Hari,
Finally, what about support?
Open Solaris support is as good, if not better, than many of the open
source projects I've worked with previously. This is espcially so if
you're not an "average desktop" user.
I've been using Linux for a number of years now and switched to Open
Solaris starting with NexentaOS then finally installing Open Solaris ON.
In my transition, I found myself in a vaguely familiar but somewhat
different environment where "simple" things such as configuring the
network were just really, really perplexing.
[Remember: I have one computer and if I lost network I could only
reboot, read the resources, reboot and try again]
My experience with Open Solaris has been very positive. The people who
listen on #opensolaris are very helpful and quite understanding. This
mailing list is very responsive. I'm not sure how I would have fared if
OpenSolaris was my *first* open source operating system -- I'm kind of
lucky in that: I know how open source support works and I won't get lost
if you speak a heap of "Unix/tech" jargon to me.
One thing that I'm still coming to terms with is that the toolchain is
just different. I picture my computer having multiple personalities and
most of the time those personalities can either get along or don't
interfere with each other. Every now and then, though, the GNU
personality will display some form of incompatibility with the Solaris
personality and things will go pear shaped.
If something happens with a product I'm used to using or debugging, I'm
fine. However, it happened with Zope 3.3.0. Specifically, I used Solars'
tar to do:
tar xvf Zope-3.3.0.tar
However, Zope has some stupendously long file paths. Unbeknownst to me,
I probably should have put a -E or used GNU tar. So, what happened?
Zope installed. It ran. Well, it kind of ran. It behaved as though a
file were missing. Not suspecting my underlying toolset, I tried to
debug Zope itself. After having fallen over the Zope community's not too
friendly help [sorry, but my experience with open source support with
Zope is that you need a good asbestos suit, especially if you're not
sure how to ask the right questions], someone worked out I was on
Solaris and asked me to use GNU tar.
Then it worked.
BTW, Solaris' make and GNU make aren't the same and if they get mixed up
for some reason in a build things can just mysteriously not build. Oh,
and Solaris doesn't come with the tools that built its kernel [unless
you're using a build that was built with the GNU toolset]. I found it
very, very jarring to type: "cc hello.c" and then get the "it doesn't
exist" message.
Feel free to answer with as much technical jargon as you want. I am not your
average desktop user who knows nothing beyond word processing, emails and web
surfing. I am just curious to learn more about the Solaris platform, especially
considering I use so much and so many of Sun's products.
All that said, Open Solaris and the operating systems that are built
using its sources have been very good to me at least.
I hope they are with you too :)
DSL
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