NYCPHP Meetup

[leam]

Tim Gales wrote:
>>On Behalf Of Adam Fields
>>Sent: Saturday, June 05, 2004 9:37 AM
>>To: NYPHP Talk
>>Subject: Re: [nycphp-talk] OT: Solaris is going open source


> As to 'the same level of hardware support' -- 
> 
> http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/ 
> 
> has a hardware compatibility list.
> 
> Frankly, I don't care if an OS supports 30 different 
> network adapters -- just mine.

That's the rub; if it works for you there's no need to improve it, is 
there? But if it's light weight and I can port it to my existing 
hardware I can use what I have and learn at the same time.

When I did  Solaris x86, for a thankfully short time, it had fairly high 
end requirements. We sometimes forget that much of the world doesn't 
have the resources to buy the extra hardware we take for granted. 
Linux/*BSD will provide for places outside of the US, and I think it 
will provide for the cost conscious in the US.

The caveat here is that I've never done HPC or Mainframe support, the 
largest box I've supported is ~10 CPUs. There may well be computing 
needs I don't really understand.

>  
> 
>>>makes a better desktop experience; more user apps are 
>>
>>written for it.
> 
> 
> Don't agree with you there, Leam, for a better destop experience -- 
> just throw on what ever 'happy face' (desktop environment) 
> floats your boat.

Not really, GNOME on Solaris dind't do some of the characters right, 
when I'm logged in remotely as root on a production server, it had 
BETTER show me exactly what I'm typing. If i'd have been using a 
home-brew desktop I'd accept that behavior. But if it shipped in the CD 
set, no thanks.

> $100 bucks for commercial support seems like a pretty good value to me.
> I think that is less money than Red Hat (Linux) charges.

Of course, a year or so ago they turned off x86 development and support 
and only recently restarted it. I think mostly because they need 
Microsoft's support so they are trying to compete with Linux as a sop to 
Bill Gates.

That is, of course, my highly biased opinion.  :)

> I agree with Adam here except for two things:
> 
> one, I am under the impression that most significant apps 
>      are already ported or were done for Solaris first --

Ported for some things, but many vendors seem to be moving coder 
resources to Linux.

> 
> two,  although it would generally seem better to 
>       incorporate whatever superior things (might) exist in 
>       Linux to Solaris -- I wouldn't overlook the fact 
>       that if SCO ever comes up with any real hard 
>       facts (specific lines of code) that they (SCO) 
>       want addressed (removed from the Linux kernel), Linux 
>       maintainers may find it expeditious to port 
>       what pieces they can from Solaris.
> 
> I am certainly no authority on Unix kernels. Here, I am assuming 
> SCO can't claim the rights to Sun's kernel and further 
> I am guessing that since the Solaris kernel is unquestionably 
> Unix-like, it would be close enough to the Linux kernel to 
> provide some useful pieces where needed.

As far as I've seen the SCO thing has no basis in fact. I'm not a 
lawyer, though. I also thought that the case referred to older code no 
longer used in the latest kernels.

ciao!

leam