Ian Murdock Joins Sun 123
RLiegh sends us the second piece of news today featuring Debian founder Ian Murdock. In an entry on his blog, Murdock announced that he is joining Sun Microsystems as their chief operating platforms officer. As he put it in his opensolaris post, this "...basically means I'll be in charge of Sun's operating system strategy, spanning Solaris and Linux." In all likelihood one of his first priorities will be "closing the usability gap" between Solaris and Linux.
Debian on Solaris? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Debian on Solaris? (Score:5, Interesting)
You mean it would have all the inconsistencies and inscrutability of the System V and BSD userland inherited from SunOS, PLUS all the additional inconsistencies Linux has contributed? I can hardly wait.
Do I use a dash or a double-dash? Will the man page refer me to the info docs? Or will it refer me to the command line help? Or was that --help?
One of the things I dislike about Linux userland is that it is such a bastard of every other userland out there. Cacophony cannot be emulated, it can only be shouted down.
Re:Shooting too low, again. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Shooting too low, again. (Score:5, Interesting)
It would be a clear win for both companies. Apple gets instant access to the enterprise, and Sun will make sure the acquisition means that Apple's technologies will get the enterprise-level support they deserve. Currently Apple's so-called enterprise offerings are really not very serious, although they have improved their support with Tiger. Sun can finally sell desktop machines sporting an amazing OS and desktop (under the Apple Macintosh brand) and have a server OS that's powerful and easy to setup and administer and with the better BSD userspace that Apple has.
Re:What usability gap? (Score:2, Interesting)
get stuck on a solaris 8 machine, I get annoyed by some of the commands. tar xvzf does not work,
I have to gunzip -c | tar xvf -. Why can't I "du -sh", or "df -sh", and what is wrong with bash?
Bash is a great shell and it should certainly be the default over csh! Well I guess Solaris is rock
solid and has a lot going over Linux (like easy ACL support over NFS), and certainly bash and other free
software can be installed on Solaris machines, but I do recall having to compile LOTS of software by hand
and recompiling it all when certain zlib vulnerabilities were made known.
However, from my limited experience after using an easy-to-use distro like Debian GNU/Linux, working on a
Solaris system can be incredibly frustrating and maddening. If Debian/openSolaris solved all these problems
would I switch to Solaris x86? Maybe. It would certainly occupy a virtual machine image!
Re:Replacement Gap (Score:5, Interesting)
Solaris assumes you know what you're doing. Linux, to a much lesser degree.
Linux has been open source since its inception, but as an admin on a Solaris box, the system definitely feels more 'open' to you. More is possible, more data is gatherable, more settings are tunable. A Solaris admin generally has more power over the system without digging into source code than the Linux counterpart. That's the major difference I've always seen. If you want both flexibility and stability, it's hard to beat.
I will say though that Solaris' defaults are generally less reasonable than the enterprise linux distributions' are. There is more tuning and such to do before you'll have your Solaris system running the way you want it to. At least there's Jumpstart.
Re:Shooting too low, again. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What usability gap? (Score:4, Interesting)