On Oct 10, 2011, at 5:42 PM, Christopher Chan wrote:

> On Tuesday, October 11, 2011 08:32 AM, Dan Swartzendruber wrote:
>> 
>> Quite true.  At this point, though, the admin space is the issue.
> 
> I come from a Linux background with my experience being done on Redhat Linux, 
> Fedora, Centos and Ubuntu. I have also worked on FreeBSD and OpenBSD. I do 
> not see a problem in the admin space. You can get various GNU tools on 
> OpenIndiana. 

And it's been that way for a very long time. I remember one of my early tasks 
was to get gnu tools on solaris (2.4? 2.5?) server where it was then nfs 
exported to all the other servers and available somewhere like /usr/local 
(maybe it was /usr/local/gnu?). This was right as it was released and 
sunfreeware didn't yet have all the stuff readily available for download. I 
believe this was 97 or 98 time frame.

I ended building packages for just about all the gnu (and several non-gnu, but 
common) tools so they were proper solaris "packages" to boot. The end result, 
all of our servers had the gnu tools. Which were default depended on your path. 

I think the perceived problem in the admin space depends on the depth of 
experience of the admin too. Admins that only know one (or maybe, MAYBE 2) 
linux distribution(s) become so entrenched in their distro of choice they have 
a hard time seeing any other options (including other Linux options). The more 
well rounded admins don't have such a problem.

I can tell you of one friend that is a well rounded Linux guy and his 
impression of OpenSolaris and OpenIndiana: Linux in 95. His personal beef was 
with the extremely limited hardware support. He spent quite a bit of time 
trying to get just the right sata card and chipset and still had problems with 
getting things working that he finally gave up. This was less than a year ago 
too.

The biggest issues with getting Linux or others to check out and use OI isn't 
email vs. forums, gnu or not user space tools, etc., it's driver support and 
documentation, and often the attitude they seem to frequently get when they 
come looking for help.

Greg
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