Earlier quoted context omitted.
And Eclipse was similarly named, just to annoy Sun.
I thought so too, but eclipses in real life are always transient phenomena.
Do no look into Eclipse with remaining eye!
The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris
241–250 of 279 posts
Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris
#242There seems to be a lot of odd nostalgia for Solaris in the comments here and on twitter. I think that's missing the point of the article. Yes, Oracle Solaris is dead. But illumos is better, open source, alive and here to stay. You can use illumos today, right now, and have your ZFS, mdb, DTrace and zones. It really is open source and we're a community using and improving it. For 7 years now already. As illumos is on…
There seems to be a lot of odd nostalgia for Solaris in the comments here and on twitter.
There is nothing odd in that: contrary to the Linux party line and all the Linux hype, before illumos and SmartOS, Solaris was the most advanced operating system on the planet. As others have very accurately described and pointed out in the comments on the other reduction in force thread, this was sadly lost on the Linux generation which "grew up on the PC in their parents' basement".
Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris
#243There seems to be a lot of odd nostalgia for Solaris in the comments here and on twitter. I think that's missing the point of the article. Yes, Oracle Solaris is dead. But illumos is better, open source, alive and here to stay. You can use illumos today, right now, and have your ZFS, mdb, DTrace and zones. It really is open source and we're a community using and improving it. For 7 years now already. As illumos is on…
How does running a different OS than most people can give a company an advantage? Can you elaborate this?
You don't have to get up at two o' clock in the morning to run fsck on a filesystem based on 30 year old concepts, for example. Or when you reboot the system, you don't have to wait 18 hours for fsck to complete because it's been more than 180 days since the last filesystem check. And I've many more examples, if you're truly interested.
Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd see only the pain of migrating applications and learning new administration tools. Solaris was dead long before oracle killed it -- to me.
"migrating applications" -- you'd be shocked at how unix software tends to run on... unix OSes with few to no modifications. Things like: * Java * PHP * Perl * Python * Ruby * Apache * Nginx * Varnish * MySqL * Postgres * Node.js * etc all run just fine on a Solaris-clone. Unless your app is using very specific kernel features it will probably work fine.
They run more than just fine; usually an illumos based OS will run circles around Linux on the same hardware, and the real slap is that it won't sacrifice reliability nor correctness of operation to do that.
Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does running a different OS than most people can give a company an advantage? Can you elaborate this?
You can run docker containers on hardware instead of on virtual machines.
...And unlike on Linux, it treats the entire datacenter as one giant machine.
Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
Open source databases still don't have a developer environment that matches what Oracle or SQL Server offer. Same applies to their stored procedures languages and deployment options.
JetBrain's DataGrip is getting there for a wide variety of databases, including Postgres.
+1 for DataGrip, I use in nearly exclusively for MSSQL and PostgreSQL (I only fire up SSMS when I need to manipulate some features of the database I can never remember the T-SQL incantation for, because Microsoft has to make shit as obtuse as possible).
Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
I dunno. I used it a little in college in the early 2000s, along with anything else I could get my hands on, and it seemed to me to be user hostile even by Unix standards. When I worked with Linux, *BSD etc. or Irix, things tended to make more sense. It was difficult to get much experience with Solaris or the other commercial Unixes because you usually had to have particular hardware. Even when Solaris became free an…
If you think Solaris is user-hostile, you should really try out IBM's AIX ("Unix by drunk aliens"). I haven't had great experiences with Irix either.
IRIX was and still is the Bugatti Veyron of operating systems. Any time there was an IRIX 6.5 upgrade, we'd throw a party because the systems were so trivial to upgrade:
inst> keep *
inst> remove incomplete overlays
inst> conflicts
no conflicts
inst> go
Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd see only the pain of migrating applications and learning new administration tools. Solaris was dead long before oracle killed it -- to me.
"migrating applications" -- you'd be shocked at how unix software tends to run on... unix OSes with few to no modifications. Things like: * Java * PHP * Perl * Python * Ruby * Apache * Nginx * Varnish * MySqL * Postgres * Node.js * etc all run just fine on a Solaris-clone. Unless your app is using very specific kernel features it will probably work fine.
The comment up above in the chain was wondering whether running Solaris (or derivatives) offered any advantage. While I'm sure the packages you listed _run_ fine, how difficult would it be to find support for each when running on Solaris? You can run those softwares on Solaris, but is Solaris on the "supported platforms" list?
Not debating here, BTW; I enjoyed my time with Solaris and then its offshoots.
Edit: The thinking here only applies to systems running in production where official support is pretty much mandated.
Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris
#249There seems to be a lot of odd nostalgia for Solaris in the comments here and on twitter. I think that's missing the point of the article. Yes, Oracle Solaris is dead. But illumos is better, open source, alive and here to stay. You can use illumos today, right now, and have your ZFS, mdb, DTrace and zones. It really is open source and we're a community using and improving it. For 7 years now already. As illumos is on…
Things make a lot more sense now. For having been interested tangentially in OpenSolaris (I still have its "bible" as a monitor stand) I never knew Illumos was the kernel, and other OSes based on it. I assumed all the different Solaris spinoffs were complete forks, and thus assumed they were all dead or dying.
I will say the wikis are not inspiring; many on Illumos, OpenIndiana and SmartOS have pages last edited multiple years ago. For Illumos, I think your info above is more useful than the alphabetical listing of distros on the wiki. I think the marketing on OI's site could better tell the "why use me over Fedora/Ubuntu/BSD?" story, and SmartOS could spend less time selling its public cloud service, and more time telling me how to create a private cloud. Its docs are not super discoverable.
All just observations; take them for what they're worth. I do think it's neat that Solaris has lived on, and it makes me want to throw up a lab server to poke around a few hours. Thanks for your work and the comment.
Re: The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
I understand the cost of switching now. Was Postgres never an option? Do the uptime requirements call for RAC etc.?
Our Banner student information system is tied to Oracle. My applications all go against Banner data. Given the licensing cost for Oracle and our current round of cost-cutting, if Postgres was an option, we'd probably take it.
Several years ago at an .edu I had to deal with an upgrade from our current system to Banner. I truly feel for you. :)