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Sun Microsystems Software Linux

Sun Says Project Indiana is Not a Linux Copy 161

Posted by CmdrTaco from the because-we-say-so dept.
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.""
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Sun Says Project Indiana is Not a Linux Copy More

Sun Says Project Indiana is Not a Linux Copy

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  • NexentaOS (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Jack Malmostoso ( 899729 )
    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:2)

      by Macrat ( 638047 )
      A reference distribution for the distros. A reference distro for developers.

    • how is this project different from NexentaOS

      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

      • 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

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by br0k_sams0n ( 848842 )
      Eh, maybe a working web site? Nexenta's site has been down for three days now.
  • The morphing of Solaris into a Linux clone is best described by the well-known pithy aphorism: "If you cannot beat them, join them."

    • Re: (Score:1, Interesting)

      by packetmon ( 977047 )
      Out of curiousity have you ever even used Solaris (http://www.infiltrated.net/sunDesk.jpg) I have do and have for the past 8+ years. Did it occur that maybe Sun is trying to woo Linux users over. One can get into the whole "Linux/BSD/Solaris" penis envy arguments about the pros and cons of each so here goes:

      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

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Vintermann ( 400722 )
        Can you please explain why your links point to a file called "spybotsd14.exe" instead of the announced jpeg images?
        • . . .a file called "spybotsd14.exe" instead of . . .


          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.

      • Stating facts.
        There isn't a single fact in your post.
      • I wanted to use and learn Solaris, I really did, but I don't have a work and even less at a huge company with lots of Sun machines (please mail me if you want to get me one ;D) and I only had a 64-bit machine which I could play around more with ZFS in and so on so I installed it as desktop.

        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
        • Solaris and Mac are very similar I would suggest buying Sun's hardware if you are going to use Solaris professionally, the desktop, running on desktop hardware, is probably at best a hobby system unless you start with the HCL.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by aliquis ( 678370 )
            Yeah, I remember reading that eventually the Via chipsets couldn't do that many interupts or something and that it might had been because of that or whatever =P, anyway might be a combo of shitty chipset and therefor also bad drivers from Sun. I bought the case, psu, motherboard, cpu, 256MB ram and 52x cd-rom for 500 sek so I can't complain so much on the hardware even thought I know the motherboard (and CPU) is shit and I wouldn't have bought these things if I would buy anything new.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dbIII ( 701233 )
        You seemed quite sane and reasonable until I got to the sig. It's in the courts - let them work it out before calling somebody a murderer.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ArcherB ( 796902 ) *
        Out of curiousity have you ever even used Solaris (http://www.infiltrated.net/sunDesk.jpg) I have do and have for the past 8+ years. Did it occur that maybe Sun is trying to woo Linux users over.

        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

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jimicus ( 737525 )
      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 @01:02PM (#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 @01:19PM (#20032913)
    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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )
      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 @01:25PM (#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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Zonk (troll) ( 1026140 )

      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.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by delire ( 809063 )
          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.
        • Yeah, I had a similair thought, why can't they just ship it with all of them and let the user choose whatever they want when compiling the kernel or thru some tool? Solaris let you switch between various schedulers, why can't Linux (if it can't that is, I have no idea if Linux ships with various schedulers or not?)

        • 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:2)

        by VENONA ( 902751 )
        The kernel rewrites can be a problem. I'm overdue to look through the IBM Linux Performance Tuning Redbook (July, 2007 version) again. Grovel through 168 pages of PDF. Compare to my current production kernels, compare to notes from the previous Redbook version, sort through my last round of production performance metrics. Test any changes, and fold into the configuration management system. Gack. The manhours do stack up, but luckily, I can do it in my copious free time.
        http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpapers/ [ibm.com]
      • If and when Solaris goes GPLv3 I'd hope many people take notice. It's a bit historical considering where UNIX has been license wise over the last 35 years.

        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"

    • 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.
    • New player? Sheesh, if anything Linux is the new kid on the block... Anyway, this is good news for solaris, there are two problems with solaris currently, it is missing a debian like approach to packaging, and it is missing a lot of drivers (which is mostly a desktop issue) seems like Sun is tackeling at least one of the holes in Solaris, I just expected that when the announcement came, that they hired Murdock. As for the drivers, this issue will be resolved over time.

    • Is there really room for a new player right now? With many years of Linux experience why should I look at Solaris?

      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.

    • 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 @01:27PM (#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.
    • I agree. Almost every GNU tool is superior to the tools they ship.

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

        by AaronW ( 33736 ) on Sunday July 29, 2007 @03:45PM (#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
        • I looks like this thread is the whole point of their project. Find a way to make solaris as usable and attractive as Linux. Folks on the MyNix is better than YurNix trip need not apply. I would like to see an OpenSolaris project feel like Linux and a Linux distro feel like Solaris. This way someone proficient in one can comfortable use the other. Not only would it make some of our lives easier it would improve the quality of both by aligning them towards the same standards.
    • 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.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jimicus ( 737525 )
          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.
      • I just want the ability to auto-download package dependencies.
    • 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
    • Exactly. They should have a "linux" distribution with a solaris kernel. I'd try that.
  • 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 @01:39PM (#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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by pschmied ( 5648 )
      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.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by turgid ( 580780 )

        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.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by fm6 ( 162816 )
        Binary compatibility isn't the only kind of compatibility. Many Linux folk try Solaris, only to lose interest when they see that familiar tools aren't provided.

        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

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by l3v1 ( 787564 )
      It can hardly be called a Linux clone if it uses a different kernel.

      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
  • 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: (Score:2)

        by khb ( 266593 )
        C# are their fault ... credit where credit is due. C# is from the folks at Redmond, not Sun.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by spitzak ( 4019 )
          I believe he was implying that Microsoft would not have made C# except to compete with Sun's Java. By that reasoning C#'s existence is due to Sun.

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

      by wiredlogic ( 135348 ) on Sunday July 29, 2007 @03:05PM (#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.

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

        by AaronW ( 33736 ) on Sunday July 29, 2007 @03:52PM (#20034081) Homepage
        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 @03:29PM (#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.
    • Just to add some more spin...

      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?
  • Regarding OpenSolaris: GPL3 or STFU.
  • Novell tried to do something like this, too.
    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.

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