Linked by Amjith Ramanujam on Tue 19th Aug 2008 14:44 UTC, submitted by M-Saunders
How does OpenSolaris, Sun's effort to free its big-iron OS, fare from a Linux user's point of view? Is it merely a passable curiosity right now, or is it truly worth installing? Linux Format takes OpenSolaris for a test drive, examining the similarities and differences to a typical Linux distro.
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Member since:2006-03-20
Member since:2006-05-13
Oh, well, /usr/ucb/ps was the normal ps. But they removed that. In fact, they removed so much from OpenSolaris, that I find it impossible to actually use in a real situation, and I've used Solaris 1.x (SunOS 4.1.4), Solaris 2.6-10.
OpenSolaris is a bad thing IMHO, and Im not interested in it, and I hope every day that Solaris 10 doesnt suffer or stop having U-releases because of this filth.
I would say that *BSD, Linux, Solaris and UNIX users would not be happy with openSolaris in its current state. Its designed to try and gain market share from Linux, it seems, and Linux in turn is trying to gain market share from OS X and Windows. So they are trying to get the table scraps of table scraps? Bonehead move.
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Member since:
2008-06-24
OpenSolaris takes quite a bit of time getting used to IMHO coming from FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and many many versions of Linux. I used it because I wanted ZFS, virtulization, and also to try something new.
I did move back to FreeBSD after about a week or so since I thought OpenSolaris brought unnecessary learning curves for someone new. Things like 'ps' being different than every other distro, network interface setup and modification is annoying, the number of programs that you can compile outside of their package manager are slim, and overall not very friendly (I don't want to use the GUI, ever). However, I have 4gb of ram and ZFS really should only be run under 64-bit FreeBSD. Qemu doesn't seem to run, Xen isn't even an option for virtulization and WINE doesn't work under 64-bit (these are the main reasons I bought 4gb of ram in the first place).
ZFS has been running flawlessly on FreeBSD for me thus far, and even the maintainer says he's been using it since he ported it over without a hickup. FreeBSD runs version 6 of ZFS, while OpenSolaris currently runs version 11. It IS true, once you go ZFS you don't go back.
I refuse to run Linux, for personal and limiting reasons, and FreeBSD won't let me virtualize. It seems that in the next few days I'll be biting the bullet and moving back to OpenSolaris. It is very nice that ZFS is seamlessly integrated and snapshots are automatically created when updating the system. This ensures you can easily roll back or boot back into an older install to test different things.
All in all OpenSolaris HAS some potential, but their licensing is very wack and limiting. If Sun wants their OS to evolve and take on more users in the community, the licence will really need to be changed.
Edited 2008-08-19 18:55 UTC