In the latest edition of his series of articles on enterprise class Linux distributions, Tom Adelstein looks at Sun’s JDS. As a reader of this series, I found each of the first three stories to represent distributions that were increasingly interesting. JDS has broken the trend. See the article at LinuxJournal here.
Latest Enterprise Linux review, JDS
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Eugenia Loli
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JDS is a mixed blessing; as a Linux distro is rock solid, with a clean, consistent UI thats easy to use and learn. Sun is sending mixed messages about Linux. I say either embrace it or dont.
As the new UI for Solaris, its a godsend, much better than CDE, though it can be slow and kludgy.
JDS is nice, but approach with an open mind.
I just get the feeling from the article that the author started out biased against Sun. It is almost as if the author took the fact that Sun hasn’t always been a gung-ho-kool-aid-drinking linux fan boy as two strikes against JDS.
How can company officials attack Red Hat and then show it as a supported solution for the Sun Ray?
They are competitors! That’s how. Portraying yourself better than your competition is a proven business strategy. Having to support your competitor’s product is merely a concession to the reality that RedHat is the current Linux market leader.
Was this a review of JDS or ignorant rant on Sun’s products?!?
The author purposefully wrote the critique on Sun Ray to make it sound confusing. Just because Sun has several products in the pipeline doesn’t makes something “chaotic.” Also, consider that Solaris 10 has been out only two months! Not every product is going to be Solaris 10-ready immediately as if by magic.
Next, Sun doesn’t sell “Athlon workstations”. They’re Opteron-based workstations. And you can implement RAID 5 in Solaris, even without hardware controllers. If you want the hardware controllers, you can get those, too.
Solaris 10 (incl. JDS3) _does_ come with Samba 3. Not sure about Active Directory, but I recall seeing that mentioned in conjunction with JES.
Does the author realize that once JDS3 converges on Solaris 10 (already here) and on Linux (on its way), that Sun will have a unified modern GUI environment across its whole product line? That the crusty Solaris admins back in the server room could have the same environment as the managers in the front office? Does the significance of this blow over his head completely?
People are so quick to judge Sun, it makes me think their fragile egos would crack if Sun actually gained a lot of traction with Solaris 10 and JDS. Uh oh, Sun _is_ gaining a lot of traction (1 million registered Solaris 10 systems, lots of Opteron servers going to research clusters, Wall Street perking up a bit, OpenSolaris now has a kick-ass advisory board).
I don’t even think the author tested the configurations he talks about in the review, as some things look very much like cut-n-paste from Sun’s website, such as the Sun Ray platform support.
Unlike Red Hat products sun outsources their support. a major point IMO
> Unlike Red Hat products sun outsources their support. a major point IMO
What kind of crack are you on? Sun *does not* outsource its support and all of Sun support belongs to Sun, only compared with RedHat Sun has engineers that develop the products Sun sells and has engineers that can fix problems, none of that can be said about RedHat — RedHat does not own the technology it sells and will never be able to adequately support it. If you want good product support, make sure RedHat is the last place where you look.
>Sun *does not* outsource its support
Hmm, that’s interesting. Considering I used to be part of a company that did Sun’s outsourced support for their Linux offerings….
“What kind of crack are you on? Sun *does not* outsource its support and all of Sun support belongs to Sun,”
from the article
“How big is Sun’s support organization? Does the company out-source its support?
Sun out-sources its support for Linux. Sun did not confirm the size of its outsourcers. Sun offers service packages through its reseller channel. Resellers then offer services as a package from Sun.”
and above comment says “Hmm, that’s interesting. Considering I used to be part of a company that did Sun’s outsourced support for their Linux offerings….”
” RedHat does not own the technology it sells and will never be able to adequately support it. ”
does sun own xorg, gnome samba and rest of the stack it supports. ?
Until Sun and Linux get 100% behind the GUI (do I believe I’m even saying this) in terms of supporting 99% of what people want to do (even advanced options), they will continue to get their clock cleaned in everything desktop related. GUI’s are what, fifteen years in the mainstream???? That’s not the point. It’s more that with something so unbelievably obvious, that people still don’t get behind it. It makes *everyone’s* life easier to have things GUI enabled. Sure, provide backend scripting using command-line tools, but for god’s sake, will Sun and Linux finally start believing in a graphical user interface please?
Here’s a perfect example. DTRACE. I imagine it’s a great technology. It should never have been released without 100% GUI support. That’s right. You heard me. Wait until you have a gui, not just any gui, but when all of your internal engineers use it from the GUI for it before releasing it. Until then, stop embarrassing yourself with lame products. Any product that doesn’t support a GUI fully that will be used by end users on a desktop is a sick joke.
And why should Sun (or anyone else) for that matter spend time creating a GUI for a CLI tool that will be used by system administrators? Development of GUI software should be focused on desktop tools primarily to make the user’s life easier. If a system administrator has to depend on GUI tools, then quite frankly they should go back to managing Windows boxes! The vast majority of the machines I manage don’t have X running at all. So whay waste time writing tools that for many of us won’t get used!
And do you actually use a Sun Ray? I do every day and I like it just fine. All I need is a desktop to perform system administration tasks, and for that a Sun Ray and Common Desktop Environment work just fine. So the Sun Ray server software does not work on Solaris 10, so what? Everything comes in time.
http://shots.osdir.com/slideshows/slideshow.php?release=277&slide=2…
>>It is almost as if the author took the fact that Sun hasn’t always been a gung-ho-kool-aid-drinking linux fan boy as two strikes against JDS<<
It’s not just a matter of Sun not being a “fan” of Linux. Sunw went as far as to finance scoxe’s anti-linux campaign, and say that all Linux distros, except Sun’s distro, were actually illegal.
>>They are competitors! That’s how. Portraying yourself better than your competition is a proven business strategy.<<
Saying you are better than the competition is one thing, saying that your Linux distro is legal, and your competitors Linux distro is illegal; is quite something else.
“It’s not just a matter of Sun not being a “fan” of Linux. Sunw went as far as to finance scoxe’s anti-linux campaign, and say that all Linux distros, except Sun’s distro, were actually illegal.”
These conspiracy theories are really really tired. Sun doesn’t have to make Linux illegal, because Solaris 10 can compete purely on merit. Solaris 10 is such an enormous step forward for UNIX that many companies won’t know what else to run for years.
Also, the main reason Sun could claim their Linux was “more legal” than others was because they bought some sort of rediculously expensive UNIX license a long time ago, long before SCO hit the fan. That is probably why SCO had to target IBM rather than Sun.
“Here’s a perfect example. DTRACE. I imagine it’s a great technology. It should never have been released without 100% GUI support.”
What are you talking about? DTrace is driven by a programming language. What would the GUI do, have one button that says “Run Program”?
“Sun is sending mixed messages about Linux. I say either embrace it or dont.”
Sun is not sending out mixed signals, your personal bias does not let you understand. Sun is fully embracing Linux. Sun is fully embracing x86. But just because they acknowledge their capabilities, their quality, and are selling them, supporting them, and treating them as tier 1 platforms, doesn’t mean they can’t work on their own products. Sun believes they can do a better job with Sparc than AMD or Intel can do with x86. But they are going to prove it by giving you the choice to choose which product is better. Just the same, Sun believes they can do better with Solaris than the open source community can with Linux, but they are going to let their customers choose. Regardless of what their customers choose, Sun will support them.
I don’t get why people say Sun is confused because they push both Solaris and Linux, Sparc and x86. Especially when IBM, who sells more processor families, who sells Linux, AIX, and Windows Server is said not to be confused. The only person who is confused are the Linux zealots that can’t understand that a company can run more than one OS (and usually does) and vendors can sell more than one OS (heard of the Toyota hybrid engines GM is selling). But then again, why am I getting mad at you. Maybe your lack of understanding is due to your lack of any real world experience.
UNIX and Linux are two of the biggest competitors on the market today. Sun has been saying “Hey, look at us! We’re a Linux company like IBM now!” followed shortly by a “While we do support Linux, we believe Solaris to be superior.”. Than they say “Hey, look at us, we’re an Opensource company like Redhat now!” followed shortly by a “While we believe opensource can make us money, we will put all such projects under a liscence with so many strings attached, that its only slightly better than a propriatary solution.”. Than when someone says “Umm… are you now a linux company, or a solaris company, or both?” the response comes back “STFU! Of course we are a linux company! We have been since time immemorial. We have our full support behind linux, opensource, and community building. Oh yeah, we also think Solaris is better, that we need tight controls over our “open code”, and that our apparent lack of direction is intentional, beneficial, and just widely misunderstood”
Now, keep in mind that I think Sun puts out top knotch products, dont have too much of a problem with propriatary software, and make my living as a j2ee developer. Also, as a developer, Im not exactly in the most informed position to make comments on the state of the industry. However, I read the news, and either John Schwartz just enjoys running his mouth, or there is some kind of power struggle over at sun marketing. Regardless, that is the image they have been putting forth with their linux strategy over the last year or so.
You don’t understand why people are saying Sun is confused?
Denial: Inability to acknowledge something apparent to others. It can be an involuntary coping strategy.A defense mechanism that is demonstrated by avoidance of disagreeable realities by the mind’s refusal to acknowledge them at a conscious level. May or may not be adaptive, depending on the information being denied.
McNeally & Baumer
Greg Papadopoulos & Bill Gates
UNIX vs Windows
Schwartz vs “l” inux
Open Source is a social movement
Sun vs Microsoft – Anti Trust
Sun vs Microsoft – Java license
McNeally testifies that Microsoft is a Monopoly
The first alternative to Windows in 15 years
Sun funds SCO
Microsoft funds SCO
SCO vs IBM
HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM
“However, I read the news, and either John Schwartz just enjoys running his mouth, or there is some kind of power struggle over at sun marketing.”
If you look at Sun’s executives, they all appear to be on the same track. Sun’s marketing deptartment does release some real whoppers occasionally, but all marketing departments do that.
I wouldn’t be suprised at all if Sun’s blogs and the OpenSolaris folks displace their marketing department more and more in time. Sun is a becoming a very transparent company, relative to their competitors, and this can only be good for Sun’s customers (when Microsoft gives you a wall, it is Sun that puts in the windows (pun intended)).