Quick poll: What do you think of when you hear the name “OpenSolaris”?
It’s an operating system? The community version of Solaris? Right?
Not quite. Like Linux, OpenSolaris is a kernel. Except that it’s more than a kernel. Or, rather, more than a kernel but not quite a complete operating system. Are you confused yet?
This comment from a recent Register article sums up the problem quite nicely:
If you go to the OpenSolaris web site, all bright eyed and eager to download a new operating system, you will walk away in bitter disappointment. Sure, it says the word “open” in two dozen languages on the web page, but when you go hunting for an installer disk to download, suddenly you are cast into a maze. Nevada builds? What the hell is Nevada? Oh, it’s what they’re calling the OpenSolaris code base. You’ll need to download these components and build them. Well, how do I install it? Oh, you can’t do that, you need to have a Solaris machine up already to build on. But you can get started if you go to Sun’s site and download their Solaris Express Enterprise Pro Champion Edition (after dutifully registering), and then enjoy that pleasant install experience. And when that’s done, you still have the work ahead of you of getting ON (what the hell is that? Oh, OS and Network. Sorry, I don’t work at Sun) built and updated. Did I miss anything? We haven’t gotten to packages to make the system usable yet.
Now, I’m willing to wager most of you reading this have probably heard about DTrace, ZFS, Zones, and the other great stuff Solaris has to offer, not to mention that Solaris is about as enterprise grade as they come, having been at the heart of the data center longer than many of the alternatives have even existed. And don’t forget about more mundane but critical things like backward compatibility, where Solaris has excelled for a very long time.
But how many of you have actually experienced this great stuff first hand? How many hands go down if you’re under 30 and don’t remember the Sun workstation—i.e., you’re one of the many for whom Linux = Unix for as long as you’ve been in the computer business? How many of you would take Solaris for a spin if doing so was as easy as, say, downloading the latest version of Ubuntu and installing it?
In other words, with all the buzz about making Solaris more familiar to Linux users, it turns out the widest part of the familiarity gap isn’t even technological.
So, how do we bridge it?
We need to make “OpenSolaris” something you can touch, something you can “Download Now!” and run on your laptop to try out the latest and greatest from the OpenSolaris community.
We need to clearly articulate the link between Solaris and OpenSolaris in ways the industry understands—namely, that OpenSolaris is the rapidly moving version that delivers the latest innovations, and that Solaris is the enterprise-grade, supported-for-many-years, backward-compatibility- guaranteed version for the data center. Furthermore, the link needs to be more than just “OpenSolaris as upstream for Solaris”. Given how many more copies of Fedora and Ubuntu are running in the world than the enterprise Linuxes, there is significant opportunity here if we can get the model right.
In short, to make OpenSolaris (and, by extension, Solaris) more familiar to Linux users, the first thing we need to do is make it a “distro” in the Linux sense of the word. After all, when people say they know “Linux”, that’s what they’re talking about—how many people really care about the Linux kernel underneath? What they care about is the GNU tools, the desktop, the development environment, and all the other things their favorite distro bundles—and the package system that holds it all together. There’s no reason in the world why (Open)Solaris can’t deliver those same things. Oh yeah, and DTrace, ZFS, Zones, enterprise grade security/scalability/performance/etc., backward compatibility, etc. too.
Put this way, it’s easy to imagine what OpenSolaris needs to look like. That’s why the issues here are not primarily technological.
This is the essence of the Project Indiana you’ve read so much about in the past several weeks. Our goal is to create a binary distribution of OpenSolaris that simultaneously delivers what people have come to expect from “Linux” alongside the great stuff that make Solaris unique.
What comes next? We’re working that out in real time. If you’re interested in following along, participating, or just giving us your two cents, I encourage you to join the indiana-discuss mailing list we just created. We’re particularly interested in hearing from you if you consider yourself a “Linux user” and have been interested in taking Solaris for a spin but, for whatever reason, have considered the gap too wide. What would it take to get you running Solaris?
Yes. Yes. A thousand times, yes.
wow, I’m glad I’m not the only one who’s been haunting the openSolaris website and coming to the realization it isn’t a full package :). I received the Solaris Express Developer Ed. DVD including the Belinix, Nexenta and SchilliX (I haven’t gotten a system free to install it on yet though).
I agree that for most people a kernel is a kernel, but the complete package (installer, updates, apps, official/unofficial support , etc.) is what makes one stand apart from the others.
I hope you can whip who you need to into making something people can get their hands on. I hear praise for Sun and Solaris technology for a few different people and I would love to try it out and while I understand it is not Linux, it’s where I’m coming from and going to have to figure things out from.
~Drew
Start by removing Joerg Schilling from all mailing lists and such.
And just GPL solaris it to get all the religious nuts out of the way.
I’m sorry. You were hired by Sun, correct? Then, please, take a reality check. There are already two such distros.
This is a good idea, as far as it goes. I’m not sure, though, that Solaris’ time hasn’t passed. If it has, it’d probably be better for Sun to just keep it proprietary and milk it as long as it lasts (10 years?).
SunOS/Solaris was my primary Unix from 1987-1999. In the beginning it seemed awesome, but in the final years it become clear that it had simply been eclipsed by Linux, GNU, and the free BSDs. The thought of developing on or administering such a machine now just sounds painful.
If my impression is incorrect, then a live OpenSolaris cd might be a good mind-changer.
Can you please not post stuff about OpenSolaris to Planet Debian? You have many interesting posts, and I don’t mean to suggest that you shouldn’t post to Planet Debian at all, but posting things about OpenSolaris to Planet Debian seems about the same as posting things about AIX or any other UNIX to Planet Debian: not just off-topic (which often doesn’t matter; I like the “window into the life of developers” aspect of Planet Debian), but actively promoting something opposed to Debian.
How many of you would take Solaris for a spin if doing so was as easy as, say, downloading the latest version of Ubuntu and installing it?
Nexenta is a distro that uses OpenSolaris’s kernel with a userland that’s based on Ubuntu. It’s in Alpha, but it works, and it is as easy as downloading an ISO image and installing it. http://www.gnusolaris.org/
I have downloaded belenix distro twice and installed it on the VM .. It was pretty straightforward.. am I missing something? or is belenix not really opensolaris? I do have an issue with the built-in screen resolution of belenix which is like 15 billion by 8 billion pixels.. I mean come on people!
@toxic: thanks for the gnusolaris link.. ‘didn’t know we had a king!” :)
So does this mean you’ll include more drivers with this OpenSolaris ‘distro’? Coz you got a lotta work to do when it comes to stuff like audio(OSS is going open source, so I guess that’ll go away soon) and network drivers…
I disagree about not posting stuff on open solaris (and other OSs) to Planet Debian (and similarly focussed forums). There may be much to learn from these and things worth grabbing (ZFS?) to adopt into other OSs (not just Debian) so any good information is always worthwhile and welcome for my part.
I would try Debian Solaris tomorrow it was available.
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I’m a bit worried about the sudden rush to change the definition of what OpenSolaris is.
Why the need for a new distro, with a special blessing from Sun to use the name? What’s wrong with the existing ones, including SXCR? Why not more resources to them, since they’ve been doing it for 2 years now? It sounds unfair to them to pit them against a new Sun-sponsored distro.
The Register comment quoted above is silly. There’s a Download link on OS.o. It brings you directly to half a dozen available distros, installable in various ways. Nobody forces you to downloads bits here and there and learn how to build them.
I’m worried this project will do what’s already much the case in the Linux worldn, where Linux means RedHat to many.
Making OpenSolaris easier to “Linux users” in itself is not a goal reachable with a single distro: are we talking about Fedora users? RHEL users? Mandriva? Gentoo? And of course, Debian? They’re all different experiences, all can be better than Solaris but in different ways. An OpenSolaris distro won’t be able to mimick them all at the same time.
So I’m puzzled.
On the main site, there should be an (Open)Solaris installer CD–yes, a single CD–that will get you up through add-on package selection; packages then should be installed over the net or via the other CD’s if you have them.
Also, I would very much like a VMWare 6 virtual machine with the latest (Open)Solaris.
With all due respect, launching a mailing list instead of a forum is hardly “up to date”. As far as a Solaris distrib, as others have pointed out, a cd/dvd/vm would be highly welcomed. I would add some documentation to the lot – the howtos, not the man pages.
Cheers
Where can You download OpenSolaris?
Here:
http://schillix.berlios.de/
Wikipedia quote:
“OpenSolaris was released for the first time on 14 June 2005; SchilliX was released on 17 June 2005. Its developers claim that it is the first OpenSolaris distribution. “
That’s utter crap and you know it Ian.
You don’t download “Linux” either, you download “Ubuntu” or “Debian”.
The only reason why your opensolaris distro gets more attemtion than anyone elses is because of it’s ties to Sun Microsystem’s marketing department ( namely, you )
Also, it scares me that you seem more interested in replacing the solaris community with the linux community than you do about making sure (Open)Solaris remains a great operating system
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The University of Oregon, at least, uses Solaris in all CIS labs and everything written for class there must compile and run properly on the CIS network. Therefore, hand is still up… And still under 30.
Don’t get me wrong, but for people who want some hands-on experience _now_, wouldn’t it be nice to supply a vmware image (for vmware player) for download? Several software projects already supply such “appliance to go” (or whatever the nifty name was that VMware Inc. made up for pre-built images) for people who want to try out a certain project without necessarily installing it on their PCs (in a traditional way).
Of course a (preferably dpkg/apt or similar based) Distribution would be nice to have once you evaluated the software a bit.
Why not just throw in with the Nexenta folks and get going. They seem to be on the right track.
Solaris is too hard to install for the neophyte, the first thing that gets them is the slices, where are the partitions and what are slices. Big hang up for Windows trained Linux types. Linux adopted the same Windows partition nomenclature so it never was a problem.
Probably the best way to solve the unfamiliarity problem is with a distro as you say, including a LiveCD.
Sven wrote:
> Dont get me wrong, but for people who want some hands-on
> experience _now_, wouldnt it be nice to supply a vmware
> image (for vmware player) for download?
Actually, that’s already been done. The nexenta team provides
it, available on the nexenta project’s download page, or the
genunix mirror (opensolaris mirror site):
http://tinyurl.com/2qn3ry
http://www.genunix.org/distributions/gnusolaris/index.html
Eric
bill wrote:
> …
> …
> Probably the best way to solve the unfamiliarity
> problem is with a distro as you say, including a LiveCD.
Actually, that’s already been done too, The belenix team
provides it, available from the belenix project’s page:
http://www.genunix.org/distributions/belenix_site/?q=home
I’ve downloaded Solaris from versions 7 to 10 for my UltraSPARCs. I find Solaris frustrating compared to almost any of the polished Linux Distros. I bought 2.6 so I guess I started on it when a 33MHz w/64MB of RAM was amazing.
I would only run Solaris if I were doing high end systems for Oracle on the backend. Otherwise Linux is much easier to work with in my experience. Anymore Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, etc are all very stable. Hell I run several Windows Servers and outside of update reboots they don’t crash either. I miss the good old days of “needing” a full time sysadmin! lol
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Why should anyone give a crap about opensolaris? Apparently the opensolaris crew hasn’t gotten their shit together enough to get a “download now” version, which is a FIRST step.
I’m 37 and still using Solaris. Though I have tried to give OpenSolaris a spin, I haven’t been successful. It really is just a lack of trying because I find that Solaris on Sun’s hardware just works, and it works great. Uptime on my Solaris servers in measured in two digit months, would be longer but power issues in the datacenter force reboots on us once in awhile.
OpenSolaris isn’t ready. Don’t get me wrong, I am also a huge Linux user, in fact, Redhat 7 is the OS that does our Solaris system backups every night and has done so for a few years due to the lack of Solaris drivers for tape library systems. I feel that OpenSolaris just isn’t ready yet. Too much non-Sun hardware to deal with.
Yes. I agreee wholeheartedly. But it’s nothing new at Sun. Have you ever tried http://java.sun.com/ and their downloads section (lets say http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/index.jsp)? Sun’s marketing (who else can be behind this?) must be on crack (what’s todays name of Sun ONE? Err iPlanet Err Java System).
OpenSolaris is going to be a huge success and a breath of fresh air for everyone. I absolutely believe that the only defensible approach to tech or anything else is: “give the people what they want.” No doubt there is some slackness in Solaris uptake but get a version of iTunes for Solaris and notify Digg and you are home free. The big holes in Linux are brand value and relationships with commercial vendors, and I say this as someone who enjoys and prefers writing bash scripts to handle ogg podcasts.
I work in a non-tech field and when I have to explain my (Debian) laptop I say the office suite is from Sun and the browser is Netscape or Mozilla. Brand identification is important for reasons that we have no right to dismiss, and Sun should leverage that unless it is really intolerable to contributing community members, which I doubt. There is a really vicious to-the-death battle for open standards and internecine fights should be faced down with some firmness, sorry Anonymous and confreres.
Yes, people often read about it and go to OpenSolaris in hopes of downloading and trying out the latest and greatest features such as ZFS and DTrace only to get disappointed when they don’t get any link to download a distro. If they do get a link it is not an official distro but more of a hobbyist kind. Getting a community-back distro would go a long way in making enthusiasts – mainly Linux users – download and see for themselves what they’ve been missing by not using Solaris!
I’ll tell you what Mr Murdock, if you can get everything I can do in Linux, working under OpenSolaris, then I’ll be more than happy to give it a shot.
ie: GPL v3 the darn thing…Have it working with MoBlock, Amule, Azureus, etc…Pretty much everything I did in Windows (that I do now in Linux).
I’ll be happy to try ZFS and DTrace as I’ve heard much about these features.
Give it to Debian to package the reference system. Nexenta peeved the Debian community by not playing nicely with others – but that’s the answer. Build OpenSolaris on the current Debian stable – you’ll have the end results of two years testing. Build an OpenSolaris testing and unstable as well. Impose Debian-like packaging standards and LSB compliance – you’re just re-inventing the wheel. Seriously, give it to the Debian community – who are the reference for multi-machine, multi-architecture ports and distributed working :) Ubuntu can offer an Ubuntu fork if they really want to – Sun can offer commercial support. I’m using Debian for mission critical stuff now – Debian testing moved down to Debian stable over the period of about a year – virtually no changes now and I can guarantee continuity of service to my bosses. OK – you take a degree of backwards compatibility hit – but if you really want to run Solaris 10+ binaries on Solaris 8 or vice versa then you have to accept extra work
I tried Nexenta and Belenix, and to be honest, I liked a lot both of distros.
I have been using Linux since 1997, and in my opinion, Solaris needs all the applications that we find in Linux distros. Sun needs to make a help for Linux users. (explaining how to do all the administration things in Solaris that we do in Linux, a kind of control painel translating Linux commands to Solaris, tutorials to help the migration …)
Give me Debian GNU Open Solaris or give me Death!…. er. not death….. I’ll just use 64bit Debian Etch….
But yeah…. I’d totally run Open Solaris on some of our boxes if I could get it installed easily and it didn’t break anythign :)
Solaris? Why bother?
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Last time I used Solaris was 2.6 (SunOS) when i bought a used SPARC to play with. After a day or so I changed it to debian-sparc :P
What I Hate about “Linux”:
1000 different distributions.
10 different Window Managers.
5 different desktop environments.
No API or ABI compatibility between distributions, or releases of a distribution, or editions of a distribution.
At least 4 different programs that are clones of each other but with a different toolkit.
Almost no commercial software.
3 different series of the Linux Kernel, 2.2, 2.4, 2.6,
100,000,000 different versions of the “kernel”
100 different pacht-sets of the “kernel”.
100 different package management systems.
30 different package formats.
5 different kernels other than Linux, (Debian GNU/Herd, Debian GNU/kBSD, Debian “User-space Utils/Kernel” Soon to be Debain GNU/OpenSolaris)
The Register article doesn’t sum it up at all (installing an ON based distro, that’s kept in sync with ON, to build the current ON?!). Apparently for the same reason you don’t seem to acknowledge that your current employer builds a fully functional OpenSolaris distribution.
The effort should be put into the current Solaris Express effort. Mainly into the installer being able to handle the new stuff, like ZFS and ZFS boot for instance. And in the user friendlyness of it.
As far as the visibility goes, yes, it does need marketing. What it also needs is a simple but effective logo along the lines of Debian or Ubuntu. Believe me or not, this is very effective. However no marketing whatsoever will be effective with the Slashdot idiot crowd, that year after year declares *BSD dead (aswell as Solaris being ridiculed with nonsense and licensing bullshit recently, after it’s gaining visibility), and such.
A Linux userland, since Project Indiana seems to suggest, won’t solve anything either. A system/network administrator worth his money will adapt to the current userland in record time. The average user will mostly stay in X11, apart from running uptime and uname in a terminal for screenshotting, and maybe running the package manager since there’s no useful GUI frontend for it. Anyone else who complains, only does so for the sake of it.
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The opensolaris download process is _really_ offputting to someone coming from the linux world. Why _exactly_ does a “free” OS require registration in order to download it? I’ve actually installed opensolaris (nevada b60), and I love ZFS, but things like registration give the appearance that Sun still doesn’t quite “get it”. Assuming you have the power to do something about this, my suggestion is not to wait: removing the reg-requirement to download Nevada is something that you could do _today_, and would serve as a stopgap until Indiana is ready.
Obviously some sort of apt’ish packaging system would also be nice to have at some point, but really any option to install a minimal system and then net-upgrade would be welcome. Downloading 6 cds, even on a fast connection, is just ridiculous.
the workflow needs to be made clearer. i think (and this is based on reading the opensolaris site) you do this (omitting the identification)
1. download the most recent solaris express
2. burn to media
3. install (1)
4. download the most recent BFU tarball
5. BFU the system
it is possible to be clever-er and use Live Upgrade.
you can see there are some nits in this. it’s not directly straightforward to find the bits. you need to create a DVD (and you may care to do this from inside Solaris which is harder than it ought to be). many people will be happy with 1-2-3 but the more experimental want 4-5.
i keep reminding people that solaris is not linux. it’s won’t be linux even if a lot of user & dev space is similar. it’s administratively different. that said, it’s perfectly plausible to get to a place where the places that opensolaris lags are addressed.
unless Zones gets rewritten to use different packaging tools, it looks like SVR4 is what opensolaris is going to be using (not RPM, DEB etc). there is nothing to prevent that happening, but the lower bar may be to improve SVR4 tools. time will tell. it’s an example of the history of solaris that differs from the history of linux.
open solaris is much more like BSD than linux, in that it includes a userspace of libraries and tools. perhaps an eye in that direction would help too.
LiveUpgrade is dumb for a large share of users you want to reach. It requires you to idle a seperate slice big enough to store the whole distrobution and more.
What there needs to be instead is a regular upgrade that loads the current system information and updates accordingly. The current “traditional upgrade” is basically just overwriting and reconfiguring the system. The only thing you get to keep and preconfigured are all user settings in /export/etc/…
A good start would be letting people download nevada without needing to be registed. Sorry, that is a massive showstopper for me right there.
Secondly, can I please, please, please download the file as a single chunk rather than multiple small chunks that I then need to manually join. I realise that the reason for this might well be the retardedness of Apache, but there shirley must be a fix.
I see the biggest problem might be building a good community around this project. Ubuntu is cited many times but so should Nexenta, as this is really the direction many people want to see OpenSolaris go.
Linux users are familiar with the GNU userland, and so are many recent Solaris users, through JDS.
As ever, the biggest hurdle is package management: specifically the ability to easily install new software, as we can do with Ubuntu and Nexenta.
for developers… a small business/startup software development kit:
— JRuby, Ruby, Groovy and associated libraries
— all the X-uby stuff packed together in a decent IDE (I think the Netbeans guys are working on it, but it would be cool if it came as part of the distro)
— something like XRays (the dtrace frontend for MacOSX)
Ian, this hits the nail on the head. I am sympathetic to OpenSolaris, and I am interested in everything. However:
– OpenSolaris feels like Debian 7 or 8 years ago …
– the kernel is great, zfs is great, dtrace is great etc.
– the OS is dead slow compared to Debian Etch (kernel’s or GUI’s fault ???)
– the Solaris userland is ancient compared to GNU’s
– default configuration is more or less missing – the default $PATH is abysmal
…
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