris cult worship it in their comments to that article. If you’re someone like me who doesn’t really care for Solaris, has had trouble with it in the past, or thinks Linux is a good competitor, be prepared to get shouted down, modded down, and called names. God forbid OSAlert actually posts a negative article about Solaris. You’ve never seen hateful comments until you see the comments on an article like that.”
So you think OSAlert should provide a more “balanced” view of the world by printing every negative comment they can find about Solaris? And why is that? Even I don’t think Solaris is the best thing since sliced bread. The last article I wrote for OSAlert has a few far less than flattering comments (enough that I no longer hear from Chris Ratcliffe of Sun Marketing (a point I have mentioned previously)):
http://www.osnews.com/story.php/15911/A-Look-at-Solaris-10-606/page…
OK, now lets play your silly game for a moment and OSAlert does just that, post every negative comment and article they can find about Solaris, and while they are at it they also do the same thing for Linux. How long do you think it would be before Linux users would start complaining about the quality of the articles and posts? How is this any different than the rabid Linux zealotry that I see on a daily basis here, that any comment not liked by any number of Linux zealots gets modded down to oblivion in nothing flat, or the “install Linux” posts in Microsoft articles published here? I see this behavior as being childish, if you don’t like what is being discussed and have nothing of value to offer, move on. Even shaman can find nice things to say about Sun and Solaris, despite him not liking either Sun or Solaris.
I do not know where your animosity for anything Sun comes from, and I really don’t care. I think your comments are out of place in a discussion of Solaris, either you have something to offer other than “Sun and or Solaris sucks”, or you don’t. And if you don’t, why don’t you just move on to the next article like the majority of the OSAlert readers. I don’t like a lot of things that are posted here, that doesn’t mean that I am going to destroy the experience for other readers by posting trash just because I feel the need to let everybody know my opinion.
I also figure we are not going to see that Linux versus Solaris article from you anytime soon?
None of those comments in my opinion constitute a troll, regardless of what you might think. If they were trollish, I am sure someone would have modded them down, since I have noticed in a number of articles published here that if someone doesn’t like what you have to say, you are pretty much assured that you are going to get modded down.
Maybe you should reread my comments on Sun articles then. Even when I state clearly that something is my opinion people like you jump down my throat because my opinion doesn’t consist of cheerleading Sun. I haven’t trolled this site and will not in the future. I’m just bugged that it seems like it is only SUN fanboys that freak out every time something slightly negative is said about their OS of choice. The last SUN article I posted in I claimed that I didn’t think SUN would last without a good client solution and you and others blasted me so much that it took over the entire conversation, which despite what you may believe, was not my intent at all. You’re so ready to argue in favor of SUN that its almost as if you’re looking for a fight that just isn’t there. Give it a rest already. Solaris will still be there in the morning even if you don’t criticize everyone who doesn’t love what SUN has to offer.
Rah rah, blah blah blah, why are you still here trolling Solaris stories? What’s this, troll attempt #85937? You ought to consider retiring, I don’t even think you agitate people anymore you’ve become such a regular.
I’m wondering if Adam didn’t code an automatic -5 down-mod for you when you post in Sun/Solaris related stories. :p If he hasn’t yet, he probably ought to (here I come, suggestion box!)
I’d like to give Solaris a chance, it’s just that I don’t want to get into a Solaris mindset. It is similar in many ways to any other Linux or BSD, but very different in other aspects. I guess having to know things like my current filesystem is mounted on c0d0s0 is just a pain. But then again, I guess I shouldn’t complaint, one of my favorite OS’s of all time is BeOS and knowing c0d0s0 is a little simpler than /dev/disk/ata/master/0/raw
My only other issue is that back when I last really gave Solaris a chance was in 2004 and at that time Solaris/x86 was total crap compared to SPARC/Solaris. Has this changed or is it still one of the slowest OS’s alive?
Ultimately, I hope he is right, that both OS’s can coexist and advance. And maybe take a little of the MS Windows market share while they’re at it.
Actually, it’s one of the nicer features of Solaris. It beats the heck out of /dev/sdaX with no indication of controller number, target LUN, etc.
If you don’t like it, use Veritas FS, the built-in software RAID, one of their SAN solutions or ZFS. This isn’t a valid criticism to my mind.
Your BeOS example is pretty clear, too.
Solaris 10 is much quicker but it’s still an ancient and archaic feeling *nix which makes life more complex than it should be… and their Java admin tools are still slow as dirt (even for a Java GUI app). It has a small handful of great features – ZFS being primary among them – but the rest of the OS fails to stand out, and is relatively inflexible. Big hardware or no hardware is Solaris’ motto.
the c0d0s0 etc assignments are great for server land but in home land, they just caused someone to have a heart attack. Heck in /dev/hdXX is enough to make people fret. So I think its all rational to what the application is.
In all my time using x86 solaris is that if its not workstation or server class, forget about. It will be stable, no doubt but it will run slower then the other guys.
So once again, depending on application…this may or may not be a concern.
Just my 2 cents
I think you have to look at Solaris and Linux as two different products rather than two versions of the same product. Here’s where I’ve found Solaris to be good option:
1) A data center environment.
2) The expected lifetime of applications is measured in years.
3) Support of hardware/software is very important.
4) You have really big requirements.
5) High-end products.
Solaris has some great fetures – like Jumpstart and management co-processors, which help you to configure and manage large farms of machines. Linux has some support as well, but with the proper tools it’s much easier and faster to bring up 100 Sun boxes from scratch. (Your mileage may vary with non-Sun hardware). For the home user, small developer, or very small company this offers no real advantage.
The second point is that an application is fielded for the next 5 years with patches and the odd upgrade. The platform has to be a supported platform and you need to be able to download patches and get parts on that server, running that OS for the next 5 years. You also want 5 years of almost un-interrupted performance (although you obviously will tolerate some down-time). In 2002 I was still seeing production databases running on Sparc 20’s with no intention of changing until the app was retired. A lot of expensive data center type applications are like this.
Sun will support systems for many years. They will also support OS releases for several years, where Microsoft is more than willing to EOL the software. Volunteer linux maintainers also don’t want to support the distro they came out with a couple of years ago, they want to work on the promising, new features. (Whic is the version I want to download and use, anyway). Commercially supported linux comes close, but generally requires a contract for the hardware and a contract for the software. Again, this is more for corporate data center types.
By big requirements I mean you have scale in two dimensions. Vertical, in the sense that you buy a 24 processor server with 192 GB of memory for Oracle data warehousing. Horizontal in the sense that you support application clusters over dozens of machines. Or temporal, in the sense you cannot tolerate down-time. I think Sun has those basis covered better than most Linux vendors. (SGI specializes in vertical, but not horizontal. Others specialize in horizontal only).
Finally, although Java has changed the game, in the sense that the VM makes it easier to support multiple platforms, some vendors don’t have customers on some platforms. For example, you might find an application supported on Solaris Sparc but not Linux x86 or Solaris x86. Usually these are specialty applications, or the vendor has a very limited customer base that only requires support on those platforms. Again, not useful for the home user.
I love Linux and use it all the time. I also use Solaris. I like them both, I just like them for different purposes and different reasons.
It is somewhat stodgy and sluggish in its default form, but it’s pretty easy to make it a comfortable environment.
I’m not savvy enough to tune Solaris to the degree of “snappiness” that you can get out of the chute with Debian or Fedora, but once you start piling on the “real” capabilities (scalability, virtualization, storage) to those OSs, the differences start to diminish.
Two to three days “getting” the Solaris-ness of it, the installation of ‘pkg-get’ (http://www.bolthole.com/solaris/pkg-get.html) a more useful shell, and optimized Xorg drivers (http://www.nvidia.com/object/solaris_display_1.0-9755.html) ease the pain, IMO.
I’ve been flirting with Solaris since 8 on i386, and only recently on SPARC hardware (Ultra 10). Based on my experience, I can appreciate the utility of Solaris on Sun gear if your goal is a managable, solid platform with tight integration with storage products. However, if you want a development or workstation environment, there’s room for Solaris to improve, and as a result, the need can be better served with something less “heavy” (Linux, MacOS)
Maybe Ian will bring some of Debian’s flexibility and modularity to Solaris.
Hmm, go to sun’s download site, try to download solaris, you have to download their download mangler. OK, so try to download their mangler, and you need their download mangler to download it!
Anyone know a way out of this conundrum?
Actually, no you don’t. Once you get to the download page and accept the License Agreement, you can donwnload whatever you want by clicking on it and select a location to save it (in Firefox) which I am doing right now.
Thanks for that.
No problem.
Hmm, go to sun’s download site, try to download solaris, you have to download their download mangler.
Are you sure you *have* to? I don’t think I’ve ever installed the download manager. I don’t think I have ever used it to download my copies of Solaris for x86 and SPARC.
Edit: I think that’s an IE thing. Ick, go grab a copy of Firefox.
Edited 2007-04-13 15:44
I’m using Linux (thus no IE), FYI. But thanks.
(Yes, I know there are ways and means to run IE on Linux. I choose not to.)
What they do is giving you the option to download their download manager which then s populated correclty with the files you have asked for. Pretty nifty. But you still have the possibility to download each file separately.
it all boils down to the long time issue of Solaris or FreeBSD being Operating Systems and Linux being a kernel.
Compare Solaris to FreeBSD or debian or Redhat or Ubuntu. I think that makes a lot more sense. i.e. compare OS to OS and kernel to kernel.
Compare Solaris to FreeBSD or debian or Redhat or Ubuntu. I think that makes a lot more sense. i.e. compare OS to OS and kernel to kernel.
You have a point, but perhaps it would be fairer to compare Solaris Express vs. Nexenta vs. Schillix vs. Debian vs. Redhat vs. {Free,Open…}BSD.
I never had a problem with Solaris. It was SPARC that became less and less attractive. In the late 90s, x86 and Linux had proven a powerful combination, at a much better price point than SPARC for the low and medium end. It started on the web server side, when Sun was wanting $20K for a web server (E250 or E450). An x86 system running Linux could handle four times web traffic and cost 1/10th the price.
Sun didn’t listen to what the users wanted. Users liked Solaris, but they didn’t like paying for SPARC. SPARC is great in many respects, but it just wasn’t worth paying the ever-increasing premium as x86 systems continued to get faster and less expensive.
Now, Sun is going in the right direction. They’ve adopted the higher power/performance of AMD for the low-medium end, opened up Solaris, and pushed x86 adoption. But they’re faced with people who have moved to Linux, FreeBSD, and others, and are generally happy with where they are. It’s not a repudiation of Solaris, it’s just that there isn’t a compelling enough reason to change with what works, and generally, works great. It would be ridiculous to change out an entire datacenter’s Linux systems for Solaris loads, just to move to Solaris.
Sun is fighting mad, they think they deserve the market that Linux now enjoys dominance of. But it’s their own fault they lost that market. Sun may have been an indirect (and unintended) boost to Linux adoption.
Hey apparently Solaris has something going for it. Our company is replacing all of our IBM i5/OS400 systems worldwide with Fujitsu/SPARC systems running Solaris.
Hey apparently Solaris has something going for it. Our company is replacing all of our IBM i5/OS400 systems worldwide with Fujitsu/SPARC systems running Solaris.
If it’s part of an upgrade process, then that’s where Sun can get in. I don’t know how old those i5s/OS400, but that platform has been out since 1988.
I’m just saying it doesn’t make sense to take a working, non-obsoleted/non-EOLd infrastructure and replace it with Solaris just because Solaris is nifty.
Our IBM’s are only about two or three years old and they are running the latest i5/OS. I never said it made sense that they were doing it, but obviously someone in the corporation has a thing for Solaris. I just hope their affinity for Solaris turns out to be well founded.
Either that, or Sun offered them a deal they couldn’t refuse; if you have a look at the price of IBM support contracts vs. Sun and most other competitors, quite frankly I question why anyone sane would go with IBM.
Sure, I could have understood 10 years ago when they had a PC unit; buy everything off the one vendor and use the muscle of a large bulk purchase to drive down the support cost – but today? makes little or no-sense what so ever.
About the only thing missing from the arsenal is the lack of a ‘big database’ but that can easily be sorted out by simply having a good relationship with a number of database vendors, IIRC they have a good working relationship with Sybase and oracle.
“If it’s part of an upgrade process, then that’s where Sun can get in. I don’t know how old those i5s/OS400, but that platform has been out since 1988.”
Here in Germany, Karstadt and Sparda-Bank are still using IBM systems (i5, AS/400) with “Windows” PCs running as 3270 terminals. As long as it runs, is secure and fits the purposes, it does not matter if anyone considers the platform to be “out since 1988”.
“I’m just saying it doesn’t make sense to take a working, non-obsoleted/non-EOLd infrastructure and replace it with Solaris just because Solaris is nifty.”
Nobody (with a properly working brain) does exterminate a working data processing facility just because some other OS is “nifty”… If a new system is needed, it may be okay to replace an AS/400 system with a Solaris installation (if Solaris is the right tool here).
And if you define “obsolete” in the right way…
“If it’s part of an upgrade process, then that’s where Sun can get in. I don’t know how old those i5s/OS400, but that platform has been out since 1988.”
Here in Germany, Karstadt and Sparda-Bank are still using IBM systems (i5, AS/400) with “Windows” PCs running as 3270 terminals. As long as it runs, is secure and fits the purposes, it does not matter if anyone considers the platform to be “out since 1988”.
“I’m just saying it doesn’t make sense to take a working, non-obsoleted/non-EOLd infrastructure and replace it with Solaris just because Solaris is nifty.”
Nobody (with a properly working brain) does exterminate a working data processing facility just because some other OS is “nifty”… If a new system is needed, it may be okay to replace an AS/400 system with a Solaris installation (if Solaris is the right tool here).
And if you define “obsolete” in the right way…
Web infrastructure typically goes through upgrade cycles, depending on the company, platform, etc., but I would imagine people are replacing their web infrastructure every 2-4 years.
Mainframes typically last longer. But there are periods of time when it makes sense to migrate platforms, and it may be necessary. Saving money, getting of EOL’d hardware, etc.
Because of that, Solaris isn’t going to make an overnight comeback. New installations are going to come only when a platform change is underway, and someone is unhappy with Linux (which there doesn’t seem to be a significant amount of), enough to justify the additional time, money, and energy that will need to be expended for even a flawless transition.
That’s just the price they must pay for going the way they did.
Edited 2007-04-13 18:37
In this article Oliver Jones says “I consider that if Solaris is good enough for the banks, it’s good enough for me”.
How dumb is that statement? Bank of America runs, or at least used to run Windows. I remember them getting hit by some worm, possibly Blaster or one of those a while back.
We have all seen galleries of the BSOD haven’t we? Heres one… http://daimyo.org/bsod/.
You could take anything running that crap and make the same argument. If its good enough for a Mc’Donalds drive-thru to run, its good enough for me. If its good enough for the NY Stock Exchange to run, its good enough for me.
Why does the summary here say Ubuntu; the original article text says Nexenta?
I think Nextenta is or is going to be Ubuntu based on the GNU/Solaris platform.
Well, it moved to being Ubuntu based after originally being Debian-based… I don’t think it’s an official Ubuntu project though.
Just wondered why the text was different between the article and summary.
While Sun Microsystems is known for shooting themselves in the foot, Sparc being an excellent example of such, I did get a copy of Solaris from Sun a couple of years back. For some odd reason it would not boot at all on my hardware, it would lock up on loading usb-uhci.
This was really odd, since the same hardware would run Linux or any BSD with no problems.
I sent an email to Sun about this problem, mentioning that every other *x I have tried loads with no issues, including loading usb-uhci. I never heard back from them, yet the very next version of Solaris resolved the problem and would boot and install, on the same hardware that the earlier version failed on.
Give Sun credit, even if they didn’t contact me directly, they did listen and check the code for the module that was causing problems, a lot of companies won’t bother fixing a problem.
Solaris vs Red Hat, or Solaris vs Ubuntu… x86 Solaris is getting there, week by week.
The driver support is swiss cheese and old software components still have wires hanging out as they are replaced by new ones… but it is getting there.
If you look at the roadmap and plans for the project, Sun and the community are being super pro-active.
There is also a tonne of stuff happening behind the scenes as well – its just a pitty to some degree that Sun doesn’t evangelise almost every piece of code which has been added, and every new device being supported.
One has to remember also the amount of work it took to re-hire new programmers to write code, get the x86 group back up and running – its only been two years; from dead project to viable product line up. I don’t know about you, but its bloody remarkable the turn around.
OpenSolaris will get there, and as more programmers come on board, you’ll find that OpenSolaris will be a viable replacement for those who dismissed it earlier, but also as a workstation for those users who want a UNIX operating system.
If you grab the latest OpenSolaris (b61), it is rock solid – the great thing with Sun; when things are integrated into Solaris, they’re actually tested and work, rather than what I see in other projects where things ‘merge first, sort out the bugs later’.
IIRC, the Next Solaris Express Developer Edition is going to be released soon, and it’ll be based on the best bits from build 63/64 of OpenSolaris, and IIRC, the aim is to get JDS/GNOME 2.18 into build 65 of OpenSolaris, which includes some big bug fixes and changes.
Couple that with KDE 4.0 officially supporting OpenSolaris once it has been ported to Studio 11 compilers, you’ll see a bigger ground swell of end users coming to OpenSolaris – it takes time. For Sun its weighing up adding features for existing customers, adding features to get new customers and adding features to OpenSolaris that’ll benefit users for the sake of just being nice
Mine arrived in the post this morning.
I am looking forward to having a good fiddle with it.
While Solaris might be nice, I dont see it having any immediate advantages besides ZFS.
Then again Linux has the new Ext4 and a user-space implimentation of ZFS via FUSE. We’ll just see how they compare after some maturity.
IIRC, *BSD and Mac OS X are getting kernel-mode ZFS implementations.
Solaris’s stable kernel interfaces, useful for closed drivers won’t mean much when the Solaris kernel goes GPLv3. All proprietary driver modules will be banned from linking with the kernel just like Linux. Im not sure how the GPLv3 handles FOSS shims loading binary blobs but I’m guessing its more restricted or banned as well.
As a desktop OS, Solaris is far behind at hardware support. I tried Solaris 11 via Nexenta last year on my then, three year old system. My CD/DVD burner didnt “burn”, my sound card didnt produce any “sound”, my 3D accelerator card didnt produce any “3D” outside the 1-2 FPS range, my printer didnt “print” (the needed packages were broken) and my scanner didn’t “scan” (Linux-only 3rd party driver excluded from SANE).
On top of that lovely situation is non-existant power management (besides my monitor) and a very broken Wine implimentation.
Of course the hardware situtation may improve but so will Linux and other competiting OSes.
So you’re comparing a old version of OpenSolaris to the latest and greatest Linux – yeah, thats a fair comparison *rolls eyes*
Not really. I was comparing it to Nexenta Alpha 6 with ON beta build 50ish. I think Nexenta is at at Alpha 6 ON build 60ish now.
I’m pretty sure the only difference is low-level bug fixes that didn’t affect me anyway.
Question: Why didn’t you download and install either the Solaris Express Developer Edition, which is designed to be used on a workstation or grab the latest Solaris Express Community Edition?
Solaris has to fight inertia.
Linux is entrenched in the low to mid range server market.
It’s also entrenched in the supercomputer market.
Sun has some advantages yet:
– Heavy government investment in sun infrastructure in the mid to late 90’s. They just have to make opensolaris semi appealing for that market to not erode further.
– Association with “traditional” software (read: oracle).
Just because of my familiarity with linux and it’s versatility as a desktop platform and my interest in technologies like firebird and “ruby on rails” over oracle and java, well, opensolaris is just not compelling.
But at least it’s far easier to code cross platform linux/solaris than it is to cross platform into windows (which microsoft is always trying to make even harder to do).
I don’t think Solaris has to fight anything at all. I feel comments like yours are an example of Linux users who think Sun has been hurt by Linux with nothing more to back it up but thier opinions.
First, not everybody wants to run Solaris on x86 boxes (we don’t). The usual pro-Linux argument almost always involves x86 hardware. There are capabilities that midrange and high end Sun hardware has over x86 machines I find it surprising that anybody would want to use anything else (this would also include IBM and HP hardware as well). Just Google Dynamic System Domains (Sun), LPAR (IBM) and nPar and vPar (HP-UX).
Sun doesn’t have to make OpenSolaris appeal to the Government (I know, I work for them), the appeal is the result of years of uptime in critical environments.
And what makes you think that you can’t do Ruby On Rails on Solaris? Oh and let’s drop the desktop argument, it is really getting old.
What I think it comes down to is Linux users using any tired argument they can come up with to justify using Linux in the face of an OS that has significant advantages in observability, provisioning, reliability, and resource control available as free and an Open Source product. Linux users have stated here time and again that “Competition is good”, well Sun is raising the bar with Solaris 10, Solaris Express and OpenSolaris and basically what I have read here is nothing more than the same tired arguments about what is wrong with Solaris, and most of them probably aren’t based on Solaris 10 at all.
So if you have something to say, at least try it before you complain. At least when I say anything about Linux, it is based on actual use of the product (RHEL 3 and 4).
Well really, sun hurt themselves.
I worked for the government through a defense contractor, I remember cutting checks for $20k for simple development systems we’d proven to be computationally and even IO wise inferior to mainstream x86 hardware at the time. I got really pissed to be spending $800 for a CD burner I could buy off the street for $80 at the time.
There’s nothing “magical” about Sun, they share responsibility for the rise of Microsoft for ignoring the market.
I don’t know why you should be so sour grapes.
The point I’m making is with linux you DON’T have to use RHEL. I know…where I worked before we processed (and even served) imagery you see on google maps & microsoft’s map services. Almost all of that done with fedora, a few gentoo peripheral systems. I wasn’t IT, I developed the software and specced the hardware with IT.
And yes you are right, the latest I saw was solaris9 which is OK, but I’ve never run a canned “out of the box” system. I’ve been a unix user a long time, desktop useability is very important to me.
Edited 2007-04-14 14:59
Sour grapes? What the Hell are you talking about? Just because I question the validity of your comments isn’t sour grapes, unless being called out for comments you made that sound as if you are locked in 1996 is sour grapes. Thanks for making my point!
So you haven’t used Solaris 10 at all but feel you can comment on it, how arrogant!
All the talk in this thread seems to be about big server hardware etc.
Something to keep in mind on the desktop is flash. Adobe just released a beta of flash player for Solaris. I know for me and quite a few other people this is a crucial piece of software for a desktop OS.
The lack of a flash player has kept me from using linux on ppc and any form of freeBSD as a desktop OS. I am however now seriously considering giving solaris a go on the desktop
http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer9.html