Linux or Solaris?

October 31, 2005 7:35 AM

Linux or Solaris?

My laptop recently shuffled off its mortal coil, and now I'm faced with a clean new PC to play with. I'd been running Red Hat 9, and I'm trying to decide whether to stick with Linux on the new machine (either Fedora or Ubuntu, probably) or to be adventurous and try the now-free Solaris 10. Most of the documentation I've seen on Solaris 10 has been aimed toward sysadmins; there's not too much commentary from hobbyists. My main questions are: how is hardware support? How hard is it to build something on Solaris which was written for Linux? I've seen references to some sort of translation which is intended to allow Solaris to run Linux applications, but without much detail — does this actually work? Any comments from anyone who's used Solaris would be helpful.

posted by IshmaelGraves to computers & internet (16 comments total)

Solaris? On a laptop? Good luck with that. Even Linux is flaky enough on most laptops.

There is a significant chance that stuff written for Linux will not work entirely right on Solaris as well. Linux is pretty fruity really.

I'm not saying don't try it, it'd definitely be educational, i'm just not sure how likely you are to end up with a particularly usable machine and not just an amusing anecdote at the end of it.
posted by alexst at 7:45 AM on October 31, 2005

Sorry, I wasn't clear — the old machine was a laptop, the new one is not.
posted by IshmaelGraves at 7:54 AM on October 31, 2005

Installing Solaris might be interesting and edumacationalistic. It will not, however, provide you with a useful computer. Solaris is a pretty decent server OS, but it's a lousy desktop OS.

Intel hardware support for linux is orders of magnitude better than with solaris, and is software support. Do they make open office for intel-solaris? How about mozilla? Do you want to have to compile those from scratch? If so: have fun.
posted by jaded at 8:04 AM on October 31, 2005

Grab ye a copy of Belenix, which is a LiveCD OpenSolaris distro. You can play with it without committing to anything.

OpenOffice is indeed available for Solaris x86, as is Mozilla and darn near anything else you'd care for. Visit Blastwave for almost all the packages that you'd care to install from the open source world.

Solaris certainly will provide you with a useful computer, provided you are willing to learn a different package management system, filesystem structure, service management mechanism, etc.

However, it's a great way to get your toe in the water. Hell, you can even make the new system dual boot and have your cake and eat it too.
posted by 5MeoCMP at 8:09 AM on October 31, 2005

why not dual boot? you can use linux when you want to get stuff done and tinker with solaris to see how it goes. i'm sure there must be a file system both can read, so you could have your personal data in a partition accessible from either (though you'll have a problem making sure user IDs are consistent, i guess).
posted by andrew cooke at 8:10 AM on October 31, 2005

Solaris 10, even the x86 port, is pretty picky about hardware. Not super restrictive, but picky. Rock solid, more than linux can ever be, but picky. Keep that in mind.

Building apps written with Linux in mind isn't too hard, in most cases, and you can usually find a pre-built binary package to save you the effort.

Solaris, like FreeBSD, has a Linux ABI kernel module. You can run most Linux ELF binaries natively, but if you're running commercial software that way, you won't get support from the vendor for it.

If you have some disk space, you really ought to try it out. Solaris makes a perfectly good workstation, even though people like jaded claim otherwise; there's an official port of just about any useful software package out there, and I think Sun even stopped shoving the CDE down your throat now.
posted by cmonkey at 8:11 AM on October 31, 2005

Oh, um, for full disclosure: I've used Solaris on a daily basis for, err, well, a long time, from SunOS 4.1.2 (in 1988) to today. I've admin'd large Solaris installations for about that long too. However, my daytime desktop OS is Gentoo Linux.
posted by 5MeoCMP at 8:11 AM on October 31, 2005

I guess it really depends how much actual work you want to get done on the machine compared to just messing around learning how to use unix commands and such.

I've recently been checking out ubuntu and simply love it. Debian based linux is excellent because of apt and ubuntu is the best desktop linux distro I've seen.

Another option is FreeBSD. That could be fun as well.
posted by meta87 at 8:12 AM on October 31, 2005

I used Solaris x86 about five or six years ago for a couple of years on a PC as a server, and even back then hardware support was pretty decent if you didn't have any unusual hardware.

If you have hardware that isn't supported, you could consider using vmware to run a virtual solaris x86 instance. That'll give you a chance to play around with solaris, but use an OS more suitable for desktop use as your primary OS (vmware runs on linux or windows).

From a sysadmin standpoint, I've always liked Solaris more, but everyone has their own favorite flavor.

Happy hacking!
posted by cactus at 8:18 AM on October 31, 2005

Oh, Solaris x86 has come miles and miles since 5 years ago, For one thing. It actually works now (I remember the abomination that was Solaris 2.1; then there was Solaris 2.2, The Solaris That Never Existed; 2.3 sucked too; 2.4 Also Never Existed; 2.5 and in rapid succession 2.5.1 Wasn't Too Bad ... and so on)

Yes, the hardware support can be a little fussy, but that's because it's aimed at stability instead of support-everything-under-the-sun (no pun intended).
posted by 5MeoCMP at 8:26 AM on October 31, 2005

If the software you want to run runs on Solaris, it'll work for you. If not, it won't. You'll probably have to try it to know. Some things will compile, some won't. I don't think Solaris uses linux's libc, so any GNU extensions to that will be a big factor.

Another big issue is sound. Solaris doesn't support ALSA (obviously), and while OSS supports Solaris, I remember it being sub-par.
posted by devilsbrigade at 8:49 AM on October 31, 2005

For correctness points, I should mention that its not linuxes libc, its the GNU libc (glibc) which happens to be popular to use on linux systems. I have seen BSD libcs ontop of a linux kernel though.
posted by devilsbrigade at 8:51 AM on October 31, 2005

It's been a couple of years since my primary desktop was Solaris, but back then I found pretty much everything important was available at sunfreeware.com. It was all very nice.

That was on Sun hardware though. Back then, the x86 version (2.8 I think) was a bit flaky by comparison. I hear it's better now. Hardware support is of course still not going to be anywhere near as wide as in Linux.

I've had no problems with compiling my own projects on both Linux and Solaris. Most software that makes even the slightest effort to be compatible with more than one system should be fine.
posted by sfenders at 9:22 AM on October 31, 2005

I used Solaris on SPARC as my primary desktop OS for eight or nine years, and I agree with all of the other posters who indicated that Linux is a far superior daily-use desktop. I switched to Fedora for my primary workstation OS about a year ago, and would not contemplate going back to Solaris.

That having been said, Ish did say he'd already used Red Hat for a while, and that this was going to be for play, so why not go ahead an load Solaris 10, at least long enough to play with some of the nifty features? Zones look neat, and maybe ZFS will come out before you get bored.

To answer your specific questions:
1) hardware support is crappy when compared to Linux.

2) If by build, you mean "compile", it's no harder in most cases. If by build you mean "use a package system to install", it's MUCH harder. There's nothing as cool as apt/yum available on Solaris. You can of course use SunFreeware to grab pre-compiled versions of most simple apps, but for complex stuff that integrates with your desktop, yum/apt can't be beat, due to the automatic dependency checking stuff.

3) emulation/ABI stuff: I have only limited experience with these kinds of tools (I reckon this falls into the WINE/Wabi camp), but my general impression is that these kinds of things are a bit bogus. But if your main goal is to play, by all means give it a shot and report back.

To date Solaris has not been much of a hobbyist OS, but for the serious enthusiast, time spent learning it for sure would not be wasted.

Good Luck!
posted by popechunk at 10:02 AM on October 31, 2005

3) emulation/ABI stuff: I have only limited experience with these kinds of tools (I reckon this falls into the WINE/Wabi camp), but my general impression is that these kinds of things are a bit bogus.

Several years ago, I ran the Linux port of Mozilla (or Navigator, can't remember) as my primary browser on FreeBSD using the Linux ABI. It actually ran faster than it did on a comparable Linux workstation. ABI translation isn't emulation, and you don't end up with the performance penalties that you get with emulation. It's actually pretty handy.
posted by cmonkey at 1:49 PM on October 31, 2005

Thanks everyone — this was exactly what I was looking for. Dual boot it is, if my 40GB drive has enough room, and maybe if I'm feeling really adventurous I'll try sticking /home on a shared partition and using it for both OSes.
posted by IshmaelGraves at 3:06 PM on October 31, 2005