Re: Open Indiana, for a "Sun at Home" server?

On Thu, Oct 27, 2011 at 11:53 AM, Derrik Walker v2.0
<[email protected]> wrote:
>
> I have a nice computer with a quad core AMD processor and 16 Gigs of ram =
that I want to turn into a UNIX server.
>
> I am trying to decide which OS to put on it.=A0 I have been using mostly =
RHEL at work for years now, but am an old time UNIX geek.
>
> I'm a long time fan of Solaris, but haven't had a running Sun system at h=
ome for a long time.
>
> So I was thinking Open Indiana.=A0 Anyone here running it? How does it co=
mpare to real Solaris?=A0 What about FreeBSD or RHEL/Cent OS?
>
> Can I install packages from the Solaris Freeware site on it?
>

Most people are leaving Solaris.=A0 Even one of the key people with Blastwa=
ve, who
make their bread and butter on Solaris support, have indicated none of their
clients are looking to migrate to Solaris 11, nor to take their
Solaris 9 up to 10,
but rather to move off Solaris to Linux.

http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg02779.html

Some might say this isn't news, but to me, it is an indicator.=A0 It is lik=
e when
a mechanic you trust for years tells you people are avoiding a certain car.
He has a radar on the industry most of us do not.

The open variants of Solaris are likewise going to have a limited lifespan.
I can't see their projects having enough critical mass to sustain without
the backing of Oracle, who have dropped OpenSolaris.

I can't take FreeBSD/netBSD seriously for a number of reasons.=A0 One being
lack of packages.=A0 Try to find a commercial backup package which supports
BSD - very few do, and of those try to find one which also supports Windows
with a native client and bare metal recovery capability.=A0 netBSD
actually put out
a multi-processor kernel for sparc32 which was known to kernel dump on boot=
 up
reliably, and just left it like that for months. What is the point of
even putting
out a kernel that won't work?=A0 Definitely a hobbyist OS.

Given it is an AMD system it can run anything, even Windows, if you wanted,
so it doesn't fit into the same class as most of the situations we deal
with in bringing home sparc based dinosaurs.

You would probably find yourself at home with CentOS, but I think
you already knew that.  Redhat costs too much for home use in my opinion
(far more than Windows over the same sort of lifespan).

If you are up for a change, you should consider Debian.  The package manager
is very well done, the package breadth is wide and QA'ed against a common
standard (unlike getting rpmforge and Redhat to play nice together).
Of course with that amount of RAM and multi core, you could install Debian
on it, set up KVM virtual machines, and run Windows, Cent OS,
FreeBSD and maybe even a free variant of Solaris, concurrently.