"can someone describe why anyone would bother with OpenSolaris? "
Sure. It has some really neat features, like zones, and dtrace. It's something to play with, and I enjoy exploring new things when it comes to software. The difference between Belenix, Nexenta, etc and Solaris though, is they are packed full of GNU software. Solaris comes with a really old version of Gnome, and some other stuff like Gaim which they have rebranded to "Java Instant Messenger" or something really stupid. But Nexenta is very, very much like Ubuntu, and you probably wouldn't even notice it was Solaris if you just walked up to it, apt-get and all.
The best thing about these OpenSolaris distro's is that they look and feel exactly like Linux distro's. Finally we can point to a GNU/Linux box and a GNU/OpenSolaris box, and people will see how little of what they thought was "Linux", is actually "Linux". This is good for GNU even if Sun's license sucks.
If they had gone with a GPL compatible license, they'd already have every Linux hardware driver ported by now. As it is, hardware support is very bad in OpenSolaris, and if you're not a hacker you should probably keep far away from OpenSolaris at this point.
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Re:Given GNU/Linux and *BSD, what's the point?
Posted by: Curtman on December 09, 2005 05:23 AMSure. It has some really neat features, like zones, and dtrace. It's something to play with, and I enjoy exploring new things when it comes to software. The difference between Belenix, Nexenta, etc and Solaris though, is they are packed full of GNU software. Solaris comes with a really old version of Gnome, and some other stuff like Gaim which they have rebranded to "Java Instant Messenger" or something really stupid. But Nexenta is very, very much like Ubuntu, and you probably wouldn't even notice it was Solaris if you just walked up to it, apt-get and all.
The best thing about these OpenSolaris distro's is that they look and feel exactly like Linux distro's. Finally we can point to a GNU/Linux box and a GNU/OpenSolaris box, and people will see how little of what they thought was "Linux", is actually "Linux". This is good for GNU even if Sun's license sucks.
If they had gone with a GPL compatible license, they'd already have every Linux hardware driver ported by now. As it is, hardware support is very bad in OpenSolaris, and if you're not a hacker you should probably keep far away from OpenSolaris at this point.
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