OpenSolaris Or FreeBSD? 405
Norsefire writes "I am in quite a predicament. I decided a while back to branch out and use a new operating system (currently running Debian). After a bit of searching (trying Gentoo, Gobo and Arch along the way), I decided to use something that isn't Linux. Long story short: I narrowed the choices down to OpenSolaris and FreeBSD, but now I'm stuck. OpenSolaris is commercially backed by Sun, has nice enterprise-y tools in the default install, and best of all, a mature implementation of ZFS. FreeBSD is backed by a foundation, has a minimal default install and a rather new (but recently improved in the 8.0 release) implementation of ZFS, however it offers the Ports Collection (I quite like the performance boost due to compiling from source, no matter how small it might be) and a bigger community than OpenSolaris. That is just a minimal mention of the differences. I would be interested to see what the Slashdot community thinks of these two operating systems."
What? (Score:5, Funny)
Those are commie Operating Systems you have there. Get some Windows 7 and be a good patriot.
Just think about what you're saying in the future.
Re:What? (Score:2, Informative)
C'mon ! Parent is funny not a Troll :) Mods try to have some second degree ...
Re:What? (Score:3, Insightful)
I abandoned the moderation system when they replaced the meta-mod system with the current thumbs up or down one. People abuse the moderation system now with impunity. If you criticize an example of piss-poor moderation, they slap you with Off Topic or Troll.
Save yourself the frustration. Just browse at -1 and ignore the troll-mods.
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Only copyleft is "commie", BSD isn't. (Score:4, Insightful)
Restrictive (copyleft) licensed software like the Linux kernel and the GNU toolchain indeed follows a communist philosophy that fails to see the value of free market competition, and instead relies on government force (see gpl-violations.org).
No it doesn't.
It raises the bar for competition. It allows everyone to start from a more advanced position, the whole "Shoulders of Giants" thing.
We are very lucky to live in a world with GPL software. The GPL has succeeded in allowing real progress to flourish where monopolies have stifled progress in an unregulated "free" market.
The Windows Interix subsystem could have evolved into a great UNIX server platform, but socialist governments (especially in Europe) place severe restrictions on what Microsoft can include in their products, which is the only thing holding them back.
The double-speak of a Microsoft apologist.
Re:Only copyleft is "commie", BSD isn't. (Score:5, Insightful)
If this weren't moderated as interesting, I'd be afraid to answer for fear of feeding stupid trols, but since it is, lets go ahead.
There's a certain stupidity in modern "soundbite" thinking that seems to think that by labelling something you thereby make it bad. This leads people to stuipdly stretch those labels as far as they think they can make them stick. Here is a perfect example. The GPL requires certain actions to avoid restrictions in copying. Microsoft's licenses restrict all copying with small exceptions. The FSF occasionally goes to court to try to get organisations to follow their license. The BSA, Microsoft's enforcers, regularly carry out military style raids on their customers searching for violations, let alone what they do to actual pirates. If you believe that this makes the FSF, the free software movement or whatever communist then you must believe that commercial software producers are all ultra communists and Microsoft is Comintern [wikipedia.org] its self. If you really did believe that and weren't just making a debating point, you could easily find yourself being declared clinically insane.
Interix was created solely for the reason of destroying UNIX; I think you will find that the "open source community" is completely rational for not working on it. Your complaint is like a person wanting to know why turkeys don't do volunteer work to spread the thanksgiving message. However, there is nothing they could do to stop the Windows community from doing the port. The reason it's not happening is because Microsoft and Microsoft collaborators aren't interested in becoming helpful collaborating members of the community.
Which leads to the question why didn't Microsoft just go ahead and fix it. Answer; because then it would be difficult to kill it later. Interix might be a sane choice for an organisation which was trying to eliminate old UNIX installs and just had a few applications which were difficult to rewrite at the current time. It's not something anyone sane would base their future on.
This is the funniest and most ironic statement of your entire post. Stallman never claimed to be an economist and from the beginning said "do this because it's the moral thing even though it will lose you money". The irony comes from the fact that he was wrong. In fact the GPL is an excellent choice as part of a commercial strategy. Either dual license model for sofware with narrow developer interest or through the free (as in beer) software + expensive support model.
Some of the other systems you mentioned should be, logically, looking at their design and historical position before Linux really took off and the number of products developed from them which could have contributed to their develomement dominating the market. However they have failed. The reason is simple. Every time someone comes up with a product based on a non copyleft system (OS-X; JunOS, Microsoft's TCP/IP stack, IPSO etc. etc.) the community divides between those working on the product and those working on the OS. This leads to continual weakening of the community. Compare with
Re:Only copyleft is "commie", BSD isn't. (Score:4, Informative)
While I agree with much of what you say, it doesn't exactly help your case when you layer your own post with fairly fanciful and stupid assertions, while rebutting the exact same in the GPs post. For one, the BSA aren't Microsoft's enforcers anymore than the RIAA are the Bee Gees' enforcers. They are a group that exists to enforce copyright and software licences, and while I don't agree with much of their policy or their actions in enforcing it, suggesting they are some puppet of Microsoft's is just absurd. Check the BSA membership, it's full of huge industry giants many of them direct competitors of Microsoft's; IBM, Apple, Dell, Adobe, Symantec, RSA, to name just a few. Further, military style raids might be a slight exaggeration, like calling the GPL communist or anti-capitalist for example.
But one point in particular I'd like to address is your assertions on the Interix system. Firstly, I think it's absurd to suggest that Interix was "created solely for the reason of destroying UNIX". Where's your proof? What leads you to this conclusion? Or does providing compatibility now (much like a huge number of other projects, like Wine) automatically entail an objective of destroying the target platform? Unix (and Unix-like) systems have always played and continue to play a major role in computing, and this is a good thing, surely some degree of compatibility with these systems at the API level is a good thing? This is a large part of what Interix does, it provides a POSIX implementation on Windows as well as a Unix-like environment for development and productivity. So you have the POSIX API, Csh/Korn shells, a large set of Unix utilities, compiler, libraries and headers, and a lot more. The idea is to provide a Unix environment on Windows for migration, compatibility and development.
Cygwin I suspect wasn't "fixed" by Microsoft for several reasons. One would be that Interix/Cygwin began development around the same time, another would be whether the developers would be receptive to development efforts by Microsoft, another might be legal concerns and all the usual licensing crap, but perhaps most of all, the way they accomplish their functionality is very different. Cygwin provides a POSIX implementation and Unix-like environment _ON TOP_ of the Win32 API. This is done through a DLL (cygwin1.dll) which translates POSIX calls into Win32 calls which in turn call into the NT Native API. Interix by contrast does not use Win32 at all, but runs directly on top of the POSIX subsystem, thus, Interix apps go POSIX Subsystem -> NT Native API. Of course, you still have to use the Win32 API as that's what the Windows OS is primarily built on, but the POSIX subsystem runs alongside it and Interix on top of it. This is indeed the point of the NT Native API and much of the NT design; the Native API is (as the name implies) the base API for the NT OS and environment subsystems run on top of it providing an API for client applications. The Windows API is one such subsystem and the one that 99% of people use, POSIX is another, Win16 is another (I think?), and in the past there has been a (fairly crippled) OS/2 subsystem, and possibly others.
This affords some unique functionality for Interix in that it can do things at the API level that the Win32 API doesn't really support, simple example: fork(). The Win32 API to my knowledge has no real fork() equivalent, however, this is supported by the POSIX subsystem. The reason is that the Native API does support fork() but does not expose it through Win32 (but does through POSIX). Clearly, the Cygwin developers have worked around this, although how they've done it I'm not sure. Perhaps they translate fork() calls to loose Win32 equivalents? Or they call directly into the Native API (possible, but strongly discouraged)? Whatever, my point is the implementations of these two environments are very different, and I suspect they offer varying functionality as well as differing in actual POSIX implementation. I gather there's quite a nice Interix community, and Microsoft has put a
Re:Only copyleft is "commie", BSD isn't. (Score:5, Insightful)
Surely the BSD lawsuit [wikipedia.org] had something to do with Linux taking off instead of BSD?
I rather doubt it, the timelines don't fit. "USL v. BSDi was a lawsuit brought in the United States in 1992 [...]. The case was settled out of court in 1993 [...]."
Meanwhile, Linux didn't hit version 1.0 until March, 1994. Yggdrasil, the first distro, was released in November, 1992, and Slackware in June, 1993, but they were strictly for hobbyists. Anyone looking to do something commercial would have wanted to use a more mature OS, and as I recall there were lots of commercial solutions during that time frame that were based off of BSD derivatives.
IMHO, Linux beat the BSDs for the same reason it beat Minux. It provided meaningful work for outside contributors. To be meaningful, work has to provide autonomy, complexity and a connection between effort and reward. The first two are easy, they are practically inherent to the software development process. The last one is the winner. Wikipedia had the same property, and look at how it grew. Now it seems to be getting harder to make meaningful contributions, and participation seems to be falling. It took a while for people to discover that the iPhone App Store never had this property, but now even the commercial developers are leaving. Especially in the early days, Linus accepted other people's contributions with very few strings, so people got rapid positive feedback. As Linux has grown, it has gotten harder to keep doing this, but Linus seems to try harder than his "competitors". This is the core of the success of Linux.
Re:Only copyleft is "commie", BSD isn't. (Score:3, Interesting)
So what if the case was settled in 1993? As a result of the case, the AT&T code was removed from free BSD distributions. FreeBSD didn't have a cleaned-up release version until 1995 [wikipedia.org].
Re:Only copyleft is "commie", BSD isn't. (Score:5, Insightful)
You ask as if I was accusing Microsoft of being especially evil. This isn't another big secret like the the way they carefully arrange APIs to disadvantage other companies that develop for Windows [groklaw.net]. In fact let's just ask them.
from an MS press release>: [microsoft.com]
It allows users with UNIX environments to take advantage of the benefits of the Windows environment without having to rewrite critical applications. In addition, users can immediately use the full Windows-based application development environment to develop native Win32® API-based applications.
In other words we'd like UNIX customers to move to Windows and abandon UNIX.
from the same MS press release:
Interix 2.2 brings Microsoft customers one step closer to its vision of a single desktop computer for all uses by providing a complete enterprise platform to run all Windows-based, UNIX and Internet applications.
In other words, we'd like you to only use Windows.
In fact there is nothing wrong with this as such. The normal way the free market works is by competition in which one company tries to destroy another companies products by getting people to use their own. What could easily be wrong is if they were, for example, ensuring some of their own software in a market where they had used illegal tactics to become a dominant player were only available on their own platform so that their competitors could not try to do the same to them.
It interests me why the MS astroturfers are so touchy about this topic? Could it be that MS has something to hide on this topic?
People who are neither working for the good of the "Open Source Community" nor Microsoft? Possibly, in part, Useful idiots? People who would be better to spend their time improving Debian or CentOS? Is Microsoft contributing or not? I know little of this and would be honestly interested to analyse it.
Agreed.
That is what many people say. However the SCO probably lawsuit hasn't really had that much influence on Linux. I'm not convinced that it's true. Certainly this doesn't apply to Minix or many of the other BSD situations. It certainly doesn't explain the success of Mozilla (copyleft) over Mosaic (not).
The source they do provide means that any major feature they implement in Linux its self is available to others. That's key. That means that competitors who release features into Linux can do so with the knowledge that major improvements to their features will be available to copy back.
As far as the binary module thing goes; this is an exce
Re:Only copyleft is "commie", BSD isn't. (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course they would. A company wants more customers. So Interix "was created solely for the reason of destroying UNIX" in the same way that any company tries to make their products better than competing products.
I suspect people contribute to these kinds of projects because they use them, not for the only benefit of helping "the community". People do use computers for useful work, from time to time.
After the BSD lawsuit, the open source BSD distributions were rewritten without infringing code. This took some time; the non infringing version of FreeBSD wasn't released until 1995.
The SCO lawsuit had no effect on Linux because it was immediately recognized as nonsense from the beginning.
In the 90s, Minix couldn't even be freely distributed [wikipedia.org]. As a useful operating system, Minix didn't compare to Linux or BSD back then.
Netscape was closed source and commercial for a long time. By the time the Mozilla project was started/Netscape was open sourced, IE (another closed source browser) had already gained significant market share and Mosaic had long been irrelevant.
The source is always available, yes - and if the feature is useful to others, and someone else has an interest to put that feature in the mainline Linux kernel, they can. Otherwise, the code will just get stale.
Companies are hardly "in" the community if they do nothing other than honor the GPL obligation to release the source. The criteria I am using: Do they contribute their useful modifications as patches to the original project or participate in the communities of the projects they use?
Re:Only copyleft is "commie", BSD isn't. (Score:3, Funny)
I didn't realize the people who wanted a complete GNU system needed different levels of indentation in the source code! :)
Re:Only copyleft is "commie", BSD isn't. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Only copyleft is "commie", BSD isn't. (Score:3, Informative)
Many small-time programmers do pick GPL for irrational ideological reasons - "don't let evil corporations steal our code". That was the prevailing culture from the early days of open source software, back when everyone lived in mom's basement and thought money grew on trees. As FLOSS got bigger, a lot of software authors simply didn't give much thought to the GPL-vs-BSD debate, and went with the herd mentality (pun intended). Some bigger players like Qt (now Nokia) also used GPL's restrictiveness to make money, which is perfectly fine as long as you don't claim that restrictively licensed software is somehow more "free" than the permissively licensed / public domain kind. A lot of people also thought GPL would be more effective at "hurting Microsoft" than BSD, which has proven to be completely the opposite - as I predicted. (Google - smart, IBM - dumb.)
I'm not "trying to pin the non-success of SFU" on anyone but the regulators. The FLOSS community doesn't have any obligation to support a particular platform, but it's very telling that they snubbed Interix as much as they did...
So, anyway, I'm just making a long-term prediction of a libertarian-minded counter-movement in open-source software - people like me picking *BSD over Linux / Solaris for ideological reasons. We'll see how that prediction holds out.
Re:Only copyleft is "commie", BSD isn't. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm completely with you. And I think there's some truth to the theory that corporations shunning GPL is going to hurt it. Sure, if your goal is to forever be a countercultural niche player, you can always thrive in that narrow space without corporate backing, but the GPL projects that have succeeded in a broader sense have almost invariably done so with *massive* corporate backing.
Take GCC, for example. If you've ever tried to fix bugs in GCC, it's a dauntingly large piece of code, and unless you work for a company that needs a fix, chances are you won't have the time or the inclination to delve into something that large, much less sufficient understanding of compiler concepts. As a result, I suspect if you took the statistics, you'd find that nearly every contribution to GCC in the past year came from someone fixing it as part of his/her job.
Without those contributions, the code would almost certainly stagnate; the "us versus the corporations" mentality is childish and self-destructive.
Dual boot. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Dual boot. (Score:2)
Don't talk to the Chancellor that way!
I have a PROBLEM. (Score:5, Funny)
I am in quite a predicament. My boss hired me because I bullshitted my way through an interview, but really I don't know shit from shinola when it comes to servers and operating systems and such. I can play WoW... HELP ME PLEASE.
Re:I have a PROBLEM. (Score:4, Funny)
Use your current job to go and get a job at rackspace or the like, you'll be fine.
Go the whole hog... (Score:5, Interesting)
Rather than playing with just another un*x clone, try something like Haiku [haiku-os.org] or FreeVMS [freevms.net] or my personal favourite Plan 9 [bell-labs.com]
Re:Go the whole hog... (Score:5, Informative)
Ah, but OpenSolaris isn't a clone, it's one of the true heirs to the throne, a direct descendent of the original UNIX lineage.
The *BSD family are now cousins to the original UNIX as all the original code was excised to make the 4.3BSD-lite codebase.
ATT Bell Labs started Unix (and the C language) (Score:2, Informative)
You have that backwards [slashdot.org].ATT&T Bell Labs invented C, and then used it to write Unix, which was a play on the name of the OS called Multics, which was also AT&T Bell Lab's baby (along with MIT and General Electric.)
Re:Go the whole hog... (Score:5, Insightful)
Except that they look outdated for at least a decade, and that their paradigms also are outdated.
I wish someone would come up with something new, that combines all good ideas of all OSes into a new basic architecture, after understanding that, creates some new, modern paradigms, and then re-builds all those good ideas from scratch into those new main paradigms.
Which should in itself already result in a load of new possibilities. But some new functions of top, and you have a certain winner.
The only problem is to get the resources to be able to pull something like that off. Because it is certainly possible. Hell I could do it, if I had the budget to hire the right people.
Re:Go the whole hog... (Score:3, Funny)
Hell I could get us to Mars, if I had the budget to hire the right people.
Re:Go the whole hog... (Score:2)
I hear ya. I was *hoping* that Google was going to do as much with their ChromeOS. Unfortunately, I'm not much intrigued with the tangent they have gone off on.
Re:Go the whole hog... (Score:3, Insightful)
What problems are you trying to solve? Re-writing code for the sake of rewriting code to make it look shiny or do shiny type things is all well and good, but if there is no real world problem to mitigate you're basically putting effort into a non-problem - effort that could be put to better use solving problems we do have - such as improving existing code.
Its easy to look at the current platforms out there and think that you could do better if you had the resources, but you're starting from so far behind. And with coding, you can't always just throw more programming hours at it. This is what Microsoft has done with Windows and look where they're at - it works, but no one knows how exactly (including coders within MS - hence the big project for minwin).
I guess my point is this: re-inventing the wheel for the sake of reinvention (eg, the linux way of "not invented here!" for many things) is wasted effort. Think long and hard before going down that path, but if you do - good luck with it. Many talented and intelligent people have tried and just added yet another fragment to the software universe.
Re:Go the whole hog... (Score:3, Funny)
I wish someone would come up with something new, that combines all good ideas of all OSes into a new basic architecture, after understanding that, creates some new, modern paradigms, and then re-builds all those good ideas from scratch into those new main paradigms.
It exists!
Just visit your favourite computer shop and get yourself this shiny new W7-DVD.
Re:Go the whole hog... (Score:3, Insightful)
Except that they look outdated for at least a decade
The upright bicycle has essentially used the same design for over 100 years, and nothing has come close to replacing it. Sometimes you just hit a sweet spot in design, I think UNIX is one of those spots. Sure some places need polish, but the underlying system is very capable and doesn't suffer much for being based on 30 year old ideas.
Re:Go the whole hog... (Score:3, Informative)
The question was about OpenSolaris which is much - but not quite - like Solaris.
Although I suspect you meant your question to be rhetorical it's a good question. HPUX and AIX has never meant to be run on consumer hardware. They are/where tailored to the hardware they where sold for. Solaris and MacOS aren't much different here.
OpenSolaris on the other hand is an open project with ongoing efforts to make it run on thing not sold by Sun or Fujitsu. It has nowhere near the peripheral device support Linux has, but as with other open source OSs that is an ongoing effort. I haven't found a PC I couldn't install OpenSolaris on for a few years now.
Re:Go the whole hog... (Score:3, Interesting)
The compelling reason to use OpenSolaris is a mature ZFS implementation. That's why I use it as a home fileserver. I was running a SXCE build from early 2008 to get ZFS, but then I just blasted away my boot drive and dumped OpenSolaris on it. Imported my pool and away it went. And now the install runs on its on pool (root pool, or rpool), so things are even easier.
Different OSes do different things really well. This is one area where OpenSolaris shines.
Re:Go the whole hog... (Score:3, Informative)
Mac OS X Server is licensed to run in a virtual environment when the host is running on Apple hardware. Actual support from virtualization software is lacking, and limited to Parallels and VMware for OS X only.
Solaris is supported and certified to run on xVM, VMware ESX and VirtualBox on SLE 11; this means that Sun will provide support for running it on these virtual environments. Solaris is supported by VMware's virtualization products as well, and can run as a Xen guest.
Re:FreeVMS (Score:5, Informative)
Instead of FreeVMS which isn't ready for prime time... Get the OpenVMS hobbiest edition, load up SimH and run OpenVMS on a real emulated Vax. For fun you could boot OpenBSD, NetBSD or BSD4.x on the emulated Vax.
As far as Solaris vs. BSD -- I run 'em both here. Solaris mostly on Sparc and BSD on x86. I've done Solaris x86
and it's ok, but it's really fun to set up a jumpstart server and load up some old Sparcs.
I've even got SunOS 4.1.4 up...
Take a look at the software available on the http://www.openvmshobbyist.com/ [openvmshobbyist.com] site. A ton of VMS languages including C, ADA, Pascal, Macro32... TCP/IP and Clustering.
http://simh.trailing-edge.com/ [trailing-edge.com]
Re:Go the whole hog... (Score:2)
A fair post. You could have made an excellent post, had you told us what you like about them, and what you don't like. I've played with a bunch of OS's now, and continue testing and playing. Solaris, for instance, is a nice strong contender in the server field, but it is much more limited as a desktop or workstation OS than most of the Linux flavors, due to a shortage of ported applications.
I've tried Haiku - can't remember now why I passed it over. Probably as limited as Solaris as a desktop/workstation, but I'm not sure.
I'll try the others.
It would just be nice if you told us what it was that YOU liked or disliked about them. ;^)
Why pick just one? (Score:3, Insightful)
If you just have to pick one, I would wait on this decision until the Oracle-Sun deal is through and see what Oracle does. I don't think either is likely to go away any time soon, though, and if OpenSolaris is really open source it *would* be forked if Oracle tried to close it.
Given that you've already tried three different Linux distros, though, why not try both? You're going to be the best judge of what your requirements are.
Disclaimer: I'm an ex-FreeBSD-committer, so I have a dog in the hunt.
Re:Why pick just one? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd say that statistically, ZFS is now safe to use from the point of memory allocation failures simply because the number of user reports to it has fallen off dramatically after the new version and resource limit patches got in (which was significantly before 8.0-release so there was plenty of time to observe the effects).
They're both good. What are you doing? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're looking to learn something new, OpenSolaris is the way I'd go. Lots of commercial enterprises use Solaris, so you're learning a skill that is of direct to a great many businesses.
Of course, that's not to say that Solaris is the only Unix out there - I'm certain that FreeBSD is used in commercial enterprises as well, just not at as high a level as Solaris is. And, ultimately, learning the idiosyncrasies of more than one Unix environment means that you're well placed to adapt if (for example) you find yourself maintaining an AIX or HP-UX host - you've already had the pain of dealing with the differences between FreeBSD/Solaris and Linux, so the next step won't be quite so difficult.
Re:They're both good. What are you doing? (Score:3, Insightful)
The subject line has it right. Without knowing what you plan to use the system for and in what kind of environment it will be in there is absolutely no way to advise you. Indeed the article itself reeks of flamebait.
That said, I can say that I am extremely happy with FreeBSD, but I haven't played with OpenSolaris so I can't make any claims that FreeBSD is better. One of the reasons that I moved to FreeBSD (from Linux) was the more coherent administration. Every Linux distribution that I tried always tacked on a set of system administration/configuration tools that could do 90% of what I needed, but not the rest. But if I tried to do things by editing configuration files manually, sometimes the system tools would step on what I did. With FreeBSD it's pretty much all done by hand editing configuration files (except for user management, where one should let pw(1) edit the files for you). So I find that much easier to maintain.
As mentioned, the ports system is great. I find this the best package management system I've used to date. And it is easy to add a port when needed; so if I need something that isn't in ports, I can create my own port for it (which will deal with dependencies for me) and submit it.
ZFS is now fully supported in FreeBSD8. I haven't used it. I was disappointed that ZFS was not developed for OS X because I was hoping to have a truly native common filesystem I could use both on my servers and desktop. (OS X can cope with UFS, but only in a limited way).
Another things that is nice about FreeBSD (and is presumably true about OpenSolaris as well) is that the base system and the kernel are maintained by the same team. That is, these are full operating systems instead of just a kernel in need of a distribution.
The parent provides some good argument for using OpenSolaris. I'm not disputing those, but the choice depends on your particular needs
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Performance boost? (Score:5, Informative)
For x86, you may get a very slight boost, because binaries in conservative distros/OSes (like FreeBSD) are still typically compiled for i686. Turning SSE and other such stuff on can let gcc generate more optimal code, particularly when floating point is involved.
On x64, it is of course quite meaningless.
In practice, either way, it's not worth the hassle at all.
Can give a boost even with same instruction set. (Score:5, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XOR_swap_algorithm [wikipedia.org]
This maybe wasn't the best example since XOR swaps are rarely useful anyway. I suspect that other things like word (mis)alignment and varying cache miss costs may be a factor for different processors.
Gentoo claims that picking e.g. core2 over nocona can boost performance by 15% (which seems a bit much to me), so picking the right x86_64 variant is still something that is considered. Not something I worry about though, unless I am compiling from source anyway.
Re:Can give a boost even with same instruction set (Score:2)
Gentoo claims that picking e.g. core2 over nocona can boost performance by 15% (which seems a bit much to me), so picking the right x86_64 variant is still something that is considered. Not something I worry about though, unless I am compiling from source anyway.
Gentoo makes all sorts of outlandish claims which seldom stack up, in exchange for which you get an OS which if you don't keep it up to date religiously will ultimately suffer bitrot. Over time, emerge <package> becomes less and less reliable.
(Yes, I have used Gentoo. For several years. I concluded at the end that the amount of work was greater than the benefit.)
Re:Can give a boost even with same instruction set (Score:3, Interesting)
(Yes, I have used Gentoo. For several years. I concluded at the end that the amount of work was greater than the benefit.)
Me too. I love Gentoo, and think it's pretty much as close to my perfect distro as possible. Gentoo Hardened is brilliant.
However, if you do what I do, and only update packages that have security issues, you'll find that suddenly one day, your profile has expired, and packages you need to bring it up to date have entered and left portage, meaning that you have to jump through hoops just to get Python working enough to update.
Say anything about this, and you get the statement "Just do emerge world every night", which is stupid for a production server.
I much prefer Gentoo to Ubuntu or Debian (and nothing to do with speed (claimed or otherwise)), but my current host? Ubuntu 9.04.
Re:Performance boost? (Score:3, Insightful)
i686? A lot of distributions are still compiled for i386. Ubuntu comes to mind, but the same with others like Debian. I suppose it allows for them to run on just about any PC built in the last 20 years, but how many people are trying to run modern, full featured distributions like Ubuntu on anything slower than a P2 nowadays?
Re:[picking a fight over a socialist sig] (Score:3, Insightful)
Mafia theft... err... "taxes" don't "pay for civilization", civilization comes from voluntary cooperation between self-interested individuals that occurs in the free market!
Show me an existing or past successful and prospering civilization which is based strictly on voluntary cooperation, with no single organizing entity with an ultimate mandate to use force (i.e. government) and no forced taxation, and then I'll agree with you.
Until then, my political views are guided by the same reasoning as my software choices - "use things proven to work". Which is why I support a society based on regulated capitalist free market, and a "safety net" of a welfare state.
Re:Performance boost? (Score:4, Interesting)
I only have my own anecdote about this, but I kind of like it.
Back around '00, I had several computers (I still do, but that's beside the point). I had my main desktop, and I had this nice old Pentium 200. I also had a TV-card (Hauppage, I think). If I tried using the TV-card on my main desktop, it would be hellishly slow for doing other things. In addition to some of my screen being covered by the TV-window, of course.
So, I installed the Hauppage card in the P200, which was running stock FreeBSD. It worked, sort of, but the machine was almost unusable for other things.
I tuned the kernel, fiddled with compiler flags, and remade the world.
And what do you think? The entire machine went from lurching slow to usable, while displaying TV. It was the "little extra boost" that was needed.
Now, of course, I don't think it would be of much use to me in most cases these days - as machines have grown so extremely much faster since back then. But, it's the story I tell whenever people ask about performance boosts from recompiling everything.
Re:Performance boost? (Score:2, Insightful)
so you finally figured out how to enable the overlay mode after rebuilding everything? nice job
Re:Performance boost? (Score:2, Informative)
I personally don't care about the little performance gain from the flags. BUT you can get a lot of performance and customization options if you compile it from source because there are many options available for you only if you compile it. A simple example: try installing pidgin from ports, and you will see a bunch of options you probably never saw before! You can disable networks you don't use, enable some underground ones, etc. Now try compiling apache and other server stuff...
It is time consuming, but ports make it really easy for you.
Re:Performance boost? (Score:2)
As I understand it, though the x86 instruction set is the standard, there are
1- optional elements to it: MMX, SSE1/2/3/4... I assume one-size-fits-all code either shuns these subsets, or branches. Both cases diminish performance.
2- Various underlying micro-architectures. So code compiled specifically for one will perform better than a generic compile: cache sizes/alignment, register count/swap...
Re:Performance boost? (Score:2, Interesting)
Why would code compiled on your system run any faster than the same code on someone else's system?
Because many pre-compiled packages use conservative optimization flags and may lack specific code paths for certain processors and instruction sets. They might also have chosen a compiler which doesn't produce the fastest code around. I'm not sure how it stands today, but a few years back, ICC produced code up to 30% faster than GCC or MSVC.
The difference all depends on the type of application of course. Overall, you might only see a performance difference of 1-5%, but for specific parts of the application, performance increase may be anywhere between 10 to 200%.
Last, compiling yourself also means you can choose what gets compiled and what not. Which in turns reduces diskspace and memory usage of the executable and may increase security and performance a bit. For things like Kernels and such, you need to compile it yourself if you want support for specific things (ALTQ for PF under FreeBSD for instance).
Re:Performance boost? (Score:2)
I'm not sure how it stands today, but a few years back, ICC produced code up to 30% faster than GCC or MSVC.
That was my understanding, but it's 10 years old... What I do know is that now Clang [llvm.org] is considered production ready for C and Objective-C code, and it produces *significantly* faster code than gcc at least. I expect ICC probably still beats it, but it's a good improvement.
Re:Performance boost? (Score:3)
Emphasis mine. You are making an unwarranted assumption - that it is the same code. When compiling a port, you can often set flags to change which functionality is compiled into the port. For example, if you are running a server, you can specify that support for X11 should be omitted. Generic binaries can't be as flexible.
Re:Performance boost? (Score:2)
Memory usage and load times with library linkage. It always amuses me when on certain systems, as a result of downloading KDE, it pulls in libraries which are linked against other libraries, which in turn are compiled with GTK support. I don't use GTK anywhere, and yet I have its code sitting in my memory, needlessly. If you compile it yourself, you don't have these needless dependencies.
That said, the difference in loading times is negligible, and I haven't had an OCD approach to software installation for a while. I also trust the likes of $DISTRO's packagers to have a lot more experience in compiling software than I have, since, er, that's what they do all day.
OpenSolaris is more supported (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:OpenSolaris is more supported (Score:3, Informative)
I have to say that I really love OpenSolaris.It's polished, works out of the box with nvidia, has good Java support (LiveConnect actually works in Firefox) and the admin tools for stuff like zfs, zones, glassfish, fault management, system services etc are really excellent.
The list of software packages is still a bit limited, but at least most important things are there. Blastwave, /contrib and /pending helps a lot.
The thing that really bothers me, however, is the lack up security updates in /release. There have been very few updates to 2009.06, even though Mozilla, for instance, has released Firefox 3.5 updates several times. It's hard to believe that 3.1 beta 3 (which is what's in 2009.06) would be immune to all these security issues found in 3.5 ..?
Why switch operating systems due to it's own sake? (Score:3, Insightful)
You didn't say what's your specific need. If you are just testing out different systems and doing some studying, then the correct answer is probably "Both". If you have specific need then would have been nice if you outlined that. FreeBSD is more towards a desktop, Solaris is more for servers, but you already know that. So if you aren't just doing this out of academic interest, would sure help to know your requirements (and why didn't the Linux flavors work out?).
Nobody will probably help you (Score:3, Insightful)
because you forgot to write down the most important part of your question: for which purpose is this server intended.
Linux has more users and software (Score:4, Interesting)
Try both (Score:2, Interesting)
Make a VM of each system and see what you like. The other question is what do you want to do with your system? Run it on your laptop? Use it as a web server? A directory server? Or something else?
This is question is like being asked by a computer illiterate user "What kind of computer should I get?" I always ask "Well what do you want to do? If you want to surf the web, maybe type a paper or two, get a netbook, if you want to play games, get a desktop, if you need to carry it to school or work..." It all depends on what will best preform the functions you're looking for.
If your goal is to learn, try both.
My take on this (Score:2)
I've been using FreeBSD since somewhere around 1999-2000 and I've also played around a bit with various versions of Solaris and the way I look at it is:
If you want to learn something that you can put on your resumé then Solaris is probably the better choice, likewise if you want mature ZFS support, other than that I'd have to say that FreeBSD is the better choice for most people but as a long time FreeBSD user I suspect I'm quite biased, FreeBSD has always made a lot of sense to me, it's well-organized and I just happen to like the simplicity and sane layout that it has. But yeah, neither OS is Debian/Ubuntu and you'll have to learn their little peculiarities (and there's no point fighting it, trying to dump all software into /usr and making /usr/local a symlink to /usr because that's how your Linux distro of choice did it isn't going to fly with FreeBSD, just accept that when you install software it goes in /usr/local and be happy with it :).
(Yes, I once (1998-ish) saw what was a large Linux distro at the time pull that stunt)
/Mikael
Re:My take on this (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:My take on this (Score:2)
Exactly, I'm only using ZFS on FreeBSD for my home file server but it has run fine so far (and considering the issues I had with the combination of cheap consumer SATA disks + expensive RAID controller that I used before it would have to act up a lot to be worse than that (although I suspect if I had gone with better disks they wouldn't have been such a PITA)).
As for the tinkering, yeah, I agree that FreeBSD feels a bit friendlier in that respect, I've also never had FreeBSD tell me that there are upgrades available and then proceeded to fill the root partition of the system and crash, I suppose that's partially my fault for not checking how large all the update files were but still...
/Mikael
Re:My take on this (Score:2)
Well yeah, the Solaris installation suggested I just put everything on one big partition and I decided to at least split off home directories and /usr from that. Guess I should've done a better job, still doesn't make sense not to warn about the whole "first thing that happens after you login is that the system will attempt to download 10+ GiB of update files" thing.
/Mikael
self-compiling not such a black/white matter (Score:2)
I quite like the performance boost due to compiling from source, no matter how small it might be.
While I generally agree... (I use Gentoo for years on multiple systems and love/hate it.)
What if the boost is smaller than the resources it takes to compile it in the first place?
If you once compiled gcc, glibc, kdelibs (or all of gnome) java (se) and ghc (with vmem requirements up to 8GB!) in a row, just to go from x.x.x.2 to x.x.x.3, you know what I am talking about. Here that can take a good day. And the gain from not simply keeping the old version is next to nothing, but often still required because of a security hole.
Here, a weekly update can consist of over 50 packages wanting to be re-compiled. For shit like going from -rc1 to -rc2, or a changed use flag (compile option).
I wonder if it wouldn’t be simpler, to just compile every combination of configure setup / architecture once, and put the binaries on a giant (and I mean bigger-than-google-by-some-magnitudes giant) server. ;)
(At least if you have multiple similar servers, you can save time by using ccache and "binpkg"es.)
Re:self-compiling not such a black/white matter (Score:3, Insightful)
Or you could use Debian and accept that your distribution hasn't been compiled with -Oevery silly little option for a fraction% improvement.
Re:self-compiling not such a black/white matter (Score:2)
Or you could use Debian and accept that your distribution hasn't been compiled with -Oevery silly little option for a fraction% improvement.
This might surprise you, but I actually don't use Debian because I don't like it, not because it "hasn't been compiled with -Oevery silly little option for a fraction% improvement".
Re:self-compiling not such a black/white matter (Score:3, Insightful)
False. Most distributions attempt to deal with this problem in this way, but unless the program uses a pluggable (not just dynamically loaded) architecture it can't actually be packaged this way. The UMN mapserver is a prime example; code might not be used if you don't turn on a feature, but there's no loadable module support so you have to build in support for everything you think you might ever use. This is the problem gentoo was truly created to solve, and so far there is no solution whatsoever other than custom compilation. Programs like Apache which permit you to build modules independently and load them are, of course, different; but then, they don't have this problem to begin with.
Re:self-compiling not such a black/white matter (Score:3, Insightful)
FreeBSD (Score:3, Interesting)
Plus, when you've spent a whole night figuring out why KDE won't compile correctly on FreeBSD....it feels good, like you've accomplished something.
Re:FreeBSD (Score:4, Funny)
I can't believe that. FreeBSD is so good you'll lose all your friends!! I'd like to try it, but I already lost them trying Hurd....
FreeBSD ZFS kernel panics? (Score:4, Interesting)
Does ZFS on FreeBSD still suffer from random kernel panics when it gets low on memory?
I'm particularly referring to this bit of documentation:
To use ZFS, at least 1GB of memory is recommended (for all architectures) but more is helpful as ZFS needs *lots* of memory. Depending on your workload, it may be possible to use ZFS on systems with less memory, but it requires careful tuning to avoid panics from memory exhaustion in the kernel.
Yeah, kernel infrastructure that can't cope with running out of memory. That fills me with confidence. Particularly I've run ZFS on OpenSolaris on a 48MB Pentium laptop and it coped fine.
Unfortunately the FreeBSD ZFS pages are a wiki, which means they're badly organised and out of date. I have no idea when the above was written or whether it's still valid. Does anyone know?
OpenSolaris is desperate (Score:2)
OpenSolaris is Sun's desperate attempt to keep up with Linux. Sun had a great history but they just aren't as relevant anymore, there is little they have that redhat ( for example ) don't. Solaris just isn't in a position to make any kind of comeback at this point.
It's pretty sad that Linux has taken market share from good companies like Sun at least as much as Microsoft.
Re:OpenSolaris is desperate (Score:3, Interesting)
Its a good point there. I work with a Microsoft shop but somewhere along the line they decided to support Oracle databases running on Redhat. Since then, I'd say the majority of our customers running Oracle have plumped for Redhat (the others won't until they upgrade). I wonder if Oracle will be trying to scrap this in favour of Solaris (not OpenSolaris surely) and charge lots of money, but I doubt any of them will migrate - migrating from Windows to Redhat makes a lot of sense, even if the cost is roughly the same overall. Migrating to a more expensive Solaris OS probably won't.
Sun made itself as irrelevant as anyone else, they were the Apple of the server world, selling overpriced hardware that wasn't much good compared to the equivalent you could get from IBM (we did this, 2 pedestal servers, the IBM was 4x the computing power, cheaper, and a much better build quality). It wasn't Linux that killed them.
Re:OpenSolaris is desperate (Score:3, Interesting)
As a long-term Linux guy (since 1995) I think ZFS integration with Samba, iSCSI Targets, and Zones makes OpenSolaris relevant to me. I am now trying to learn Opensolaris so I can use these on a SOHO server. Sure in a year or two BTRFS may have RAID5-like redundancy, caching and intent logging on SSD, and these features, but OpenSolaris/ZFS has them now. I definitely won't be running any solaris on my netbook (kubuntu), laptop (WinXP), or Macs though.
I think if the opensolaris community can produce a variant that makes it easy for a less-than-elite user to set up a server with a samba share, some iSCSI targets (for time machine, aperture library, or whatever), and possibly an IMAP server, they can greatly increase the pool to whom they are relevant. Auto-magic HDD management like drobo would help too.
Debian GNU/kFreeBSD (Score:5, Informative)
You are used to Debian ? Then try Debian GNU/kFreeBSD [debian.org].
The Debian distro on top of a FreeBSD kernel.
Re:Debian GNU/kFreeBSD (Score:3, Insightful)
I have no mod points, but this is exactly what I was going to suggest... Get the best of both worlds.
Re:Debian GNU/kFreeBSD (Score:4, Informative)
Depends on what you are looking for (Score:2, Insightful)
Therefore if we are to restrict our options to OpenBSD and FreeBSD i would lean towards FreeBSD simply due to the large no. of apps available through ports.Also i believe driver compatibility is a little better in FreeBSD, especially recently with nvidia cards.
However as another poster said, the best judge is you. therefore install each and try them out and see which works best with your hardware. you may also want to compare desktop responsiveness with Linux, as I believe that recent linux kernels have received further optimizations for desktop performance.
If its a server OS you are looking for then it depends on what you are using it for (LAMP, file server, DB host etc.). If you are looking to run commercial DBs like Oracle on it, a certified OS like RHEL/Solaris may be a better bet if u plan to ask for support. Thats a totally different ball game all together and is something on which one can write pages on.
Good luck on whatever you choose to use.
Re:Depends on what you are looking for (Score:4, Interesting)
Therefore if we are to restrict our options to OpenBSD and FreeBSD i would lean towards FreeBSD simply due to the large no. of apps available through ports.Also i believe driver compatibility is a little better in FreeBSD, especially recently with nvidia cards.
FreeBSD only had NVidia on i386 kernels at least when I tried it on the desktop and quit about 2 months ago. You have the open source driver with works, but for decent multi head on a new model card you still need the closed source driver. OpenBSD has similar and (in my case) sometimes better hardware support. The Intel wireless card in my Dull laptop is supported on OpenBSD out of the box but FreeBSD still required me (at 8.0-RC1) to download a driver and munge with boot options to make it happen. Doable, but mildly annoying since it is the essentially the same driver with an extra PCI ID added to it to let it use the card.
If you're building a kick-ass server then the choice is up to you. You can't go wrong with Slowlaris or *BSD. I like FreeBSD because it has jails. They take a little getting used to but they are great. It's particularly useful to be able to give people root in a jail to admin something and know they can't actually root any of the other jails or the host. Solaris has Zones. Linux has a suite of patches that can do jails but it's not mainstream yet, and I wouldn't trust it as far as I could throw it if I were trying to attach a patched kernel to a current distro.
Solaris and FreeBSD have ZFS. Both are stable. Solaris has the slightly more mature support, but I've never seen FreeBSD lose data or kernel panic on me because of ZFS. There's a LOT of advantages to using ZFS. Quite a few are met with LVM on Linux or dynamic disks on Windows, but not all.
OpenBSD is going to be more secure out of the box, until you start installing from ports or packages.
Solaris is heavy. The default install was massive last time I tried it and it took forever to boot. Linux is even worse on size but fast to boot now (Ubuntu and Fedora at least have made huge advances in their latest releases). FreeBSD and OpenBSD can be shoehorned into very little space if needed without resorting to rolling your own distro, which can be advantageous.
For hardware support, Linux is generally better than the alternatives. If you only have very new hardware then Windows 7 is going to have better support.
Right; it should be clear as mud now that every system has its own advantages and disadvantages. It's like asking "should I choose a Porsche or a VW" (Ok since VW owns half of Porsche now...) Horses for courses as they say. You'd test drive the cars if you were looking to make sure they met your needs. Try the different operating systems on a sacrificial machine or VM. Stick with the choice that you feel comfortable with.
hm (Score:5, Informative)
Drivers, Drivers, Drivers.... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm using Debian stable right now as the solution for my particular requirements (development desktop that's a good Xen Dom0), but I'd much rather be using a BSD (the first machine I bare metaled was BSD 2.x onto a PDP-11/44 in 1981 (sic)) or Solaris (it took me most of a decade, but I eventually got over their switch to AT&T :-).
The big problems with FreeBSD when I made my decision were no Dom0 support and an immature ZFS, and the problem I've always had with Solaris is solid mass storage device driver support, at least for vaguely affordable controllers that don't require a PCI-X bus. E.g. when I last checked nVidia SATA chipset support was iffy (which was odd since a classic workstation they shipped had a rebadged Tyan motherboard with a nVidia chipset; I've got two of those Tyans in prodution and they're rock solid ... with Windows XP :-( hey, I'm not willing to put my parents on Linux or whatever quite yet )).
This may have improved since then, but be sure to check for problems in the field.
What are your goals??? (Score:3, Insightful)
Without that information, all you'll get is a bunch of people suggesting their own pet projects.
Even if you just want to learn and play you might want to have a goal. Do you want to learn to administer ZFS? You seem to be fixated on it.
Why? (Score:2, Interesting)
What makes you want to blow away something you're already running & comfortable with? You give no reason for switching away from Debian.
Suggestions:
- For Linux, Debian is pretty much the granddaddy, and can likely be wrangled to do whatever you want. You seem the explorative type. If you're comfortable with Debian, figure out how to do whatever it is you're interested in on Debian and get on with it. Changing distros won't change your life.
- For other OSs, you're blessed to live in the age where you can just grab virtualbox, fire up a VM of whatever it is you wan to play with, and fiddle with it. When I was messing with all this I had 5 crappy old noisy minitower PCs around my desk (and a NeXT on top of it, which was what I actually used as my workstation becuase it Just Worked). If you're really really impressed by something that you've monkeyed with in your VMs for a while, switch to it if you really want to, but honestly in ISP and hosting type shops Debian is what I see most.
- It sounds like you want slowlaris or FreeBSD just to get ZFS, presumably because you have an ever-expanding collection of media, pr0n, und w4r3z and want to be able to just add disks to your storage pool on the fly and all the other spiffy stuff that ZFS does. If you want to kick the tires on a new filesystem technology, may I suggest that you grab the latest iso release of DragonFlyBSD and check out HAMMER? It's really a lot simpler to use than ZFS, and personally I feel it's really designed The Right Way.
- If you really want a challenge, get a Mac (or buy yourself Snow Leopard and make yourself a hackintosh) and learn how to use the powerful and complicated tools that make Mac OS X Server work. Things are very different from the way other unixen do things, and I find messing with them and learning how they work to be very satisfying.
Stick with Linux (Score:2, Interesting)
I came from a SunOS background but used Linux based distributions at home (Slaskware was the easiest at the time).
I the tried NetBSD and FreeBSD and they were okay, I found general responsiveness felt good, not necessarily faster, but more consistant, this was years before low lateny linux kernel.
After about 9-12 months, I realised I was spending a lot of my time just trying to get iBCS, Wine and Linux compatibility working so I could be productive. I realised I wasn't gaining anything from running FreeBSD
and was struggling to make it work like a Linux based desktop OS. As a server I favoured Solaris anyway.
I've been Happy with Both (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm quite happy with both OpenSolaris and FreeBSD as desktops, as well as servers.
You didn't specify what your primary goals are for the system in question-- if you're looking for a general purpose web surfing/light development machine, OpenSolaris should be fine for you-- as long as you have at least a gigabyte of memory and a moderately fast processor.
FreeBSD's a lot less resource intensive in my experience-- I'm currently supporting two sites that still have Pentium III/600-based servers with uptimes approaching a year each. (Last reboot for each was due to a multi-day power outage.)
If you have VirtualBox installed, give both FreeBSD and OpenSolaris a whirl, see what you think.
Use CP/M (Score:5, Funny)
Since you're not telling us what you're actually planning to do with the OS, might as well advice some random OS based on no reason whatsoever.
Re:Use CP/M (Score:4, Funny)
Since you're not telling us what you're actually planning to do with the OS, might as well advice some random OS based on no reason whatsoever.
I was favouring OS/360 myself. He sounded like he wanted a challenge.
And Multics would have been my second choice.
CP/M is a great idea, but too simple. Something BIG and totally irrelevant is called for here.
both (Score:2)
If you need the features (or paid sun support) though, go for it - but FreeBSD has most of the feature set these days and is much faster. Ports are also way easier than obtaining package X from source and then running into whatever undiscovered bugs exist in that particular package under opensolaris becuase you happen to be the first one to actually run it on that platform.
It REALLY depends on your intended purpose as to which OS is best - the only one who can really answer that, whilst taking into account your previous history, skillset andn willingness to learn/fiddle is you.
Re:Why? (Score:3, Insightful)
Surely it depends upon what you mean by "support?"
OpenSolaris is backed by one of the big UNIX developers and is a true, direct lineage UNIX. You can also pay Sun for full enterprise OS support, which could include getting their programmers to fix a particular kernel or core OS bug for you within days.. if you're rich enough to afford the Platinum Support.
Re:Why? (Score:4, Informative)
Surely it depends upon what you mean by "support?"
OpenSolaris is backed by one of the big UNIX developers and is a true, direct lineage UNIX. You can also pay Sun for full enterprise OS support, which could include getting their programmers to fix a particular kernel or core OS bug for you within days.. if you're rich enough to afford the Platinum Support.
And you've bought hardware on their "supported hardware" list.
Re:Why? (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know if it has been fixed today, but when I last tried and tested OpenSolaris as a replacement for my Linux, I ended up ditching it because of lacking support for Bluetooth.
While this particular feature isn't vital to a server, other features may be. So my general advice to OP would be first to make clear what the requirements are, and put priority to the corporate support vs. license question. Since OpenSolaris and BSD are what's left to decide between, I would guess the license isn't that important.
So if OpenSolaris supports all the hardware and features needed for the task, I would go for that in a corporate environment, because of the posibility of corporate class support. If the company already have plenty of experienced un*x admins to provide a 24/7 3hr support on its own, I'd say go for FreeBSD, because development is more agile than OpenSolaris, new features and hardware are supported quicker on this platform, and given you have these skillfull admins already, the new stuff could be made to work easily.
Re:Why? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Why? (Score:3, Interesting)
Looks like this is "just for fun" or to learn new, interesting things. A good reason, if you ask me.
Having used both briefly, I can't think of a good answer other than "try both" or "flip a coin" - neither is better or more interesting than the other and both are different from Linux in many subtle ways, enough to force you to learn something, and to cause that funny feeling when you perform some learned, almost mechanical tasks as if it were Linux and almost forget it isn't, when suddenly something unexpected happens (as in, a command having completely different output formatting or existing under a different name, or a subtle difference in directory structure, not a spurious rm -rf /, hopefully).
Re:Why? (Score:2)
Yep, why indeed would you use linux over Mac OS, or Mac OS over windows... after all, each of those has more "support" in sequence*.
* For a given definition of support, other peoples definition of support may vary.
Re:Grow Up (Score:2)
Whilst I don't agree with the profanity, I agree with the sentiment.
This site used to be such a haven for trolls and geeks, now it's full of wannabes for both :(
Re:Article is trollbait (Score:2)
Re:Article is trollbait (Score:2)
Re:Article is trollbait (Score:2, Troll)
You have been trolled.
Nope. They are the distros I tried. Gentoo for its compiled-from-source nature, Gobo for its new approach on the filesystem, and Arch because it was recommended that I try it. All had their hangups but if I was sticking with Linux I would probably use Arch.
Still trolled by gentoo -O flag weenies, aren't we?
I also like setting compile-time options, applying patches etc. that you can't do with packages.
This is a good choice
Yeah ... but I feel like a change :-)
No, just no, not unless you have a specific reason to. As a desktop? They don't call it Slowaris for nothing, y'know.
Now who's trolling/flambating?
Well, it is Sun, after all. They did write the bloody thing. But don't forget that ZFS has its own overhead, so if you don't have a use for it, you're wasting your time and your system resources.
I have plenty of use for ZFS, it was one the main factors in narrowing my choice down to FreeBSD and OSOL.
Why? Not unless you have a specific reason to. You're already running a stable operating system that works on your hardware. Have you looked to see if the drivers you want are available? If it supports your hardware, go for it. If not, why put yourself through hell?
I have both OSOL and FreeBSD installed already. But there's only one of me so I can't use both. So I wanted to see what the general opinion about those two was.
Doesn't make any difference, bro, unless you are trying to start a flamewar. It either does what you want or it's crap.
No it doesn't, I was merely mentioning some differences.
Re:Article is trollbait (Score:3, Informative)
> Now who's trolling/flambating?
I was over the top, but...
You said you like to compile your own because of "speed issues." If your speed issues are that sensitive, you don't want Solaris. Solaris on x86 has been known to be a pig for speed in the past. While this has improved in Solaris10, I think you'll find Solaris on x86 to be slightly below par compared to a precompiled Debian kernel for your architecture.
The reasons for running Solaris are not speed related.
> I also like setting compile-time options, applying patches etc. that you can't do with packages
I believe that the whole "locally compiled = better performance" is a load of hogwash since you chew up time compiling, and if you compile in the background, doesn't that affect what's going on in the foreground? This is why some people have a separate "compile machine" for Gentoo. I believe this "wasted" effort and time outweighs whatever potential benefits you get from a local compile.
And someone up there mentioned going from hypothetical versions x.x.3 to x.x.4rc or something, leaving you with the choice of not being arsed to do it and put up with a potential security hole or do another recompile for a minor bugfix.
Your argument for local compilation also assumes that packages go unpatched. That's simply not true. And if you're really impatient or can't find it in the repository, you can build your own packages from source with chkinstall. I have my own little repository called local.debs just for that.
> But there's only one of me so I can't use both.
Sure you can. They're called virtual machines. It's also called multiple boot.
Make some space and try 'em out for yourself.
--
BMO
Re:Article is trollbait (Score:2)
It's the long boot time that gives it the name (and makes its appearance in a Stargate episode amusing when they need the gate going in 20 seconds and the machine controlling it is still showing the openboot prompt). Once it's running it isn't slow. I'm running it on some pretty old sparc hardware and it runs quite well. NFS on linux for one thing has not yet caught up so it's faster in some areas, and zones are nice.
Re:Article is trollbait (Score:4, Insightful)
> Switch to OpenSolaris
No, just no, not unless you have a specific reason to. As a desktop? They don't call it Slowaris for nothing, y'know.
Way to keep the troll alive. I know you are just trying to get a rise out of people, but come on, digging up a term from like 1995 isn't very convincing. I personally run Solaris (and production systems at work) because there is nothing in the space that scales like it. Even for single thread applications (and only one of them) with no memory requirements it is just as fast (now at least, early x86 versions of Solaris didn't perform as well as their SPARC counterparts) as FreeBSD, Linux, Windows, etc.
I could go on to bash Linux et al but, but what would be the point? What ever suits your needs the best is the best OS. Oh, I remember, this is slashdot, we make uninformed, brash comments here now. In 2000, this was a forum for killing FUD, now it is hear to spread FUD.
To the original poster, I think, if you want a better debate, you should take it to serverfault.com