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back to article Four years and 1000 promises land Solaris at Dell

By our count, it has taken Sun about four years and 1,000s of promises to bring Dell over to the Solaris camp in a proper fashion. Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz assured us of a Dell win so many times in the past that the discussion started to lose all meaning. "When will you line Dell up?" we'd ask. "Stay tuned. It's on the way," …

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  1. E

    Irrelevant

    All of Solaris's command line programs act funny. They don't use standard Linux options, and the output is different. Solaris isn't even real UNIX, just a carefully crafted impersonation?

    Also, Solaris x86 has crappy driver support, and uses strange and obscure commands to install software. Maybe Sun never heard of apt-get, more likely this is just an attempt to take over from Linux, or slip some more Java in where it does not belong.

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  2. Anonymous Coward
    Alien

    Creepy

    Solaris is more verbose, and it's implementation is idiosyncratic like it's from an old iron curtain country. The driver situation they can fix the annoying Rube Goldberg / Blofeld personality, who knows.

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  3. Alice Tenner

    Alright Sun!

    Great to see more progress at Sun. Solaris just got more relevant where I work.

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  4. Craig

    Irrelevant to the ignorant perhaps

    Solaris' utilities don't 'act funny', they simply don't support the GNU extensions... the 'carefully crafted impersonation' of UNIX is actually Linux with a GNU userland.

    The driver support isn't really that bad, it just requires a bit more effort to get many things going, rather than the fairly magic driver installations in many recent distrobutions.

    If you want to see the Solaris kernel in a familiar setting, check out Nexenta (http://www.gnusolaris.org), which is basically a version of Ubuntu with a Solaris kernel replacing the Linux one.

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  5. Brian Miller

    Finally!

    I'm glad to see that Dell is loading Solaris. It is a great OS, and I have had better performance on Solaris than Linux.

    The Solaris commands aren't "funny," they are standard. If you used more AT&T-derived Unixes, like HP-UX and AIX, you would see that they are very close to each other. It is Linux that is kind of "out there."

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  6. KK
    IT Angle

    Is Dell's own SVR4 forgotten this easily?

    For several years, through the early 1990s, Dell offered their own licensed version of SVR4, aka "Dell Unix 2.2". This competed directly with Sun Solaris x86.

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  7. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    Stunned.

    "They don't use standard Linux options and the output is different"..

    Poor dear! You got confused because of the korn shell or because Solaris (as well as HP-UX) is POSIX compliant?

    How bad is this eh?

    And what about > 15 years of IEEE compliance.

    But, after all, I am not concerned about distorted perception of Linux newcomers. What really p**s me off is that a mass of ignorants is nowadays pretending to cast themselves as Unix gurus just because they are able to type randomly five or six commands on their distros.

    Linux is a great product: it does not deserve such a bad support.

    GaB

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  8. Anonymous Coward
    Happy

    @ E

    "All of Solaris's command line programs act funny"

    Now that made me laugh.

    And since when were the silly long GNU extentsions (e.g. --version for the Linux kids that have never used proper UNIX systems) considered 'standard'?

    To anyone who actually works with Solaris machines this is not irellevant in the slightest. Granted Dell would not be my first choice of vendor to run pretty much anything on.. But more vendor choice can only be a good thing to the Solaris shops.

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  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "Solaris' utilities don't 'act funny', they simply don't support the GNU extensions"

    (and related subjects).

    And until the Unix world realises that consistency is (in general) good and progress is good, but divergence is not so good, Microsoft will continue to make the Unix(1) world largely irrelevant, even though the disaster which is Vista will likely give the Unix/Linux world its best opportunity for many years.

    Seems like too many folks haven't learned the lesson from the days when BSD and SV were warring factions. Since then the names may have changed, but the factions are still at war with each other, rather than focusing on diminishing the role of the Gatesmonster. (Insert traditional "Life of Brian" reference here).

    (1) UNIX is a trademark of .... more companies than I can remember these days. And where are they now, mostly? Why?

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  10. Dunstan Vavasour

    @E

    Don't give up the day job.

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  11. Tim

    "UNIX is a trademark of ...."

    The Open Group. www.unix.org, where you can even learn that Linux isn't Unix.

    And the unix industry _did_ realize that use erexperience convergence was necessary, and they created CDE.

    It is Linux that has always chosen to ignore standards.

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  12. E

    Loss of communications acuity

    There was a time, before the advent of graphical web browsers ( 16 years ago, back when I used a Sparcstation) when people could identify a troll.

    Now, in these fallen times, y'all appear to need a sarcasm or irony icon to alert you.

    I shake my, head, sadly.

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  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "It is Linux that has always chosen to ignore standards."

    As far as the meejah are concerned, and indeed as far as some IT managers are concerned, it's now Linux that is the industry standard, whatever the rest of the industry and the user base of AIX, HPUX, Solaris, etc may believe.

    Of course, getting an Ubuntu evangelist to agree with a Debian fan or a RedHat or an OpenSuse or a Mandriva or a ... is still a bit of a challenge. Choice is good, fragmentation is bad.

    I've been around long enought to remember Motif, and CDE, and OSF/1 and Single Unix Specification and POSIX, and before that had a bit of a tinker with Unix V7 and BSD4.3 and System V.

    What's the fix?

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  14. Matt Bryant Silver badge
    Happy

    Just a ploy to avoid inspection?

    I have a sneaky idea the whole Dell and Solaris partnership is just Dell trying not to be investigated for their tight ties to Microsoft. Remember, they did this before with Linux, and look how hard they made it to order a Linux system. And this time, I suspect it will have the blessing of Bill, seeing as M$ and SUN are suddenly so lovey-dovey, as long as it allows Dell to carry on getting a massive discount from M$ and M$ to insist Windows is the default install for Dell systems.

    As for HP, the way I heard it was customers were much more willing to pay for Red Hat or SuSE on ProLiant than Slowaris. Seeing as HP has since gone on to be the number one Linux server shipper (more than all the Slowaris x86 shipments combined) I think they may just have got that one right....

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  15. Anonymous Coward
    Boffin

    UNIX standard and Solaris

    I believe that the relation among Solaris, HP-UX, and IBM AIX is the same as those Linux distros. I learnt that they are "relatively" standard. I think you can't compare UNIX and Linux together they are totally different entities. UNIX is commonly used for the central datacenter while Linux is still being used for webservers or any support servers. You still can't replace UNIX with Linux, people know that all big firms (with datacenter, of course) do NOT want to be the first having this major changes. It is gonna be a long way to go for Linux to replace UNIX.

    As far as UNIX is concerned, I heard (not really sure though) that Sun Solaris is the most "standard" compare to HP-UX and IBM AIX. Nevertheless, it comes back to the system administrator him/herself. I heard system admins don't really like HP-UX OS structure and commands, well, I am not a system admin afterall.

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  16. Anonymous Coward
    Go

    relatively (ir)relevant, then ?

    Ah, the OS-es.... always good for a laugh and a fight..... Frankly, I did them all, or at least a fair share of them, and got all the t-shirts. (linux,aix, solaris,vms,os2,winnt, a bit of novell and <......>)

    I find it very irrelevant which one you favor most. I think the point is, what are you trying to achieve and how much green can you spend ?

    For example..... ;-)

    I know linux for what it is good at: webservers, maybe some java and currently my AMD X2 desktop. ( multimedia, sound recording, satellite tv-watching, productivity apps, the works). The system mgmt interface on e.g. SuSe is an example of how to do it. A medium / small business might very well run its entire IT on it, and never be sorry about it. It won't run your 6000-session website, though, unless you favour to have 200 servers, 10 admins and the space to put them in...... Linux is there, and it will grow, because it caters a need.

    By it's shear market-share and it did force all the unixes to standardize on API interfaces, which is good; today you can run linux-bread software on any unix you ever heard about...... and the other way around.....

    Solaris is solid on all kinds of server-tasks. However, I would not dream of having it on my desktop, because I will end up re-compiling linux software to get stuff to work; it does lack menu driven admin interfaces, though. which makes it a costly affair to train people for it... most young kids today aren't interested in typing arcane commands, and some day they will have to take over.......

    AIX is solid for all kinds of server-tasks, just like solaris; the big bonus is that you get the fastest hardware on the planet and a day2day system mgmt interface that is easy to learn, without having to know the inner workings of unix.....

    On the upside, doing complicated batch processing with a lot of interdependencies is something one doesn't want to do on any unix to begin with..... if you are used to mainframe capabilities.....

    RG

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