Seems to me you already have your mind made up so why bother? still.. read on
On Saturday 26 November 2005 17:38, Jake Maciejewski wrote: > > Dtrace is better than just for a developer, it's good for system > > Administrator as well. > > What would [i]I[/i] do with it [i]on a desktop[/i]. I use shell scripting > frequently and the occasional PERL, but I rarely have the need to dig very > deep. This is true until you strike some obscure problem and want to debug it. Oops, sorry, we're talking desktop here, ... Just reboot then. > > > Well I wouldn't limit zones and SMF just for servers. Zones give you > > the ability to install an temporarily to test, when its done you > > simply delete the zone, it also allows you to wall off an application > > from the rest of the system, unsure an application is safe, wall it > > off inside a zone. > > Normally when I screw up my system with upgrades or new applications it's > because of intricacies of my system that wouldn't easily be replicated in a > zone. Also, setting up a zone for new software might be more trouble than > just installing and hoping it works. Temporarily breaking GNOME on my > desktop isn't as big of a deal as upgrading Apache and breaking a server, > for example. > It depends what you want, you might for example run wine in a zone to prevent windows viruses or poorly behaved widows apps from affecting the rest of your system. > > SMF makes it easier to maintain workstations and > > servers; you can use it to track problems your hardware and software > > so it makes sense on the desktop as well. > > I may have underestimated SMF. > Probably, but it does work better on SPARC systems > > When you add in ZFS it also > > makes great uses for the desktop, snapshots, clones are perfect for > > working on projects. You can setup automatic snapshots of any project > > you are working on. It's then easy to go backward. > > I can see how ZFS would be useful, but not useful enough to run Solaris for > it. The simplicity of administering ZFS is far over everything else. All other systems seem to have usability problems, even the windows practice of rooting all drives in the same place isn't particularly convenient especially when it breaks all you shortcuts. I think ZFS gives all the benefits of unix filesystem semantics without the drawbacks. > > > Besides hardware support, what does Linux bring to the table? Solaris > > and Linux both use X.org as its graphics display subsystem. > > Well, I have 3D acceleration support from nvidia, who now offer Solaris > drivers I see. I don't know about AGP support, though. I'm running amd64 > with an nividia chipset, which I don't think is supported by Solaris > agpgart. What I do know for sure is I'm not going to be playing Quake 4 in > Solaris, and I as far as I know ATI isn't an option unless I want to pay > for XiG's drivers. Time will tell, gee go buy a 59 buck GEFORCE and plug it in till something else comes along, dunno about agpgart but I think many chipsets implement this in pretty similar ways, so I'd expect reasonably broad support. On this note, Solaris does have more limited driver support, but the Solaris DDI is STABLE and drivers do not break between versions, (linux breaks drivers even between BUILDS), as far as I know drivers as far back as solaris 7 can still be loaded on S10. So when I upgrade Solaris I have a very good chance that all my hardware will work too. Somathing that can't be said for linux. I have found locating drivers for a PARTICULAR linux distro and revision almost impossible in some cases. Of course there is also the ABI stability - Guaranteed for a certain ABI subset. There's a bunch of stuff I haven't updated since solaris 7 ! As far as I know much of blastwaves stuff is linked for Solaris 8 and will run on everything up to 10. Try running an app linked for RH 7 on fedora, or say debian linux.. Actually try even _finding_ a modern version of anything linked for RH7 ! This is a very attractive feature in my book, that saves me an absolute heap of time. > I know WINE supports Solaris, but I don't think CrossOver Office and Cedega > do, so running MS Office and games gets significantly trickier. > Far as I know these apps work fine in a straight wine environment these days. Crossover is a commercial product and codeweavers are open to a Solaris version if there is a market for it (or someone else like sun pays for it). Transgaming are open to a port as well, as I last heard (they just don't want to maintain it). I have considered porting Transgamings wine derivative once or twice. > > You are free to use any display manager you, thanks to Blastwave it has > > most if not all the standard desktop environments. Blastwave has over > > 1300 ready made applications. > > Great! I'd like GNOME 2.12 (with some degree of integration), gkrellm (with > support for CPU temperature, for example), MPlayer with win32codecs and > without pulling in esd, k3b and konqueror without pulling in arts, a cross > toolchain for Linux PPC built automatically, fsv, cdrdao, dvd+rw-tools, and > bittorrent without the GUI. Gentoo portage supports it all. Blastwave > misses by a long shot. The closest I get is Nexenta and installing stuff > like MPlayer manually, but that Linux PPC cross toolchain sure would be a > pain. > Of course you choose deliberately difficult configurations but. 1. Far as I know you can build gnome up to the cvs version if you like 2. Don't know gkrellm, there are only one or two drivers for the system management bus around so it's unlikely you will get your cpu temperature. A digital thermometer in the air stream works well :-) 3. Mplayer works fine without esd or kde components using the sun audio plugin, and works with all the windows dlls up to WMV3, was just browsing a bunch of video files with it just today. Solaris was quite a bit faster than linux doing it too. 4,5,6 Cross gccs are possible on any OS so go for it. dvd+rwtools works out of the box, for cdrdao,substitute cdrw or cdrecord The others I don't know, though I'm pretty sure there are multiple bittorent clients around. fsv is documented to work, but I've never tried it. > > As far as kernel stability, mostly because > > everything is tested to extreme limits by Sun and its customers, who > > demand a stable, scalable solution. There hardware certification > > testing has been known to kill the product being tested in some cases. > > Linux runs on everything from many of the top supercomputers to embedded > applications like DVD players and broadband routers. IBM, RedHat, and SUSE > are all very much involved in enterprise Linux. I'd call this one a draw. > Huh, how many different breeds of computer do you have in your lounge room? We were talking about desktops systems, yes ? As far as stability is concerned Solaris beats linux hands down particularly under heavy loads or in low resource (memory + swap) which can kill a linux box. You know linux is not an ideal OS for a dvd player you know, lots of companies use it just because it's free and they don't have to pay royalties. Thats pretty attractive to them, but when it comes to it, why should I care if my DVD player has linux in it or Win CE or QNX or some custom OS if it plays my dvds properly ? > > Solaris in the future will be a better choice for more of those > > choices. OpenBSD currently offers very little that Solaris doesn't, > > Solaris currently lacks only network bridging; Solaris 10 currently > > has a cleaner and faster network implementation. > > Cleaner and faster than OpenBSD, probably, but I use OpenBSD for security > because it's been security-oriented for years. Trusted Solaris might be a > better Sun product to compare OpenBSD to, but it's still proprietary and > lacks the network enhancements. I'm not sure how firewalling on Solaris > compares to PF, but openbsd.org gives very clear instructions on setting up > even complicated stuff like load balancing with PF. > Doesn't sound very desktopish to me, if you are doing these things then you might appreciate other Solaris features like RBAC (including ACLS), secure zones, smf and any number of other security features that linux doesn't have. You need to make up your mind, are you interested in server grade security and administration or not ? > > The biggest problem with Xen is that you are > > basically inheriting a full OS to maintain for each virtual machine > > you are implementing. > > That's an advantage. The usability of Linux and security of OpenBSD, for > example, are mutally exclusive. > Thats not exactly true, Solaris is secure and still usable, AFAIK trusted Solaris is being rolled into standard Solaris. > > Here is another example, Grandma calls and says my computer isn't > > working. With Solaris you can tell her to run scvs ?x and have it > > read what it says. And it will explain that a hard drive has failed, > > or her network cable is unplugged. Does Linux have anything like that? > > Like I said above, I might have underestimated SMF. > This message posted from opensolaris.org This may also be a good reason to use RBAC and other Solaris security features so you can fix your grandmas machine over the internet without opening the entire system to hacking through your account. Anyway, this is why I think you should care. _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
