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Hi
What is the name of the Solaris 10 iso?
Cya j5
Because computing isn’t limited to KDE.
1) most people aren’t using Solaris for desktops
2) blastwave.org has KDE and just about everything else you’d expect from a GNU/Linux or BSD distro
To me, KDE is not such a big deal.
I am actually happy with Solaris, and I think it is cleaner than Linux.
Solaris needs to ditch the ancient userland utilities that they have. No UNIX in 2004 should have the ancient bourne shell as its default shell. Same goes for the ancient versions of utilities like tar and vi that they use. If I can’t do a “tar -jcvf blah.tar.bz2” in your version of UNIX, that means your version of UNIX is terrible! Don’t make me pipe to bzip2… its just not right 😉
Linux/BSD is so much more pleasant to use in the CLI. Solaris may have some interesting features, but its long term future is in doubt in my opinion. Linux is looking sexier on big iron all the time…
On the bright side, at least they ditched CDE and OpenWin as defaults in 10. Not all is lost.
“Same goes for the ancient versions of utilities like tar and vi that they use. If I can’t do a “tar -jcvf blah.tar.bz2″ in your version of UNIX, that means your version of UNIX is terrible!”
This is for backward compatibility. But it would seem that you know about as much as the other guy did when it comes to Solaris, which is to say nothing. Otherwise you would be aware that the GNU utilities ship with Solaris and are just in another directory that you can easily add to your parth before /usr/bin if you want to use the GNU utilities by default. You would also know that Solaris has bash pre-installed, and there is no reason you can’t set it as your default shell when you set up a user account. You can even set useradd to use bash as the default if you do not specify any other shell.
And Solaris administrator land is a joy compared to Linux administrator land. Patches are easier to install. And they are much easier to remove and restore the system to a previous state if they cause problems than doing something similar in Linux.
You aren’t backing your side up either. Things may have changed in the past 4 years, I’m not sure. I know I worked with Soaris from 1994 to 2000. Since then I’ve worked mostly with linux. Moving over to it was like a breath of fresh air, things were easier to configure and get to. That might have had something to do with it being much, much easier to find support from the online linux community than anything else. That and the generic solaris installs are very stripped down compared to any linux distro I’ve seen.
We do have some solaris 8 and 9 boxes in house on a different project. I played with a couple of the hoping to hijack their cpus for some cluster tinkering. Nothing really seemed to have changed, online support and easy to install application availability is still a big bust.
We’ll see where solaris 10 goes, but I seriously doubt there’s going to be any mass exodus over to the Sun platform. At this point Sun is having to fight an already entrenched linux that in the vast majority of cases provides something more than good enough for the right price.
If I can’t do a “tar -jcvf blah.tar.bz2” in your version of UNIX, that means your version of UNIX is terrible!
No, that means you’re used to GNU tar and therefore Linux, not Unix. GNU tar ships on the companion CD if you want to use it.
But please, don’t criticize Unix for not being Linux… they have backward compatibility to worry about whereas Linux simply breaks things when it sees fit.
“Solaris needs to ditch the ancient userland utilities that they have. No UNIX in 2004 should have the ancient bourne shell as its default shell.”
IRIX has that too, but in both situations you can install yourself gtar or bash2. You could also use a pipe. Big deal, i don’t really care for such minor detail.
Solaris 10 betas were already earlier available btw.
it annoys me to see these linux folk complain about stuff they just dont know. Solaris HAS TO be backwards compatible with ancient stuff because Sun customers pay $$$$ precisely for this, no need to fix or change what works, old stuff will run with no change. Solaris is not meant to be a hobbyist OS or your 1 user mail/mp3 server at home.
“You aren’t backing your side up either. Things may have changed in the past 4 years, I’m not sure. I know I worked with Soaris from 1994 to 2000.”
Personally I find “patchadd” and “backoutpatch” to be far easier methods of patching the system than anything that any Linux system offers. The Solaris patch database is second to none, and it makes it easy to restore the system to any prior state because it tracks every patch that has been applied. That’s a big part of what I mean when I say it is easier to maintain.
“Linux/BSD is so much more pleasant to use in the CLI. Solaris may have some interesting features, but its long term future is in doubt in my opinion. Linux is looking sexier on big iron all the time…”
I personally know of three large shops who are migrating their Red Hat servers to Solaris x86 thanks to the new Solaris licensing model. So I would say its long term future is just fine.
“We’ll see where solaris 10 goes, but I seriously doubt there’s going to be any mass exodus over to the Sun platform.”
Well, first of all, as I said, I personally know of three large shops that are migrating to Solaris x86 from Red Hat.
“At this point Sun is having to fight an already entrenched linux that in the vast majority of cases provides something more than good enough for the right price.”
I don’t agree with this for a couple of reasons. The first is that Sun already has a huge customer base that runs Solaris. And I think they are likely to stay with Solaris rather than move to Linux.
Second, Solaris is still king in Fortune 1000 companies. More Fortune 1000 companies use Solaris for their servers than Linux by a very wide margin. And once again, these companies are likely to stay with Sun.
Sun has bran recognition. It also has the advantage of being a company that many clients have already built a relationship with and have been doing business with for years. It is well established and respected. I think when it comes to critical services, companies are more likely to trust Sun then to trust an OS developed largely by an uncooridinated group of hackers with a kernel maintainer who hasn’t even finished an undergrad degree in comp-sci yet.
Solaris just has more “brant trustworthyness” than Linux does. And that will be important.
An already Entrenched Linux? You know that linux is crap as far as scaling is concerned, don’t you? Sun’s main business seems to be systems with a high CPU count, and scaling to 32 CPUs linux could never handle… at least not now. Windows Datacenter does better with a high CPU count than Linux does…
I don’t see them having to fight anybody other than IBM (AIX, not linux), since the big money for their company is with companies like Mitchell, who buy new 16-32 CPU systems every 3 years, and they will keep buying from SUN, in addition to IBM and Digital (Compaq, HP, whatever… it’s an ALPHA), becasuse their already installed software will always keep working with those systems.
Yes, older versions of Solaris were slow if you didn’t have the know-how to optomize them, but from my own testing Solaris 10 is faster out of the box than a tweaked Linux install is.
Yes, it’s stripped down, but that’s only because you don’t need x-libs, GTK, libmad, or any other nonsensical clutter for a server. It only gives you what you need, and is a better system in what it does as a result.
You know that linux is crap as far as scaling is concerned, don’t you?
Which is why those sgi supercomputer run linux, right?
“Which is why those sgi supercomputer run linux, right?”
Are you sure about that? Cause that was a common misconception regarding the new IBM supercomputer “Blue Gene” which is the world’s fastest. It does not, in fact, run Linux on anything except the front end. ie: Linux provides an interface to the system. The backend workhorse nodes, however, run a stripped down custom operating system.
Simba is right. The relationship that companies have with Sun is still very strong. Sure, where i worked, most low end stuff has migrated to windows (not linux), but the critical systems remain tied with their vendors and their support, (IBM, Sun, HP) and if it’s very very hard to justify a migration between them, imagine changing them to linux.
And by the way, part of the reason the supercomputers built with Linux are built with hundreds or even thousands of nodes is to make up for the fact that a single Linux installation can’t scale well to very many CPUs. So they have to rely on clustering to accomplish the same thing. That means lots of operating systems to maintain rather than just one like you would have with Solaris running on a 128 CPU box.
So no, Linux does not scale well. It allows you to easily build clusters. But that is different than scaling. Each node in the cluster is running its own copy of Linux. That’s not true when it comes to massively scalable operating systems like Solaris, where a single OS instance is controlling 128 processors.
>Well, first of all, as I said, I personally know of three
>large shops that are migrating to Solaris x86 from Red Hat.
Can you give the names of those shops?
>I don’t agree with this for a couple of reasons.
>The first is that Sun already has a huge customer base that
>runs Solaris.
Huge? What is huge can you give me a figure?
>And I think they are likely to stay with Solaris rather
>than move to Linux.
In the real world people are switching from Solaris to Linux in lightspeed. What do you think Sun makes a Linux distro why do you think Solaris is free now?
“Can you give the names of those shops?”
I do not know the names of the shops. I know people that work in the IT department at them who have told me that they are switching.
“Huge? What is huge can you give me a figure?”
No, because Sun’s customer base is not public record. But we can start with virtually every major financial institution and insurance company in the United States if you would like, and I almost gurantee you they will have several Sun boxes running. We can then add virtually every public University in the country.
“What do you think Sun makes a Linux distro why do you think Solaris is free now?”
To make Solaris more attractive. I’m not saying Sun’s business model didn’t have to change if they wanted to remain competitive with Linux. It did have to change. No one is denying that Sun made Solaris free to compete with Linux. But what I am saying is that the reports of Solaris’s death are greatly exagerated. It is very much alive and well and still very competitive. And it is even more competitive now that it is free. Your real world “switching from Solaris to Linux at light speed” A: Never existed because most companies have too much invested in Solaris. Maybe they moved a few Web servers and email servers to Linux. But their main data werehouses and such still ran Solaris. And B: Is not going to happen nearly as often now that Solaris is free.
But if you want to make the claim that “in the real world companies are switching from Solaris to Linux at light speed”, can you back it up with some names? Other than Oracle?
let me just add to this flamefest that a fully supported solaris oracle solution still beats the equivalent red hat/oracle solution for business that need the uptime.
“let me just add to this flamefest that a fully supported solaris oracle solution still beats the equivalent red hat/oracle solution for business that need the uptime.”
That’s true as well. I have never worked at single company that is using Linux for any kind of serious database work. All of the companies I have worked at were running Oracle on Solaris. I haven’t even worked at a single company that was using Linux for any serious email work. Most of them were using Lotus Notes on AIX.
I also do not know of any companies that are using Linux for serious database work. So I will ask the question I have asked about 100 times before… Where are these mass Linux migrations that Linux advocates like to talk about? As someone who has worked in corporate IT for 15 years, mostly at large insurance companies and such, I simply am not seeing them. All of the companies I have worked for are still using Solaris and AIX for almost all of their UNIX stuff.
“Are you sure about that? Cause that was a common misconception regarding the new IBM supercomputer “Blue Gene” which is the world’s fastest. It does not, in fact, run Linux on anything except the front end. ie: Linux provides an interface to the system. The backend workhorse nodes, however, run a stripped down custom operating system.”
Blue Gene runs AIX.
Columbia runs Linux.
Public data. Just check out http://www.top500.org — EOD.
“And by the way, part of the reason the supercomputers built with Linux are built with hundreds or even thousands of nodes is to make up for the fact that a single Linux installation can’t scale well to very many CPUs. So they have to rely on clustering to accomplish the same thing. That means lots of operating systems to maintain rather than just one like you would have with Solaris running on a 128 CPU box.”
WTF are you talking about? Altix runs on 512 CPUs and the 1024 is in development! Columbia uses 512 CPU nodes, see r.h. http://www.sgi.com/features/2004/oct/columbia/columbia_pg2.html or the public data at top500.org.
Where are these mass Linux migrations that Linux advocates like to talk about? As someone who has worked in corporate IT for 15 years, mostly at large insurance companies and such, I simply am not seeing them. All of the companies I have worked for are still using Solaris and AIX for almost all of their UNIX stuff.
Well definitely at every university I’ve come across. Running Linux with out a doubt means lower cost of ownership since there are countless Linux distos that are completely free of charge, and since there are loads of decent admins readily available at a very low cost.
And it’s not that I don’t like proprietary systems like solaris and whatnot. If I had my way, we’d go all Irix where I work. But the cost of hardware is just way too cost prohibitive, so we get by with what we can. Sure the hardware may not be as reliable as SGI or Sun hardware and whatnot, but if you’re gonna go and tell me you can’t build some high availability clusters with Linux that are just as good as Sun or whatever, be it oracle or apache or what have you, well, you’re sadly mistaken.
Oh, and I think my buddies already covered Linux scalability…
>I do not know the names of the shops. I know people that
>work in the IT department at them who have told me that
>they are switching.
So you know people at a company who are working in IT just like you and you do not know their company names?
I think you made it up.
You can always ask them their company name right? please let me know i am intressted in there move.
>But if you want to make the claim that “in the real world
>companies are switching from Solaris to Linux at light speed”, can you back it up with some names? Other than
>Oracle?
-Sita (garbage collector (HUGE) has been and is still switching from Solaris and AIX to Linux)
-Versatel (esp. VOIP ect)
-Deutsche Bank
The list is long if you do some research you will get more and more and more names.
Besides that server shipped with Solaris/Sun is delicining every year the opposite is true for Linux.
Oh, and by the way, you’re gonna tell me that adding some extra functionality to tar, like gzip compression, bzip2 compression, that’s gonna break compatibility? Please. Out of all the Unix systems I’ve used, from Linux, to OSX, to BSD, to Irix, to SunOS, to Solaris, by far Sun software is the worst as far as usability goes.
And man, just installing Solaris is a nightmare. You ever try and customize the packages? Let me tell ya, don’t even try, you’ll just end up completely borking your system. I’ll take something even as arcane as the text mode Irix installer over a Solaris install. And then you get to configure Solaris. Far as I know there aren’t any nice configuration apps like Irix or Linux has. The Sun management console is the biggest piece of junk I’ve ever encountered at any rate. But then I suppose you’re gonna tell me about some obscure Solaris command I don’t know about, hidden away somewhere deep in /usr/jurg/glurg/v444/glagalag/bin. But then all that’s gonna do is add to the argument about how unusable Solaris is, so have at it.
And then you go and tell me patching Solaris is easier than your typical Linux system? Have you ever used patch pro or whatever the heck it’s called? You’re gonna tell me it’s easy to install that and set that up? Right…
>Oh, and by the way, you’re gonna tell me that adding some extra functionality to tar, like gzip compression, bzip2 compression, that’s gonna break compatibility?
Adding functionality is one thing. However, the GNU utils more often than not have different and/or incompatible flags from the traditional *nix ones, which is why they cannot be made the default, since this would result in breaking a lot of scripts and such. Ditto for making bash the default shell, since even in strict sh mode it allows various things that real sh does not, and consequently it is possible to write incompatible scripts with it. As was said, backward compatibility does matter in this case.
Are you sure about that? Cause that was a common misconception regarding the new IBM supercomputer “Blue Gene” which is the world’s fastest. It does not, in fact, run Linux on anything except the front end. ie: Linux provides an interface to the system. The backend workhorse nodes, however, run a stripped down custom operating system.
SGI have installed SSI (Single System Image) Altix boxes running Linux on up to 1024 processors. Columbia (the new #2) runs 512 processor Linux nodes. That’s a single instance of the Linux kernel running on 512 processors.
Bascule will pipe up now with some rubbish on how Linux isn’t actually scalable on these systems, supported with his outstandingly dubious benchmarks on his dual Athlon.
And by the way, part of the reason the supercomputers built with Linux are built with hundreds or even thousands of nodes is to make up for the fact that a single Linux installation can’t scale well to very many CPUs. So they have to rely on clustering to accomplish the same thing. That means lots of operating systems to maintain rather than just one like you would have with Solaris running on a 128 CPU box.
…
No, that’s pretty amazingly wrong. The reason that people use clusters of uni or 2-way SMP nodes is that the hardware is incredibly cheap. Large n-way SMP boxes are frightfully expensive and, when you’re working on highly parellizable problems, offer poor bang-for-buck.
SUN MICROSYSTEMS, INC.
PRE-RELEASE SOFTWARE AND HARDWARE EVALUATION LICENSE AGREEMENT
…
3.0 LICENSE RESTRICTIONS
…
3.5 Licensee acknowledges that the Licensed Software may contain a time bomb mechanism.
…
TIME BOMB?!
Oh, my god! some one call the FBI! They’re terrorists!
Better to read license agreements before proceeding with
SoulSucking(TM) registrations…
Regards.
what is the story ???
I mean… solaris can use gnome
solaris can use kde
when will sun give back instead of just taking !
Sometimes the ignorance of osnews.com is sometimes downright embarrassing =).
“solaris can use kde”.
OK, i’ll take this comment at face value (despite your obvious trolling *cough* ) – the KDE packages for Solaris are provided by Blastwave, a volunteer-based community group that compiles OSS for Solaris – they have nothing to do with Sun Corp.
“I mean… solaris can use gnome”
Solaris has invested an astounding amount of manpower, time and effort into the Gnome project. Their commitment to the project has been going on for a while (although admittedly not very well advertised) – I simply don’t understand the hypocrisy of people who bash Sun for contributing to OSS, whilst singing the virtues companies like say IBM.
We don’t see people bashing, say Novell or RH for ‘leeching’ off OSS, do we? RH, like Sun, has also contributed large amounts of time and effort into Gnome – Novell’s contributions are relatively recent (and IMHO, far less than Sun’s), so why don’t people like this raver31 fellow bash Novell for ‘leeching’ off Gnome/KDE?
Bye,
Victor
I am not bashing sun for leeching.. I was simply enquiring as to when they will put the development back into gnome/kde
you say they do
prove it…..
let them prove it…
Dude, what the?
Who the heck do you think funded the Gnome HIG? I’ll let you take a guess…starts with a capital S, end with un. Geez, honestly.
Perhaps you should try reading something like The Evolution of the Gnome Project (http://opensource.ucc.ie/icse2002/German.pdf) before opening your trap in future.
Also, try having a look through some of the Gnome/KDE development mailing lists, and look at how many of the email addresses end in @sun.com. Oooohhh, I wonder what that means? (sarcasm).
Or just read the list at http://wwws.sun.com/software/javadesktopsystem/resources.html (yes, Sun site, but not *that* biased hehehe)
bye,
victor
yes you are correct.
I did need to spend some time on google before I started yapping.
I apologise to all here
Hi,
No worrries mate =).
I’ll be the first to admit that Sun’s PR department seriously need to get out there and do some…PR.
Solaris, despite it’s quirks, has a certain coolness/arcanessness (at least for me).
bye,
Victor
I can’t wait to get my dirty hands on this one. How bloated is it? can you make a minimal install w/o X? I’d like to install it on an old 1.1Ghz P3. I’d sure be the most 1337 nerd in the hood by running a true Unix on my gateway lol!!! mouhahahha
That’s right, I switched from Solaris on about 8 servers.
There’s a real life study for you. But what’s more, I then moved on and switched about 40 customer servers to Linux too.
Direct misses: Sun’s patching system is useful for backing out patches, no doubt. But simpler, more current and more powerful than Apt? Get a clue. Not even close. Sun’s patching system has some powerful features, but overall it’s arcane, slow, time consuming, limited and painful.
Scalability? Linux scales exceedingly well these days. There are a number of studies that show 2.6 scaling O1 linearly through a heavy load. It’s being used on systems with thousands of processors. Supports HT. What part of Linux (or FreeBSD 5.3 actually) doesn’t scale?
As for command line… Solaris is painful and archaic. Yes they are being paid for keeping compatibility for legacy apps, whoever said that is dead on. However, I think they’d be better off allowing a choice of environments: legacy and current. Seeing as how that’s an opinion, don’t even bother to argue it, pls kthx.
If you’d gone on and on about Dtrace, the new TCP stack and ZFS you’d have more of a point (not much of one, but more). However I see these three features summed up in two words: About Time. Solaris got the nickname Slowlaris for a reason, like it or not.
I certainly hope you converted those machines from Solaris to Linux with a more convincing argument than the troll “slowaris”. Any operating system/application combination has to be tuned to get optimal performance. More often than not what I hear is either:
1. The “OS” is slow, replace it.
2. The application is slow, replace the OS. And if you think I am kidding, I’m not.
In order to determine what the problem is you have to collect data and analyze it to find the actual problem or problems. Most places I have worked at don’t baseline their systems to set minimum and maximum performance criteria. Just “install and run” then complain when everything doesn’t work. A default installtion of Solaris and Oracle is going to suck performance wise, building the system to get maximum peformance and tuning both Solaris and Oracle ensures maximum performance. This requires monitoring and data gathering, lots of it! And it is an ongoing effort, not something you do only once.
Did you actually tune your Solaris installations, or just “install and run”? I am sure that your Linux installations could be viewed in the same light by anyone.
Huge? What is huge can you give me a figure?
How about looking at some financial statements for instance. Like $7.4 billion net revenue for Product (that’s be OS, HW, and other software) in FY04. And $7.9 billion net revenue in FY03. And $1.7 billion for 1Q05. Compare that to RedHat’s $124.7 million for FY04. Wow, Sun’s net revenue for one quarter is almost 15 times RedHat’s yearly revenue. RedHat’s 206,000 total subscriptions versus Sun’s 4.5 million Solaris 8 and 9 licenses (not to mention the 500,000 Solaris Express downloads). Sun’s 20,000 iForce partners versus RedHat’s 750 ISVs.
Besides that server shipped with Solaris/Sun is delicining every year the opposite is true for Linux.
Really, please cite sources. According to IDC and Gartner (as well as Sun’s own SEC filings) Sun’s volumes have increased year over year.
And your point is? This is PRE-RELEASE SOFTWARE. It may contain a time bomb that may do something (maybe flash a message, maybe refuse to boot, maybe reformat the disk, it doesn’t say) after some period of time. Is that really that strange to think about? They want you to be able to test out the software, but they don’t want you using it forever.
Did they finally fix the backspace/delete keys?
>According to IDC and Gartner (as well as Sun’s own SEC filings) Sun’s
>volumes have increased year over year.
Please link me to those pages where they state that. I can not seem to find them on their website.
What i could find was:
http://www.businessweekasia.com/magazine/content/04_48/b3910053_mz0…
http://www.serverwatch.com/news/article.php/1400431
http://www.serverwatch.com/eur/article.php/3437951
You should already know that i really like Solaris and that its not like i think Linux is a better OS but Sun is in trouble and cats in trouble make stranges jumps…
Can someone recommend some good soalris books, all the training bokos i find are limited, i want to know how manage users, and services like, apache, mail, dns, ftp, firewall, nfs, the book should also cover things like Raid using solstice, lvm (im not sure if this is available on solaris). basically network admin, and system admin in one all recommendations are welcome, please note as solaris 10 has just come out, solaris 9 would be perfect for book recommendations
THANKS!!!
Snake
There is no “all singing, all dancing” book for Solaris administration, performance tuning, security, etc. If you intend to use Solaris 10 then I strongly recommend that you read the appropriate documentation at docs.sun.com. Solaris 10 has significant differences (particularly Service Management) that is unique to Solaris 10.
Other sources of material:
http://www.sun.com/blueprints/
http://www.sun.com/bigadmin
http://www.solarisinternals.com
My shop (mine as in I own it) is evaluating Solaris 10 with an expressed intrest in migrating from Debian & FreeBSD.
Now don’t get me wrong, we’ve loved Linux/BSD. However, both are still rather immature compared to the (in our opinion) more professionally built Solaris.
You have to realize, too, that for my company this move just makes since. Our main (Fortune 100) client uses Solaris and HP internally and a move to Solaris, even partially, will better bring us inline in terms of support and testing with our bread & butter.
This may not be the case for everyone, and that’s what the flame-throwing posters on this thread need to realize. The business reality is that for some organizations Linux/BSD is a perfect fit. For some Solaris or some other traditional UNIX is the best fit. Some businesses even (horror of horrors!) find Windows to be the best tool available.
So, please, cut the “my OS is better than your OS” crap.
As a BSD and Linux user, I find Solaris 10 both familiar and unfamiliar.
All of the common commands work pretty much the same (with differences as noted by other posters). This doesn’t bother me at all because alternatives, such as Bash, are freely available from places like blastwave.org.
One thing that I don’t like is the administration of common system functions. Adding a new network daemon on a Linux or BSD system requires a single new line in /etc/inetd.conf. Solaris uses a set of administrative tools that are not intuitive or easy to use. They may not present a problem to a veteran Solaris admin, but to someone used to other UNIX systems, they’re a pain. It almost seems like Sun has gone out of their way to make simple tasks harder and more complex than they need to be.
Another thing I don’t like is the Sun Management Console (SMC) that’s needed to perform many common sysadm functions. Its functionality is OK; performance is where it stumbles. SMC takes almost a minute to start up on my machine, and using it feels like wading through a pool filled with sticky molasses.
I still haven’t been able to get my network printer to work. The Print Manager “add printer” dialog has a field called “destination” that’s not documented very well (and not at all in the help window brought up by clicking on the “help” button in the dialog). I tried 192.168.1.15, 192.168.1.15:9100, lpr://192.168.1.15, and lpr://192.168.1.15:9100, but nothing seems to work. I can queue files to the printer, but nothing prints.
I like the default user interfaces (CDE and JDS3). The colors and layouts are bright and clean. Too many Linux distros come with dark, gothic themes with lots of unneeded transparency and garish window decorations as their standard themes.
It’s a good thing Solaris 10 is free. I’m not sure I’d want to pay for this kind of experience. I can’t think of a single thing Solaris does better than Linux or one of the BSDs on x86 hardware. I haven’t tried any of Solaris’ more advanced features, such as zones, yet, so perhaps my opinion will change when I do. I hope so.
”
That’s true as well. I have never worked at single company that is using Linux for any kind of serious database work. All of the companies I have worked at were running Oracle on Solaris. I haven’t even worked at a single company that was using Linux for any serious email work. Most of them were using Lotus Notes on AIX. ”
maybe you have worked on enough companies. Personally One BIG move from solaris to Linux on oracle was done by indian railway. another was IDBI bank. yet another was central bank. want more?
This is for backward compatibility. But it would seem that you know about as much as the other guy did when it comes to Solaris, which is to say nothing.
You’re totally missing the point. This guy’s point is the fact that it shouldn’t be like this at all. If you’re going to be backwards compatible then do so, and allow the new method alongside the old one. It’s easy to do and there’s absolutely no reason why not at all.
I personally know of three large shops who are migrating their Red Hat servers to Solaris x86 thanks to the new Solaris licensing model. So I would say its long term future is just fine.
Only three? Of course you do, and everyone else knows people who have moved or are in the process of moving in the other direction. When they realise just how much Sun is going to have to charge in the future for additional software services to justify the low initial prices of some of their servers and initial subscriptions to keep the revenues they have, then we’ll see the resolve of these large shops. Sun has seen the word cheap, and they’re actually getting too obsessed with that direction rather than working out an acceptable and reasonable price.
Sun has bran recognition.
They must go to the toilet a lot at Sun
.
Solaris just has more “brant trustworthyness” than Linux does.
Very subjective, and from the companies actually using Linux, doesn’t mean anything.
I know of several people who’ve mentally tied themselves to Solaris who come up with stuff like this, and you ask them “Well, what is it that you do with these machines?” and they squirm uncomfortably in their chairs. It turns out that they’ve spent a pile of money on Solaris (and in many cases SPARC) and additional services for absolutely no reason whatsoever, and all the open source software they are using has been designed with a Linux/GNU infrastructure in mind anyway because that’s what they’re all using.
It is well established and respected. I think when it comes to critical services, companies are more likely to trust Sun then to trust an OS developed largely by an uncooridinated group of hackers
And yet Solaris depends on those same hackers to provide any kind of infrastructure for Solaris – Gnome, GNU tools, Apache, most of the Java infrastructure… Red Hat, Novell, IBM, and HP all provide Linux solutions – the customer feels the shared development model of Linux indirectly. That argument doesn’t wash, and is a sign of worry. I thought you said you knew of three large shops moving to Solaris
?
with a kernel maintainer who hasn’t even finished an undergrad degree in comp-sci yet.
And yet Linux works spectacularly well. Have you finished your undergrad computer degree yet (Linus is to good to be thinking about an undergrad)?
Are you sure about that?
Yes. SGI did a lot of work with kernel 2.4 quite a while ago, along with a lot of custom enhancements (the whole point of Linux development) to scale up to 256 processors with Altix and beyond. You won’t get a vanilla kernel to do that of course, but you’ll find a lot of companies that will do that with you and they’ve been doing it for years.
That means lots of operating systems to maintain rather than just one like you would have with Solaris running on a 128 CPU box.
You’re missing the point there – it isn’t just the OS that’s important but the out and out capacity of the hardware you’re running. No matter how well your OS scales in terms of adding processors, if your hardware isn’t up to the job then you’re not going anywhere. x86 is good for commodity systems, 4-way or 8-way, but beyond that you’re going to have to bite the bullet and go for something more substantial. People get around it to a large extent with clustering because people feel that a bunch of cheap x86 boxes is worth it for what they’re doing and they like the redundancy it provides. Clustering has its limits of course but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t Linux systems in the world that won’t scale on a single system.
People use clustering because they think it’s worth it, not as a silver bullet, but we get people who come out and whinge “Oh, people use clustering because Linux doesn’t scale…..”. Large SMP systems are unbelievably expensive, and they have to be worth it. A lot of the time they’re not.
You’re under the impression that there’s one solution for everything, but there isn’t. Horizontal scaling is where the growth is and where the most work is done by many people, and that’s what has hurt Sun quite badly over the years.
I have been using Solaris 10 EA build 68, and I am impressed with the quality. I could not find a single bug, not even with the Gnome desktop (though that’s not important for the stuff I work with).
I think DTrace could be the dark horse for Sun at this moment. For (server) software developers, the possibilities are endless.
Apart from Gnome, I think NIS, NFS and others, are important to mention. And of course, openoffice.
You’re totally missing the point. This guy’s point is the fact that it shouldn’t be like this at all. If you’re going to be backwards compatible then do so, and allow the new method alongside the old one. It’s easy to do and there’s absolutely no reason why not at all.
It sounds like you’ve completely missed the point. These “arcane” features need to exist both for backwards compatability and compliance with UNIX/POSIX speficiations. Your objection is entirely baseless since Sun has done exactly what you suggest that they should have. Bash is shipped by default and is available in /usr/bin, Gnu Tar is shipped by default and is in /usr/sfw/bin. Sun has added these GNU conveniences and placed them alongside their existing userland toolset. Those who object that their favorite GNU utility xyz isn’t there, probably haven’t looked.
When they realise just how much Sun is going to have to charge in the future for additional software services to justify the low initial prices of some of their servers and initial subscriptions to keep the revenues they have, then we’ll see the resolve of these large shops.
This is a specious argument and a fallacy. The fact that Sun is giving Solaris away for free is a tacit acknowledgement that it wasn’t a significant source of revenue. Sun makes tons off of licensing Java, but obviously not off of Solaris. The idea is that by making Solaris free, they’ll generate more volumes which will allow them to sell more subscriptions, services, and hardware to customers. Since Solaris is going to be open-source, this forces Sun to be competitive in their pricing. If, as you claim, they’ll eventually jack-up their service prices, there’s absolutely nothing to stop customers from going elsewhere and obtaining the same support and similar services/subscriptions from another OpenSolaris vendor.
Large shops aren’t stupid, they’re going to go for the best deal they can find.
Sun has seen the word cheap, and they’re actually getting too obsessed with that direction rather than working out an acceptable and reasonable price.
This is, as you say, very subjective and doesn’t mean anything.
And yet Solaris depends on those same hackers to provide any kind of infrastructure for Solaris – Gnome, GNU tools, Apache, most of the Java infrastructure
This is only half-true. Certainly all major vendors have been leveraging work done by Gnome, GNU tools, Apache, et. al. However, Sun also has their own middleware stack that they provide to customers and its integrated from top to bottom. The idea, whether you believe it or not, is that customers would rather purchase an integrated stack instead of trying to get all of these other solutions to play nicely together. Whether or not this is worth the money depends on the customer and their needs; however, I think it’s still a valid claim that some companies would rather take an integrated solution from one vendor instead of building a piecemeal solution from a variety of different sources.
Bash is shipped by default and is available in /usr/bin, Gnu Tar is shipped by default and is in /usr/sfw/bin.
No, that’s not what I said and it’s what others have said in other posts. There should be a side-by-side installation at the same time for people to maintain compatibility backwards and for what they are using now, and they should be able to use them at the same time. There’s no way that doing anything like that should break backwards compatibility, and it has absolutely nothing to do with Posix/UNIX compliance which is absolutely bizarre.
There’s no good reason for it, and you’ve confirmed that.
The fact that Sun is giving Solaris away for free…
Solaris was going to be open sourced, not just be made available for free.
…is a tacit acknowledgement that it wasn’t a significant source of revenue.
Wow, really? Why bother with it then? Why all the man-hours of excruciating development if Sun is making no money from Solaris whatsoever? Either you have a proprietary product and make sure it makes money, or you completely open source it, give up control, let the community push it forwards but still contribute engineering expertise and benefit from keeping your costs down on that level. That’s what people are using Linux for.
What you’ve admitted there makes no economic sense whatsoever, and it means the open sourcing of Solaris really needs to succeed for it to survive.
The idea is that by making Solaris free, they’ll generate more volumes which will allow them to sell more subscriptions, services, and hardware to customers.
Looking at the revenues that Sun are going to have to prop up and protect in the future and looking at those of Red Hat or even Novell, you’re just never going to be competitive. You’re giving away Solaris, an operating system you develop, fund and fix yourselves, and you’re effectively giving away your x86 based servers as well, and you’re banking on the off-chance that you’re going to then rip these companies off in the future by selling more subscriptions, services and hardware?
If, as you claim, they’ll eventually jack-up their service prices, there’s absolutely nothing to stop customers from going elsewhere and obtaining the same support and similar services/subscriptions from another OpenSolaris vendor.
Since there are no Open Solaris vendors, there’s no guarantee of there being any, none even on the horizon and we all know Sun will ultimately keep control of Solaris then they’re not going to get anything from any Open Solaris vendor.
I think we both know where they’re going to go……
Large shops aren’t stupid, they’re going to go for the best deal they can find.
Quite right, which is why they’re not going to get robbed later on.
This is, as you say, very subjective and doesn’t mean anything.
I sincerely hope you’re not a strategist at Sun, working out what you’re business model’s actually going to be. It is not subjective at all:
FACT: Sun is going to try to give away Solaris, admitted by you. As I’ve pointed out, this isn’t sustainable as it makes huge assumptions about what you’re going to sell off the back of it.
FACT: Sun is trying to give away their x86 servers. They’re very nice prices, but they’re not sustainable in the long-term.
It has all the hallmarks of a give-get. Quite what the get is is anyone’s guess. If you think that you’re going to capture customers with giveaway x86s and a free Solaris, and then hit them with subscriptions, services and presumably non-x86 hardware (hmmm, what would that be?) they’re never going to come back to you and you’ll probably lose a good portion of the customers you have left. Bad will stinks to high heaven.
I apologise if I’ve blown the lid off your strategy, but Linux and companies like Novell, IBM and Red Hat are not things you can assume will just go away if you give away x86 servers and Solaris for long enough.
Can we hear a strategy that’s going to work now please?
however, I think it’s still a valid claim that some companies would rather take an integrated solution from one vendor instead of building a piecemeal solution from a variety of different sources.
What makes you think that anything Novell or Red Hat provides is piecemeal? The only thing that generally doesn’t come as an integrated whole is the hardware itself, which simply doesn’t matter to the vast majority of people.
To say that any software that any other company provides is not integrated compared to Sun’s offerings is quite simply not true. That’s what people pay money to these companies for, and that’s what they do – integrate it together. When it comes to the JDS and making Gnome integrate well with Java and vice versa you’ve got an awful lot of learning to do from your partners at Microsoft. I’m sure you’re a bit sore about Red Hat purchasing Netscape’s server software and GPLing it, but come on. And no, I’m afraid it isn’t antique software as it is a version up from the very software that iPlanet was based on!
iPlanet…. Now what on Earth does that sound like it’s used for?
And man, just installing Solaris is a nightmare. You ever try and customize the packages? Let me tell ya, don’t even try, you’ll just end up completely borking your system. I’ll take something even as arcane as the text mode Irix installer over a Solaris install. And then you get to configure Solaris. Far as I know there aren’t any nice configuration apps like Irix or Linux has.
That’s the whole point though. You’re going to need a Sun engineer or a half-dozen (and all those additional services and subscriptions MJ talks about) in over several days, weeks, months and years just to set the damn thing up!
I don’t know about you guys, but I have no problems setting up and using Solaris. It is extremely well documented, although from time to time Sun sneaks in features and doesn’t document them very well (this is a point that is not falling on deaf ears at Sun). This is no different than any other OS vendor (including Microsoft and the “loved” Linux distros).
I usually pre-configure the systems I am about to build using JumpStart, so most of the customization is done as the machine is being built. This is no different than using NIM (AIX) or the equivalent for HP-UX, RedHat, etc. Creating build documentation helps as well. The only “engineering assistance” I have seen in setting up Solaris is our current SunFire 4800/StorEdge 6320 rig (having problems with the SAN).
From a management standpoint, AIX with smit or smitty, and HP-UX with sam is easier to manage than Solaris with either AdminTool (Solaris 9 and earlier) or SMC. Most of the environments I have worked in do not allow the use of a GUI so that is moot. And the functionality of SMC can easily be duplicated with CLI tools, in some cases it is faster and easier to use the CLI tools than to use SMC. It is simply a case of learning how to use the OS, and it does not matter which OS, each one has its own quirks.
And “customize packages”, what the Hell are you talking about? You build packages to distribute software, you don’t customize them.
Holy crap. I see an argument on OSNews where someone actually…admitted they were wrong and changed their mind!
*looks out of window*
Oooh, Satan just went by on his snowplough, escorted by the Porcine Wing of the Royal Air Force…
😉
No, that’s not what I said and it’s what others have said in other posts. There should be a side-by-side installation at the same time for people to maintain compatibility backwards and for what they are using now, and they should be able to use them at the same time. There’s no way that doing anything like that should break backwards compatibility, and it has absolutely nothing to do with Posix/UNIX compliance which is absolutely bizarre.
So exactly why do we disagree here? Have you read the UNIX2003 specification? I’m telling you that when you install Solaris you get both /bin/sh, and /usr/bin/bash. I don’t see your point.
Solaris was going to be open sourced, not just be made available for free.
Both. Solaris will be open sourced, and that will be OpenSolaris. Solaris The Sun Product ™ will be available for free unless you want service/support/etc.
What you’ve admitted there makes no economic sense whatsoever, and it means the open sourcing of Solaris really needs to succeed for it to survive.
No, I haven’t. You’re making fantastically wild assumptions about my statements. The fact is that you have no comprehension about how companies sell services to make money. We’ve been through this argument before, about how wireless providers will sell the handset at a loss, so they can make money off you as you subscribe for service. Yet, you fail to grasp that Sun, unlike many of their competitors can actually do this.
Looking at the revenues that Sun are going to have to prop up and protect in the future and looking at those of Red Hat or even Novell, you’re just never going to be competitive. You’re giving away Solaris, an operating system you develop, fund and fix yourselves, and you’re effectively giving away your x86 based servers as well, and you’re banking on the off-chance that you’re going to then rip these companies off in the future by selling more subscriptions, services and hardware?
There’s absolutely nothing factual in this statement. How do you know what revenues Sun needs to generate to make a profit? Are you certain they’re selling x86 servers at a loss? You’re speculating wildly based upon your pre-concieved notions and the fact that you assert that Sun will have to rip off their customers to make a profit, doesn’t make it so. Fundamentally, there’s no way customers would consent to this, and Sun would be stupid to do it, especially after spending all of this effort trying to become competitive again. Are you trying to claim that economics don’t apply here?
FACT: Sun is trying to give away their x86 servers. They’re very nice prices, but they’re not sustainable in the long-term.
This is an assertion, not a fact. There’s nothing factual about this statement. Do you know if Sun is taking a loss on these server sales? How do you know what is and isn’t sustainable for Sun? Are you an accountant?
To say that any software that any other company provides is not integrated compared to Sun’s offerings is quite simply not true.
I didn’t say that, you’re misquoting, misinterpreting, or just beleving whatever you want to believe I said. I said that Sun has their own middleware stack that is integrated from top to bottom. I’m aware that other companies provide similar offerings. Some are based upon Gnome, Apache, MySQL, etc, and others are based upon proprietary products these particular companies happen to own or partner with. Nowhere did I say, “Everything Non-Sun is a piecemeal solution.” You’re looking desperately for absolutes and completely missing the nuiance of my argument. I don’t think we fundamentally disagree; however, you’re too busy trying to argue absurd points that you think I made, and don’t seem to realize that my entire point was that some customers want to pay for an integrated stack, while others would prefer to build/assemble the pieces themselves. This is hardly contraversial.
That’s the whole point though. You’re going to need a Sun engineer or a half-dozen (and all those additional services and subscriptions MJ talks about) in over several days, weeks, months and years just to set the damn thing up!
Just because you’re not clever enough to set up Solaris yourself doesn’t actually mean that every installation or deployment is going to require you to purchase a support. The fact that S10 is going to be available for free is a boon for administrators who know how to maintain their deployments. If they don’t want the service, they don’t have to purchase it, and don’t have to pay any licensing fee. Just because you’ve got a chip on your shoulder, and are more interested in spouting conspiracy theories doesn’t mean that people who actually make purchasing decisions for companies aren’t going to consider the facts and make a decision which best addresses their needs.
I’ve run Solaris 9 and Express on my 650MHz duron with a
16Mb video card. Admittedly it helped that I had 256Mb
of dram to start with (and upgraded to 1gig as soon as
I could afford it)….