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Sun Puts its Weight Behind Ubuntu Linux
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Wed May 17, 2006 12:34 PM
from the stepping-stones-to-success dept.
from the stepping-stones-to-success dept.
fak3r writes "Sun today announced that they are putting their weight behind Ubuntu Linux. While Ubuntu has been many people's desktop Linux choice for a few years now, with its Debian heritage, you can see what kind of server it could be. Slap that on the new Sun 1Us with the new Niagra T1's CPU, the one that'll have four, six or eight cores each, and go to town."
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With friends like these... (Score:5, Funny)
But it could be worse, it could be "Ubuntu, supported by SGI"
Re:With friends like these... (Score:5, Funny)
At least you won't have to hunt down and install j2se. /P
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As an aside... (Score:3, Informative)
Conversly, Solaris 10 on opteron ==
Re:With friends like these... (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:With friends like these... (Score:5, Insightful)
When you're automatically rebuilding a Linux box, and you only want to re-install the OS and not blow away the data on the SAN, this would be a godsend.
At the moment, we install Linux on
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would Sun put all their weight behind apt-get? (Score:5, Interesting)
apt-get is not a Linux distribution (Score:5, Informative)
Merits of dpkg aside, SUN may give standards compliance a high priority in its products, and like it or not in order to comply with ISO23360 the operating system MUST support the installation and management of RPMs (it need not be the native package system of the OS, but ALL ISO23360 compliant applicaitons are distributed as RPM packages). SUN could very likely contribute its resources towards making Ubuntu comply with ISO23360. Mark Shuttleworth himself stated that this was a goal for upcoming Ubuntu releases so they would be on the same page. Therefore if the ISO23360 standard gains traction it could mean that installing RPMs on Ubuntu machines could become more common than you'd think, especially for companies like my employer--large enterprises that salivate over anything with "ISO##### Compliant" on it...and guess what SUN's customer base is?
Oh yeah...perhaps I should explain what this ISO23360 is. Basically it is a standard that specifies a set of requirements for Linux-based OSes (file structures, included shared libraries, software packaging format, etc) to allow compliant application software to be easily deployed and executed on any compliant OS without the need to recompile and/or re-package for each OS as is the case today with Linux systems. It is more commonly known as LSB3.1
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RPM in ubuntu :: HOWTO (Score:4, Informative)
$ sudo apt-get install rpm
$ sudo rpm --force-all -ivh PACKAGE.rpm
Alternative 2 (cleaner, four steps):
$ sudo apt-get install rpm alien fakeroot
$ fakeroot alien PACKAGE.rpm
$ sudo dpkg -i package.deb
$ sudo apt-get -f install # will install any dependencies
Alternative 3 (suppose multiverse is in sources.list)
$ sudo apt-get install package ## it is probably there
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Re:would Sun put all their weight behind apt-get? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:would Sun put all their weight behind apt-get? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:would Sun put all their weight behind apt-get? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:would Sun put all their weight behind apt-get? (Score:5, Informative)
Debian is the only OS I use in which I feel confident upgrading a production server without extensive testing. 100 packages might need upgrading, but I know it will work and won't break anything.
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Main problem with yum - slowness (Score:5, Interesting)
Want to install something? 'yum install foobar', wait 30 seconds while it connects to the repository, wait 30 more seconds while it resolves dependancies, wait 30 more seconds for it to think about installing, wait 30 more seconds and it is finally done.
With apt-get this all happens in about 10 seconds or less.
Part of the problem is that *EVERY SINGLE ACTION* causes it to hit the server and verify it's package repository. Any 'yum install' command essentially does a 'yum update' first, even if your database is only 3 minutes old. When you're installing a fair number of packages on a new system, this is very tedious. What is the point of even having 'yum update'? apt-get is much better in this regard, *always* using the local cache unless you explicitly 'apt-get update'.
Also, I don't know if it is because of the differences between
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Re:Main problem with yum - slowness (Score:5, Interesting)
That's a complaint about yum, not about RPM. There are other dependency-resolving tools for RPM, including urpmi, yast and (surprise) apt. Yast and apt don't exhibit the annoying behavior of which you write.
Similarly other posts say that the advantage of apt is the Debian repositories. That's an advantage of Debian, not of apt. Ubuntu uses apt and dpkg, yet Ubuntu's package repository != Debian's package repository.
Every distribution I know of uses one program and format to keep track of installed packages and to figure out the dependencies needed (e.g. dpkg, rpm, ebuild) and another program to query repositories and automate the process of fetching needed packages (e.g. apt, urpmi, yum, emerge). A lot of grief directed at RPM has nothing to do with RPM and is instead better directed at the tools that query repositories and fetch packages. Similarly, credit for Debian's repositories belongs to Debian's maintainers, not to the wonders of apt.
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Re:Main problem with yum - slowness (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, Debian universe and multiverse are in the
there's a typo ;) (Score:3, Informative)
Debian (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Debian (Score:3, Funny)
(Though I hope Etch will be the start of a new trend there)
Re:Debian (Score:5, Funny)
Justin.
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Re:Debian (Score:5, Informative)
Commercial Support.
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How far we've come... (Score:5, Informative)
Remember this quote from Scott Mcnealy [linuxtoday.com] a few years back?
Question (Score:5, Interesting)
Can anyone tell me why a person would want to use Ubuntu on a server, as opposed to just using Debian?
It seems to me that most of the advantages of Ubuntu are on the GUI side of things, and this is the way that most of the software that's different for Ubuntu than Debian is aimed towards. Most of the server-type packages you'd probably be pulling from the Debian repositories anyway, so there's not much advantage and some things might not work, because Ubuntu doesn't follow the "Debian way" in everything (there are some file locations and paths that are different, I believe). Plus Debian has always seemed a bit better documented, although I admit that's arguable.
I'm glad to see Sun put its weight behind a Debian-based distro, but I don't quite get why Ubuntu and not just Debian, especially if it's for servers. The only reason I can think is that they don't want to get too close to Debian's leadership and philosophy, and find Ubuntu more palatable from a PR and customer-relations perspective. Still, it seems like an odd choice.
direct support and control (Score:5, Insightful)
As a big proponent of debian, the biggest problem corporate/companies have with debian support options is that is not coming directly from the distributor of the software. So maybe thats one reason for choosing Ubuntu is that they offer support directly.
Its also probably a lot easier for Sun to deal with a company when wanting changes/partnerships, rather than dealing with a fully community based effort. You can't just go to 1-2 guys in Debian and say do this and get it in by next week or else!
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Didn't Ian Murdock try this already? (Score:3, Interesting)
I understand this, but didn't Ian Murdock (founder of Debian) already try this with Progeny? The distro went belly-up and eventually Progeny became just another Linux services and support company. I'm not even sure if they're still around TTT. How is Ubunt
Re:Didn't Ian Murdock try this already? (Score:5, Informative)
By the time Ubuntu came out, Fedora had taken (and partly dropped) the torch, GNOME was vastly improved, KDE wasn't in danger of being placed in non-free, and a lot of Linux providers dropped out after the
The other half of the equation was simple: goals. Shuttleworth aims to be truly successful [launchpad.net], not just something to feed himself and his kids (*cough* his progeny *cough*). He capitalized on the fact that Debian stable was so sorely out of date that when everyone else stated they'd not be packaging xfree 4.4, debian had just gotten 4.3 into unstable. Ubuntu's release schedule is (usually) designed to be synchronized with GNOME so that, for a brief moment, Ubuntu is one of two places to go for the latest (the second being CVS). Shuttleworth recognized that a number of people didn't have access to windows based CD burning software, or perhaps the knowhow to find some, and funded ShipIt.
While Murdock was aiming for NOW (network of workstations), Ubuntu's initial focus was on laptop support. Even in 2000, the question was asked "why do you think your SSI will succeed in today's environment?" If the answer was "it's open source," well that answer clearly wasn't adaquate. NOW assumes a very specific kind of resources, and adds a lot of complexity to gain something that rapidly falls in price. It might be interesting, but you have to own more than a couple workstations to make it worth your time, and it doesn't really aid mysql or apache much.
It almost seems like Canonical learned from Progeny that half of selling Debian support was going to be making people want it, instead of capitalizing on some imaginary underserved market segment looking for ways to reduce the cost of Debian deployment. As always, sales, sales, sales!
Parent
Re:Question (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been a big fan of Debian since I first started using Linux 10 years ago. I really respect their attitudes towards a lot of things, and yet, I hardly ever use it. There a couple factors behind this, most notably their tradtionally huge lag behind current development, and their adherence to "the Debian way" even if it is less convenient for no good technical reason. One example of this is lacking a "local" startup file by default. It is relatively trivial to add one, but there's no reason not to have a template for that in place out of the box, like every other distro I have ever worked with. For me, the Debian experience is sort of a death of 1000 cuts where there are no major deal breakers, but a lot of minor annoyances. For a lot of people, this is offset by the other things they do well, but for even more people, it is not. Ubuntu takes all the stuff that Debian does right, and then removes a lot of the painful little annoyances. That's a big part of the reason that I run Ubuntu on servers as well as desktops. MAybe a lot of this will be fixed by the new leadership that Debian has, but only time will tell. I know a lot of people don't see these as problems to be fixed, but I think those people are the typical "vocal minority" that is so common in the FOSS world. The users don't always know best, but if they are complaining, it's a good sign that a change should at least be seriously considered. Hanging onto dogma is not good just for its own sake, there have to be sound technical or (sometimes) philosophical reasons behind it.
I also run a highly heterogenous environment, and I find it easier to have everything I touch be either completely the same or totally different. Having a number of machines that behave nearly the same is harder for me because of the "close but not quite"-ness of it. Moving between a Fedora machine and an Ubuntu machine is easier than moving from a Debian and an Ubuntu. There's a clearer differentiation, which makes it easier to "change gears". It's like moving between different versions of windows, things are close enough you expect them to be the same, but different enough to be really annoying. This is probably just me though.
So, yeah, that's why. For me anyway.
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Re:Question (Score:5, Interesting)
I would argue that Debian stable packages are better than Ubuntu packages, but not always once you get outside of the stable repositories. Ubuntu can stabilize newer packages faster.
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Why Ubuntu ? (Score:5, Insightful)
I use Ubuntu as well as Debian, both on desktops and servers. Here is a couple of advantages Ubuntu has over Debian on servers:
As a Unix guru/developer I also regularly use a couple of other Linux and BSD distros (FreeBSD, Gentoo, OpenBSD, etc) because I like to experiment a lot and like to live on the bleeding edge of technology, but all in all I have realized that Ubuntu plainly rocks and there is a lot of reasons why it is becomming so popular. I think every IT engineer easily understands the advantages of Ubuntu. And somehow it totally makes sense that Sun, "a company built for engineers, by engineers" [1], is interested in Ubuntu :-)
I am a technological perfectionist and Mark Shuttleworth (the man behind Ubuntu) seems to
have created a distro the way I would have done it. It is well engineered and It Just Works (TM).
[1] http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan [sun.com]
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Must be new math or a time warp (Score:5, Insightful)
While Ubuntu has been many people's desktop Linux choice for a few years now,
I find it interesting that a distro only first released slightly over 18 months ago [1] [distrowatch.com] [2] [wikipedia.org], could be "many people's desktop Linux choice for a few years now" (emphasis added).
Re:Must be new math or a time warp (Score:5, Funny)
--Robert
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Re:Must be new math or a time warp (Score:4, Funny)
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What does this mean for Oracle? (Score:3, Insightful)
So if Ubuntu is going to bed with Sun, does this leave Oracle out in the cold? Will they now be forced to look to Red Hat (which is clearly not interested) or Novell (which is probably not the best fit) instead? The Linux-go-round continues to spin.
OSS is being quite the slut lately! (Score:3, Funny)
Today: Sun flirts with Ubuntu (yahoo article title)
Nothing builds character... (Score:4, Insightful)
This is a good thing for Ubuntu and Open source.
Hope you're not in a hurry (Score:4, Informative)
Java support for Debian at last? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Java support for Debian at last? (Score:5, Informative)
Perhaps we'll see a repository for Java .debs at last, eh?
You must have missed the big news: official packages of Sun Java .debs were uploaded into Debian's non-free archive yesterday.
The announcement [debian.org]
Link to the page for the "source" package [debian.org] (I put "source" in quotes since it actually contains tarballs of the binaries, but you can obtain real source code in the sun-java5-source [debian.org] binary Debian package.)
License [java.net] and FAQ about the license [java.net] under which these packages are made available (note in particular that it permits sublicensing for derived distributions).
Parent
Weight? (Score:5, Insightful)
sun to the destkop (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:sun to the destkop (Score:3, Insightful)
It's gonna explode!!! (Score:3, Funny)
Don't forget Gentoo (Score:3)
Re:Don't forget Gentoo (Score:3)
I don't buy it. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I don't buy it. (Score:4, Funny)
becaus if Linux wins, Sun will be reduced to a vendor of exotic albeit powerful and very expensive hardware running a commodity OS on it.
No, I believe that violates several of Apple's patents.Parent
This could be interesting. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Server? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, there is a lot of buzz around Ubuntu, and Sun is trying to capitalize on it.
That aside, there's nothing wrong with running Ubuntu on a server. Do a "server" install to avoid all the bloat, and you have a stable Debian system with up to date software.
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Re:Server? (Score:3, Insightful)
No, you don't. You have the Ubuntu repository without X. The Ubuntu releases aren't particular stable; if you look at the process, you'll see that there's nothing like the level of testing that goes on in Debian.
Re:Server? (Score:5, Insightful)
That said, I agree that stability on the server is much more important than being on the cutting edge of technology, for most server uses. Besides, if you install Ubuntu to get a Debian system, well, why not just install Debian? :)
I guess it depends on the usage where the maximum cost/benefit point lies. If you want a rock-solid mail/webserver, Debian Stable is great. If you want to stream 3gp to your phone, Ubuntu is probably the best bet (with Flumotion and packages). Or if you want to use the latest version of PHP or whatever.
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Re:Server? (Score:4, Informative)
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