[geeks] operating systems to replace Solaris

[Shannon]

On Apr 11, 2011, at 09:36 , Dr. Robert Pasken wrote:

> Replacing Solaris-10 with one of the OpenSolaris distros fixes the problem
with the licensing.

No it doesn't. The licensing affects them to, and both of the major
distributions have been cancelled anyway.

> Having machines running some flavor of BSD, linux and Solaris, I find the
amount time I have to devote to "maintaining" the systems versus actually
"using" the system linux is the worst offender followed by the BSD flavors.

Maintenance of BSD is about as simple as any UNIX can get.

Solaris is complicated, even for simple things, and has the most bizarre
patching and package system ever created. Its installer is horrible.

Once installed, it runs quite well, but then so do the BSD and Linux systems.

What exactly do you do on BSD systems that you don't have to do on Solaris?

The main issue I ran into is there are fewer packages for Solaris, and I had
to do a lot of odd things to get some of them working correctly. Not a huge
big deal, but its just simpler on BSD.

Otherwise, Solaris is easier for complicated setups and certain hardware, but
otherwise offers little advantage.

Linux I'd agree with you if you mean the package system and its dependency
hell, except that the Sun systems have the same issue. Everyone does now: too
much software is careless with dependencies, creating a huge mess for all
systems.

> I have several clusters that are used for real-time weather forecasts. I
gave up on linux, even though the code I get from NWS is written for linux,
because I am tired of weird kernel panics, NFS hangs and really awful
performance.

Meanwhile other people do this all the time without issue.

NASA's atmospheric research center where I live uses Linux all the time on
projects like LATIS and CERES. I used to work there, no issues like that at
all.

That isn't so much a vote for Linux as just a: you had to be doing something
wrong or had bad hardware. That causes most kernel panics.

> The BSD flavors are better, but not by much. I can get a two week long run
on the cluster running Solaris and not get a crash which cann't be said for
linux or BSD

Again, other people don't have this issue.

All systems can have issues of course, Solaris included. Solaris at several
local shops has crapped itself on million dollar hardware more than once,
though a lot of that turned out to be bad Sun hardware.

Most of it is user error or bad hardware.

> Considering the bog standard hardware and hardware support in Solaris, you
must be running some odd hardware.

The solaris mailing lists are full of calls for hardware support that is
common on other OS. Its a fairly serious issue with Solaris that you can't
miss if you used it much on PC hardware or spent any time reading the lists.

It did improve a lot before Oracle borked the licensing and killed a lot of
development, but there are still gaps in very, very standard PC hardware.

Just CPU and power control on Solaris is a few years behind the others. Maybe
not an issue for a lot of people, but it is for some.

--
Shannon Hendrix
shannon at widomaker.com