OSNews

> "Ian had stated that the Solaris driver situation in the
> past year or two has improved dramatically and he
> believes the situation will continue to improve once the
> OpenSolaris user-base expands with Project Indiana.
> Once the user-base expands, he believes the OEM
> vendors will begin providing the drivers themselves.!

I don't mind much that lots of hardware isn't supported. What I do mind is that it's impossible to find out what hardware is supported. There should be a hardware compatibility database for OpenSolaris (much like there is one for Solaris, except with normal desktop hardware too).
(E.g., I've search a lot for either a normal mobo (i.e., not any $200+ server board) and/or a cheap pci-e sata adapter or two with a total of at least 6 ports. Either nobody is successfully running OpenSolaris on normal modern hardware or they just won't speak up about it, AFAIK.)

Didn't look very hard did ya?

http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/

> > There should be a hardware compatibility database for
> > OpenSolaris (much like there is one for Solaris, except
> > with normal desktop hardware too).
>
> Didn't look very hard did ya?
> http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/

Didn't read what I wrote, did ya?

I have this one. It gets detected right out of the box, the drivers are included on the Solaris CDs. It has 8 sata ports and works flawlessly. It is a PCI-X card, but fits in a normal PCI slot (though the transfer rate drops from 2GB/s to 150MB/s or something like that). I have a PV-800 Asus or something like that, mobo. P4@2.4GHz. I have 4 Samsung 500GB discs in RaidZ. Works like a dream.

The reason I bought an external card, is that I can change the mobo without bothering to check if it's SATA chipset is compatible with Solaris. I just buy which mobo I want, and insert this card. No more worries. I can recommend this card.

http://www.supermicro.com/products/accessories/addon/AoC-SAT2-MV8.c...

> [The AOC-SAT2-MV8] gets detected right out of the box,
> the drivers are included on the Solaris CDs. It has 8
> sata ports and works flawlessly. It is a PCI-X card,
> but fits in a normal PCI slot (though the transfer rate
> drops from 2GB/s to 150MB/s or something like that).

First of all it's an incredibly rare piece of hardware. At least in this part of the world, where it costs 160 EUR (=220 USD) +shipping. That's more than a complete motherboard with 6 integrated SATA ports which are A LOT faster than those PCI-X-card-in-PCI-slot ports.

PCI-X is a really bad option if you have normal desktop hardware. A PCI-E 4X or 8X card would be a hundred times more sensible. Or even a bunch of cheap PCI-E 1X cards with 2 SATA ports per card.

Edited 2007-09-24 17:46

The article is wrong. They won't be using apt-get, but it will be something like it.

If I'm not mistaken, Sun already runs Gnome on quiet a few (customer) desktops.

KDE is an official OpenSolaris project, like many others: http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/desktop/communities/kde/

See also Adriaan's blog http://people.fruitsalad.org/adridg/bobulate/index.php?/categories/...

Yes, so you're supporting my point that while KDE people are actively supporting OpenSolaris, OpenSolaris does not care to support KDE on an equal footing with Gnome.

Well, the slides indicate that Project Indiana is looking for a lot of help/feedback from the community. It won't take long until they have a KDE "spin" just like Fedora.

Sun will use GNOME as they are a key contributor to the source code. They aren't preventing you from rolling your own KDE, nor would they - this is the point of open source.

Just as Linus says use KDE, Sun just have an opposite preference. THats the ting about freedom - you don't have to follow what someone else does

Hmm, not exactly.
I think that as far as OpenSolaris is concerned, there isn't any or not much difference.

As far as the official Sun Solaris is concerned, there obviously is a difference, since Sun e.g offers commercial support for GNOME on Solaris.

However, as we have seen on other occasions, a well working community based subproject, in this case KDE, can become a commercial supported option when customers request it.

I ask this issue in an OpenSolaris mailing list some time before and someone replied me answering my questions. Basically, Solaris will not support KDE as its desktop environment because three things:

1. The C ABI is standard, so, any library compiled with any C compiler can be used by any application compiled with another C compiler (this is very important, because Sun pushes SUNWpro C compiler but they want to provide compatibility with the GNU C compiler also.

The C++ ABI is not standard and it is far from be stable (including between two versions of the same C++ compiler), so, creating some library with SUNWpro C++ compiler will not be useful for an application written with g++. This is a very critical problem because KDE is written in C++; as far as I know, Qt does not support SUNWPro C++ compiler and in order to provide library usability on KDE, they should build several versions of the same library, compiled with several compilers: impractical.

2. GTK+, the GNOME base library, has a LGPL license; meanwhile, Qt, the KDE base library, has a dual license: GPL for open source applications and a commercial license for proprietary applications. If Solaris would support officially KDE, the developers that want to write some commercial applications for KDE, should buy the Qt library; in the other extreme, nothing stops them from writing commercial applications using GTK+.

3. Solaris has invested a lot of resources in the GNOME accessibility framework, so, GNOME fully implements an accessibility standard [I do not remember its code] and KDE, no.

I've seen this as well, even from Sun engineers. Seems their C++ compiler can't keep stable ABI either, at least not through a Solaris release cycle.

Probably their C++ team is a lot smaller than any other engineering unit and therefore can't keep the same stability as others.



I'd say this is more an excuse than an argument.
Given a platform there is always one compiler defining "the standard" and since we are talking about Solaris here, it is Sun's own one.
If g++ is incompatible, bad luck.



Extremely unlikely, unless Sun has a couple of totally different C++ compilers, because it supports the one from Sun we are using on Solaris/SPARC every day when doing nightly builds.

Sometimes generates loads of warning for our code, all correct though
One of the prime advantages when doing mulitplatform software.



Licence royalties haven't kept them from shipping Motif and hasn't kept hunderts of companies from licencing Qt so far.

Not a problem though, since Solaris is also X11 based, companies can licence the toolkit they want to use instead of relying on what is shipped by the OSV.

Edit: fixed quoting

Edited 2007-09-23 18:15

They forgot to mention point number 4. The one where they explain that endorsing a third-party cross-platform framework designed for effective write-once/compile-anywhere development would sort of conflict with the original java strategy.

Gnome made sense originally because it lacked a real development framework, and I remember how the whole "Java Desktop" thing was supposed to be about a java desktop framework for app development, or something to that effect. Never took off, and then the primates came along and muddied the waters as well with their attempt to make mono the de facto development framework.

It's also worth mentioning, in fairness, that one of the Sun offices in Europe has been supporting some of the local KDE devs working on KDE4/Solaris, and have even provided hardware for test builds etc.

Nor does Ubuntu arguably, and nor do many others.

Just like many KDE-centric distributions (Linspire, Xandros, etc.) don't support GNOME equally.

I see posts on here all the time about people complaining about wasted resources and lack of focus.

Well, here's some focus, enjoy it!

KDE is the largest non-distribution open source project (non-distribution = not counting eg. FreeBSD or various Linux distros, because lots of their activity is syncing code with other projects).
I can't remember a single day when GNOME had more activity on http://cia.vc/ than KDE.
When Sun got involved, GNOME was even smaller. Sun tried to hijack GNOME (smaller projects are easier to take over), but apart from the inclusion of the results from their usability tests Sun didn't succeed. Almost no desktop software for GNOME is written Java.

Is isn't that some gnome contributors work at sun. It is more like several gnome maintainers work at sun. Several years ago, Sun was looking for something to replace their venerable CDE desktop environment. Their choice was gnome pretty early on and they have been shipping it for sometime. Even their discontinued Linux distro, the Java Desktop System was gnome based.

Sun also paid a lot of money for the original gnome HIG (Human Interface Guidelines) and initial documentation to be written. They have an investment in gnome.

Sun made the GNOME decision a long time ago.

The short version at this point is that:

1) GNOME has better accessibility

2) GNOME has better licensing (for business purposes, no flame wars please)

3) GNOME has a time-based release schedule that makes it very easy and predictable to integrate

4) Until recently, KDE didn't even work fully on Solaris! (Thanks to Stefan Teleman for changing that)

5) Sun has invested millions of man hours and dollars into GNOME (through the HIG, etc.) and it doesn't make good financial sense to waste that investment.

GNOME doesn't have a powerful marketing/lobby campaign, it's just that some of the choices it has made as a project fit in better with what some folks are doing.

Ubuntu chose GNOME as their primary desktop as well, so you can gripe to them too.

Ian has already stated he would like to see someone do "Kindiana".

Everyone has their personal preference and I hope to see KDE 4.x on Solaris as well and plan on helping out in any way I can.

I just think your accusations aren't fair or right.

Edited 2007-09-24 01:22

This is highly debatable, so do not add it if you want to avoid friction.

Licencing is always just a part of the decision making and depends on a lot of things.
Writing "better licencing" is always just flamebait, since there is no such thing as universally better.

Which is why I said "for business purposes"...obviously licensing that doesn't require paying someone a fee is better from a financial perspective *always*. That doesn't mean the technology is better, but the terms of the licensing certainly are. That is a factually correct statement.

Edited 2007-09-24 13:13

Well, you said for business purposes, not for financial ones.

Being a non English native speaker, I interpreted it as "from companies' point of view", which would depend on what the company's goals are.

It still assumes that the financial perspective does only cover licencing cost and no other cost involved in development, deployment or maintenance of the software.

It's quite educating that native English interpretation of "business purposes" means "low initial cost".

That's probably why so many US based companies always talk about TCO separately

Which is why I said "for business purposes"...obviously licensing that doesn't require paying someone a fee is better from a financial perspective *always*. That doesn't mean the technology is better, but the terms of the licensing certainly are. That is a factually correct statement. "

Actually, no, it's not factually correct, although it gets stated often as such. If it was factually correct, Trolltech would not have a revenue stream and would have been out of business long ago since customers can always use free toolkits instead for financial reasons. You can't dismiss whether the technology is better or not as a factor, because that is directly related to the value a customer perceives in paying for the license, not the price itself.

Businesses make decisions on ROI, not in terms of static prices and costs, hence the old adage "you need to spend money to make money". The license fee for a Qt license is but one aspect of an equation that different organizations will measure with different points of emphasis and value. If Qt in comparison to GTK (or alternatives) can help an ISV deliver applications with reduced turnaround, can enable cross-platform development, can provide support and documentation, etc., then the license fee becomes fairly moot in comparison to the overall equation, particularly considering it amounts to a one time-payment equivalent to 2-3 weeks of the average paid developer's salary.

So as a simplistic example, if an ISV can develop and deliver an application in 20 weeks using Qt versus 30 weeks using GTK, then GTK very likely provides a financial disincentive from a business perspective, despite it's "free" license price since it actually increases the cost to the ISV in terms of the number of weeks required for development. Certainly not saying that's the case for all developers and applications and situations, and as I said, I'm oversimplifying, but it's more indicative of how the decision making gets made with businesses.

For organizations developing and deploying internal applications, the licensing fee doesn't apply since there is no obligation to deliver source with a product that is not being distributed. Though even in those cases, many of Trolltech's customers continue to pay for support simply because of the value they perceive.

I'd be willing to accept that GTK's LGPL simplifies licensing, but not that cheaper = better for business purposes. From a financial perspective, cost != value, and value is what must be considered *always*.

OR it could be because Sun has been one of the major supporters of GNOME for years, both in source contributions and in developers. It is also on the GNOME advisory board, and GNOME has been the desktop they have used in Solaris for as far back as I can remember.

If you really are worried about support length, why dont you later - when the need rises - switch to Solaris? Me personally are not running nuclear reaction software or something similar. In fact I am running OpenSolaris Express version build 68 which is - in reality a beta software. And I dont notice any instability issues as Linux sometimes have. Solaris in beta version is more stable than Linux, in my opionion.

And after becoming used to OpenSolaris, want support length, you should just switch to Solaris which have support length of 10 years. Problem solved.

I agree that Solaris releases and development builds are pretty stable but you can't judge Linux in some generic way. What amazes me in the Linux distribution landscape is that everyone wants to release his own distribution, wildly varying in quality.

That doesn't mean that I am against the fact that there are so many of them, in fact I'd say the more the better! But a distinction must be made between work and play.

For work you need the best stability, reliability, security and performance. For play you can have all the eye candy and bleeding edge system software and applications you want to have.

Most distributions, including Red Hat, Novell/SUSE and Ubuntu have these two confused. I just don't understand this, but maybe that's just me. All the while there is a distribution that really rivals Solaris and BSDs, which I won't mention but its maintainer's initials are P.V.

I have found it easier to kill Solaris than this distribution I use, but I also agree that sometimes the Linux distribution landscape just looks like kindergarten.

It can't connect to the registration because you can't register the Nevada build - only the 'stable release' (latest being 08/07) can be registered - as it is the only one officially supported via Sun with updates and so forth.

Indiana will be the first 'Nevada derived distribution' which will include updates.

That works only as part of Solaris, not OpenSolaris...
Check the FAQ/forums in opensolaris.org