anyone running solaris 10?

[Net]

how do you like it? looks like there is more opensource programs for it now

 

[Nothinman]

Most OSS software should run fine on it, but other than ZFS and dtrace I don't really see the point. And even then I'd much rather go without those things and use something well, usable, like Debian.

 

[QuixoticOne]

It's great when it works. Build 94 of SXCE / ON is the first one that would actually install properly on my
P35/ICH9R motherboard and work with my GbE LAN chip properly.

There are still major rough edges when it comes to supporting various chipsets / peripherals, but it seems that they're making
great strides in getting at least a good selection of the major ones supported.

Post-Build 100 and/or the subsequent 2008.11 release of the next major change set in a few months should be especially
good.

The half-weekly build / release cycle for (ON/SXCE) is good to get the latest changes.

I like it for ZFS, and an overall sense of security / stability and solidity as a file server role compared to most any
other OS. I'd probably be just as happy in those respects with FreeBSD if its ZFS implementation and some of its
bells and whistles for serving / sharing were as good as Solaris' which at this time isn't so.

In terms of a developer workstation role I've always liked running the SunStudio compilers and development tools,
compared to the old versions of the GNU C/C++/Fortran or Microsoft VisualStudio C/C++ they're just superior.

I suppose their advantage is less now that things like Eclipse and VisualStudio, the GNU compilers, and other IDE /
tool sets have improved.

The freeware available for Solaris is almost the same as that available for LINUX; even way back in the early 90s
I was downloading or getting CDs of virtually all the major popular open source programs for SOLARIS 6 / SunOS 4.x
SPARC or X86. Sites like sunfreeware and blastwave and so on have great 3rd party package collections of
open source programs that rival the collections available in some LINUX distributions.

The main things that annoy me are:
a) the 2nd class support (or total lack thereof) of good GPU drivers for it (Hello, ATI/AMD?!)
b) the relative lack of driver support compared to LINUX; it'd be good if there was a way to "wrap"/port BSD or LINUX drivers to Solaris more easily.
c) Often byzantine sysadmin commands which differ appeciably in name / syntax from the ways one would do the same
kinds of things in BSD/LINUX. In some cases I see the present justification for a divergence. In some cases I see the
HISTORICAL motivation to perpetuate a difference. Often, though, they ought to just include the familiar tools/commands
alongside the "SUN" ones and let them interoperate easily. Package management comes strongly to mind; IPS/PKG/...
are OK but somehow yum/apt/... seems nicer. Disk and device management / nomenclature too.
d) Lack of ext2/ext3/NTFS/... filesystem support; are you KIDDING SUN?! Yes I know ZFS is superior, but does
that really mean you couldn't include the tools to read/write OTHER common filesystems too?
e) Could the packages be named anything worse? Are we still trying to fit the names on punched card? Can't we have
something approaching descriptive english or whatever?

Yeah dtrace is nice too. Zones rock, too bad x86/x64 architecture sucks in the MMU area so they can't be
taken advantage of on commodity hardware.

 

[crontab]

only at work, only on sparcs.

 

[sourceninja]

We run it here on sparc for our webserver, oracle server, and application server. Works rock solid, except for the fact nothing works like you are used too if you are a linux guy. For example our guys here basically have us install an entire gnu tool suite into /usr/local. I really see no reason to use it as a desktop for sure.

 

[RaiderJ]

Going to make an attempt to run S10 on an Atom board for a ZFS file server.

<fingers crossed>