On Monday 10 October 2005 08:47 pm, David Schanen wrote: > On 10/10/05, S Destika <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > You don't need to patch the Kernel on your own if you use vendor > > supported ones. You are > comparing freeware Linux distro with paid > > Solaris support. > > > > Enterprises go with RHEL, SLES and with support - Redhat/SuSE fix > > whatever is busted. There are many shops running Linux in their > > Enterprise. One of them even posted here. > > I administer a cluster of RHEL3 machines actually, and you seem to > have several misconceptions about it. We don't use 4, even though it > has been out for some time, because nearly all the applications we use > aren't supported under it. They update the kernel frequently, though > their changelog's are too ambiguous to discern exactly what they > changed. Enterprise 3 has been out for some time, yet new kernel > revisions end up in the stable channel at least once a month, so I'll > grant you its not daily (but then I don't keep up with how often 4 > releases new kernels, maybe it is nearly that often). I must say, they > break our applications much less frequently than in the early days of > 3, when rebooting from 2.4.21-9.0.2 to -9.0.3 really ran a chance of > causing segfaults in important programs. Their actual tech support is > subpar as far as I'm concerned, and on the few occasions I've > contacted them I concluded they knew even less than I did about our > problems and will just make stuff up when they can't help you (yes, > really).
Another good point you bring up (actually a couple). glibc and gtk+ have always caused problems on Linux and when they change it effects a lot of software. The scenario you raise is a very real situation that folks face. I guess in that case you get the vendor to recompile the software on the new kernel/libraries, huh? That certainly requires carefully planned upgrades to ensure that one has all of their software running on the new kernel. Solaris was planned out well in that respect and most all software that ran on a prior version will continue to run in the future. Even device driver seem to work fine on future releases as long as coded properly. Yet another plus for Solaris. I also mentioned to a colleague today that most folks do not run RHEL 4 yet, and are sticking with RHEL 3, and a point was made that many of Sun's customers are still running on S8 and S9. This is true. S10 is a magnitude better, though. In the past the question of why to use Linux was answered differently by a lot of folks, but many had similar reasons. Some liked the low/no cost, some liked the fact that it's open source, some liked the fact that it ran on commodity hardware. Solaris has addressed many of these issues and continues to make strides of improvement. Couple this with the fact that Solaris 10 had some top notch work done to it, such as DTrace, SMF, Zones, etc...and it really is a terrific product. I don't want to let this get in the way of those that do use Linux, many of which are happy with the solution it provides to them. I have used Linux in the past also, but have gotten away on all but one system which is running Debian. -- Alan DuBoff - Sun Microsystems Solaris x86 Engineering _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
