General OpenSolaris Discussion

[vermaden]

I once considered OpenSolaris as my main system, later only for a laptop, now after FreeBSD replaced all my OpenSolaris installations I start to think, why I wasted all that time trying to use OpenSolaris Package Manager called IPS, also comments on this blog sums a lot about it: http://cuddletech.com/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=1115#comm

... like these:

"Ian Murdock has taken a superb enterprise O/S and turned it into Linux circa 1998."

"Maybe i’m old-fashioned, but shouldn’t core O/S tools be written in C? If you can’t code in C, I don’t want you writing my O/S."

I do not want to bash OpenSolaris (from which we have great ZFS for example), OpenSolaris just wants to be Linux too much (like taking Ian Murdock for the job).

What are Your OpenSolaris issues?

PS. 1. Draft of "What's New in OpenSolaris 2010.03" is available here: http://cr.opensolaris.org/~gman/open...s-new-2010-03/ I have read some rumors that they are rebranding 2010.03 from OpenSolaris to Oracle Solaris Express.

PS. 2. Solaris will not be free to use anymore: http://www.osnews.com/comments/23077

[BSDfan666]

I found the renaming thing to be funny, people already know the name OpenSolaris.. the new product name doesn't really communicate the open source nature of it.

The best thing Oracle can do with Solaris now is to relicense it under a permissive licence and be done with it.. has anyone here ever read the CDDL? it's terrible.

[Carpetsmoker]

Ive been running it on my laptop for half a year orso.

In short,

Like:
Xorg works properly (Unlike FreeBSD/OpenBSD where I could not get it work beyond vesa driver speeds).
Flash support, I hate it, but it's "needed" at times, to be honest it's also more convenient than youtube_dl from the commandline.
VirtualBox support - FreeBSD has this too now, I "need" it for work.

Dislike:
It's big, complicated, difficult to understand, does a lot of automagic.
The way packages work suck, also often outdated.
Unclear release scheme/dates, 2010.02 is now 2010.03, and AFAIK it will not be released in March :-/

While not perfect, it works for me as a desktop OS at this point ...

"Maybe i’m old-fashioned, but shouldn’t core O/S tools be written in C? If you can’t code in C, I don’t want you writing my O/S."

Nonsense. Code quality is what counts. Programming language is often secondary, depending on what exactly you are writing of course (No, writing a kernel in Python would not be a good idea).

[vermaden]

Originally Posted by Carpetsmoker

Programming language is often secondary, depending on what exactly you are writing of course (No, writing a kernel in Python would not be a good idea).

The Unununium OS was meant to be written in Python: http://unununium.org/

[ephemera]

I am not sure if Python is the best choice for IPS. IPS can be slow & buggy sometimes.
Writing important system utilities in Python doesn't make sense to me.

[phoenix]

Originally Posted by BSDfan666

I found the renaming thing to be funny, people already know the name OpenSolaris.. the new product name doesn't really communicate the open source nature of it.

Well, if you called it OSol in the past, you can continue to call it OSol now.

[Carpetsmoker]

Originally Posted by ephemera

I am not sure if Python is the best choice for IPS. IPS can be slow & buggy sometimes.
Writing important system utilities in Python doesn't make sense to me.

Right, and C is always stable and bugfree

[TerryP]

I've always toyed with the idea that if I made a small OS kernel for fun, that I might set it up to be done largely in Python just for the hell of it, and try to find a way to boost execution speed for a largely Python implementation of the userland.

but I think writing an OS in Python isn't on topic :-P.



Never have tried OpenSolaris on my hardware, because I don't think Solaris would take to it, Linux doesn't always take to it as well as BSD does... lol. That said though, I've always had an interest in trying Solaris and HP-UX.

[ephemera]

Originally Posted by Carpetsmoker

Right, and C is always stable and bugfree

Of course software can't be perfect.
But have you ever had pkg_* crash on you or become mysteriously unresponsive?

[TerryP]

I've had FreeBSDs pkg_delete crash; many programs out there have crash friendly bits to them if you look hard enough, whether they're written in C, Perl, Python, or with furbies.

[Carpetsmoker]

yeah, that sucks. But IMO that has little to do with the programming language and more with the quality of the code ...

[TerryP]

Well, no one ever said the pkg_* tools were specular quality code. I have seen a lot worse, but FreeBSDs tools are, eh, should we say far from pretty on the inside. Many parts of it feels like something that was hacked out as needed and no ones the time to refactor.

I don't think I want to know what OpenSolaris' looks like inside the package management system, lol.

[Oko]

Originally Posted by vermaden

PS. 2. Solaris will not be free to use anymore: http://www.osnews.com/comments/23077

It is not free any more. It is official. Evaluation version can be used only 90 days. After that one has to purchase service contract from Oracle.

OpenSolaris on the another hand looks dead. The February release has been postponed until the end of the March but we are in April and OpenSolaris is still not available.

[Oliver_H]

Originally Posted by Oko

It is not free any more. It is official. Evaluation version can be used only 90 days. After that one has to purchase service contract from Oracle.

OpenSolaris on the another hand looks dead. The February release has been postponed until the end of the March but we are in April and OpenSolaris is still not available.

That's a pity, but I didn't expect any different from Oracle.

We don't have to fight open source, we have to exploit open source.

--Larry Ellison

And it seems OpenSolaris isn't of any value for them.

[ocicat]

Originally Posted by Oliver_H

And it seems OpenSolaris isn't of any value for them.

Larry's goal is to sell.

Having high TPC benchmarks helps sell big iron databases which results in lots of income. High TPC ratings requires lots & lots of OS tuning (read corporate costs) which can be offset by by more sales of tweaked Solaris. Expending lots of time polishing OpenSolaris results in little to no return, so why bother?

Larry can be called a lot of things, but "altruistic" isn't one of them.

[vermaden]

Another reason that always pushed me away from OpenSolaris:
http://forums.freebsd.org/showpost.p...19&postcount=5

[Oliver_H]

@vermaden

http://solaris.homeunix.com/

Finally it isn't a desktop-os like FreeBSD. It's possible, it's sometimes easier to achieve than in FreeBSD, sometimes it's harder, sometimes it's impossible. But you can do it, if you want so.

[vermaden]

Probably they created that repository after I abandoned any effort on OpenSolaris, but thanks for info, may be helpful in the future.

[Beastie]

Originally Posted by Oliver_H

a desktop-os like FreeBSD

[TerryP]

Personally with how relations with Oracle seem to be going (media wise), I'm beginning to doubt the long term viability of OpenSolaris.