open and free license? eerrmmm
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| tuxchick Sep 15, 2005 3:13 PM EDT |
I've never used Solaris, but I've heard plenty of Solaris admins sigh heavily and wish Linux were as good, or that Solaris would run on x86. I've always been curious how the two really compare- is it just sepia-toned memories of olden times? Are there things that Solaris can do that Linux can't? Are these nostalgic Solaris admins comparing to the last Linux they tried, RH 5? To me it's like wanting Mac OS to run on x86; that is, pointless. It's the marriage of software and hardware that makes them special. After reading this review this still seems to be the case. I wonder about the author's interpretation of the Solaris license. The free-beer part is nice, but as near as I can tell the openess is one-way- Sun wants to own all code developed by independent developers. Sooo...I'm still confused. |
| cjcox Sep 15, 2005 3:24 PM EDT |
Let's see... I've used Sun product since the old Motorola based ones... I've been using, programming and administrating Unix since 1983. The Solaris admins for the most part are just plain wrong. While it is true that there are some nice features in Solaris that are not in Linux (yet)... the list is probably 2 to 3 times as long for features present in GNU/Linux for which there is NO similar feature found in Solaris. Most Solaris admins, once they REALLY try Linux, find themselves deploying Linux more and more. The dtrace thing is nice and the containers are better than just a BSD jail like thing... but not as nice in some ways as Xen. I think Linux will get a dtrace like addition at some point (some of it is already happening I believe) and not even Sun has their mega, ultra, super, duper new 128-bit filesystem ready yet (can't really compare anything to bugware). Regardless... even if Solaris had all the features of a GNU/Linux system, there's still the whole "control" thing. Deploy Solaris (or even OpenSolaris) and you will have all of your eggs in one basket so to speak. The yokes on you when Sun cries out, "Abandon ship!" |
| tadelste Sep 15, 2005 4:13 PM EDT |
cjcox paints a fairly good picture. To just build on his points, I don't know many (if any) senior Solaris admins who really use Linux today that would support the claim that solaris is superior. Some time back, say seven years, I think Solaris administration was really awesome. At Ericsson, 2 Solaris admins supported more users than 25 Microsoft CPs. Somewhere around 2000, Solaris innovation slowed down. Sun had done a remarkable job of selling their hardware into the telecommunications and Internet Service provider verticals and the software took a back seat. Sun's proprietary processors also didn't keep pace and started losing sales to commodity based hardware suppliers. IBM also made Sun a primary target and took away a lot of Sun's customers. One of the things I dislike about Solaris administration has to do with "waiting around". It takes forever to boot a Solaris machine and it's difficult to bring one back from the dead. You don't have virtual terminals so you're pretty well stuck if an X session freezes. If someone like cjcox has strong command-line skills and writes his own scripts to do administration, I can't see why someone would prefer Solaris to Linux today. Sometimes people simply like one system over another because of habit. I think that's more of an emotional issue than a rational one. |
| cjcox Sep 18, 2005 2:32 PM EDT |
In all fairness, Solaris 10 does boot very quickly now. Not sure if journaling is now the default on their ufs filesystem or not. It's easily corrected though. Ufs does NOT like coming down hard. Not that many filesystems do.. but you almost always have to intervene as root (fsck won't recover) with Solaris on boot (unless you turn on journaling). Just something else I thought of. Solaris has never "wowed" me with something. I guess dtrace is nice though. Not sure if that is a "wow" yet. Back when Windows was still young, Sun and the other commercial Unix vendors basically rolled over and allowed Microsoft to have the desktop and then allowed them to start establishing a foothold in the datacenter. The only ones they (Sun etc.) can blame for the success of Microsoft in the corporate enterprise is themselves. I'd rather use Solaris than Microsoft. But IMHO, Linux is far more usable across the enterprise than Solaris is. |
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