Typing this from the new Open Solaris live cd Indiana distro

[greggh]

http://distrowatch.com/?newsid=04568

Burned the cd and it booted right up running Gnome. No flash palying available which is a major bummer. I'm still confused about the whole Open Solaris thing though. Did Sun completely GPL it? The license for this preview distro is some kind of a limited binary only license. Also, is Open Solaris just the Kernel with GNU as the OS or is Open Solaris the full OS? Anyway here's the first review of Indiana..

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=899

[jamathis]

I'll have to check this out. I tried Nexenta a while back, which is basically Ubuntu with the Solaris kernel. It was ok, not something I would use everyday mainly because of the lack of codecs and Flash. I think I read that Sun released parts of OpenSolaris under the GPL and the rest under their CDDL (Common Developement and Distribution License). I don't know if that changed or not. Maybe someone else has better/more info on that.

[allix]

I think I read that Sun released parts of OpenSolaris under the GPL and the rest under their CDDL (Common Developement and Distribution License). I don't know if that changed or not. Maybe someone else has better/more info on that.

That's right , a lot of drivers are just blobs.
You can download flash

mplayer has reversed engineered most codecs, ive yet needed to use win32codecs for over a year , since wmv9 has been reverse engineered, i no longer need win32codecs,

[Tsuroerusu]

Burned the cd and it booted right up running Gnome.

Bummer .... just kidding!

I'm still confused about the whole Open Solaris thing though. Did Sun completely GPL it?

No, most of OpenSolaris is under Sun's CDDL license, which is a free software license under the FSF's definition. It's basically a generic license based on the Mozilla Public License, deals with patents and stuff.

The license for this preview distro is some kind of a limited binary only license.

Yeah, and that is because, like Allix said, the thing includes a lot of proprietary drivers for even simple things like network cards.

Also, is Open Solaris just the Kernel with GNU as the OS or is Open Solaris the full OS?

When I read the release notes it said it had the GNU utilities ("ls", "cp" and stuff) in $PATH by default. Whether it uses the full GNU system (glibc, etc. etc. etc.) I do not know, if it did it would indeed be a GNU/Solaris system.

Anyway here's the first review of Indiana..

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=899

Technically it looks pretty interesting, however I find it extremely ridiculous that I have to use proprietary drivers for simple stuff like standardized Realtek ethernet devices. I mean ALL of the BSD's has rock-solid BSD licensed drivers for those that Sun could use.
So Solaris is a major drawback for me, especially in terms of freedom. Which is a shame, because I would really like to use ZFS for my storage box.

[jnash2001]

So Solaris is a major drawback for me, especially in terms of freedom. Which is a shame, because I would really like to use ZFS for my storage box.

what about zfs in freebsd?

[Tsuroerusu]

So Solaris is a major drawback for me, especially in terms of freedom. Which is a shame, because I would really like to use ZFS for my storage box.

what about zfs in freebsd?

For FreeBSD 7.0 it's just an experimental feature, some stuff is still missing, it's in no way production ready, and I consider hosting my hundreds of gigabytes of data as production usage.

[jamathis]

I think I read that Sun released parts of OpenSolaris under the GPL and the rest under their CDDL (Common Developement and Distribution License). I don't know if that changed or not. Maybe someone else has better/more info on that.

That's right , a lot of drivers are just blobs.
You can download flash

mplayer has reversed engineered most codecs, ive yet needed to use win32codecs for over a year , since wmv9 has been reverse engineered, i no longer need win32codecs,

I might have to give a try again then. It's been almost 9-12 months since I checked out Nexenta. So I figure some things would have improved. Project Indiana sounds interesting so I'll give it a try before too long.

[allix]

For FreeBSD 7.0 it's just an experimental feature, some stuff is still missing, it's in no way production ready, and I consider hosting my hundreds of gigabytes of data as production usage.

Production usage is a loose term, many companies use testing versions, I vaguely remember a Bsdtalk interview with someone who said his company has been using FreeBSD 7 and this was ages ago.

I am not saying zfs is ready to use ....

Heck, Ubuntu recently released a new version to the world, and it seems far from reading the threads on here that its ready for production usage.

[Tsuroerusu]

For FreeBSD 7.0 it's just an experimental feature, some stuff is still missing, it's in no way production ready, and I consider hosting my hundreds of gigabytes of data as production usage.

Production usage is a loose term, many companies use testing versions, I vaguely remember a Bsdtalk interview with someone who said his company has been using FreeBSD 7 and this was ages ago.

Yeah it is a loose term, you're right about that. But then let me use a specific example to demonstrate the kind of stability and reliability that I meant. If you were gonna run a hospital's IT infrastructure, Would you use Debian testing or Debian stable? Or Fedora or RHEL?

Also, I know that a bunch of people use -STABLE and -CURRENT of FreeBSD in production in various places, however I don't care what other people do, to me it makes extremely little sense to have to constantly keep an eye on changelogs in case some stuff in the core system have changed. I really hate having those kinds of things sneak up on you.
And don't even bring up the fact that Fedora ships new versions of stuff as updates, because I have yet to receive a git snapshot of the file system tools or of critical system components.

I am not saying zfs is ready to use ....

Good, because in FreeBSD's case it isn't. The official 7.0 feature list, list it as an experimental feature, and if you look here: http://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFS.
You can see that several items aren't finished yet.

Also, a file system is probably THE most critical thing in a system that I absolutely want to be bullet proof. When FreeBSD declares ZFS "stable" as in "You can use this to run your hospital servers on", I'll wait like 12 - 18 months before using it, let somebody else be the guinea pig, not me!

Heck, Ubuntu recently released a new version to the world, and it seems far from reading the threads on here that its ready for production usage.

So true!
* Tsuroerusu ducks the bullets

[Wally Balljacker]

I think it is fair to say Ubuntu is the best desktop Linux distro around, and that the large number of people having issues with it is entirely related to the fact that it has a larger market share than any other Linux distro ever has in history. I think Canonical and the Ubuntu team do a hell of a job, and I'd venture to say if any other distro managed to attract such a massive user base, they'd have just as much trouble, if not more so.

In other words: Huge user base = more potential problems.

[snarkout]

I'd agree with all of that post except for the first half of the first sentence. "Best" is a hell of a difficult thing to define.

[deptrai]

In other words: Huge user base = more potential problems.

How many orders of magnitude larger is Windows's user-base than Ubuntu's? 3, 4, 5? Are you willing to forgive MS 10,000 times more problems in a new release than Ubuntu? True enough, a larger user base equates into more people experiencing the same problem, but it's the _percentage_ of no-problems installs vs. had-issues installs that matters, not the overall number. Granted, of course, those who had issues are unduly over-represented in forums, etc., because people who had no problems are less likely to post about it, but still...

[Gomer_X]

I think it is fair to say Ubuntu is the best desktop Linux distro around...

It is fair, but unfortunately not truthful.

Fedora used to be the distro that was so close to the cutting edge that it had lots of release bugs. I'm glad that Ubuntu has taken over that role. I guess we'll see what happens with Fedora 8, though.