Re: Solaris 10

["Timothy M. Lyons-2" <user=1435@nabble.blu.org>]

 As a die-hard Linux enthusiast, I have to say I had been hard-pressed to 
find may good things to say about Solaris  for years.  However, having 
spent the better part of the last 18-months working intimately with 
Solaris 10 in an enterprise environment, I can say I have gone 
180-degrees from my original opinion.  I'm in full agreement that the 
Solaris installer is "painful" to say the least, especially when you 
need to be able to refine the install to customize a standard build 
environment.  A lot of (imho) unnecessary effort went into getting the 
dependencies correct and I too wished for "a better way" on more than 
one occasion...  However, if you take a look at the OpenSolaris 
Installation and Packaging Community 
(http://opensolaris.org/os/community/install/), I think you'll find 
we're not alone and progress is being made towards a new/updated Solaris 
installer as with a host of other communities developing solutions to 
address the demanding needs of the user base. 

For what it's worth, we've taken a Solaris 8 shop, brought it up to 10 
and over time, positively changed the general negative perspective of 
our user base by leveraging JET Jumpstart, containers, zfs, live 
upgrade, Dtrace and a host of other functionality that was unstable or 
non-existent prior to this release.  Thats not even touching on the lab 
work we're doing with SunCluster & Sun Grid (fun stuff), and S10 X86 on 
VM's.  Now I wont sit here and try to tell you it's perfect, because it 
isn't, but then again, show me a 'perfect' OS.   Admittedly, the initial 
curve was steep but we leveraged the integration of Blastwave into our 
standard build to ensure we had the tools we all knew, trusted and 
understood from the Linux side of the world. For all that effort we now 
have a highly refined Solaris build on which I would bet the works on 
it's stability. 

As a qualifier, In that same time, we've also rolled out a standard 
RHEL4 deployment using Satellite server, both on physical boxes and 
vmware instances with similar levels of success.  One thing we were 
surprised at was the lack of interest in migrating to Linux (even by 
those who had previously expressed interest), once we had the Solaris 10 
build up and running. 

Sorry if this is all over the place but I'm being hounded to get away 
from the computer and out the door... ;-) 

--Tim 


[hidden email] wrote: 
> I am re-installing, yet again, Solaris 10. Why? Well I need it for a 
> project and I have to make sure my code compiles and runs on it. 
> 
> I tell you, I have been using the self guiding Linux installers for 
> several years now, and Solaris, in that context, is a HUGE step backward. 
> Its like installing FreeBSD with a quick and dirty Java installer. 
> 
> The now habitual, "ps ax" doesn't work on solaris, you have to use "ps 
> -e." Which is a pain. 
> 
> There is no, that I can see, analogy to adept_manager where I can pick and 
> choose packages and install them easily with all the dependencies managed. 
> 
> Has anyone even looked at Solaris lately? 
> 
>