3 ms·

Time Warp, Solaris

2 points by bootload 18y ago

SwellJoe 18y ago
Sun has been doing all the right things...but several years too late. They've Open Sourced Solaris, but they seem to expect good package management to simply spring into existence (or they expect people to pretend like their pkg tools are an acceptable substitute for package management, since they've put a shiny GUI on top of it...but a highly polished turd is still a turd). I thought when they hired Ian Murdock, there would be an instant move towards apt-get and dpkg on Solaris, which would be a huge step in the right direction (I like yum/RPM better, but both are perfectly acceptable). There's seemingly a belief within Sun that Solaris is so good that people will beat a path to their door now that it's Open. The problem is that it exhibits a complete lack of comprehension of what makes Linux so much better for the vast majority of users. Linux is so much more adaptable than Solaris...and it all comes down to how many nicely packaged applications are available for Linux, instantly. So, for all the great stuff in Solaris (and there's plenty to be excited about: ZFS, dtrace, Zones), it's simply not an acceptable substitute for Linux, and the folks who are in a position to fix it are utterly oblivious to how badly they're failing. So, I expect the folks at Sun will get packaging figured out three or four years from now...and at that point Solaris will be even less relevant than it is today.
- gaius 18y ago
  The number one thing Sun, as a large corporate entity, needs to do is put some pressure on other large corporate entities. I would love to be deploying Solaris on AMD. I can't because two of the major vendors I rely on (no, there are no open source alternatives for these products) only have half-arsed efforts on that platform, despite Solaris on SPARC being their tier-1 platforms. So I am reluctantly running Red Hat on Dell kit, and Solaris/AMD isn't even on the table at my organization - despite us once being a through-and-through Solaris shop. Sun have dropped the ball big time. Solaris is a great OS, feature for feature, it is literally years ahead of Red Hat. But no-one runs an OS just for the sake of it - apps are what matter. Sun used to understand this, they boasted of the 10,000 apps on Solaris, they created the ABI guarantee so people knew their apps were in safe hands. Nowadays they are just committing blunder after blunder.
- gaius 18y ago
  PS Dude need to check out blastwave.org.
  - SwellJoe 18y ago
    Yes, we use blastwave packages for the Solaris version of our products. It's an admirable effort, but it leaves a lot to be desired.

2 points by bootload 18y ago

Sun has been doing all the right things...but several years too late. They've Open Sourced Solaris, but they seem to expect good package management to simply spring into existence (or they expect people to pretend like their pkg tools are an acceptable substitute for package management, since they've put a shiny GUI on top of it...but a highly polished turd is still a turd). I thought when they hired Ian Murdock, there would be an instant move towards apt-get and dpkg on Solaris, which would be a huge step in the right direction (I like yum/RPM better, but both are perfectly acceptable). There's seemingly a belief within Sun that Solaris is so good that people will beat a path to their door now that it's Open. The problem is that it exhibits a complete lack of comprehension of what makes Linux so much better for the vast majority of users. Linux is so much more adaptable than Solaris...and it all comes down to how many nicely packaged applications are available for Linux, instantly. So, for all the great stuff in Solaris (and there's plenty to be excited about: ZFS, dtrace, Zones), it's simply not an acceptable substitute for Linux, and the folks who are in a position to fix it are utterly oblivious to how badly they're failing. So, I expect the folks at Sun will get packaging figured out three or four years from now...and at that point Solaris will be even less relevant than it is today.

gaius 18y ago
The number one thing Sun, as a large corporate entity, needs to do is put some pressure on other large corporate entities. I would love to be deploying Solaris on AMD. I can't because two of the major vendors I rely on (no, there are no open source alternatives for these products) only have half-arsed efforts on that platform, despite Solaris on SPARC being their tier-1 platforms. So I am reluctantly running Red Hat on Dell kit, and Solaris/AMD isn't even on the table at my organization - despite us once being a through-and-through Solaris shop. Sun have dropped the ball big time. Solaris is a great OS, feature for feature, it is literally years ahead of Red Hat. But no-one runs an OS just for the sake of it - apps are what matter. Sun used to understand this, they boasted of the 10,000 apps on Solaris, they created the ABI guarantee so people knew their apps were in safe hands. Nowadays they are just committing blunder after blunder.
gaius 18y ago
PS Dude need to check out blastwave.org.
- SwellJoe 18y ago
  Yes, we use blastwave packages for the Solaris version of our products. It's an admirable effort, but it leaves a lot to be desired.