Una nuova release di Opensolaris, la prima “ufficiale”. La provo subito. Ogni volta ho qualche grosso problema con l’hardware e la uso pochi minuti prima di lasciar perdere, ma questa volta è diverso. Quì c’è dietro Project Indiana (project copy linux), c’è Ian Murdock, c’è tutta una nuova serie di miglioramenti. E poi adesso ho anche un laptop Dell, con un bios come si deve, e componenti supportati da driver aperti.
Tre minuti come al solito e si pianta.
In questi tre minuti però ho potuto accettare una licenza, senza sapere bene cosa accettavo, perchè era lunghissima e nessuno ha pensato bene di spiegare il contentuto all’inizio, senza termini legali. Quando capiranno che il meglio dell’Open Source viene col Free Software e non sono due cose distinte?
Lo so che smadonnando a sufficienza si possono sistemare molti problemi, ma per quale motivo uno dovrebbe farlo? Per ZFS, forse, non per altro. Opensolaris compete direttamente con GNU/Linux e parte svantaggiato su tutti i fronti, dalla libertà, all’usabilità, al supporto, alla comunità, alla tecnologia. Lo seguo distrattamente da quando è nato, ma oramai credo che possano anche lasciar perdere.
In the first part of my review of Solaris I have talked about Solaris Express. In this part I am going over Nexenta and final conclusions.
Nexenta Elatte Alpha 5
Nexenta, or GNU-Solaris, is taking the effort to combine the Solaris kernel with the GNU userland, using the debian package management as glue. It’s an amazing idea and the project seems very active, although it’s still in alpha stage. As I already mentioned Nexenta also did not find my sata drives on the desktop pc and eventually the installer entered an endless loop. On my laptop it did install with a pretty straightforward curses based procedure. Since the installed resembles much debian’s one I was a bit disappointed not to find the same partitioning program, which in debian is very good.
I was excited during the first boot about having Solaris with apt powers, since I missed a proper package management system in Solaris Express. I am presented a low resolution login screen and finally a gnome desktop. I think that standard gnome is nicer than Sun’s java “desktop environment”. The nexenta project is packaging a lot of programs (over 12000 packages, at the moment) so you should find your favorite dekstop applications easily. After a while I decide to get a better resolution and see if I can use this thing for a week or two. I use dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg and answer the questions about my hardware. I also check the xorg.conf with an editor after that and it seems ok. I logout to restart X, but the new configuration make the X server fail to start. I think I have to start debugging, but my keyboard is messed up and prints strange stuff at any button pressure. I can’t login anymore even in the console! After a reboot the problem remains: Xorg fails and somewhat makes the keyboard useless. I do not know if there is a parameter or a key combination to make the boot process avoid starting the gui. This has been the show stopper bug for me.
Conclusions
My adventure with Solaris has been a small disaster. I think that Sun’s move to open the source code was late and they work on the operating system was not enough to keep the pace with linux. We all know that developing an operating system requires a lot of efforts. The community may do some work, but if the project does not reach the critical mass to attract lots of developers, being open source may not pay off. There are many small operating systems out there; some of them also make some improvements from time to time, but their competitors make more and their gap increases over the years. Solaris is making progresses and some of them are really nice, like zfs. On the desktop things like control-alt-F* console switching, fuse and HAL are being ported. New drivers are being added. But is it enough to keep the pace with the competitors? Frankly I do not think that Solaris has any chance to gain a share in the desktop market. It’s far behind linux on the desktop. However It does have some possibilities on the server and it may be a good choice for some workstations which need a lot of stability.
Sun has almost lost the open source train. If Solaris was opened years ago it would probably be in a different position now. Sun did not do well with Solaris for some years and, as of now, it remains an alternative for very few, those with the right hardware and the right needs. You can’t think to choose only Solaris for you network, it will fit just in some places.
This is why Solaris has to play nice with other operating systems. I see a good possibility in Xen. Xen support is coming in the next months and that may be really help Solaris in the next years.
Xen will probably change the way we run servers. You can pick the best os for any given task and Solaris + zfs may be a good choice for a file server, perhaps on a linux dom0 providing hardware support and the firewall.
My next experience with Solaris will surely be in a xen unprivileged domain.
I have tried both Solaris and Nexenta, and had a terrible experience. In this fist post I’ll talk about Solaris, Nexenta and final conclusions will follow in another article.
On my desktop pc (AMD athlon, nforce2, sata hd) they both failed to recognize the sata controller, which is a sil3112. The Sun’s installer took really long, end eventually exited saying “no disk present”. The Nexenta although got beyond that entering in loop and had to be killed with control-C. About one year ago I got the very same result from Solaris, so I argue hardware support has not gone that far, after opening the source.
Since I really wanted to give this unix os a go, I cleared a partition on my laptop and installed it there.
Solaris Express 6/06
The installation process is a bit slow, but comprehensible. I had problems only with the system clock, which is set to UTC, but Solaris showed UTC time even after my local timezone was assigned. Very few questions are asked: just partitions, filesystems and networking. Solaris now uses GRUB, so I thought I could boot it directly, adding a couple of lines to my current menu.lst. And I was wrong: the grub I had installed with linux on the mbr could not read the UFS filesystem of Solaris, and the grub installed by Solaris could not mount my linux xfs partition. So actually to boot Solaris I had to load my grub in the mbr and chainload Solaris’ grub in its partition.
At the first boot I receive many errors from the kernel and some more from services, spoiling an else very quiet boot. I am presented a low resolution graphical login. I think: “perhaps it want me to log in as root to finish configuration”, so I log in, and find that there is nothing to configure. Very bad, I really expect an installer to ask me about graphic setup, and to add some users. I also find out that I am logged in without a proper home, and that I am placing a lot of hidden files ad directories in the root directory. I log out, get to the console (but no control-alt-F*, you have either one console or the graphical environment and no switching between) and make a home for root. The default shell has almost nothing to make the use of the command line more comfortable, but bash is installed.
I don’t get discouraged easily and go on with configuring X11. Solaris now uses x.org but it has no default /etc/X11/xorg.conf, you have to create one, after you find xorgconfig which is not in the executables PATH, but in /usr/X11/bin. I answer all the questions and it creates my config file… but it segfaults in the process, leaving me with just half of the file! I retry with the same result, so I try again changing some parameters and it works. At least i now have a 1024×768 resolution, though my laptop supports 1280×800. I know that I have to paste some magic “modeline” in xorg.conf to make it work, but at the moment I just want to be able to browse the web in search for infos.
The desktop environment is fundamentally gnome, with a nice gtk theme and an orange button to launch applications. Some desktop shortcuts have been renamed to have the same name of their MS Windows counterpart. You can see evident efforts to look like Windows. To me is seems almost a joke. Also your home directory is harder to access than your ~/Documents, which is silly. Browsing and mailing capabilities are provided by mozilla, whit a pretty skin to make it look like the other gtk apps. Overall you do not get a feeling or integration and coherence through out the desktop. Different graphic tookiks are used, standard gnome apps are slightly modified, some pointless java apps made their way in and the Windows-like layout make this desktop feel more like an hybrid than an original creation.
I am asked to register an account in order to get updates, but just security updates since I don’t have paid for support. I decide that I want to install some software, where’s the package manager? I find a pkg-add and some other utilities, but none if them is able to fetch packages from the web, resolve dependencies and install them. There is an external program however, pkg-get, but it requires some work to be installed, and requires wget, which is not installed by default. This is the final drop for me. Thank you Solaris, see you next year!
Keep reading the second part.