Sun Says Project Indiana is Not a Linux Copy 161
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.""
NexentaOS (Score:2, Interesting)
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Nexenta is GNU+OpenSolaris. That is, GNU tools + OpenSolaris kernel, or more specifically, Ubuntu using the OpenSolaris kernel instead of Linux.
"Project Indiana" will use OpenSolaris as the kernel (obviously), but it isn't yet clear what else. Sun has their own set of tools for package management and so forth, so they don't need GNU (and not Debian or Ubuntu which are specialized systems built on GNU). So, it may turn out that Indiana and Nexenta only have th
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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
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Pithy Aphorism: "If you cannot beat them ..." (Score:2, Insightful)
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http://www.infiltrated.net/openpimp.jpg [infiltrated.net] (my openbsd screen)
http://www.infiltrated.net/currentPentestDesktop.j pg [infiltrated.net] (linux (Backtrack screen))
http://www.infiltrated.net/sunDesk.jpg [infiltrated.net] (Solaris Nevada)
I
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Must be because on his site, network security is handled by FreeBSD, instead of Linux or Solaris.
Jokes aside, I 100% agree with GP. Each of these unixy OSes have their own strength. And in a professional environment, you should use them where they have the best fit.
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This shows one of the problems with Solaris today. (Score:2)
But that failed completely for me and I found myself booting Windows XP all the time which I only had installed to be able to play Warcraft III, why is that? Where did Solaris fail on me?
1) Desktop performance.
This might
Re:This shows one of the problems with Solaris tod (Score:2)
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I used Solaris for about 8 minutes. It took me that long to figure out that pressing the TAB key at the CLI did not complete my command. The next 15 minutes was spent reinstalling Linux.
I was going to see if there is some way to get command line completion enabled, but it didn't seem worth it once I saw that I was
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I know. I'm a Solaris bigot, actually. I do believe that only child molestors use Linux, so I do know that there are compilers included in Solaris.
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Re:Pithy Aphorism: "If you cannot beat them ..." (Score:5, Funny)
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If you're going to feed the trolls, you might as well go hog wild...
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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.
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Why doesn't this work yet: 'tar jxvf meh.tar.bz2' ? That's just one silly example,
Where have we seen this before? (Score:3, Interesting)
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)
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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
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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)
Will it offer me a more productive development environment? Probably not. Will it give me a wider audience? Definitely not.
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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.
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OTOH, it's getting better fast, and the feature list is already pretty sweet.
But, I also have to comment that SystemTap was developed as a response to DTrace. This would have been useful to kernel devs a long time ago. But SystemTap didn't happen until the Solaris folk pav
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Personally, once OpenSolaris goes GPLv3 I'm switching.
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Seems to work for a gazillion enterprises out there.
Linux schedulers (Score:2)
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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
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http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpapers/ [ibm.com]
Solaris and GPLv3 (Score:2)
Not that there is much (any?) code left in Solaris from the early UNIX days. Imagine the shock of the UNIX camps 20 years ago if a traveler from the future came back and told them that eventually Solaris would be re-licensed under the FSF's GPL.
They probably would of laughed pretty hard and said "riiiiiight"
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- 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)
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.
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Well, one unexpected turn of events is that Solaris will probably be GPLv3 years before Linux. Maybe that won't make a difference, but should the need arise to link a GPLv3 library into the kernel to add some functionality, that may not be legally possible under Linux.
Irony, thy name is FSF.
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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)
Oh, and while you're refactoring, please fix JES. It is a clusterfuck mess, particularly the Delegated Administrator.
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Re:Good Gnus? (Score:5, Informative)
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
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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
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This is Nice! (Score:2, Funny)
more 'compatible' might be better (Score:3, Insightful)
But they can still make the OS more Linux compatible, particularly from the software development perspective.
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Adding binary compatibility between such systems isn't trivial, but it's certainly within Sun's reach.
Sun did it over 2 years ago now (Linux compatibility at the kernel level). I saw it with my own eyes.
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I recently implemented a TWiki on an old Sun x64 system. When I got it, the system had Solaris installed on it. I would have preferred to stick with Solaris, but it was just too difficult to install all the Perl modules I needed. Perl itself is well supported on Solaris, but too many Perl library modules have dependencies on software that
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Well, a kernel is a kernel... thing is, the new Solaris won't be widely adopted - outside the world it's adopted now, that is - until it gets drivers, drivers, drivers. Now, what's the easiest way ? I'd guess it'd be using Linux drivers. Then, you use the gnu toolchain, a package management system which probably will be somewhat dpkg/apt-like (not that I'd object) and what you'll end up with will hopefully be a Linux-like and somewhat Sola
It never was after lopping off some good bits... (Score:2)
muddying? (Score:2)
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.
solaris is starting to sound good (Score:2)
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
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The plagues called Java and C# are their fault, but I don't think that's the reason.
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
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Re:solaris is starting to sound good (Score:4, Informative)
Re:solaris is starting to sound good (Score:4, Insightful)
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)
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.
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Linux will stay as GPL2, but we know Sun is going GPL3 for Solaris. What if some big player, such as RedHat or Canonical drop the Linux kernel, and instead go with solaris for a full GLP3 distro?
Dear Sun (Score:2)
Gemini 2: Sun's booboo (Score:2)
Back when Novell's wallet was a big as their head they bought out UNIX (yes, the REAL code), told everybody that they wanted to merge NetWare and Unix together and have ONE OS code-named: Gemini. (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3649/is_ 1 99507/ai_n8727330)
The announcement angered Netware and Unix people alike, Both vowing to not learn the other stuff. Novell saved face by calling the thing "UnixWare" and limiting the scope of the OS merger.
Re:Bummer... (Score:5, Informative)
In 1996, Bruce Perens replaced Ian Murdock as the project leader.
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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...
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They copyied > 1 KLOC.
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But if it's just some header lines, this will have no affect on you. That's *why* I doubt anyone will care very much. In some respects, particularly where there's some push for a move to GPL, as is the case with OpenSolaris, header commonality might even be regarded as desireable.
Some people, for instance, do small-scale systems administration. One source of information on some of the limits of their systems, such as how many characte
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POSIX specifies what #include files are available and what macros they #define. (For example, limit.h [opengroup.org]).
Most operating systems tend to include other nonstandard stuff as well.
Anyhow, header files are inherently open source -- you can read them, you can edit/modify them (assuming you have write permission or can copy them to a local include directory). And more importantly, my understanding is that they're not copyrightable.
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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.
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Is the man considered to be somehow ensnared in Debian his entire life, just because he created the project? In '93, as a student? Lives evolve. Respons
Re:Bummer... (Score:5, Funny)
Good idea. I'm almost tempted to give you an "insightful" for that suggestion, but it'd rather detract from the "troll" rating.
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Re:Sun as usual is copying IBM (Score:4, Funny)
No need to try to reverse engineer their strategy, it's openly published:
http://media.arstechnica.com/journals/microsoft.m
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Having worked with AIX 5L (as well as 1.x on PS/2, 3.x on RS6k and 4.x on PPC), my impression of the 'L' part was mainly "Look! We have rpm! Now you can install OpenSSH and a bunch of other freeware from this companion cd! See how Linux compatible we are!" Junior admins are still "stuck" with SMIT until they get enough experience to learn all of the funky commands that AIX requires you to learn in order to actually manage the system from the shell.
While it is nice to see IBM (slowly) moving
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If you believe that, you should maybe be careful using the term "Open Source", because that term was invented specifically to have a way to talk about some of the practical aspects of Free Software without mentioning that it's about freedom. You should read http://www.fsf.org/licensing/essays/free-software- for-freedom.html [fsf.org]