# Comments on Switching From Solaris to Linux

There's an interesting post and discussion at Blog O'Matty about why
[people are switching from Solaris to Linux][1].  I suppose it's a
matter of familiarity, but I could never get used to the Solaris way
of doing things. Why can't Sun just ship their OS with all the GNU
and other packages like OpenSSH that [everyone just installs
anyway][2]?

> Redhat Linux ships and provides regular updates for numerous
> opensource software (e.g., postgres, MySQL, Apache, Samba, Bind,
> Sendmail, openssh, openssl, etc), where Sun keeps trying to sell
> customers the Sun Java One stack, "modifies" an opensource package
> and diverges the product from what is available everywhere else,
> and fails to provide timely bug fixes and security patches for the
> opensource packages that are shipped (Apache, MySQL and Samba are
> perfect examples) with Solaris.

I agree that the support for most free/open source software under
Solaris seems incomplete at best. [Sun's SunSSH is a perfect example
of this][3]. Red Hat is very involved in the open source community,
providing upstream patches regularly to major projects. The software
they ship with RHEL and Fedora is also reasonably current. As for
package management:

> 5. Managing applications and patches on Solaris systems is a
> disaster, and redhat's up2date utility is not only efficient, but
> has numerous options to control the patch notification and update
> process... 6\. Staying on the cutting edge with Nevada is
> difficult, since there is currently no way to easily and
> automatically upgrade from one release of Nevada to another. On
> Fedora Core servers, you can run 'yum upgrade' to get the latest
> bits. Having to download archives and BFU is tedious, and most
> admins don't want to spend their few spare cycles BFU'ing to new
> releases.

Too true - yum is very nice - although I think Fedora is a bit too
bleeding edge for production server use. For those admins who have
not [discovered Debian's package management][4], you don't know what
you are missing. I'm not sure why admins feel the need to waste all
sorts of time manually upgrading and patching systems
anymore. [Debian stable][5] and RHEL automate these mundane tasks
quite nicely, and both provide timely security updates to reasonably
up-to-date software.

## Comments

**[Anonymous](#22 "2006-06-08 02:45:00"):** You have a very
interesting point of view. I can tell by your comments that you have
not looked into solaris very deep. Have you tired to install a
package on Solaris? The fact that solaris has very few updates is
what makes it a mature operating system. Redhat and Fedora have
updates in the hundreds of megabites. How often do you see a kernel
update for Solaris, I see one for Red Hat every few weeks.Last but
not least, Solaris ships with just enough tools to get you started
which renders it more secure. By the way sshd is included in the
standard installation of Solaris 10.

**[Thinknix](#24 "2006-06-09 02:00:00"):** Thanks for the comments. Yes,
my recent experience with Solaris is limited. I had quite a bit of
it back in the 2.6 days...what struck me about the blog I was
commenting on was that some of the complaints I had from using 2.6
were still relevant - and there still seems to be a need for what I
would call "core" GNU or FOSS packages even in Solaris 10. I see
from http://sunfreeware.com/indexintel10.html that sunfreeware is
far from dead. As for patching, I can't comment on recent Sun
trends, but I do recall the recommended patch bundles being over
100MB each, containing dozens of patches.

[1]: https://prefetch.net/blog/2006/04/30/reasons-why-people-are-switching-from-solaris-to-linux/
[2]: http://sunfreeware.com/
[3]: https://web.archive.org/web/20061110170247/http://www.thejemreport.com/mambo/content/view/239/1/
[4]: gopher://gopher.unixlore.net/0/articles/historical-blog-posts/20060408-apt-debians-killer-app.txt
[5]: http://www.us.debian.org/releases/stable/
.