Pinderkent

Sun's Solaris operating system has numerous useful features that really aren't found in other OSes, including Linux. Every so often I hear a Linux user say, "I'd love to be able to use that feature of Solaris!" One example is in this Slashdot comment, where the poster wishes that there was a ZFS-like filesystem for Linux.

Now, I don't blame him for a second for wanting the features of ZFS on Linux! ZFS is a truly remarkable filesystem, with just the kind of functionality we need these days. The "What is ZFS?" page does an excellent job of describing ZFS, and the many benefits it offers.

But I also think that if you want some feature of Solaris on Linux, maybe you'd be better off just using Solaris in the first place. These days, it's readily available. There's even source code available through the OpenSolaris project. Although the hardware support is lacking in some areas, it is often more than suitable.

There is much in the way of open source software available for Solaris. The Blastwave.org Community Software for Solaris site is one such source. Of course, you can also compile the software yourself in many cases.

Licensing issues aside, porting something like ZFS to Linux is a major undertaking. There is the ZFS on FUSE effort. So in the end, just using Solaris may really be the best option.

Today I shared the experience a friend had with one of the companies he works with. It involved a failed transition from what was mainly a console-based suite of applications powered by Sun systems and Oracle, to an AJAX and Web-based system running on Windows, .NET and SQL Server. It seems that that entry was submitted to Reddit, and so I've been reading some of the comments that were left there.

Some of the comments were quite insightful. But there were two that I found to be just plain funny! Here is the first comment, and here is the second comment.

In those comments I am accused of being "biased against windows and ajax" and guilty of "discrimination against Windows & dot-Net". Well, I would like to address those allegations!

First of all, I've been doing this long enough to not get to attached to certain products or technologies. In the end, it's all about solutions that work to solve the client's problems in an efficient and financially-sound way. I'm glad that I get to mostly work with Solaris, HP-UX, AiX, FreeBSD, Linux and other UNIX-like systems. But I've worked with Windows many times before. As long as the job gets done properly, I really don't care what software is being used.

In this case, my feelings regarding Windows, .NET and SQL Server have absolutely no impact on the problems that that company experienced with their transition. Beyond hearing about it from my friend, I had no involvement with the development of the old system, nor any involvement with the development of the new system.

Furthermore, the fact remains that the old, UNIX- and Oracle-based system worked just fine. The new .NET-based system did not work in a suitable manner. Pointing out that certain software did not perform in an adequate fashion in a certain situation does not indicate bias. All it indicates is that the software in question was not capable of performing what needed to be done.

Likewise, the AJAX-based UI proved inefficient compared to the previous curses-based interface. That's just how things worked out. Again, my feelings, thoughts or biases would have had absolutely no impact on the situation, as I was not involved.

I do thank the two comment authors for their thoughts and opinions. However, I also urge them to be more careful in the future when accusing others of bias. Just because a particular technology fails to work in a particular situation, and this failure becomes a topic of discussion, there is not necessarily bias against that technology. Sometimes technology fails. We must admit this, and learn from such failures.

Thanks to an article on DesktopLinux.com, I was reading about the Asus Eee PC 701 system. One interesting thing about this system is that it will reportedly run a variant of Xandros Desktop Linux.

The article goes on to note that this device will apparently have 512 MB of RAM. It's the paragraph following that portion of the article that I find most interesting: While this may not sound like enough RAM to run Xandros, this Linux operating system is well-known for its ability to run with a bare minimum of RAM. In a DesktopLinux.com review in 2006, we were able to run the latest version, Xandros Desktop 4.0, on a far less powerful system: a 6-year-old Compaq Deskpro EN Desktop with a 500MHz Pentium III processor, 128MB of RAM and a 10GB hard drive.

I find it laughable that 128 MB of RAM is considered "a bare minimum" today. It's actually a very large amount of RAM. Back in the 1980s and even into the late 1990s, those of us in the corporate world would have been amazed to have that much RAM at our disposal. At one job, we used a Sun SPARCstation 1 with 1 MB of RAM. This was around 1991 or 1992. On this system, we ran not only a fairly busy email server, but also a couple of databases and several other backend applications. Looking back, I don't know how we got by with such a system. Perhaps software was written with more care in those days. Regardless, we had some of the older system administrators telling us how lucky we were to have 1 MB. They recalled the days when 64 KB of RAM was considered a lot.

When it comes to desktop systems, there's absolutely no legitimate reason why a capable desktop system needs more than 128 MB of RAM. In the early 1990s we had NeXTstation systems that worked comfortably with 12 MB of RAM. Keep in mind that these systems came with a very capable suite of desktop software, still comparable in many ways to Mac OS X today. And even then, we were dealing with relatively heavy-weight technologies like Objective-C, Display PostScript, Mach, and so forth. Yet those systems still performed very well, with 100 times less RAM than the typical low-end consumer PC today!

Every so often I hear somebody come along and compare the fragmentation of the various Linux distributions today to the "UNIX Wars" of the late 1980s and the early 1990s. I find it somewhat funny when that happens, as I think that the situation is quite different.

First of all, the article mentions there being over 300 different Linux distributions. There were nowhere near that many UNIX vendors in the late 1980s. So the scale of fragmentation isn't even remotely close.

And the nature of the products are different. Most Linux distributions use the same kernel and much of the same userland source code. This wasn't necessary the case during the 1980s. Between the BSD- and System V-based systems, we had at least two fairly distinct codebases. Then there were unique systems, including Coherent. So when it comes to the Linux distributions, we're talking about essentially all the same code. Although the UNIX variants usually had a common beginning at some point in time, they had diverged to the point where each variant was quite unique in its own way.

For instance, we knew that Sun workstations running SunOS were often quite good for developers and power users. SGI IRIX-based systems were useful for tasks requiring a powerful GUI, or for other multimedia-related jobs. HP-UX was often good for back-end database related roles, as was AiX. Of course, BSD/386, SCO UNIX, SCO ODT and Xenix were often used on x86 PCs. Each UNIX variant tended to have its own niche when it came to maximizing performance and minimizing cost.

When it comes to most Linux distributions today, we have much more variability, even within a single distribution. A base Debian or Ubuntu system can quickly be adapted to provide a workstation environment, or be used as a server, or even slimmed down to a minimalistic system. A wide range of hardware platforms are also supported, compared to the UNIX systems which only tended to support the vendor's hardware.

We also can't forget that commercial UNIX was driven by hardware vendors who needed software to run on their various systems. This is not so much the case with the Linux distributions of today. Although a great number do receive funding from corporations or other businesses, and others receive academic or government funding, many of them are community-based projects. The priorities of community-based projects often differ significantly from profit-driven ventures.

So as we can see, the fragmentation of the Linux distributions today really can't be compared to the different UNIX varieties we could choose from in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The two situations involve far too many differing factors for any similarity to be seen.

Those who follow GNOME have probably read about the GNOME Online Desktop. After reading about this concept, I find myself very confused at what it is they're actually trying to accomplish.

Take what is, at the time of writing, the second paragraph under the "Philosophy" section: Imagine an OS that keeps all its information online, so you can use a live CD as easily as a full installation. When you start up a newly-installed computer, or visit a friend's house, your whole environment will be waiting for you, with no setup to redo. For the techies, think Stateless Linux Desktop; your files and settings are somewhere else.

Why do I need to imagine that sort of an operating system? I've had that for years now. It's really quite simple: I have a system at my house running Solaris, connected to a broadband Internet connection. Using SSH, I can connect to it from virtually any other network-enabled computer. And over that secure connection I can run X-based applications quite well. All I need to bring with me is a USB key with an X server installed. Since most UNIX or UNIX-like systems, like Solaris, Linux and Mac OS X often already have an X server present, it's really only a matter of using Xming on Windows.

Best of all, I get to use real desktop applications. I don't have to bother with lousy JavaScript-based web apps, and I have full access to all of my data. Also very important, I have much more control over how my data is stored, copied and backed up. Yes, it's a little bit more effort on my part, but I think it's well worth it to know how my private files are being stored and used.

So I find it difficult to understand what exactly the GNOME developers here are trying to accomplish. Using my setup, it's already possible to use the existing GNOME applications from other computers quite comfortably. We get the benefits of web apps, without what is often the poor quality they exhibit, and without having to worry about who else has access to our information.

Now is major turning point for the GNOME project. KDE 4.0 is coming soon. GNOME isn't prepared. We may very well see a mass exodus of users from GNOME to KDE, just because KDE 4.0 will be so far ahead of GNOME. It's doubtful that this GNOME Online Desktop idea will bring any benefit.