Sun engineer Harry Foxwell, a well known advocate of OpenSolaris and co-author of the book "Pro OpenSolaris: A New Open Source OS for Linux Developers and Administrators," shared his enthusiasm for the solution with Joab Jackson of Government Computer News in a recent interview.

"The point that I made in the beginning of the book is that some people call themselves Linux developers but they really are open-source developers who happen to run their applications on a Linux OS," Foxwell states. "They could, in theory, use some other OS to support the tools they use. And OpenSolaris, in fact, does."

Among the first reasons Foxwell cites as compelling for Linux users contemplating a switch to OpenSolaris are that even the look and feel is similar, and OpenSolaris includes the Gnome desktop environment and all the GNU and Gnome tools, along with all of the open source AMP (Apache, MySQL and PHP) stack software administrators and developers are already using. What is more, Foxwell continued, OpenSolaris includes technologies not available in Linux, such as built-in virtualization in the form of Zones, the very popular ZFS [128-bit] file system, and the DTrace debugger tool. It also includes a new way of managing services called the Service Management Facility (SMF).

The SMF provides the framework to manage all services and to give users an understanding of dependencies that facilitates the diagnosing of problems when things don't work as one expects.

The migration from Linux to OpenSolaris is a relatively simple matter for users with a web-based infrastructure: transfer scripts, configure files and data.

There are tools available for the recompiling necessary in migrating custom C or C++ code, along with the libraries and documentation needed for that compilation, Foxwell assured Jackson.

Foxwell also allayed Jackson's concerns about the supposed lack of drivers in Solaris for non-Sun hardware. The contributions of members of the OpenSolaris community have provided thousands of now-supported components, Foxwell asserted. These are available from the Sun Web site's Hardware Compatibility List.

Users wishing to run Solaris Trusted Extensions, Foxwell continued, can certainly do so on OpenSolaris though they need to be aware that Trusted Extensions is not supported for production deployments. Those requiring that support need to use Solaris 10 OS, he said.

Asked about OpenSolaris and virtualization, Foxwell pointed out three possibilities: Containers or Zones; the still under development XVM Hypervisor; and virtualization based on the SPARC multithreading processors. No shortage, therefore, of approaches to virtualization with OpenSolaris. Yet another reason to draw Linux users to the solution.

More Information

How to Host Open Source Applications on OpenSolaris

Learn How to Become an OpenSolaris Power User

Leaving Linux for OpenSolaris [...read more...]

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