[geeks] operating systems to replace Solaris

[Shannon]

On Apr 10, 2011, at 17:20 , Patrick Giagnocavo wrote:

> There is a lot of stuff that I miss from Solaris, though my use case may
> be different than yours.  I was running a lot of zones and switched to
> Proxmox (proxmox.com) which uses either KVM for whole virtualization or
> OpenVZ for Linux-like zones. Solaris IO still seems superior.

I loved the zones, although I really wanted them to make it so new zones were
always very bare bones to start, and custom packaging a bit easier to manage.

Nice stuff though if you need it.

If you don't, its harder to justify.

> 8 stills feel weird to me in the way things are named and where files
> are located.  Perhaps you could get over it as you have a lot of
> experience with NetBSD and I have been tainted with Linux-isms.

FreeBSD's layout is a bit different from NetBSD. NetBSD is the most "pure"
UNIX out there in that regard. Everything else runs from about the same to
really whacked out.

I find Solaris to be path-hell myself.

> Supposedly the 8.1 release had bootable ZFS, which means 8.2 should be
> solid - I see the 8.2 release notes added functionality and fixed a lot
> of bugs in ZFS....

Yea, I did a lot of reading today and talked to a couple of admins who have
good luck with it. You can also patch ZFS to filesystem 28 without much issue
form what I read. You get 15 by default in the stable build.

If you follow some fairly basic installation instructions, you can boot
mirrored ZFS installs of FreeBSD.

>> I am not currently considering Linux because all the distributions seem
fairly
>> bloated and I don't like the package systems. Some of them seem to put
very
>> heavy dependencies even on basic server packages that are, or should be,
all
>> text.
> The only one to consider would be Debian in that case.

I think I'd like to avoid Linux, but I'll think about it.

--
Shannon Hendrix
shannon at widomaker.com