If Sun gets very serious about Solaris 10 on x86 and the Open Solaris project that it hopes will nourish it, Linux vendors had better get very worried. That's because, in the many areas where Linux is miles ahead of Solaris, Sun stands a good chance of catching up quickly if it has the will, whereas in the many areas where Solaris is miles ahead, the Linux community will be hard pressed to narrow the gap.
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2005-08-11
I believe that was sarcasm.
You say it's sarcasm, I say it's a valid question. I'm not a Solaris zealot, lambasting someone for saying it doesn't have a good installer. I was attempting to ask the poster why he felt the installer wasn't good. Nobody gets anywhere by saying "program x's installer sucks, but program y's is good"... you need to find out why it's not good. That's all I was attempting to find out. There was no sarcasm (nor none intended) in my post.
Member since:Solaris is incredible... once you have it installed. The install process is horrible. It takes hours, it is incredibly error prone, and the documentation is quite poor if you stray off the beaten path.
A few weeks ago I installed Solaris 10 on an Opteron machine. I mistakenly select the "GUI" version of the installer. Unable to back out of my decision, I elected to continue and save time.
During the install process I HAD to use a floppy to install a patch that, without, Solaris would only recognize 18g of my 73g hard drive. There were no options other than the floppy, I could not use the CDROM, as it was in use by the installer. USB floppy drives, cd drives, hard drives, and network patch installations are not supported. Later in the installation, the process froze and I had to restart the machine.
During the second installation attempt, accidentally selecting the GUI again (my bad), the installer froze at the same point. There were no messages in the existing console window, but I finally found that if I manually opened a different console terminal, there was a text prompt asking me to re-insert the floppy (which was still inserted). The installer would not continue without my correspondance in the terminal. It was almost luck that I opened up this window, given the existance of the other window named "Console" already on the desktop.
This is one sad tale, but I have several from various installs of various Solaris version of various hardware. I feel that being anything less than an entry-level Solaris Guru requires time and frustration.
I sincerely hope that the Open Solaris folks take a page from Debian's book and provide a powerful but easy to use installer that given a decent net connection, can be installed with only a few hundred megs of download, rather than four CD's worth.
Thankfully, once installed, Solaris can run for years without problems. Before last September, before a two day power outage, I had solaris machines that had uptimes of over two years but had never required any maintenance beyond simple security patches.
Member since:
2005-08-11
I'm not attempting to flame you or anything, but how does Solaris not have a good installer? I found it to be quite pleasing in fact (because it worked). I'm not sure what the worst Linux distro installer is... does anyone have any thoughts on this? I heard Debian was a pain to install, but I didn't think so. I breezed through the Gentoo install. I've read that many people are chased away from FreeBSD because of the installer. Took me a few minutes. So I don't get it, what makes an installer bad and/or hard to use? I could understand if it dropped you into a shell and expected you to magically know what to do (similar to Gentoo, except Gentoo comes with extensive documentation), but the Solaris install is very easy and straight-forward. So what makes it "not good"?