Comments on: What Sun Should Do

By: Pau Garcia i Quiles

Pau Garcia i Quiles — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 21:21:52 +0000

@Davidoff: Exactly! My response to Tim Bray talks about that: http://www.elpauer.org/?p=335 . I thought the problem with Sun sales making sales impossible was localized in Spain but from what you say, I see it’s at least three countries: Germany, Spain and UK.

By: Davidoff

Davidoff — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 20:28:56 +0000

I think you forgot some important bit in your list:

7. Bad: Sun Sales is just a PITA. Ever tried to order a Try&Buy yourself? I can tell you that at least in UK and Germany (but I heard it’s the same in other countries) this is just a ridiculous nervebreaking and painful experience. Fill out the application form (and don’t dare you want to have the system sent to a company address if you’re an individual!), and wait forever nothing to happen. The website says sales will contact you within 5 days but it doesn’t. If after some time you’re fed up and ask what’s going on they give useless replies, and of course won’t call back when promised. Ever tried to buy anything from them? Even a simple keyboard requires you to request a quote from sales which takes almost four weeks to be sent out, and of course it states the exact same price like the website. I have dealed with a lot of companies (HP, Dell, FSC, IBM, SGI) and Sun by far has the worst sales droids ever.

As to why people use more Linux than Solaris on white boxes, it’s probably the hype. Sun never managed to create a big enough fuzz outside the informed and geek community about Solaris, what it can and that it’s free.

@Rastloser: it should be obvious that OpenSolaris doesn’t have the support of Ubuntu and other Linux distros, just look how young OpenSolaris is. It’s somewhat silly to compare OpenSolaris with an Enterprise Linux, if you need enterprise-class stability then the proven and fully supported Solaris 10 (which is free, too) is the way to go. And Solaris does have a huge and active community which is comparable with the most common Linux distro communities.

By: Rastloser

Rastloser — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 11:31:59 +0000

I have tried to set up a small server based on beige box hardware using OpenSolaris. The support for someone getting into this for the first time was far worse than what I knew from several Linux distributions. Compare the project and support websites of Ubuntu, CentOS or even Gentoo with those for Open Solaris, you'll find that the latter are just not as comprehensive and helpful. Then, there was the issue of what distribution to choose. I could not find any one that promised as much stability and professional management as an "enterprisey" Linux distribution (does anyone remember the Blastwave kindergarten?), and hence decided it was not worth the effort of looking further into it. Of course, I expect Open Solaris itself to be a stable and mature system. However, it seems to me that it targets professional admins with a lot of time for the maintenance of their systems. This is not necessarily the profile of an admin of Linux-based beige boxes.

By: bartleyg

bartleyg — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 17:36:50 +0000

Peter,
I agree with much of your article. I’ve used Solaris for the past 4 years after 7 years with HP-UX. I’ve also used Linux distros (Red Hat/Debian) for the past 10 years. I do have SXCE as a second OS on a multi-boot machine. While I love doing clustering, AVS and zones, I don’t use the Solaris box for my home web/mail server. The default apache2/php that deploys with Solaris needs to be recompiled to be really useful. While I have done it, it is really cumbersome. The Sunfreeware site has a lot of good software, however if they don’t have what you need, compiling your own can be a problem. By problem I mean ‘do I need to use gcc or Sun’s compiler’; ‘which linker do I need to use’, ‘are the dependencies already on the machine’ etc. I think that a Freebsd ports or Macports type packaging system would be ideal. With Red Hat, Debian or even my Mac I can quickly recompile packages to include the options I need. I just dread assembling all of the dependencies and compiling anything special on a Solaris box. I have thought about replacing my web/mail server with Solaris several times, I just can’t get over the ‘hump’ to swap it out. Linux is just too easy.