Solaris 10

[markw at mohawksoft.com]

> 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.

Does "Blastwave" get me all the autoconf/automak/libtool things I need for
Solaris? I'm trying to compile some packages and none of the GNU tools are
there, and I'm sort of facing a chicken/egg problem getting them. For
instance, libtool won't compile, I'm pretty sure it is an incompatibility
with gcc and solaris' ar. I have to track that down, but if you know an
"easy" way to get the GNU build environment working that would be awesome.

>
> 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.

On a side note, non-technical CIOs and CEOs are still very uncomfortable
with Linux. I'm amazed, but hey, fact is fact. It is the whole "Who can I
sue if something goes wrong" argument. The fact that most all EULAs state
that you can't sue is besides the point.
>
> Sorry if this is all over the place but I'm being hounded to get away
> from the computer and out the door... ;-)

No prob.
>
> --Tim
>
>
> markw at mohawksoft.com 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?
>>
>>
>


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