Now that I work over at Onvoy, I get plenty of exposure to Solaris. In fact, at the U, I had to manage an aging E4500 running Solaris 2.6. Recent experience with Solaris 10 on SPARC hardware has shown me that it's not quite polished. We continue to have race conditions with sendmail on Solaris 10 while under botnet attack from Poland. So much so, that we have to remove the machine from our mail server lineup between the hours of 00:00 and 03:30. That does not give me much confidence in Solaris 10, honestly. Solaris 9 hums along happily enough. > The reason is that Linux has been really taking over in computing > and everything is ready to compile and run under Linux. Linux uses > GNU tools, which are much better than Solaris's tools. Because of > this, I wouldn't bother with Solaris. "Better" is a very subjective opinion. I like GNU tools. I'm familiar with GNU tools. I can hack on GNU tools and not worry about Copyright infringement. Therefore, I think GNU tools are better. Feature-wise, GNU tools mature quickly. However, GNU tools may not target hardware-specific management and optimizations that you gain with vendor tools. One of the goals with GNU tools is to be cross-platform. Solaris is one of the most prominent platforms on which GNU tools run. If you go to http://www.sunfreeware.com, you will not many of the more popular GPL'ed software available there. So, I disagree that Linux is taking off JUST because of pre-compiled GNU tools. I believe Linux is taking off for a number of reasons: * The Price is Right -- Can't beat free * Advanced packaging tools (Sun's is a bit behind the curve on this one.) * Public, central, network-accessible package archives (Sun's aren't exactly public.) * Convenient search tools for querying the plethora of packages The more I support Solaris, the less I dislike it. The company seems to take a very Debian-like approach when providing patches for installed, stable software rather than forcing newer versions of the software to be installed. They could use some help in determining exactly when reboots are necessary, for example. (i.e. Their installation/patching scripts could be a bit more intelligent.) No, I think one of the reasons Solaris isn't as popular amongst desktop consumers is because until recently, they didn't have an x86 product. Even so, they're likely to get more Solaris admins than general consumers. They weren't (aren't) popular amongst smaller businesses or smaller-budget groups because the hardware was (is) quite expensive to run. Their support of x86 platform and release of OpenSolaris might change some of that. I think it's too hard to predict, really. Linux has a lot of momentum, and companies like Solaris are finally starting to react appropriately. We shall see... -- Chad Walstrom <chewie at wookimus.net> http://www.wookimus.net/ assert(expired(knowledge)); /* core dump */