On 10/10/05, Alan DuBoff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Monday 10 October 2005 08:47 pm, David Schanen wrote: > > I administer a cluster of RHEL3 machines actually > > David, > > I'd like to ask you a question in regards to Linux and Solaris. You've > mentioned that you administer systems running RHEL 3, arguably the most > common Linux running in production to this day. > > What is it that peaked your curiousity on OpenSolaris? > > Was there something that Sun did that made you interested in S10? Was it > because they opened up the source? > > And are you running Solaris on any systems yet, or testing with it?
Well, it wasn't my decision to go with Linux in general or Redhat in particular, but I wouldn't have necessarily lobbied against it had I been a part of the process at the time. In my personal usage I got my start in unix-like world with Linux/GNU some years ago and began to use Solaris 8/9 largely because I wanted to play with the ultrasparc. Anyway, Linux on single user workstation have developed into an okay option I guess. I work on a scientific system and there is much more in the way of 3rd party software support for Redhat Ent. 3 as opposed to Solaris x86 ( MATLAB, etc.) The problem is many of the issues that have been raised--if it were not for 3rd party vendors doing a terrific job of dealing with differing versions of glibc, the kernel, and other dynamic libraries I don't think it would be possible to even use Redhat in a reasonable way. Throughput isn't even an issue if you can't get what you're simulating to work in a reasonably reliable manner, and downtime is killer in multi-user environment where people have deadlines. My interest in OpenSolaris began as a result for the search for OS that actually worked on my previous Athlon64 system. NetBSD 2.0 and Solaris 10 were the only two things that worked reliably for me--this is no b.s., I tried just about every Linux distro and BSD out there. to make a long explanation short, for a number of reasons (licensing, the many people already experienced with SunOS, the free compilers) I think OpenSolaris has lots of potential in scientific computing at universities, which is my particular area of interest. Cheers, Dave _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
