[geeks] operating systems to replace Solaris

[Mike Meredith]

On Sun, 10 Apr 2011 12:06:49 -0400, Shannon wrote:
> Some of you guys who replaced Solaris have any comments on what
> choice you made and how it has worked out?

Well, I'm one of them ...

> The main thing I would miss is ZFS, I really like it a lot.

That's one of the main reasons why I went with FreeBSD. 

> I had bad luck with FreeBSD 6 and 7 so it sorta soured me on it, but
> it does have some features I like. Anyone using 8 and liking it?

It's been running on my home server for a while now. No issues.

> The main thing is whatever I move to has to be solid as a rock, no
> experimental stuff need apply.

A pure ZFS FreeBSD might look a bit experimental when installing it (no
installer support, it's an old-fashioned command-line install) but in
operation it's fine.

> 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.

Personally I think that Debian or even Ubuntu server are fairly
light-weight in that they're build up rather than chop down server
installs. A Debian server I recently put together is using a total of
about 840Mbytes of disk space, and I wasn't trying to keep it small.




-- 
Mike Meredith (http://zonky.org/)
 Write a wise saying and your name will live forever
 -- anonymous