I have been involved with Linux since it was first available as a development only release. This length of time predates Solaris and extends back into the SunOS days, so I feel I am in a position to offer good feedback.
Solaris x86 never really caught on because few commercial packages were offered for it and most major UNIX development was done on Solaris SPARC. Many of the people that looked into Solaris x86 < 10 had found it was lacking in many ways. For those that needed a version of UNIX that ran on x86 (Not RISC or MIPS) turned to SCO which had already established a presence for that platform. Many years later with all the corporate and government cut backs, Linux developed a huge following that continues to grow. The Linux user base has grown to the point Solaris SPARC is no longer the preferred development platform. Personally, I have mixed feeling about that because I like both equally. However, I prefer to do development on Solaris 9. While Solaris 10 has some nice features like dtrace, I honestly hate how the SysV startup scripts were ported to something resembling that of AIX. I know there remains some support for backwards compatibility though. However, if you want something resembling AIX, than use AIX. Today SCO is of little interest to anyone with Linux as a competitor and why get caught up in SCO's traditionally nightmarish licensing scheme. Talk about bloody hell! Let’s not forget Linux, Solaris x86, and SCO are not the only choices for an x86 based UNIX. Some others are FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD; all of which are both mature and stable and used by companies like Ebay and Amazon. To judge the future of Linux based on Redhat is not going to lead to an accurate prediction. Redhat is referred to has the Microsoft of the Linux world because of how they sacrifice usability for their controllability. Two perfect examples are file-systems and the kernel. When you install Redhat, you only have one choice for the file-system, ext3. The kernel modules for the other file-systems like reiser, jfs, and xfs are not even built. If you want to or need to rebuild the kernel, well sorry, Redhat has broken the build process. If you decide to download a more current and clean kernel source tree from kernel.org and build that you might have a surprise when and if the system boots. Yes, you guessed it- Rehat intentionally prevents many programs from working with any kernel other than theirs. The last time I tried this, the system booted fine, but the GUI would not run anymore and DNS no longer worked. My preferred flavor of Linux has been SuSe for the last several years and it offers applications that are more current. Cheers, Shawn Leard This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
