Sun to Make Solaris More Linux Like

ramboando writes "In an effort to spur adoption of Solaris, Sun Microsystems has begun a project code-named Indiana to try to give its operating system some of Linux's success. Sun has been trying for years to restore the luster of Solaris, but that since has faced a strong challenge chiefly from Linux. Sun wants to embrace some Linux elements so "we make Solaris a better Linux than Linux," said Ian Murdock, Sun's chief operating systems officer, quoting Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, whose latest start-up, Ning, uses Solaris. But it's a tricky balance to adopt elements of Linux while preserving Solaris technology and advantages such as the promise of backward compatibility. "As we make Solaris more familiar to Linux users, we don't [want to] lose what makes it more compelling and competitive.""

I'm frightened already.

Not to say that some of the Solaris tools couldn't use a good sprucing up with newer and fresher versions, but I tend to get nervous whenever Sun codenames something. It usually means that they're about to start on something that isn't a bad idea per se, but will be guaranteed to be aborted prior to any real commitment or follow-through. What state that will leave Solaris in is anyone's guess.

*shudder* I still remember Mad Hatter. Such promise. Such failure to follow up,

Re:I'm frightened already.

Bullshit. Solbourne weren't the only people making Sun compatible kit, nor where they the first - Axil were. Meanwhile Tadpole and RDI were making Sparc based portables (I hesitate to call them laptops as the weight would cut the blood flow off from your legs) which were basically SS5s with an LCD screen. Tadpole later acquired RDI. Compatibles came in two forms, those with licensed mainboard designs from Sun, and those with mainboards designed in house. The reason for the demise of most of these companies was not down to licensing shenanigans but the simple fact that few of these machines offered benefits over the Suns own kit. The exception was the portables, and that's most likely why Tadpole are still around.

First Java open-sourced, now this... go Sun!

I've liked many aspects of Solaris for a long time, but the #1 thing that turns me off it is the userland tools.

Yes, I know they ship a DVD with lots of GNU tools, but the fact that the built-in make, vi, grep, etc. are still basically unmodified from the early 1990s (if not longer) is not, to me, a feature. Those hoary old versions should be the ones on a supplementary DVD for those who need perfect backward compatibility with 15-year-old shell scripts and so forth.

It sounds like that's a focus of this project, so I say fabulous. If I can get ZFS and DTrace plus a modern toolset out of the box, Solaris will start to look much more attractive.

Re:First Java open-sourced, now this... go Sun!

Well, to one part of your argument, I know at least one fortune 100 company that has a fair amount of ubuntu in place. I also know that a fortune 1 company uses linux extensively, though I do not have specifics on what architecture. With HP, Sun, IBM, et. al taking linux Damn seriously, you can consider linux *real enterprrise sector stuff*. Linux is popular because it implements the fundamental design of Unix systems in a development situation that largely precludes any sort of vendor lock-in. You buy AIX on IBM System p, you have committed that as time goes by your investment is tied to buying from IBM again. You buy RedHat on Dell, and Dell disappoints you can go try HP in a future upgrade with minimal changes (one x86 box is just like another for most fundamental ways that matter). If Red Hat pisses you off, you go to Novell (not quite as non-impact, but certainly well within the realm of possibility, better than, say, AIX to HP-UX). Technical people love the unix-like architecture and the ready availability for whatever they wish. Business loves linux because of the vendor freedom and because the technical guys who love it and know it well are plentiful. Any interview I conduct, I ask about home usage and what they are looking into outside the boundaries of commercial experience. Inevitably the answers are more technically advanced and prove qualifications beyond their commercial work. Being freely available has not hurt. Solaris absolutely will need to cede control and authority so that more than one healthy commercial vendor sells and can support Solaris 100% independent of Sun's help. Making it supported on non Sun systems and x86 didn't help, making it as free-as-in-beer for most people didn't help, and making it more BSD-like has yet to make significant progress. If they GPL the codebase I don't think that in and of itself will help, but if some company or two succeeds in becoming a prominent solaris vendor who doesn't have to go to Sun for any partnership or anything, then it could begin to work, but they still have the momentum of linux which is not a situation easily overcome. I do think if they succeeded in making Solaris a prominent platform, their commercial distribution of it would probably not be that popular (I don't think on many fronts Sun 'gets it' on some of the technical things not right out-of-the-box with their software, the core is good and a good system can be built on it, but I don't think Sun is capable). Admittedly a small market share of a linux-scale market is much better than their total market-share of a small market.

Now, even if your statement was 100% accurate in every sense of the word, Nexenta's lack of development does *not* represent a stable and basically functional system. It represents a stale Nevada build. Sun has done many better builds since the last Nexenta release. A pity, Nexenta debian-ified Solaris enough to have the package management and general interface strategy be bearable (No matter how you slice it, Nevada's UI may have better options, but it's still ugly and misses a lot of the point in my opinion.

Re:First Java open-sourced, now this... go Sun!

I have recently been engaged in a serious effort to learn about Solaris 10, and have been very pleasantly surprised at what I have found. While there may be valid reasons that some Linux users may dislike Solaris, I cannot agree that the criticism you cite about the userland tools being "basically unmodified from the early 1990s" is one of the valid reasons. Most of the GNU userland tools that you describe as missing are actually installed under /usr/sfw/bin in the *default* Solaris 10 install that you get right from the standard DVD. This is in addition to the same non-GNU tools being present in other locations on the default install. You simply need to adjust your PATH accordingly if you want the GNU tools to be found first.

If you want to prefer Linux over Solaris that's fine, but make sure that what you are criticizing is actually true. Otherwise you are misleading yourself and possibly missing out on some really cool technology. You point out the cool technology in ZFS and DTrace, and I agree that they are really fantastic reasons to use Solaris. In fact, I am right now thinking that Solaris offers a lot of technologies that Linux can't touch without giving up a lot of the characteristics that make Linux useful. Give it an honest chance and you might be surprised at what Solaris 10 can do!

Re:First Java open-sourced, now this... go Sun!

Sorry you had a disappointing experience. Mine turned out much happier.

I wanted to see what Solaris 10 was like so I put it on an AthlonXP 2400 machine I had. The motherboard has onboard audio and network. I spent a few minutes trying to figure out if Solaris could detect the network adapter and it didn't seem to be able to do so, so I put in an Intel EtherExpress Pro adapter I had in a box and it immediately recognized this. As for audio, I did a Google search for "Solaris 10 audio" and found a site that had drivers that I downloaded, installed with one or two commands that were pretty clearly indicated, and rebooted. Audio worked then.

My video card is a 2D Matrox card which was immediately recognized and configured by the X11 server used by Solaris 10 (this is called Xorg and is probably the same X11 server you use on Linux). I have seen people using accelerated NVidia video on Solaris 10 but I have not personally tried this. I know that there ARE drivers available from NVidia, so I am assuming that if I can follow the instructions to get them to work with Linux that I can probably also do so with Solaris. One advantage that Solaris has here (as far as I know) is that you don't have to keep relinking the driver to deal with ABI issues that Linux has when you upgrade your Linux kernel. I appreciate that because it makes my life simpler.

I don't have a SATA controller in my Athlon, so I cannot speak to that. However I believe that the machines coming from Sun have SATA so I assume that it must work.

I do not believe that Solaris 10 is supported on notebook computers, so I do not believe that wireless cards are typical hardware for Solaris. That said, during my Googling around I did see that someone has some experimental wireless drivers, but I have not looked at them in detail nor have I attempted to use them, so I cannot speak to how well they work.

I don't think my AthlonXP 2400+, EtherExpress, and Matrox card are too atypical to expect geeks to be able to easily get if someone was determined to try Solaris 10. It was certainly nowhere near as difficult for me to put together this system for experimenting as it was for me to put together my first Linux systems in the mid-1990's that required things like SCSI adapters to really work well.

Re:Enumerate the current advantages of Solaris

dtrace, if I (mis-)understand correctly, is mainly useful for kernel work and is available on other platforms. What other uses might there be, if any?

As a developer, DTrace is a hugely powerful tool. It's a very detailed profiling tool that lets you find a lot of bugs and suboptimalities very easily. To an administrator, it's a good way of finding where your bottlenecks are, so that you can tweak your system accordingly.

zfs seems to have some kind of RAID capabilities, but last I heard can't be used as the root file system.

ZFS is a lot more than that. Read this [informit.com] for more information. It's a complete re-write of the volume management, VFS and filesystem layers of Solaris, moving the boundaries slightly, and providing much richer interfaces between them.

zones seem intriguing, but a cursory examination does make it stand out over other virtualization / paravirtualization methods.

Zones are pretty similar to FreeBSD Jails. If you use OpenBSD, you can get something similar with sysjail, built on top of systrace. It's advantage over [para]virtualisation is that it's much cheaper. You are not running a whole new kernel, just to isolate one application. Think of it as a (very) advanced version of chroot.

If Ian Murdock is able to get Sun to adopt apt, that would bring me and a lot of others in again.

Pkgsrc already runs nicely on Solaris (thanks to Sun for donating some hardware to the developers), and it has some advantages over apt. DragonFly BSD and NetBSD also use it as their default packaging system.

Coming from a BSD background, the thing I dislike the most about Solaris is that it refuses to have a 'minimal install' that is actually usable. I can install *BSD in a few tens of MBs, and then add the packages I want easily. This makes it easy to secure and run the machine, because I know exactly what's on it. Last time I installed Solaris, the base system seemed to be about 4GB.

Re:First Java open-sourced, now this... go Sun!

Have you used old versions of vi? There's a reason that linux old timers used to argue over who's text editor was better (i.e. emacs versus vi). I personally am a fan of vim, but once in a while run into using some crufty old version of vi that is just painful to use. I can't speak to changes in grep or make, but there have certainly been significant improvements in userland tools since the 90s. I remember first trying to install and use linux on a machine in the 90s and found using it to be a most painful experience. Today, I use linux all the time and fine that all the software tools have improved significantly.

Re:First Java open-sourced, now this... go Sun!

"but the fact that the built-in make, vi, grep, etc. are still basically unmodified"

Who cares? Do they work?

That depends on your measure of "work". They do the raw bare minimum one would expect from such things, but the GNU versions tend to come with a lot of comforts that you start taking for granted after not very long. Its nothing you can't technically live without, but it does start to feel awfully spartan. A good comparison might be Solaris grep [sun.com] and GNU grep [ed.ac.uk], or perhaps Solaris diff [sun.com] and GNU diff [ed.ac.uk]. Nothing wrong with the Solaris versions, but the GNU versions have some useful extra options, and more flexible regexps.

Re:First Java open-sourced, now this... go Sun!

damnit man you don't NEED a command line, why aren't you using punch cards or dip switchs to program the thing!

Re:First Java open-sourced, now this... go Sun!

damnit man you don't NEED a command line, why aren't you using punch cards or dip switchs to program the thing!

Because, they're dead, Jim!

Re:First Java open-sourced, now this... go Sun!

Who cares? Do they work?

In a 100% Solaris environment, sure. In a multi-platform environment with several *nix systems, with user account portability between machines, it most definitely does not work. At my university I used Linux, Solaris, IRIX, Tru64, and HP-UX. Linux and IRIX were nice to use Tru64 was decent, but Solaris required much tweaking to keep scripts running. The compiler was also a piece of crap in the 96-99 timeframe, though eventually it caught up. Admittedly, HP-UX was much worse, so I avoided it like the plague. Sun started beating out other vendors, so it was impossible to avoid using Sun boxes.

I expect vi to be the same from platform to platform. grep as well. Make????

grep, and many other programs, would be missing lots of options, or have incompatible options. The shell would have lots of subtle differences requiring many "if solaris" options in my setup. I consider make unusable if it doesn't support gmake's extensions. If you don't have gmake, you need to use things like automake, but if you are going to install those why not just make gmake the default? Sun's cc was terrible when compared to the MIPS or Alpha compilers that came with their respective unices. On the bright side, the man pages were far and away the best IMO.

I have always thought of Solaris as an awesome kernel paired with a userland that was only an afterthought. Kernel features are nice (low latency, scalability, etc), and the trend continues with ZFS and DTrace, but I wish they wouldn't neglect the userland. After all, where does a user spend his time?

Re:First Java open-sourced, now this... go Sun!

Meantime, stop being a linux fanboy.

Ha ha. That "don't add child directories' disk usage to the parents'" option in the Solaris "du"? Yeah. Um, I wrote that when I worked at Sun. Along with a bunch of other things, e.g. the first CD player app (WorkMan) that could pull track listings over the network. That existed on Solaris years before anyone ported it to Linux. I think I've earned my opinion on Solaris, thank you very much.

Although you're right that one can install the companion disc (and then go to sunfreeware.com to pick up the stuff that's missing or out of date) it still remains the case that, e.g., if I log in as root on one of the random Solaris systems at work (where I have superuser privileges but not unilateral control over what root's environment looks like) I get a nasty old Bourne shell with no history, no completion, etc. If I were to change root's shell to bash or zsh, I'd run the risk of breaking system admin scripts that assume I'm using the default shell.

If in your book it makes me a Linux fanboy to want Solaris to improve in the areas where it's currently behind Linux, then so be it, I don't really care what name you put to that. My interest is in seeing Solaris improve because I think it's fundamentally a pretty good piece of software.

Re:First Java open-sourced, now this... go Sun!

I've not tried it, but I presume this also works on Solaris:

Most UNIX systems allow a multiple usernames to have the same user ID, but different shells (and even home directories). The convention on BSD machines is to have a 'toor' user for GNU people that is UID 0 but runs bash as the default shell. This allows things that run as root to get the shell they expect, and people from GNU-land to get the shell they expect.

Re:First Java open-sourced, now this... go Sun!

Solaris grep in particular is horrible.
vi breaks every time you expand your console beyond 132 characters, and quite a few of the tools on the default PATH don't conform to any modern standard - including POSIX.
Windows with SFU provides a more compatible UNIX environment than what you get out of the box with Solaris.

Somewhere in Redmond, a demon just snorted gasoline and battery acid onto it's keyboard.

Re:Err....

and all the functionality of Linux has jumped ahead of Solaris...

ZFS? DTrace? Zones?

Re:Err....

I thought you could already use DTrace on Linux, and if they GPL their stuff, it will all be ported to Linux. The article says that it would be hard, but you know it would happen.

Linux does not have DTrace. You're right that it will probably happen. Eventually, after much work. And ZFS isn't looking like it'll be an easy addition either. There doesn't look to be an equivalent of Zones either -- Linux has some nice security module hook in the kernel thanks to work by the NSA, but right now it is largely unused (even distros that enable SELinux have very lax policies, and fairly basic management). Again, that might arrive, at some indeterminate time in the future. Considering that your original post was proclaiming:

...and all the functionality of Linux has jumped ahead of Solaris...

arguing that Linux may eventually catch up with these powerful Solaris features is a little disingenuous don't you think? Linux and Solaris are both worth having, depending on what you need. I look forward to what this project, and the OpenSolaris project, can put together.

Re:Err....

BrandZ isn't for Linux... it is Linux, running in a Solaris Zone.

If you want a GNU-like system for Solaris, try out Nexenta [gnusolaris.org]

Re:Err....

ZFS? DTrace? Zones?

May I add: Fault Management Framework [1], Crossbow [2], pNFS [3], stable device driver interface (one of the biggest point driver developers complain about in Linux). Clearly the GP has no idea about the number of technological advances Sun is pushing in OpenSolaris.

[1] http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/fm [opensolaris.org]
[2] http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/crossbow [opensolaris.org]
[3] http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/nfsv41/pnfsd emos/basics [opensolaris.org]

Re:Is it going to be free?

Solaris is open source and free. http://www.opensolaris.org/os/ [opensolaris.org]

Also consider that some of the better solaris features have been added to FreeBSD recently. dtrace and zfs are available for FreeBSD 7 current.

Business model?

Sun is a for-profit entity. How do they expect to make money off of their OS? They should GPL Solaris, let the code monkeys snatch the best bits for Linux, and forget about wasting their money developing Solaris. They can write a "shim layer" on Linux for people needing backward compatibility so they don't alienate long-time customers. They need to figure out where they plan on making money, and scrap the parts that lose money. Open sourcing Java was an indication of desperation; we saw plenty of companies open source their product during the dot-com bust, either because they didn't want their work to die, or because they thought it would magically boost market share and generate revenue. It doesn't.

Backward Compatibility?!

What the hell are they talking about "...promise of backward compatibility."? I guess it depends on how you define backward compatibility... but I manage about 1500 SUN servers, from old Sparcstations to enterprise class servers, and they are about as backward compatible as putting a stone wheel on your Honda. Sure, it might fit, but you sure as hell don't want to drive anywhere with it.

Most of my users on various boxes are afraid to even apply Sun patches because it breaks applications left and right. Granted, we are development segment of my company, but still... the Solaris operating system is barely backward compatible within it's own major release, much less between versions. Simple tools will run just fine, of course, but the more complex the application, the less likely it is to run between major versions, and likely going to cause some sort of havoc between minor revisions within the same version. I see it happen daily.

They really don't need to worry about their "backward compatibility," when trying to make Solaris more Linux like... I'm glad they are doing this - I absolutely hate administrating a stock Solaris system. It feels so archaic and like something straight out of the late 80's or early 90's, back when I was logging into the beasts on my 300 baud modem. The only worse offender in this area is HP-UX... though I will admit that with Solaris 10 and HP-UX 11 there have been some minor inroads into the monolithic, archaic feel to both OS's, but they both have a very, very, very long way to go.

Just to clarify - I understand why those OS's are that way, but it doesn't mean I like it nor want to use them. If they can retain the stability of Solaris and make it more comfortable to use, I'm all for it.

Re:Backward Compatibility?!

Excuse me?

I just migrated an entire system from Solaris 7 to a Solaris 10 Zone - How? I tarred up /home and /usr/local, and a few other directories, and copied the relevant entries from /etc/passwd and /etc/group. Copied whole applications, their environments, etc.

Solaris 7 is from 1999, and this is 2007. Try that on an 8 year old redhat box and see what happens. Good luck with that.

Re:Backward Compatibility?!

Solaris 7 is from 1999, and this is 2007. Try that on an 8 year old redhat box and see what happens. Good luck with that.

It should work fine, as long as you remember to configure the zone to use BrandZ...

Making Solaris more Linux-like...

...is like making caviar more vegemite-like.

Re:Making Solaris more Linux-like...

Not necessarily a bad thing, vegemite is much more palatable than caviar

Better Linux than Linux?

Yeah, and OS/2 was a better Windows than Windows. Anyone remember how that worked out?

-matthew

About time

I'm currently struggling to implement a Solaris server right now. The user space is archaic, obscure, and seems to be difficult for the sake of being difficult. Things like updates are still done the way they were done 15 years ago, often requiring a drop to single user mode (as bad as a reboot in my opinion), and often require a system reconfigure. Solaris' kernel is cutting edge and, in some ways, way ahead of Linux. But in the ways that count, Solaris lags far behind.

Just to make the system usable requires a ton of third-party software that sun does not ship nor support. In the end my path has nearly half a dozen bin folders in it, by the time you could /usr/bin, usr/local/bin, /opt/sfw/bin, /usr/sfw/bin, /usr/ucp, etc. I frequently find that I have to compile things from source just to get basic functionality. For example, Sun ships Samba with solaris, but it doesn't support LDAP. They also ship some hacked kerberos libraries, based on MIT, but if you need to build anything that depends on kerberos, you have to compile and install a separate set of MIT Kerberos libraries. Some apps are available in package form (solaris packages) from sunfreeware.com that you can pkgadd. But PKGs don't seem to be a complete packaging system like deb or rpm is. The pkg-get utility from the aforementioned site is very useful, though.

The init system is currently in a disorganized state. Most things are migrating to svcadm, which under the hood is very much like launchd. But there are still init.d scripts, but they don't always work right. Maybe Linux should move away from init.d, but at least on redhat, they are very full-featured and quite easy to work with.

Sun's biggest strengths right now are zones, zfs, and dtrace. However, if you don't specifically need these features, Linux is a better choice in many circumstances. And Linux is gaining features in these areas. xen can do a lot of what zones do, albeit much less efficiently. dtrace functionality is coming, I hear. ZFS, well the kernel developers seem to be suffering a bad case of NIH syndrome. The only reason I'm using solaris right now is ZFS. But I'm taking a big risk deploying it on a 12 TB disk. I have yet to hear of a failure, and Sun assures me that it's enterprise-ready. Sun's assurances do carry a lot of weight; they've had a lot of experience in these things. But I'm only a silver-level support customer. It's taken two weeks and some 20 phone calls to get issues sorted out with our sunsolve account and updatemanager. Our assigned support group only wants to talk over e-mail, which is annoying. Turnaround time on trying out their suggestions is hours if not days. This certainly isn't quite the same Sun as in the olden days.

Anyway, talk to any Sun jocky and he'll tell you that none of my complaints about Solaris are weaknesses. They are strengths. Cryptic commands are second nature. Besides, they separate the real sysadmins from the wannabes. Sound familiar? I think I've talked the same way about Linux to my Windows friends. I'm glad that Ian is going to work to improve Solaris' user space (which is what he means when he says make Solaris more like Linux, right?). On the other hand, Solaris reminds me not to get complacent with the state of linux. Every complaint I have about Solaris could easily be echoed by a Windows refugee trying to make sense of Linux. Both Linux and Solaris are powerful, cryptic, and archaic OSes. They both have a lot of room for improvement. We'll have to see. I told my RedHat friend the other day that his company has nothing to worry about from Solaris. Hopefully Ian will change that.

About Sun's Support - a view from the inside

Anonymous Coward for a reason: I'm a Sun TSE.

Caseih" is correct when he says "This certainly isn't quite the same Sun as in the olden days", in regard to support and how it is delivered. It certainly isn't the same Sun for those of us who are tasked with delivering support. Management has implemented all sorts of programs to improve customer "sat" and bring down call hold times, programs that INTERFERE with the day to day support work; effective and seasoned TSEs are bailing out right and left and ARE NOT BEING REPLACED in many cases; the EDS "partners" have a large turnover rate (what do you want for $9 an hour?); more time on the phone taking live calls, meaning the TSE have less (or no) time to do followups, research, spend time in the lab . . .. . . . I could go on but you get the idea.

The "Dell-ization" of tech support is spreading like a virus; support is a commodity now. Even enterprise level tech support. Sold to the lowest bidder. Who cares if the person on the phone can't spell "LDAP", as long as the call is picked up in X minutes and keeps the manager's pager from going off? THAT is where Sun support is today.

Okay, call me a noob.

But what exactly makes Solaris worth using to begin with? What open source or commercial software makes it worth having? What makes it more than just a fringe system? Linux is finally approaching the point where it stands a chance at competing against Windows in the consumer market, does it really need competition from a fairly mainstream corporation?

For that matter, sure, the machines look cool on the outside, but why do so many people consider them worth buying (even models up to 10 years old) today, and for that matter, what makes them worth switching over to? Is it sheer geek chic, or do they actually provide some form of useful function, as opposed to Windows/Mac/Linux's growing trend towards multipurpose multimedia machines?

Re:Okay, call me a noob.

I'm using Solaris because the data mining application I'm building (in Lisp) brings the Linux kernel absolutely to its knees. Solaris runs it just fine on the same hardware. (We're talking 30+ GB of heap -- Linux is dead meat after 3 to 4 GB.)

A friend of mine says this is because the Linux kernel hackers optimize for the common case, not for extreme cases. I suspect this is correct. To put it another way, they are more into cycle shaving than analyzing the time and space complexity of their algorithms -- just as one might expect from smart hackers with a relatively weak computer science background.

The result is a kernel that does great on normal workloads, but just falls over when subjected to unusual stresses. Unless and until this is corrected, there will be a need for Solaris.

Re:Okay, call me a noob.

You should look at you kernel parameters ulimit -a As shipped Solaris is intended for big iron in a way that most Linux distros aren't

Re:Okay, call me a noob.

Although I'm not hands on now, I originally moved from Linux to Solaris (with some Irix stuff in the middle). I still prefer Solaris for the following reason:

Simple is better.

This single thought is perhaps the biggest lesson I've learned in my whole career, about almost any aspect of computing. Complexity is the enemy.

caveat: by 'Linux' I mean 'The particular distro your company has standardised on'
caveat: I'm only concerned with servers. Solaris may be the worst desktop OS in the world FAIK.

1. Less shovelware. Although a base Solaris install is still annoyingly large, it's not nearly as bad as most Linux distros. It infuriates me that operating systems think its useful to install entire database, programming languages, you name its 'just in case you need them'.
2. Better backward compatability. Upgrades to discreet parts of Solaris don't usually require upgrades to other parts of Solaris. This means that you aren't constantly trying to run the latest versions of everything.
3. Better hardware integration. When you are running a lot of servers, it's very useful to have a nice console, so you can talk to the things properly. I think Linux has improved a bit in this area, but I'm not aware that it has an equivalent to the OK prompt, and the various diagnostic tools therein.

Others have talked about various tools and kernel level stuff, but I wanted to make that point that while the Solaris userland might feel archaic to some, to me it feels pleasantly simple - devoid of hidden complexity, obscure features that badly written apps come to rely on, and all the other 'let's have another feature' attitude prevalent in much OS software.

To me, Solaris feels like HTTP, and Linux feels like SOAP.

not helpful to change it

Anyone who has managed very high load webservers already knows that solaris has significant advantages. a much better effort would be a grass-roots effort to educate the Linux community of why 10+ years of professional development lead to significant performance benefits on multi-core, multi-processor systems.

Solaris serves a niche in the market that is growing like crazy now, and most web developers who are building apps today should look into it seriously, IMHO.

Just give us more drivers....

that's all we want... the current list of supported x86 hardware is ridiculously small... oh and put some effort into Gnu/Solaris... that project has effectively stagnated for ages now and nothing appears to be happening...

More Linux Like?

They can start by making the man pages suck.

Have they completely lost the plot?

I've been using sunos and Solaris and sun hardware since '86. I can build a very security solaris 9 server that ends up with about 5 packages and a few things from a few other packages so it results in a nice simple stripped down system that is just enough to run the application and its great for systems that live in data centers.

Then sun comes along with Solaris 10 and adds in a ton of complexity with out providing any additional services. The new things like zones and zfs don't need all the new extra crud but its nearly impossible to build a lean system with solaris 10. There are also a number of issues that are just plain wrong and reeks of security the Microsoft way. Why does live update look inside zones? If its in a zone, its not to be trusted outside the zone. Thats covered in Security layers 101 so back to school guys. (you can purge one file inside a zone that breaks doing patches in the global zone). The new admin tools remove the rc scripts... except that most of them are just moved and hidden by layers of config files. Then it uses a binary file to figure out what to run at shutdown, and it keeps changing the file when servers start and stop and you can't get an accurate picture of the data its going to use when it shuts down the system. Since the file is a binary file, you can't checksum it and you can't dump it so you've got no clue if someone has put a Trojan in it. The data in the file could have just gone in a nice plane text file but I guess the coders missed the Windows registry too much. The appear to be handing the keys to the source castle to any old hack. Someone "fixed" telnetd and added a new feature in one of the worst security lapses I've seen in a long time.

I just bought 3 new netra 210 because 1) they run SPACR Solaris 9, 2) they fit in my racks and 3) are one RU. I'll stop buying Sun hardware the day I can't run Solaris 9 because there is no way I'm putting Sol 10 on a production machine.

Nexenta

Nexenta seems to be doing things the right way for Solaris to proceed as a viable operating system. A debian-like package system and a choice of easy installable GUIs, but still without the hardware support that linux has,

I am also curious about Solaris's desire to go GPL. If that ever happened, Solaris will most likely be cannibalized into Linux - and Solaris will die a slow death. Even as we speak, the most valuable assets for Solaris (Dtrace and ZFS) are being usurped by FreeBSD (thanks to a more permissive BSD license) - which means that some people may choose it over Solaris.

Sun really has to work hard to sell us on the benefits of Solaris, and why we would choose it over other things available at the moment.

A Better Linux

A better Linux than free Linux is a Linux they actually pay you to use. Are you listening, Sun?

You could have this today!

People are interested in Solaris technology such as DTrace, which lets administrators peer deeply into running software to uncover performance bottlenecks, and ZFS, file system software designed to make storage systems more reliable and easier to manage. But good luck to Linux fans trying to kick the tires.

FreeBSD current has ZFS and DTrace now! Why wait? Run, don't walk, to your nearest FreeBSD dealer ( ftp.freebsd.org ). Let's face it, Sun just hasn't been the same since AT&T strong-armed them away from BSD into the void of System V.

Disclaimer: Your mileage may vary. May cause increased bandwidth charges. Offer not valid in Lichtenstein on odd days of even months during leap years.

Compelling and Competitive?

"As we make Solaris more familiar to Linux users, we don't [want to] lose what makes it more compelling and competitive."

If Solaris was compelling and competitive, they wouldn't be trying to make it more like Linux.

Solaris is something that we use as a legacy OS where I work. We have well over 700 Linux systems in the school of engineering. At last count we had maybe 35 systems running Solaris still lingering here and there in places where they either cannot be replaced or there is no economy in doing so. There has not been a NEW installation of Solaris deployed in at least two years. We've also got five Tru64 systems, two HP-UX systems, three Irix systems, and I think 4 VMS systems that a dedicated die-hard won't allow to expire.

The bottom line is that the unix wars are over, Linux has won, and whatever contender eventually does take the crown from it will NOT be one of the has-eens of the past.

I'm long past caring what Sun does or does not do with Solaris for the same reason that I don't care what E-com does with OS/2. Both OS's may or may not be configured with fancy new features in the future, but it doesn't matter because they've already lost.

Game over dude, and no you don't get your quarter back.

Celebrity Endorsements

FTFA:

Sun wants to embrace some Linux elements so "we make Solaris a better Linux than Linux," said Ian Murdock, Sun's chief operating systems officer, quoting Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, whose latest start-up, Ning, uses Solaris.

Andreessen said that about Solaris? Or is Ian Murdock paraphrasing Andreessen, rather than quoting him? I could be totally wrong on this, but I imagine Andreessen said something along the lines of "we make Ning a better MySpace than MySpace".

At any rate, it's a very awkwardly constructed and confusing sentence, and if I was some kind of grammar Nazi, I'd fucking parse the author's ass.

The Wheel Turns Full Circle

And so, the wheel turns full circle. As summer fades into autumn, then winter gives way to spring and summer returns again; so doth GNU depart from Unix, only to return again to Unix.

The GNU project was originally meant to be an alternative to the closed-source Unix implementations of the day. Like a heroin dealer relying on the twin pillars of illegality and addictive potential, closed-source Unix vendors had little incentive to improve their products; they just had to be different enough from the competition that you couldn't switch easily.

It really took for Linux to come on the scene to get GNU into a usable state; the BSD kernel (which had been favoured by the GNU developers prior to the advent Linux) already came with well-matched userland tools. And you've got to be serious about something to buy a whole car that already works just to rip out the engine and use it in a different chassis that looks identical to the first one from a distance. The GNU/Linux combination sparked interest in GNU. In turn, the BSDs diversified; today FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD all have their own respective market niches.

Closed-source Unix continues to stagnate and ultimately will grow irrelevant. The elephant in the room is that neither hardware nor software make up the bulk of the intrinsic value of a computer system; that value comes mainly from users' saved data.

Open Source pretty much forces you to implement Open Standards for saved files, which leads to transparent interoperability between programs that do the same sort of thing. In the end, AbiWord on GNU/Linux, OpenOffice.org on Solaris and KWord on FreeBSD will all be able to open the same documents. The brand of tools used to shape the data is becoming less important than the result of using them. That's already how it is in other industries. After all, who ever asked what brand of cooking equipment a restaurant uses, or what make of tools a cabinet maker uses? The important thing is that chopping food with one make of knife doesn't block you from cooking it in a different manufacturer's pans, and rough-cutting a piece of wood with one make of power saw doesn't prevent you finishing it with a different manufacturer's chisel. Using one OS and application stack on your computer shouldn't preclude you from working with data manipulated using a different OS and stack. That's already the way it's heading, slowly but surely.