http://www.osnews.com/story/15397/Solaris_on_a_Diet Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2009, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Tue, 10 Nov 2009 10:58:30 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com http://osnews.com/thread?149498 http://osnews.com/thread?149498 It would be just great to have such short bootup times, no swapping of system files to harddisks (so you end up with a very responsive system), and still ZFS for the most reliable file storage available. Would be cool for webservers, mailservers and fileservers.

The author should take himself more serious. He ends with something like he has to return to his real work, but frankly, I think this Diet-Solaris should be a priority for him. The result can prove to be very applicable to a lot of situations. Sun, 06 Aug 2006 09:32:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (evert) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?149544 http://osnews.com/thread?149544 I just migrate to solaris because there is more consistant and mature software than linux (sun java enterprise system, sun studio creeator...), and the documentation from sun is just the best...and the software are free.This ideia fills my thoughts that solaris gets most of the inovation in unix world.Edited 2006-08-06 13:42 Sun, 06 Aug 2006 13:41:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (csousa) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?149556 http://osnews.com/thread?149556 Will it fit on a cdrom so I don't have to buy my ancient sparc a scsi dvd? Sun, 06 Aug 2006 14:57:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Sphinx) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?149559 http://osnews.com/thread?149559 "more consistant and mature software"??? Please take a good look for example at the Solaris userland tools - they are a joke. They are very old, and the way they are implemented is just terrible. The only thing that interests me in Solaris is the kernel - but then I think the Linux kernel has its good sides too. Sun Studio Creator is nice - is it open source? Does it produce faster binaries than gcc? Solaris gets a lot of innovation - compared to the innovation Linux gets it's a margin. Sun, 06 Aug 2006 15:26:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (deb2006) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?149565 http://osnews.com/thread?149565 There is a reason for that, it's called stability! Look at AIX and HP-UX, they are pretty much the same as Solaris when it comes to feature integration and age of some of their binaries. You don't get that stability by using alpha and beta code in your OS, nor do you put in a bunch of "features" just to impress a handful of people.

If you want bleeding edge features you go to OpenSolaris or Linux. I am sure over a period of time the code that is being tested and written for OpenSolaris will be integrated into Solaris, but I prefer the slow and methodical approach. That means less problems for me as I deploy on production systems. Sun, 06 Aug 2006 16:06:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Robert Escue) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?149578 http://osnews.com/thread?149578 That sounds very-very interesting - there's a lot of situations where a slim Solaris would come in handy.

Just one thing, the Cyrix processors reign ended with the MII-400GP and didn't OC very well - the mentioned 1Ghz processor more sounds like a Via C5/C7, which still is based on the Centaur Winchip design (And actually still developed by Centaur). Sun, 06 Aug 2006 16:55:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (flywheel) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?149585 http://osnews.com/thread?149585 From the top description:
"about 60 MB (the compressed image, which GRUB uses, is less than 30MB)"

From the article:
"Countless Linux devices boot from flash in a matter of seconds and just work. Why can't Solaris do the same thing? " Sun, 06 Aug 2006 17:28:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (ValiantSoul) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?149600 http://osnews.com/thread?149600 Funny I've always found the Solaris userland tools much simpler and less error prone. Let's compare burning CDs just for kicks on Solaris vs. Linux.

Solaris:

# cdrw file.iso

Linux:

# cdrecord -v speed=12 dev=/dev/hdc -pad -data -please-dont-coaster file.iso Sun, 06 Aug 2006 18:17:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (kernelpanicked) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?149601 http://osnews.com/thread?149601 I was thinking the same thing. I'm not even asking for a 60MB image, just something along the lines of a one cd install. Sun, 06 Aug 2006 18:19:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (kernelpanicked) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?149617 http://osnews.com/thread?149617 Have you ever tried rolling your own Installation CD based on the Reduced Networking (SUNWrnet) install cluster? I recently built a Flash Archive of a Solaris 10 1/06 install with a decent range of SPARC hardware support, as well as support for Zones. It came in under 600 MB, this includes gcc and all of the development tools and libraries. Sun, 06 Aug 2006 19:10:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Robert Escue) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?149642 http://osnews.com/thread?149642 and that is the link to the thread:
http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?messageID=50585&tst... Sun, 06 Aug 2006 21:17:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (cedric.walter) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?149656 http://osnews.com/thread?149656 60MB? 1GHz? 45 seconds?

I miss my Amiga. Sun, 06 Aug 2006 21:45:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (DevL) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?149664 http://osnews.com/thread?149664 No I haven't, but it sounds like a cool idea to try out next time I feel the urge to geek-out. Sun, 06 Aug 2006 22:29:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (kernelpanicked) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?149709 http://osnews.com/thread?149709 This is fud and you know it.

cdrecord does not need all of those options specified!

At most:

# cdrecord dev=/dev/hdc file.iso

How does Solaris distinguish which CD-RW drive to use if you have more than one? You'd have to tell it a device somehow. Mon, 07 Aug 2006 03:30:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (spstarr) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?149720 http://osnews.com/thread?149720 cdrw -l will show you all the writable CD/DVD devices.

If you need to specify a specific one then use the -d flag which takes as a argument the alias name from -l output.

Latest Solaris Express (Sun's OpenSolaris distribution) also come with cdrecord.

In my opinion the fact that you have to specify a device at all, particularly for the case were there is only one device, is poor user interface design. Mon, 07 Aug 2006 05:02:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (darrenmoffat) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?149726 http://osnews.com/thread?149726 Please stop using that word (fud). I don't think it means what you think it means. Mon, 07 Aug 2006 05:51:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (kernelpanicked) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?149741 http://osnews.com/thread?149741 Note that your Amiga OS didn't have memory protection, it wasn't portable, had not journalised FS etc..

Still I agree that this is far too much.. Mon, 07 Aug 2006 08:52:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (renox) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?149752 http://osnews.com/thread?149752 If you only have one burner, can't you just stick a

alias cdrw='cdrecord -v dev=/dev/hdc -driveropts=burnfree'

in your .profile?Edited 2006-08-07 09:58 Mon, 07 Aug 2006 09:56:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (pxa270) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?150064 http://osnews.com/thread?150064 That's a terrific idea. thanks. Tue, 08 Aug 2006 01:44:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Sphinx) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?150085 http://osnews.com/thread?150085 That assumes that every machine I use has /dev/hdc as the burner. The whole point of my post (and the original one I believe) is that with cdrw(1) you as the end user don't need to find this out it does it. With cdrecord you need to specify it and it could be different for every machine.

Also on Solaris there isn't a /dev/hdc we name devices differently :-) Tue, 08 Aug 2006 02:36:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (darrenmoffat) Comments