Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments
Search

News for nerds, stuff that matters

Slashdot Log In

Log In

Create Account  |  Retrieve Password

Sun Says Project Indiana is Not a Linux Copy

Posted by CmdrTaco on Sun Jul 29, 2007 11:45 AM
from the because-we-say-so dept.
Sun Microsystems Software Linux
eldavojohn writes "Ian Murdock (Debian author & Sun's OS Chief) made some comments about Project Indiana that many have said is an attempt to make Solaris simply "more Linux-like." But Murdock quashes any concerns that this is just another Linux clone — muddying up the waters of distribution selection. He says that it's more a 'best of both worlds' attempt to make an OS that appeals to a broader audience. From the article, "Project Indiana will include a revamped package management system, which should prove popular with developers unaccustomed to Solaris. The OS has some clunky, archaic aspects, and Murdock thinks the new package system will modernize Solaris.""
+ -
story
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

Sun Says Project Indiana is Not a Linux Copy 50 Comments More /

 Full
 Abbreviated
 Hidden
More
Loading... please wait.
  • Apart from being an official Sun project, how is this project different from NexentaOS? http://www.gnusolaris.org/ [gnusolaris.org] Any explanation is appreciated!

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Ginger Unicorn (952287)
        i just read the article and it seems project indiana is just solaris adopting some linux-like features, such as a 6 monthly community version on top of the 3 yearly enterprise release (think red hat) plus a new package management system, as the solaris one is apparently rather clunky.

        It has nothing to do with blending it with linux in any way. It seems they are trying to make it appeal to the linux community in order to reap the benefits of community feedback, without actually just giving in and GPL'ing s

  • The morphing of Solaris into a Linux clone is best described by the well-known pithy aphorism: "If you cannot beat them, join them."
    • Solaris does a lot of things very nicely. ZFS and DTrace spring to mind - and unlike Linux, Solaris AIUI can boot off ZFS.

      A former lecturer when I was at university back in 2002 reckoned commercial Unix had 5-10 years left to live. Looks like he may not have been far off the mark - where they're not dying, commercial unixes are being made to look more like Linux and less commercial (witness OpenSolaris) by the month.

  • Where have we seen this before? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by wellingj (1030460) on Sunday July 29 2007, @12:02PM (#20032793)
    Oh yea, It looks like Ian Murdock is making Solaris more like Debian/Ubuntu, RedHat/Fedora and SLED/OpenSUSE.
    If it has worked for other distributions, it will probably work well for Solaris, especially since they don't
    have to bicker over what goes into upstream or not. Not that debate is a bad thing... not by any stretch.

  • package management (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Peter La Casse (3992) on Sunday July 29 2007, @12:19PM (#20032913) Homepage
    It would be great to see Solaris become tightly integrated with something like apt. pkg-get is ok, but it isn't currently used for all packages, and a Sun-backed and -improved version would be better. For example, I'd like to see it manage security updates in a way that meets the needs of Solaris sysadmins, with separate actions for downloading, applying and rolling back. I'd also like to see my attempts to install gvim not download 50 megabytes worth of libraries that are already on my system, in a slightly different version number.
    • I'd also like to see my attempts to install gvim not download 50 megabytes worth of libraries that are already on my system, in a slightly different version number.

      I can't speak for that package system since I don't know it, but usually that's the fault of the packages not the system. Sometimes maintainers don't know, don't care or just by policy think you should be using a fairly new library version with all the latest fixes. With dependencies that can easily lead to every library being knocked up an inch

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by wellingj (1030460)
        Sounds bizar but, isn't that what Debian avoids with its stable/testing/experimental branches?

      • I can't speak for that package system since I don't know it, but usually that's the fault of the packages not the system.

        It depends where one draws the boundary between "packages" and "system". In the case of pkg-get, it isn't used for the core operating system, so there is a lot of installed software outside of its worldview. Of course it's partly the fault of gvim for requiring something different from what's installed, but if Sun were the maintainer for the entire repository, then packages would hopef

  • Why look at Solaris now? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by delire (809063) on Sunday July 29 2007, @12:25PM (#20032957)
    Is there really room for a new player right now? With many years of Linux experience why should I look at Solaris? Curiosity only holds so much water when you just want to get stuff done.

    Will it offer me a more productive development environment? Probably not. Will it give me a wider audience? Definitely not.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Not much longer than 10 years ago, most people in the world were asking the same question in reverse. Solaris is hardly a "new player" - lest we forget that Bill Joy, co-founder of SUN and designer of the SPARC, was the original BSD developer as well. Solaris is as real as it gets.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by VENONA (902751)
      Productivity improvements might be determined by how badly you need Dtrace functionality: http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/dtrace/ [opensolaris.org]
      I'm not confident that a clone will make it into Linux any time soon.

      In audience terms, I'm thinking that the limiter is still hardware support. I don't get much time to look at OpenSolaris, so I could be in left field.

    • Is there really room for a new player right now? With many years of Linux experience why should I look at Solaris? Curiosity only holds so much water when you just want to get stuff done.
      Solaris is very stable. Also, unlike Linux, large parts of it's kernel are not constantly being rewritten. It also has a stable ABI.

      Personally, once OpenSolaris goes GPLv3 I'm switching.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by TheRaven64 (641858)

        Also, unlike Linux, large parts of it's kernel are not constantly being rewritten
        You know, one thing that struck me in the scheduler discussion yesterday was that no one said 'WTF? Why are you replacing a (working) core component of the kernel with a more-or-less untested one in a minor release?' With that kind of commitment to stability, I'm glad I don't run Linux anywhere important.
        • Who switches to minor releases other than developers? Surely you'd just use the one that works and switch when you're ready, not 'Linux'.

          Seems to work for a gazillion enterprises out there.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by LuSiDe (755770)

          You know, one thing that struck me in the scheduler discussion yesterday was that no one said 'WTF? Why are you replacing a (working) core component of the kernel with a more-or-less untested one in a minor release?' With that kind of commitment to stability, I'm glad I don't run Linux anywhere important.

          You ehm, can like, still run a version which is well tested and came with your distribution? One which, you know, contains only backported security and reliability fixes? The one ehm... the one your Linux d

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      - Much finer grain security (RBAC principles in Solaris are much better handled than in grsecurity for GNU/Linux).

      - ZFS is now bootable (ZFS is now bootable [wikipedia.org])

      - DTrace is much more powerful than strace (a number I read in one of the Sun DTrace presentation stated ~40000 probe points in Solaris to ~40 in GNU/Linux).

      - All the p* tools on Solaris are much more powerful (and in some instances, there are no equivalents in GNU/Linux requiring users to have to code their own inotify CLI program)

      - Service management

    • Well... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by LWATCDR (28044)
      Is there really room for a new player right now? With many years of Windows experience why should I look at Linux? Curiosity only holds so much water when you just want to get stuff done.

      Stability, security, and frankly scalability. Solaris has been running on huge SMP systems for many years longer than Linux. It takes security very seriously right up there with Open BSD. And let's face it, Sun has some of the most brilliant Unix developers on the planet.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by ChrisA90278 (905188)
      Because Solaris can do things Linux can't. First off Solaris scales better.

      To make an analogy, You might argue that Toyota makes nice pickup trucks and "Who needs Caterpillar?". Well those 20 foot tall earth moving machines do a different job and are very usfull to some people. But yes Toyota sell __way__ more trucks than Cat. Those 20 foot tall machine are real "clunkers" f you try to use then for every day tasks like driving to work or the store.

      If you really need a machine with four dozen CPUs then S

  • Good Gnus? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by otis wildflower (4889) on Sunday July 29 2007, @12:27PM (#20032969) Homepage
    Beyond fixing software distribution and pkg mgmt (which is lonnnnngggg overdue!!), how about making GNU utils the default and tossing the archaic Solaris versions of common tools into some compat directory? If the GNU tool doesn't support some Solarisism (like, say, RBAC or extended attributes), hack the GNU tool and release the change as GPL.

    Oh, and while you're refactoring, please fix JES. It is a clusterfuck mess, particularly the Delegated Administrator.
    • pkg is a problem? I actually wish that RedHat had gone with pkg, instead of re-inventing the wheel. And, a layer (like yum) could be put on top of pkg.

      As to the plethora of tools -- SUN customers may be running scripts done on SunOS, using BSD semantics. Or Sys5 semantics. Or GNU semantics. Especially difficult if they are all needed.

      So, Solaris defaults to Sys5, and gives (ccs/bin) the option to use BSD, and (via installing) the option to use GNU. Seems reasonable to me.

      Even Linux has such schisms (eg. the
      • Yeah, let's keep package. Then, every time there is a patch we can reboot to single usermode to install it. We can even have changing versions of packages that are now longer compatible with older versions - and hell, who needs config file management? We can just have it overwrite everything without asking.
        • None of those problems you describe sound particularly fundamental to the package format. More, they are features(!) of the tool which installs them and the folks who create the packages.
    • RBAC's and re-visiting Trusted Solaris... I happen to like a lot of the security functions Sol10+ has integrated into new releases. Sort of reminds me slightly of Trusted Sol. What I do semi agree on is gnu compatibility but to be honest with you, I have no problem administrating a Sol box (any version) without GNU utils. One thing I can foresee with Solaris moving towards this route is the introduction of more security issues. It's kind of rare to see dozens of Solaris security issues - granted when they'r

      • Re:Good Gnus? (Score:5, Informative)

        by AaronW (33736) <aaron,slashdot013&doofus,org> on Sunday July 29 2007, @02:45PM (#20034021) Homepage
        I remember reading a discussion by the Opensolaris folks claiming how much better their tools were than the Gnu tools. They were singling out Solaris TAR and saying what a mess the Gnu version is. As a user, Solaris TAR is crap to use compared to GnuTAR. It can't even handle tar files over 2GB, for example, and I've had several tar files it can't handle that GnuTAR can. I also like the built-in support for bzip2 and gzip in GnuTAR. Now granted, I haven't tried Solaris 10, but I suspect the problems remain. That isn't to say that GnuTAR is perfect... I was running an older version that would truncate some filenames.

        Another one that caused me endless frustration was Solaris newgrp did not allow you to specify a command line like the Linux one did. I ended up porting over the Gnu version just so I could do my job without having to manually type in a command as part of a build procedure.

        At my job I've been maintaining KDE for Solaris for a bunch of Sun users. When I migrated my desktop to Linux I'm still having to support KDE for them (and that's not my job, I'm not in IT). None of the developers like Sun's Gnome 2.0 that's included with Solaris 9, and newer versions have problems compiling because Sun still does not support the X render extension (on Sparc). Trying to compile KDE was difficult, since Sun's libraries and tools are often broken or so out of date. I also have had to compile GCC for Solaris to do it, since Sun's C++ compiler we have barfs on a lot of open source packages. I've also hit a number of problems because numerous features are missing in Sun's libc, even though they've been part of the posix or ISO standard for many years (i.e. missing stdint.h), including some parts of stdio.h. (stdint.h is part of the ISO C99 standard, well before Solaris 9 came out).

        I remember having tons of problems with Sun's sed because it would silently truncate after 4-8KB of input.

        -Aaron
  • What the world really needs is more OS players. Welcome SUN!

  • more 'compatible' might be better (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Qwavel (733416) on Sunday July 29 2007, @12:39PM (#20033033)
    It can hardly be called a Linux clone if it uses a different kernel.

    But they can still make the OS more Linux compatible, particularly from the software development perspective.
    • Why not compatible? *BSD, AIX, and others have had binary compatibility for several other *nixen for a long time. Adding binary compatibility between such systems isn't trivial, but it's certainly within Sun's reach.
  • Since they removed sun4(c/d/m) support and defended that decision, there's no doubt that anything current in Solaris is not a copy.
  • "...muddying up the waters of distribution selection..."

    I think at this point, adding a single new distribution isn't really muddying. When the list of distributions is as long as your leg, one more doesn't really make things that hairy.
  • There seems to be a lot of sun bashing on slashdot, but I've got to say I have no understanding of why. I haven't used solaris yet, but everything I've heard about what they're doing with it has been good.

    D-trace sounds pretty sexy, apparently sexy enough that the next OSX version is going to include a port. Binary drivers that don't break compatibility across versions are pretty nice, although I've heard they still don't support as much hardware as linux.

    Really, lack of good profilers and the need to compi

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by jgrahn (181062)

      There seems to be a lot of sun bashing on slashdot, but I've got to say I have no understanding of why.

      The plagues called Java and C# are their fault, but I don't think that's the reason.

      I haven't used solaris yet, but everything I've heard about what they're doing with it has been good.

      Regarding Unix, Sun was Unix in the 1980s to the mid-1990s, at least for many of us. High-resolution, diskless workstations, networking, all the cool free software available ... And Bill Joy in management!

      I feel perso

      • Yeah ignoring the fact that Java is actually a fairly good language and that all the negative conceptions of it are based on older versions from 10 years ago. Java isn't the slow, annoying language it may have once been to some extent. It is a very good cross-platform language and it is also object orientated and well structured, and it runs a million times faster than it used to; it runs fast enough to the point that it is pretty much indistinguishable from a regular system code OS-specific compiled progra

    • Re:solaris is starting to sound good (Score:4, Informative)

      by wiredlogic (135348) on Sunday July 29 2007, @02:05PM (#20033633)
      Solaris is a pretty nice system overall. Sun's biggest failing from a user experience is their adherence to obsolete versions of the standard *NIX applications. Most of the stuff in /bin has none of the useful features added by POSIX. The POSIX stuff is all sequestered in /usr/xpg4/bin. This is a PITA when you want to write portable shell scripts that aren't restricted to a 25-year old subset of UNIX.
      • Exactly. I can't count how many scripts fail on Solaris 9 because of Sun's /bin/sh missing some key functionality (usually replacing it with /bin/bash fixes it). And why should scripts have to hunt around all over the place just to find a working version of very common tools (like Sun's sed which used to be quite broken). And some very useful features are always missing (recursive grep anyone).

        Trying to compile GNU software on Solaris 9 is often a painful experience because even their libc and header files are in the dark ages (i.e. many ISO C99 features are missing). I haven't tried Solaris 10 and moved on to Linux at work.

  • The sincererest form of flattery (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Zigurd (3528) on Sunday July 29 2007, @02:29PM (#20033853) Homepage
    Sun has been groping for a way to compete with Microsoft for over 10 years. Well, "groping" might be too harsh, considering the strategy consisted mainly of denial about the fact that Windows on commodity hardware could run serious applications.

    Ubuntu showed the way in both how to do it and the right business model, and Sun has done absolutely the right thing by directly imitating the Ubuntu way by becoming, effectively, a downstream Debian distro. Heck, they hired Ian Murdock to make sure you get it right. At Sun, this is probably necessary because corporate conservatism about cannibalizing revenues would have watered down a purely internal initiative.

    Sun could still screw it up. There are plenty of weasel words like "two tier" in this article. But if Sun gets it right and "dissolves" Solaris into a number of userland projects and a kernel alternative to Linux (the way GNU Hurd theoretically is), and executes an a la carte support model like Canonical, they deserve to win a big slice of the business.

    • Re:Bummer... (Score:5, Informative)

      by wellingj (1030460) on Sunday July 29 2007, @12:06PM (#20032829)
      Yes you are indeed a troll. But mostly because you are talking out your ass.
      In 1996, Bruce Perens replaced Ian Murdock as the project leader.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by VENONA (902751)
          Contrary to the opinion of some people, it is possible to have both principles and an income.

            • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

              by VENONA (902751)
              OK, some hand-waving and vague flammage going on. I'm not aware that he's done anything heinous. I'm willing to be corrected. But he's undoubtedly done some Good Things. If you must slander the guy, at least provide a link to something he's done that's so frapping evil. People trash Bill Gates, me included. But in the Gates case I could point to specific things. Given his contributions, don't you think Murdoch deserves as least that much respect?
          • I'd want to see references. If it's just some header lines, I doubt anyone much cares.

                  • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

                    by VENONA (902751)
                    "my understanding is that they're not copyrightable"

                    OK, a derived work, even with the nonstandard bits. Good! I thought I'd heard something intimating that part of IBM being sued by SCO was about header files. But I'd gotten numb and quit following a lot of that, so maybe I misheard, and that was part of why the suit was bogus. Or maybe I heard a bunch of bull.
        • No it was good ass talking... I enjoyed it.
          But that still doesn't change the fact that you think Debian is full of bloat...
          You should try a minimal net-install [debian.org] and only apt-get what you want then...

    • Re:Bummer... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 29 2007, @12:29PM (#20032977)

      Mod me troll if you must

      Good idea. I'm almost tempted to give you an "insightful" for that suggestion, but it'd rather detract from the "troll" rating.
    • You know, through the magic of apt you can forgo the installation of that "user-friendly GUI crap" and have all the functionality and stability you want.

All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2009 Geeknet, Inc.