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Sun Microsystems Operating Systems Software

A Comprehensive Look at Solaris 10 332

Posted by CowboyNeal from the kicking-the-tires dept.
sebFlyte writes "After linking to Mad Penguin's first look all seems to have gone quiet on the Solaris 10 front. ZDNet now has a comprehensive review up, and are cautiously positive about the OS, though, as they say: 'as an alternative to Linux, it doesn't yet deliver.'"
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A Comprehensive Look at Solaris 10 More

A Comprehensive Look at Solaris 10

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  • Lo, How The Mighty Have Fallen... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by spoonboy42 ( 146048 ) on Friday April 22, 2005 @08:10AM (#12311811)
    Seems like just yesterday people were saying Linux doesn't yet deliver as an alternative to Solaris.

    • Re:Lo, How The Mighty Have Fallen... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Saint Aardvark ( 159009 ) * on Friday April 22, 2005 @08:17AM (#12311847) Homepage Journal
      I was just thinking that. Other deja-vu provoking lines:

      We...experienced lots of basic compatibility problems. These ranged from a clash between the install program and the CD-ROM drive to -- where we could get that to work -- a failure to recognise the network or storage adapters being used.

      Sun has a long way to go before it can claim to provide the same wide platform support that's available from the top Linux vendors.

      Man, remember when everyone was saying that about Linux?

      • Sun has a long way to go before it can claim to provide the same wide platform support that's available from the top Linux vendors.

        And by releasing Solaris under CDDL which is not GPL compatible, they cannot use the thousands of GPL-based drivers included in Linux.

        Why are they limiting themselves in this fashion?
        • Why are they limiting themselves in this fashion?

          Plain and simple, because they fear competition. By being GPL, it allows others to benefit from their work (and work that they received from others). By going with CDDL, only they become the all inclusive taker. It is similar to the MS shared source. But unlike MS, when SUN's shares start sinking (and they will), Sun will move over to the GPL, still have a losing market and then state that GPL does not work.

          Somewhere down the road, companies will figure out

          • Plain and simple, because they fear competition.

            Nonsense. Sun helped pioneer competition in the OS market with their strong backing of open systems. Unix is about competition, as it is about providing implementation of open standards, which make the version of Unix you use a matter of choice, and not something you are tied to.
            • which make the version of Unix you use a matter of choice, and not something you are tied to.

              You must be young...
              • "which make the version of Unix you use a matter of choice, and not something you are tied to."

                You must be young...

                On the contrary. I have been using Unix since the 70s, so I know what I am talking about.
              • That's frickin' funny. The only indicator that you have about him would be his /. id which is in the 40 thousand range while yours is in the 600 thousand range and you assume he's young. Nice deductive skills.

                BTW, everyone used to clamor for opening standards so that Linux could be compatible with the big boys. It was all in the name of choice. Now that Linux is a big player, it's not so much about choice anymore. Hell, most of the kids on here happily install fedora or whatever with their binary driv
            • How many proprietary UNIX flavors can one run on Sparc hardware besides Solaris?
              • How many proprietary UNIX flavors can one run on Sparc hardware besides Solaris?

                That is not the point. You have a choice to compile your code for Solaris on Sparc, or HP/UX on whatever, or Linux, or AIX... that is what open systems are about.

                We were discussing the openness of the software, not the hardware, as the latter is hidden by the OS.
              • Not proprietary, but NetBSD, Linux and (iirc) OpenBSD all run fine on sparc64. Indeed, I have a vague notion Sun gave David Miller access to some big Sparc64 machines to help test Linux Sparc64 on big SMP Sparc64 boxes (but i could be wrong).

          • Re:Lo, How The Mighty Have Fallen... (Score:5, Insightful)

            by Paul Jakma ( 2677 ) on Friday April 22, 2005 @11:25AM (#12313588) Homepage Journal
            Plain and simple, because they fear competition. By being GPL, it allows others to benefit from their work (and work that they received from others). By going with CDDL, only they become the all inclusive taker. It is similar to the MS shared source. But unlike MS, when SUN's shares start sinking (and they will), Sun will move over to the GPL, still have a losing market and then state that GPL does not work.

            Rubbish. As already described several times on the blogs of important Sun people, they considered the GPL quite seriously, but found it wasn't suitable. One obvious reason is that the GPL is slightly too restrictive for OpenSolaris - not all hardware vendors want to have to release source, which coding to a GPL'd driver interface would almost certainly require. The CDDL allows ISVs to decide for themselves whether to open their code or not. Sun wrote and/or own Solaris, Sun wanted to allow others to be able to use it without having to release their modifications (remember, Sun has strong BSD roots), so Sun fixed the problems in the MPL to create the CDDL. Further, the GPL does not deal with the problem of patent litigation in any meaningful way (one of the goals for GPLv3 apparently is to do that - hopefully they'll draw from the CDDL approach to patents, which is quite nice.).

            I fail to see how working towards releasing Solaris under a liberal licence such as the CDDL qualifies as trying to "hold on to a monopoly".

            If you think this is bogus, consider that many many Linux users who are happy to bash the CDDL are using proprietary kernel drivers, particularly for graphics cards, which are in possibly in a grey legal area wrt GPL status of Linux - particularly the ATi drivers, which are (IIRC) based on DRI in some way (the NVidia drivers arent).

            Note that Sun do not have a problem with the GPL. There are lots of GPL and LGPL projects out there whose ChangeLogs contain @sun.com addresses, eg GNOME and OpenOffice to name just two (Indeed, Sun bought out and then LGPL'd OpenOffice). And I'm very involved in a GPL project myself..

            It's a real shame there is such anti-Sun hysteria on /. and other "open source" community sites. If the Sun-haters were to have their way and see Sun fail then a good[1] number of open-source hackers would be out of work (including myself).

            Thanks.

            1. And I dont include OpenSolaris hackers in that. Once OpenSolaris is out there, virtually every Sun engineer working on Solaris will be an open-source hacker too.

            • Re:Lo, How The Mighty Have Fallen... (Score:4, Insightful)

              by killjoe ( 766577 ) on Friday April 22, 2005 @01:24PM (#12314786)
              "It's a real shame there is such anti-Sun hysteria on /. and other "open source" community sites. If the Sun-haters were to have their way and see Sun fail then a good[1] number of open-source hackers would be out of work (including myself)."

              Sun will fail, not because the peanut gallery is yelling at them or making fun of them but because the management has no vision for the company and instead are flinging shit on the wall hoping something sticks. Just read the blogs of their top level execs. Either these people are manic depressive or they really do change their minds radically once a week.

              As for sun being pro GPL I don't buy it. When they came out with their patent grant they excluded all licenses except their own. To me this says they reserve the right to sue GPLed projects for patent infringement. When pushed on the matter they just weasel and flip flop.
          • Give me a break. Sun has been growing and recovering quite well lately, without the GPL. This is in no small part due to their new sever lines (yes, Sun is in no small part a hardware company). You are making a mistake if you look at them as a company like Red Hat. They are much much different.


            It is pretty arrogant to assume that the GPL is the key to making or breaking a company.

          • Wow. That's a pretty radical interpretation of the text. Companies are avoiding Gnu because they fear competition? No. Companies are avoiding Gnu because they have a responsibility to their shareholders to make good decisions. There's no way that releasing software under terms that (1) not merely allow but actually require copies to be given away for free, (2) has a tendency to pull any code that's linked to it into the same quagmire, and (3) leads to lawsuit after lawsuit after lawsuit could be considered
        • And by releasing Solaris under CDDL which is not GPL compatible, they cannot use the thousands of GPL-based drivers included in Linux.


          Why are they limiting themselves in this fashion?

          They could not use those drivers regardless. Porting UNIX drivers to Linux and vice versa is a little bit more involved than porting a shell script.

          They can look at the drivers to learn what they need to know, which might be a good start.
        • > they cannot use the thousands of GPL-based drivers included in Linux.

          What exactly is stopping that?
          If the drivers are under GPL, you can grab them and compile them on your target platform, and use them, just don't distribute them in compiled binary. Only downside is that you need to have compiler installed in that system where you plan to use the drivers.

          Sun should just "emulate" the linux way of supporting drivers for all the devices they don't support natively yet.
          The source is there, and since it'

        • Why are they limiting themselves in this fashion?

          Because it also protects the Solaris code from being plundered for other OSes. When the origional 'Solaris is being opensourced' stories hit, I had the distinct impression that comments along the lines of 'Great, now we can port Solaris feature X to Linux!' vastly outnumbered comments about improving Solaris.

          By putting it under its own license, you have the freedom of improving Solaris if you need to (and thus have many of the advantages of opensource

    • Re:Lo, How The Mighty Have Fallen... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Actually, that is not an contradiction at all. Linux is no replacement for Solaris and vice versa. A 40ton truck is no replacement for a family car, but that does not mean they are obsolete.
      • Have you used Solaris and Linux? Linux is a complete replacement for Solaris. Solaris on Sun hardware is better in the same way that OS X on Apple hardware is better (synergy!), but Solaris doesn't ever win out over Linux because of its capabilities.
        • Errr...

          You appear not to have done very much with Solaris. It seems pretty clear that Linux cannot support very sophisticated hardware (say, more than 8 CPUs), whereas Solaris can.

          Even ignoring that, having used both OSes, I prefer Solaris. Linux distribution chaos more or less removes the advantage of what 'commercial' support there is for Linux. Thus, you can't say "Sybase runs on Linux". You can only say "Sybase runs on some particular versions of some particular distributions of Linux" - and those ver
      • Linux is no replacement for Solaris and vice versa. A 40ton truck...

        This incorrect perception that Solaris is only good for mid-to-large systems is Sun's biggest problem in the marketplace -- The demand for 8+ way UNIX systems is declining sharply, while sales of cheap Xeon/Opteron servers is booming. However, there's nothing about Solaris which makes it unsuitable for lowend boxes -- it's just a minor tuning issue.

        With AMD/Intel's dualcore chips coming out, you'll see "low-end" 4-way Dells for $2000 by
    • Seems like just yesterday people were saying Linux doesn't yet deliver as an alternative to Solaris.

      Er, that's because it doesn't. They're different OSs tuned for different goals.
      • Not so, they are very much directly competing in the same market for the same customers.
        • Not so, they are very much directly competing in the same market for the same customers.

          'Linux' covers a wide range of distributions, which are tailored for a wide range of uses. The primary competitor for Solaris is RedHat Enterprise Linux. This is not the same as 'Linux' in general. For example, Solaris is not aimed at the desktop, like Mandrake.
    • Seems like just yesterday people were saying Linux doesn't yet deliver as an alternative to Solaris

      Obviously you didn't RTFA. What the FA says (as opposed to what the Slashdot blurb says) is "Sun has a long way to go before it can claim to provide the same wide platform support that's available from the top Linux vendors." Nobody ever claimed, yesterday or the day before, that Linux supports fewer platforms than Solaris.

  • Comprehensive? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Conrad ( 600139 ) on Friday April 22, 2005 @08:11AM (#12311814)
    'tis but a few paragraphs long and summarised thus:

    - it's not open source
    - it's picky about its hardware
    - Linux compatibility limited to i686 RHEL3 compatibility
    - good docs, pay-for support, bundled stuff
    - it's proprietry, stick to Linux

    • Re:Comprehensive? (Score:5, Informative)

      by blastwave ( 757518 ) on Friday April 22, 2005 @09:08AM (#12312216)
      Well, personally I'd rather have an OS that has about a billion dollars in research and development behind it as well as support that doesn't cost me an arm and a leg. A license of SUSE with support can cost about $900 a year. More or less. I can put in Solaris 10 dirt cheap on server grade hardware and sleep at night. No, it does not have support for the latest USP coffee cup warmer and I don't care for that anyways.

      I want excellent support for the components that matter in the server room; fibre, network, Opteron processors and big Sparc. Multi-core is just iceing on the cake.

      If I want a snazzy looking workstation also then I'll put in pkg-get from Blastwave and then install everything that I'd want in one shot.

      Oh, and unless you have been living under a rock on mars for the last year then you would know that Solaris 10 is open source and the pilot group is well entrenched. We will roll out the source when we have all our ducks lined up and ready.

      Dennis at Blastwave
      http://www.blastwave.org/
      An OpenSolaris Community Site

      ps: we can write our own drivers for the USB coffee cup warmer if we really want that. :)

    • Re:Comprehensive? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by AKAImBatman ( 238306 ) *
      'tis but a few paragraphs long and summarised thus:

      No kidding. I written a few reviews (see my journal for some of them) and all I could think of when reading this was "weak". As in, "Where's all the content?" Ok, we said we had installation problems, we said it's proprietary, and then we spend the rest of the article on Linux compatibility?!? Do these people have any idea what they're reviewing?

      Unfortunately, this seems to be a trend in Unix style OS reviews. Linux magazines in particular tend to be *r

  • I use Windows servers. (Score:3, Funny)

    by bigtallmofo ( 695287 ) on Friday April 22, 2005 @08:12AM (#12311819)
    To start with, it's faster than any previous Solaris implementation, with a slick new IP stack just one of many performance enhancements.

    What's it like to have a new release of your server operating system that isn't slower?

  • Linux Alternative? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dreamchaser ( 49529 ) on Friday April 22, 2005 @08:13AM (#12311826) Homepage Journal
    'as an alternative to Linux, it doesn't yet deliver

    Does anyone actually think it will? It looks like a fine upgrade for shops that are already heavily invested in Solaris, but I highly doubt that Solaris 10 (or 11 or 12 or 25 for that matter) will ever really be a 'Linux alternative'. Why would anyone using Linux go for a closed, proprietary Unix flavor? They cattle are stampeding in the other direction and will continue to do so.

    • Re:Linux Alternative? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by rpozz ( 249652 ) on Friday April 22, 2005 @08:28AM (#12311907)
      Solaris isn't going to be closed for long. When it is opened up, I'd imagine that the hardware incompatiblity problem will go away very, very quickly as people start to write drivers for it.

      Anyone who's used Solaris will know it's a really, really good OS which is arguably more stable and secure than Linux (flame-proof suit on), and has good backwards compatibility.

      Competition is always a good thing. In the long run this will be good for both Linux and Solaris.
      • That I agree with. I have used Solaris and it is a very powerful OS. My only quibble was with the 'Linux alternative' part.

        By the time Solaris gets to the point where it is open and has all sorts of drivers available, will Sun even still be a player though? Linux adoption is growing by leaps and bounds along with it's capabilities. Solaris adoption is at best static and is probably in decline.

        Then again, Sun could always pull a SCO after they open everything up. Wait a few months then claim 'Look! Th
        • Then again, Sun could always pull a SCO after they open everything up. Wait a few months then claim 'Look! Those Linux hippies are stealing our code and ideas!'. Yes that's a joke and not a likely scenario ;)

          It's not funny. If Johnathan Schwartz can take out Red Hat this way, he will. Yeah, it's just business, but if he tries to hit Red Hat or Novell this way, so goes Debian, Gentoo and the rest.

          Sun is a competitive, not collaborative company, so I'm not what you would call trusting of them.

          Soko
      • Solaris isn't going to be closed for long.
        There's a lot of doubt [groklaw.net] about Sun's ability to be open. The CDDL is not going to attract FOSS developers.
        • Well, I'm a "FOSS" developer technically, and it's attracted me. You were saying?
      • A good OS... compared to Linux, or compared to the other varieties of Unix?

        As a "Linux alternative" I'd say it is ok. As an alternative to AIX, HPUX, Tru64, IRIX, Mach even... well, it is ok.

        The only reason I've seen a company choose Solaris has been cost. They wanted HP (Tru64) or IBM (AIX), but couldn't afford it. So they go with Sun (Solaris) because it is better than MS (Windows).

        Otherwise, it is a very middle-of-the-road Unix. Not great, not spectacularly bad (ala SCO).

        Oh, and if any of you are hav
      • Parts of Solaris will be entirely closed. And Solaris will have a very restrictive "open" license.

        Besides, Sun has been talking about opening solaris for seven years now. Hard to believe it will ever actually happen.
      • Solaris isn't going to be closed for long. When it is opened up, I'd imagine that the hardware incompatiblity problem will go away very, very quickly as people start to write drivers for it.

        It remains to be seen if they'll open everything or just what suits them.
        If they open enough that an unaffiliated party can build the system, then
        device drivers might be forthcoming.

      • ...start a "contributed hardware driver" website. This should allow anyone to contribute a driver (or changes to the driver) with documentation of what it supports or what it fixes.

        The website should have a radiobutton for the license chosen by the author (BSD, SCSL or whatever Sun is using, etc.).

        Members who have contributed drivers should be able to "mod up/down" other drivers. Sun engineers should then act as "moderators" and include portions of these drivers in the base distribution. dmesg output sh

    • It's not "closed" and "proprietary" - it's an Open System based on Open Standards (in fact it set many of them) and it will be Open Source soon.

      I don't work for Sun any more so I have no vested interest, but please, get the facts right.

      will ever really be a 'Linux alternative'

      It is intended to be a (cheaper, better) alternative to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, not "Linux" in general.

      They cattle are stampeding in the other direction and will continue to do so.

      So they are. And unfortunately, I think the Su

    • Unix != closed, proprietary (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Decaff ( 42676 ) on Friday April 22, 2005 @09:39AM (#12312488)
      Why would anyone using Linux go for a closed, proprietary Unix flavor?

      Because most of what is done on such systems uses the open, non-proprietary features.

      Unix (and similar systems such as Linux) has been such a success over the years because they implement open standards: TCP/IP networking, POSIX, X-Windows etc. This use of open standards and APIs explains why it is so much easier to port programs between different versions of Unix than to other OSes.

      To say that Solaris is a 'closed, proprietary Unix flavor' is self-contradictory. Unix is a set of open standards. What is proprietary is the implementation. If you use GNU tools on Solaris, you can even avoid most of that. Commercial Unix users usually don't care about whether or not the kernel source is available; all they care about is the quality of implementations and price.
    • It's not at all hard to transition people off of CDE. The first time you login, Solaris 10 asks which windowing system you prefer to use - CDE or JDS. Either work fine, for both root and ordinary users. In our case, we have a pretty heavy deployment of HP-UX and Solaris engineering desktops, with lots of custom buttons (actions), preinstalled printer queues, etc. Eventually we'll transition those, but it's nice not having to do it right now.

  • Leave it to a PC mag to not know... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 22, 2005 @08:15AM (#12311839)
    Solaris 10 on an ultrasparc is the best thing cince sliced bread. It is the best solaris yet and makes older sun hardware very useable. YES I have gentoo running on ultrasparcs and a sparcstation 5 and those have their place. But if you really need to run sun specific software on sun hardware solaris 10 is certianly a step foreward.

    Maybe if a PC mag would stick to their intel and windurs operating systems they might continue to be somewhat knowlegeable...

    what's next? SCO magazine going to comment on OSX?

    • Re:Leave it to a PC mag to not know... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Ubergrendle ( 531719 ) on Friday April 22, 2005 @08:53AM (#12312061) Journal
      To my (limited) knowledge, Linux does not have anything that is comparable to:
      1. dtrace
      2. zones/containers (e.g. kernel isolation)
      3. 128-bit file systems (ZFS)

      Also, there is no longer a 'secure' Solaris version, which was typically used by the US government. Solaris 10 is (apparently) secure enough 'out of the box' to be natively deployed in the CIA, NSA, etc...
      • It's worth pointing out that the need for features such as the ones you point out is extremely minimal and constricted to the highest echelons of computing.

        We have a Solaris box at work, running Oracle. It's got about 80GB of data. I imagine this is fairly common in the lower end Sun shops.

        I'd ditch it for Linux in a SECOND if the program it was running wasn't being phased out anyways. It's a piece of shit OS, seriously. It's a pain to get things done. It took me 2 hours to figure out the right command ma
        • It took me 2 hours to figure out the right command magic yesterday to get a local queue to a remote LPD. (Yeah I know you can install Cups on it, I'm just saying, *by default*)

          Solaris provides a highly standard implementation of Unix System V printing. The administration of this can be found in a few minutes via Google.

        • Re:Leave it to a PC mag to not know... (Score:4, Informative)

          by MrMickS ( 568778 ) on Friday April 22, 2005 @10:51AM (#12313247) Homepage Journal
          I don't agree with the parent at old. I suspect that they have knowledge of the benefits of them. I'll try and educate a little.

          ZFS. The 128 bit nature is the thing that is touted most of all, however this is a headline figure that can be latched onto by journalists and PHBs. The real advantages of ZFS are to do with the elimination of complex volume management systems to handle mirroring and data integrity. Volume management could be called a high end feature so ignore that an move onto data integrity. ZFS uses a copy on write approach when writing blocks a opposed to overwriting existing blocks. The net result is should the system fail during operation the file system will not be corrupt. The last write may be lost but the filesystem will be okay. No more fsck. Another feature is when mirroring ZFS stores a checksum of each block in a parent block. If one of the mirrors has bad blocks ZFS can determine not only that there is an error but which of the two alternative blocks to use.

          Zones. What amazes me is how many people just don't see the potential of zones from a security standpoint. Using zones you can make the base system secure, to the point of only allowing SSH access from specific networks/hosts. Zones can then be created for each application running on the host and resources allocated appropriately. This allows a real separation between administration and user access. Even for a server at home running say a web server and email running each of those in a separate zone with no need for general user accounts is safer than running all services on a traditional system.

        • Which version of Solaris? I'm guessing an old version.

          Comparing old versions of Solaris to Linux today is as fair as comparing Linux circa kernel-2.0-era to Solaris 10.
      • To my (limited) knowledge, Linux does not have anything that is comparable to:
        2. zones/containers (e.g. kernel isolation)

        That is not true. Linux can have zones too. See UserMode Linux [sourceforge.net]

      • ZFS availability (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Troy Baer ( 1395 )
        Is ZFS really available yet? The last time I looked (admittedly a couple months ago), it wasn't...

        BTW, IBM's SAN File System [ibm.com] appears to do more or less everything that ZFS does, and it's available for Linux.

  • How times change... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ender- ( 42944 ) on Friday April 22, 2005 @08:21AM (#12311870) Homepage Journal
    as an alternative to Linux, it doesn't yet deliver.

    Am I the only person who finds this statement insanely hilarious? Maybe it's just my time spent as a sysadmin, but it seems to me that just a few/several years ago Linux was said to not deliver as an alternative to Solaris. A statement like that has got to really sting Sun.

    My, my how times change.

    Ender-

    • Re:How times change... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by turgid ( 580780 )
      Am I the only person who finds this statement insanely hilarious?

      Yes, but this is ZDNet, the M$ Windoze shills and fanboys, we are talking about here.

    • Re:How times change... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 22, 2005 @08:37AM (#12311970)
      Ummm.... I never considered Solaris and Linux to be in the same league. I mean, Solaris is what I run on big iron, Linux is something I run on little x86 servers. I know that each OS can run perfectly fine on the other, but really, Solaris with less than 4 processors has never been any good. And Linux with 4 or more is getting better, but the entire software base is lacking there.

      Things you expect from Solaris software :
      - Lots of threads (good for multiple CPU's)
      - Built-in clustering options, use of message passing
      - Efficient use of large memory
      - A small collection of extensively developed applications that communicate with one another

      Things you expect from Linux software :
      - Optimization for one or two processors
      - Tight loops at the GUI event handler
      - A large selection of non-integrated packages

      They serve different markets. You can spend a lot more time setting up your servers and such, but Solaris is a lot simpler overall.

    • Re:How times change... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by FidelCatsro ( 861135 ) <fidelcatsro&gmail,com> on Friday April 22, 2005 @08:54AM (#12312080) Journal
      I find it hilarious for other reasons , Having worked as a sys-admin on solaris and linux I know that each system has their strengths.
      Such a blanket statment is totaly useless and the review was entierly to vauge .
      I am rather dispondant that things like this pass for journalism nowadays .
      It is grand that Linux is getting such recognition , but i would rather have it from a fair review as opposed to this

  • Where is the comprehensive review ? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gorim ( 700913 ) on Friday April 22, 2005 @08:27AM (#12311905)
    All they did was test out installing on sundry hardware platforms. Thats no real life test because people who use Solaris will match the hardware to the OS, and not the other way around.

    They briefly mentioned Janus, ZFS, zones (maybe) and the improved tcp/ip stack.

    They said it was faster than previous versions.

    Thats it ?

    Oh, and its not a good alternative for linux ? On the sole basis that you can't install it on any hardware ? Utter BS! Yes, its a true statement, but probably the worst basis for comparison.

    Having worked side-by-side with thousands of CPUs of Linux and Solaris, its still Linux that isn't a good alternative to Solaris.

  • Sun, where is your leadership? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DaGoodBoy ( 8080 ) on Friday April 22, 2005 @08:29AM (#12311916) Homepage
    I remember cutting my teeth on SunOS and Solaris starting back in 93/94. They were amazing innovators and almost single-handedly brought Unix into the enterprise. Here is a short list of technologies that were developed largely by Sun:

    o The name service switch (nsswitch)
    o Network Information Service (NIS/NIS+)
    o Network File System (NFS)
    o Pluggable Authentication Module (PAM)

    I know we make fun of NIS and NFS today as being old and insecure, but in 1993 it was the only way to provide single-sign-on and meet other enterprise requirements for scalability.

    I ask Sun, where are you innovating now? Are you providing leadership in LDAP / Directory Services? Nope. Are you providing leadership in distributed computing? Nope, that would be Linux and Open Source. Are you providing leadership in software development? Well, you developed Java, but it took the Free / Open Source guys to make Ant, Junit, Jmeter and other tools to make it really usable.

    If Sun wants to drive, it needs to stop complaining from the back seat. It needs to start acting like it did back in the 1990's by developing solutions to enterprise problems and then showing the rest of the market how its done. Leaders lead and right now Sun is like some crotchity old man complaining about "the damn kids". Well, "the damn kids" are too busy driving right now to care about your CDDL and Solaris 10.

    DaGoodBoy

    • Re:Sun, where is your leadership? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Jon Peterson ( 1443 ) <jonNO@SPAMsnowdrift.org> on Friday April 22, 2005 @09:32AM (#12312436) Homepage
      Sun made a few huge mistakes:

      0. Not ditching the workstation market soon enough. Sun used to make lots of workstations. Anyone on the outside could see Intel/NT was going to eat these up in seconds. Sun held on far too long, although this didn't wipe them out like it did SGI.

      1. Profiteering from the demise of HP/IBM/SGI. For a period of about 10 years, Solaris on Sparc was pretty much the only safe solution for many large organisations. Sun realised this and gouged customers pretty heavily. This made senior IT people hate them, and accelerated the move to NT.

      2. Ditching Solaris on Intel. Sun used to make a free as in beer distro of Solaris to run on Intel. It had limited hardware support, but it was easy enough to get going on the machines from the big vendors. This was an excellent way of getting Solaris used for things that might have been shifted to NT or Linux, but for some stupid reason they just cut support for it on day. Pissed off huge numbers of customers. I think the idea was they were introducing new low-end sparc machines that were going to be 'as cheap as Intel servers'. Yeah, right - let's compete with Dell, that's work.

      3. Java. I don't think Sun has made much money from Java, and it's been a huge distraction. Are Sun the solid trusted makers of server hardware and server OSes, or are they funky cool bleeding edge software guys changing the face of the internet? Rather obviously the former, but disasterous crap like JavaStations and so on took up a huge amount of time and effort.

      Sun should have made Java an open specification like, err, EVERY OTHER FRIGGING LANGUAGE EVER MADE, instead of fighting idiotic lawsuits with MS (who were in the right for a change).
      • 3. Java. I don't think Sun has made much money from Java, and it's been a huge distraction.

        It has been one of the best things they have ever done. They have made a considerable amount of money from J2EE licensing and J2ME.

        Sun should have made Java an open specification like, err, EVERY OTHER FRIGGING LANGUAGE EVER MADE,

        Java is an open specification. Anyone can implement it, and many do. Your 'every other language' can't possibly include Visual Basic - highly popular, and totally closed.

        instead o
  • 5GB for a minimum install? So much for making a "Schwarz's floppy which has a root filesystem and is also bootable".
    At least now we know how many gigabytes the kitchen sink takes up: 2
    • I really don't know where that number comes from, but it just isn't accurate. At all. I've got several machines running Solaris 10, and most of them are under 1gb for the OS. If you avoid the compilers and other development tools, you can easily get it inside of 500mb. The "minimum install" is more like 175mb out-of-box, but that is quite bare-bones.

  • All about the interface and usability (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 22, 2005 @08:32AM (#12311930)
    Let's face it. You can have the most unbelievable OS on the planet with the most advanced features, but if people can't get a hold of it and can't figure out how to use the features, why bother. As the article stated Solaris 10 is a no-brainer for existing Solaris customers.

    What Linux *represents* (and definitely does not yet provide), is ease of use combined with power. There are very high-end computing companies (like SGI) that are still in business but aren't really relevant to an "end user". But Linux, by virtue of running on commodity hardware, becomes much more available, and has a level of integration with the GUI and hardware that Solaris does not even come close to.

    That said, on the point of GUI integration, Solaris->Linux as Linux->Windows. Windows makes everything intuitive and possible from the GUI, with the exception of perhaps .001 % of what one might want to do. Linux is getting better, but it is still severely lacking.

    It seems overall that Linux has a GUI just for looks, just so that it doesn't look archaic, but it is not expected to run in entirely in such a manner. The developers need to take responsibility for this and make it a priority. Sit and watch someone try to do something, and then go fix it. Stop scratching their own itch and scratch someone elses for a while.

    With Solaris, though, you really can't even begin to manage a system without the command line. It's at least 50 times worse than Linux in this regard. You can't add drivers, configure hardware, configuring networking, or do any of that from the GUI. It's really targeted more at the enterprise, which is fine. But don't represent it as something that I, as a small shop (that runs tons of Java development stuff) would bother with. I have five customers all running SuSE and I won't go near Solaris because it's such a pain to use from the GUI. I have enough to do without getting back into CLI system administration.

  • Oh great, another one of THOSE articles... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Octorian ( 14086 ) on Friday April 22, 2005 @08:36AM (#12311963) Homepage
    Yeah, we've been getting a slew of articles these days on Solaris 10 that "review" the product by simply reading the marketing materials. Also, yet another article on Solaris 10 that tries to only look at the x86 version, and then complains when it doesn't measure up. Well guess what? The x86 version of Solaris has NEVER measured up. Sol 10 is Sun's first attempt at changing that, and it truely won't go anywhere (beyond their approved-compatable hardware) until 3rd parties get more invested in development.

    Solaris 10 is first and foremost an UltraSPARC-based OS. That's where it runs best, supports almost all the hardware, and is all around a good thing. (Though the x86-64 version should be interesting down the line, as I hear Sun is now working on Opteron servers entirely of their own motherboard design.)

    I just wish, for once, someone would review the OS by actually USING IT on the proper hardware, and talk about new and interesting features that aren't blabbed about on the shiney sheets thrown around by marketing.

    For example, one of the biggest and most obvious new features of Solaris 10 (that doesn't make the list of "Zones! Self-healing! ZFS, when we finish it!" would have to be the Service Management Facility. They've completely redone the entire framework of how services are managed (i.e. "init.d", "inetd", etc.), to even include service dependency tracking and allow non-dependent services to start in parallel (making big systems boot a lot faster).

    At least all of the MacOS X articles by journals like this were the result of actually trying to use and explore the OS itself. (Even if they were formulaic, and pretty much involved saying "this is cool", "hey, the /etc files don't do anything," "oh, they use something called NetInfo," "back to babbling")
  • As desktop OS I suppose. As much as I like linux, Solaris IS a good choice for servers - and the download is gratis, and it will be open sourced soon [opensolaris.org].

    I don't think Solaris will beat redhat & cia though. With linux 2.6 scaling to 512 CPUs boxes and huge storage devices, is no longer a toy

  • Utter and absolute tosh... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by victorhooi ( 830021 ) on Friday April 22, 2005 @08:39AM (#12311978)
    I think I'd have to agree with the guy above that this is an utter load of tosh...


    "Doesn't yet deliver?".


    On the basis that *gasp* it's proprietary? When was the last time you saw a ZDNet reviewer lambast Windows because it's proprietary? The reviewer sounds like some childish linux fanboy attempting to take cheap potshots at a sturdy, well-featured, commercial OS with a heck of a lot of new *useful* features (Dtrace, Janus, ZFS, all of which he either fails to mention, or writes some bogus statement showing he doesn't understand them).


    Here's a quote from a osnews comment on the story:

    Very Funny
    By Smartpatrol (IP: ---.galileo.com) - Posted on 2005-04-21 22:34:38
    I almost choked when he mentioned Solaris as a Linux alternative....What?

    To begin with, it's important to understand that you're still dealing with a proprietary OS here.

    So what! spoken like a true Linux zealot! Its a question of usability and picking the best tool to enable business. Not whether or not the product you choose supports the OSS religion or not...what a wanker this guy is.


    Speaking of features, his comments are supreficial at best, and show a profound lack of knowledge. He never mentions what this magical hardware that doesn't work with the OS is, he is assumedly too lazy to see the DVD image download on the page he links to, and he whines childishly about the download - can ZDNet somehow not afford cable internet?


    Also, last time I checked, many linux distros came on quite a few cds...let's see, Fedora comes on how many discs again? How about Suse? Mandrake? Even my beloved Slackware is two...


    How about judging an OS on useability, features, stability, and how it fits the purposes it was designed for? Not some blatant rant on your own fanatical adherence to your pet ideology, and some idiotic statements on a product you probably haven't even actually tested...and reading comments on alt.linux doesn't count as testing it...


    cya,
    victor

  • Zones (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 22, 2005 @08:41AM (#12311989)
    The real power of Solaris 10 is the creation of zones. You can basically setup a VMWare-type environment on the same server.

    Think: giving you programmer full root access to program and muck up what he wants on the development zone or giving a Web designer a place to test run a new interation/dev web site without going live. You can basically let your devs play and play without worry to the production side of the system; saving costs for a development environment.

    The zone is a fully function Solaris/Unix environment with it's own network connectivity and services. All packages that you want to have installed in that environment derive from the main install.

  • Solaris 10 JDS 3 Screenshots (Score:4, Informative)

    by linuxbeta ( 837266 ) on Friday April 22, 2005 @08:42AM (#12311996)
    -> screenshots [osdir.com]

  • Solaris 10 article and comments (Score:5, Informative)

    by nemaispuke ( 624303 ) on Friday April 22, 2005 @08:48AM (#12312027)
    There is another article out there where Solaris 10 was reviewed by an actual Solaris administrator and not some Linux user:

    http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=9865

    If you need a GUI to set up a network interface, maybe you need to go back to Windows, because you aren't going to be doing it over a serial link! Solaris was built with Enterprise computing in mind, not "making it easy" for people who don't want to type.

    And if that is the quality of articles from PC Magazine nowadays, I'm glad I don't read it anymore! Because I thought "yet another whiny Linux zealot bitching about Solaris" article, what bullshit. If PC Magazine is going to review Solaris, do it right or don't do it at all!

    • If you need a GUI to set up a network interface, maybe you need to go back to Windows, because you aren't going to be doing it over a serial link! Solaris was built with Enterprise computing in mind, not "making it easy" for people who don't want to type.

      I wouldn't agree with that. A person who can admin a linux box over a serial link, might not be able to admin a sun box. On linux I perfer to use the console to edit the config files. But I was recently handed 5 solaris 8 boxes and was completely lost.

  • Unrealistic to compare (Score:4, Interesting)

    by inflex ( 123318 ) on Friday April 22, 2005 @09:00AM (#12312144) Homepage Journal
    Solaris is not meant to be a used in the same vein as Linux.

    I'd like to see linux /realistically/ scale in the same fasion as Solaris does on things like the E25K's and other large iron systems.

    No doubt solaris scores as "badly" in some areas relative to linux as linux does relative to solaris in others.

    Nothing to see here, usual hippie fanatics at work.

  • Well, maybe not. ;-)

    What about a review of its stability, its security, its speed? All they wrote is it doesn't run linux apps well, it doesn't have zfs, and it won't run in a virtual machine. How was this comprehensive?

  • A "comprehensive" review, my ass (Score:5, Insightful)

    by oldmanmtn ( 33675 ) on Friday April 22, 2005 @09:17AM (#12312310)
    The review is one page long. There are two paragraphs that list new features, with damn close to zero explanation of what they actually are, and absolutely no indication that the author even tried them. There is no discussion of the benefits of those features, how well they work, how easy/hard they are to use, what the performance implications are, what applications the reviewer tried, or anything.

    The review states:

    Unfortunately it's at this point that the Solaris proposition starts to lose some of it lustre. Yes, you can download and install it just like Red Hat or SuSE Linux, but there the similarities end, making Solaris 10 far less of an obvious choice for companies looking for a Linux alternative.

    What does that even mean? What "similarities" between Solaris and Linux is he looking for and what benefits do those similarities deliver to the customer? How does the absence of these unspecified similarities reduce the "lustre" on Solaris "proposition"? This may be the single dumbest sentence I've ever seen in a review of any product.

    To begin with, it's important to understand that you're still dealing with a proprietary OS here.

    And?

    He then goes on to complain about the Linux compatibility feature's poor emulation. It's not clear how he is able to test this, since he admits that it's not even shipped as part of the product yet.

    Let's give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he isn't just making shit up, and that he actually does have super-special access to software that Sun hasn't shipped. Maybe there is a reason Sun chose not to ship that code yet? Why is the shipping product being criticized for the quality of code that was deliberately left out of it?

    This review is just a shoddy piece of work. ZDnet should be embarrassed to have their name on it and Slashdot should be embarrassed that one of their editors believes that this is a "comprehensive" review.

  • Comprehensive as in brief.
    Seriously this review is lacking in several areas and only grazes over some features and some lacking.

  • You want a comprehensive look at Solaris? (Score:4, Informative)

    by sjvn ( 11568 ) <sjvn AT vna1 DOT com> on Friday April 22, 2005 @09:22AM (#12312351) Homepage
    Try this one on for size:

    http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1774989,00. as p

    It, along with the MadPenguin review, are the best third-party reviews out there on Sun's newest OS.

    Steven

  • Solaris 10 on X86 (Score:2, Interesting)

    by rdavis542 ( 878124 )
    I'd like to say that running Solaris 10 on a homegrown AMD XP 1800+ with a VIA chipset is a great advance for the OS. Of course you still need a specific NIC (3Com), but it has made advances in its compatibilty with X86 hardware. Take a look at this http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/ [sun.com] if you are interested in running 10 on a X86 machine. It's still pretty rigourous and you'll more than likely have more success running it on a Dell/HP workstation but 10 has opened the doors for better X86 hardware support.
  • The article on ZDNET is not my idea of comprehensive. It is also very wrong in certain areas. For example it claims that the cryptographic framework came from Trusted Solaris, it didn't [ I know it didn't because I was one of the lead architects and developers for it ] it is a completely new Solaris 10 features.

  • Ridiculous (Score:3, Funny)

    by elmegil ( 12001 ) * on Friday April 22, 2005 @02:30PM (#12315582) Homepage Journal
    ZDNet now has a comprehensive review up

    If that one-pager counts as comprehensive, I'm Bill Gates.

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