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Toshiba To OEM Laptops With OpenSolaris
Posted by
kdawson
on Fri Dec 19, 2008 09:03 AM
from the good-news-for-lem-fans dept.
from the good-news-for-lem-fans dept.
ruphus13 writes to tell us of Sun's latest attempt to drive OpenSolaris adoption. The company has inked a deal to pre-install OpenSolaris on Toshiba laptops. "Slowly but surely, major laptop vendors are taking to the idea of shipping systems with pre-loaded open source operating systems. The latest case in point is Toshiba — one of the longest-standing players in the market for portable computers — and its new plan to pre-install Sun Microsystems' OpenSolaris on its laptops. The machines are supposed to ship in early 2009."
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I really like Solaris but... (Score:5, Interesting)
Why go with Solaris and not Linux?
In terms of usability and functionality for a Laptop Solaris would be at a disadvantage to Linux and even Windows. Unless you job is to write and compile and or run Solaris X86 Apps. Then you are in general at a disadvantage to Linux which has more application written for it, communicates very well with Solaris Based Type Networks, As far as End User is concerned Linux and Solaris really look so much alike that it wouldn't be much of a learning curve.
Solaris is superior as a server OS. But for a desktop Laptop OS... Why?
Re:I really like Solaris but... (Score:5, Funny)
2009 is the year of Solaris on the laptop!
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Re: (Score:2, Funny)
But since when do operating systems HAVE to follow Chinese Astrology?
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At least since the Year of Commodore on the Deathbed, if not longer.
Re:I really like Solaris but... (Score:5, Insightful)
The point is brand dilution. With Solaris (and OpenSolaris no less) offered on laptops, the computer==windows mentality will soon be as dead as the internet=IE mentality. When you have 3 viable alternatives with the same feature set, (Star/OpenOffice, Webkit/Gecko, Unix) the idea that Windows is somehow the 'best' option begins to just be silly.
For me, I can go to my friends and say, look, Sun, IBM, Novell, Canonical, and a ton of other companies have been pouring money into these free systems. These companies use them extensively. Have you honestly had such a fantastic experience with Microsoft that you want to stick with them when you have all these other options?
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Re:I really like Solaris but... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:I really like Solaris but... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you are right. I also think that OpenSolaris on a Toshiba laptop will be as popular as the Danger Hiptop (aka Sidekick from T-Mobile) has been. There are a lot of good things to say about Sun and Solaris and some bad things. What they do seem to be doing is moving to get some market share lost to Linux. It was not that long ago that you used Sun in the data center if you wanted reliable solid servers. It's not your only choice anymore. With Linux making inroads on the desktops of the world, Sun has a chance to move in and get some share without competing directly against MS. OpenSolaris is not that bad but has some limitations. With the Gnome desktop it looks more or less like any Linux OS. I have yet to see the SunBlade on my desk crater or act up. Rock solid operation.
If Sun and Toshiba can translate that reputation to the laptop and make it usable for Joe Public, Sun will not only be impressive, but on their way toward being a player that everyone has to worry about again. In the business that Sun is in, good is not enough. They need to be the preferred supplier of many people. That has to be their goal, to become the preferred supplier of computer products.
Hardware got really cheap, so x86 OpenSolaris is a smart move, a necessary one. Even Apple went there. They both should have anticipated it. If they get the app development further along, and morph their support systems to more or less match Linux distributions, they have a chance of regaining significant market share. Remember that the difference between new high end laptops and a data center server are decreasing every month. I don't think that Sun has any choice but to do this.
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Gnome is better in OpenSolaris. (Score:3, Interesting)
Gnome is being tightly integrated with ZFS, you will have functionality in OpenSolaris that you will not see for a while, if at all, in Linux.
Re:I really like Solaris but... (Score:5, Insightful)
But the CHOICE is the important part. I don't care if they offer linux, Open Solaris, freeBSD, or even Darwin, its great to see that OEM companies are realizing that having a choice is a good thing. We've seen what happens when there is only one choice. OpenSolaris will only get better on laptops over time with this. Because it is "Open" it will drive competition (and hopefully share new features) with linux. This will drive having more compatible hardware, and better drivers, and companies will realize its nice to not send a chunk of every sale to MS.
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its great to see that OEM companies are realizing that having a choice is a good thing.
I'm not sure I exactly agree with you. OEM companies don't really care about "choice", they care about selling laptops. What's good is that the market has opened up enough that OEMs think they might gain some sales by selling other operating systems. The choice of OpenSolaris puzzles me a little though. Solaris isn't exactly a large market, and as the OP pointed out it's not really a good desktop OS.
The only thing I c
Bring forth the trebuchets! (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not sure if it's that the OEMs think they can sell that many, it's that they think Microsoft can't stop them any more.
We'll not know how many they could have sold before, because it's only recently that they've dared to try.
Microsoft is like a castle under siege, there's an attack from Asus on one wall, then IBM on another, then Dell at the main gate, now Toshiba... Each wave is beaten back, but the defenders look increasingly shaky.
Re:I really like Solaris but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why? The only serious issue with OpenSolaris I can think of is a lack of third party support, which is because OpenSolaris doesn't have a wide install base. If some major manufacturer, say Toshiba, of, say, laptop computers was to provide it pre-installed, then that might change.
OpenSolaris has a number of differences to, say, Ubuntu, which are very attractive, notably the ZFS file system. For Enterprise use, where all the critical applications (the Apache suite and virtually everything that runs over it, Kerberos, OpenLDAP, Samba, Various IMAP daemons, various MTAs, etc) are all supported natively, and it works well as a Xen domain, the support for ZFS makes it arguably a superior option to RHEL, and having the option of having it run as a desktop environment helps administrators use the same tools locally and remotely.
There's no legitimate reason to suggest it's not something people would want in preference to Windows. It's a solid operating system with a strong pedigree, a decent level of support, and some extremely nice features.
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Re:I really like Solaris but... (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't get me wrong, I've been wanting to play with OpenSolaris myself, but every feature you listed is relevant to the server or workstation market. The desktop market doesn't care about MTAs and IMAP daemons. Kerberos, LDAP, and Samba are nice, but they have to be more than just present. They have to work well with minimal fuss.
Linux, after stumbling around with this for years, is just now finally getting to the point where it can easily be a drop-in replacement for Windows on a corporate desktop (i.e: authenticating on an AD domain). Sure, it's been possible for a while, the question has always been how much tweaking you have to do to various configuration files including possible changes to the domain controllers depending on what you are trying to do. With nice config utilities and better autoconfiguration, this has recently become a lot easier (but not yet perfect).
In addition, there is the issue of desktop optimizations. The Solaris kernel is engineered for throughput, smp, and big iron, and it is very good at those things. Linux has been through many years of flame wars, new schedulers, low-latency patches, preempt patches, rewritten vfs layers, scsi subsystems, and audio subsystems--all addressing the complicated issues of performance on the server and the desktop. The desktop part of that has really matured in the last year, but even three or four years ago desktop performance was pretty sucky. Remember, for the desktop user, latency (even perceived latency) is a much bigger issue than throughput, and the optimizations for the former are often degrading to the latter.
So, I like the idea of OpenSolaris, but it's going to take a lot more than slapping Compiz and Gnome on it to make it into a good desktop OS. Sure, they will get there eventually, just like Linux (maybe even faster if they can use some of the same approaches Linux has), but it's not there yet.
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This is kind of a BS argument, in that other than the kernel what is different between the two? Both Linux and Opensolaris run the same open source desktop, and applications.
Re:I really like Solaris but... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:I really like Solaris but... (Score:4, Informative)
Its more marketable than 'pure' linux because there is a large company supporting it, as opposed to an amorphous community which technically doesn't have anything really tying it together beyond the OS.
True.. "Pure" Linux is an amorphous mass. But just compare *ONE* Linux company (RedHat) to Sun in terms of market cap:
Sun [yahoo.com]
RedHat [yahoo.com]
And RedHat just represents *ONE* Linux company. There are many out there. IBM and Oracle both support Linux. Linux has a much larger commercial support base than does Solaris or OpenSolaris.
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Re:I really like Solaris but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Solaris is superior as a server OS. But for a desktop Laptop OS... Why?
I loved Solaris too. Knowing SunOS paid for my first house and first car. I used to maintain multiple enterprise systems all by my lonesome self. This included a mass of 450s and a couple 6500s.
Unfortunately, Sun seems to have lost their mojo. Solaris was once much better, much more reliable than Linux. When LVM was still trashing LVs under capacity loads, Sun had super-stable Veritas file systems. When Linux were marvelling at 4-processor systems, Sun was pushing out 64-way machines. At the time, Linux NFS was non-standard and failed under high load. Sun's NFS implementation was rock solid.
Then PCs grew up. And Linux grew up along with it.
There's a well-known chart that talks about the reason why Microsoft continues to add features (and bloat) to their products. The reason is competition. If they don't add features, then other products with fewer features can become "good enough" for what a user (er, consumer) needs. If Microsoft didn't continually add new features, users will ask themselves why they are paying a price premium for something they can do for free or at a much reduced cost.
But Sun went on another track. They decided they didn't want to court that rapidly advancing Linux horde. They missed out on the low-end server market by casting doubt on the future of their x86 Solaris product. They started hoarding their IP portfolio, forgetting their history. In all this time, Linux was getting "good enough".
Good enough, in fact, to steal away the web server market. Good enough to steal away the edge-of-network market. Good enough to steal away the low-end database market. Good enough to steal away the high-end workstation market. All these were Sun's markets. All gone. I know this because I used Sun boxes in these capacities.
At my company the last enterprise Sun box went away almost 18 months ago. We're pushing Linux to supplement our AIX systems now. And Linux excels. It's stable. It's supported. It's cheap. And it's doing what the Sun box did for $50,000 more.
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Re:I really like Solaris but... (Score:5, Interesting)
Depends. We use a lot of Sun boxes and a lot of Dell boxes. Solaris 10 on a Sun box (even an x86) is way easier to administer than Linux - particularly when things go wrong. The OS indicates problems very nicely in messages and syslog, better than RHEL does.
The downside is that modern open source software is too often written by coders who think "cross-platform" means "works on Fedora and Ubuntu."
So we end up doing things like running Solaris 10 on Dell boxes and RHEL on Sun servers ;-)
Sun's hardware is competitively priced and their service is really good (I'm in London), so we're very happy to stay with Sun boxes even running Linux.
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Selling point?? (Score:2, Interesting)
What exactly is the selling point here? I can see how ZFS is enticing for servers, and perhaps a narrow range of power users, but most FOSS stuff is more work to install on Solaris (Open or otherwise).
Perhaps on a two-harddisk laptop ZFS is an interesting option.
What about drivers? (Score:2)
Webcams seem to be high on the list of laptop users of today. Does OpenSolaris have many webcam drivers? Or maybe they went with the simple solution. Include a webcam and have a driver ready for it.
yeah riiight. (Score:5, Insightful)
MS to scrap the OEM tax and instead install an OS that is free for 30 days and then asks you to did into your wallet and type in a credit card number.
MS will never allow this to continue without a fight, they drop the prices or allowed older operating systems anywhere they can to ensure machines are shipped with their OS.
It seems clear that threatening OEMS with more a expensive windows tax if they do not cooperate is becoming less effective these days.
They might even give the OS away free if they have no choice at all and get money back on cloud, upgrades, applications and web services. But I cannot see them ever willingly accepting PCs sold in large numbers without windows.
Re:yeah riiight. (Score:4, Insightful)
They might even give the OS away free
Frankly, I've always wondered why they don't.
Who knows, if Microsoft can't convince people to move on from XP, it very well might end up free. Of course, I would also like to see Windows open-sourced, and that's never gonna happen, so hey. In a perfect world, anyway...
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The thing about the 'expensive Windows tax' is, all of the major OEMs are now shipping non-Windows machines. That mean, every OEM should be paying the higher price, if it still exists. Which will only serve to drive up the cost of Windows for their customers. That either creates a larger price discrepancy between the Windows and non-Windows box, or the OEM will make more money by keeping the cost of the Linux machine similar to the Windows machine, which will encourage the OEM to sell even more non-Windo
Wonderful... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Speaking as someone who lives and breathes in the Solaris world...
True enough that it's a niche market, but let's not forget that Linux was just as small (if not smaller) of a niche some time ago. Also, OpenSolaris ties directly into developers for back-end enterprise software--there's a lot of gear running Solaris out there!
But I have to ask: What _is_ the 'cost of giving people the choice'? Assuming that Toshiba has set up the environment to efficiently install OpenSolaris on their boxes, it's a matter of
Customs (Score:2)
Poor Microsoft (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
What needs to go down is the fucking unions. They're bleeding the companies dry, they're the reason that GM/Ford/etc. can't compete with Toyota and Honda and Subaru.
Unions aren't really the problem (Score:3, Insightful)
US car companies have ignored the future for 40 years, fighting every environmental and fuel economy standard that would have make them competitive.
Why? (Score:2, Interesting)
Nobody's asking the right questions.
1) Why is Toshiba doing this? This will make them money either directly (Sun is paying them with either money or services) or indirectly (Toshiba wants to get a better deal from Microsoft).
2) Why is Sun doing this? I think they want to drive adoption of OpenSolaris among the open source developers that would normally use Linux. The low-hanging fruit is probably Java devs like me who would otherwise prefer to use Linux.
The market for developer workstations is not small,
No BIOS support (Score:2)
Maybe the next bios patch for my Toshiba will not completely fux Linux access to hardware again. Do I dare chance it? They might even have re-enabled VT. I'm soooo tempted. But the last 4 times I had to rebuild, hack, and rebuild to get hardware to work again. But if they are going to support OpenSolaris... But what if my fears are correct and the bios update makes my machine a Vista only POS. I'm soooo torn.
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/general-10/warning-there-is-windows-in-my..-bios-5447 [linuxquestions.org]
Actually, I can see why they're doing this (Score:5, Informative)
I'm typing this from OpenSolaris 2008.11 and I'm actually surprised how "desktop-friendly" Solaris has actually become. The default GNOME-based desktop is gorgeous and works well. Hardware support may not be all that broad, but when hardware is supported it's REALLY supported: even booting off the live CD, my Atheros wireless card, NVidia 3D card and crappy on-mobo sound were "auto-magically" detected and set up. Performance is also quite snappy, even on my aging Athlon XP 3000+ with a measly 1 GB of RAM. In short, OpenSolaris is more than up to the task of working on Toshiba's new laptops.
just remember... (Score:3, Informative)
That will fix most of the problems you will run into with Solaris. Other than that, it's a solid OS. Why they would put that Network Auto-Magic shit in, I have no clue.
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Hot New Enterprise Dev environment for '09 (Score:3, Interesting)
Seriously:
If I could have Solaris as an option, I would take it. There's a justifiable niche here.. Solaris is a supported alterna-UNIX with class
leading development tools.
If OpenSolaris provided the second-best iPhone application development environment, it would be strong enough to justify the move.
If Sun takes the opportunity to bundle and better integrate OpenOffice with their new Enterprise Desktop, and add all sorts of security and platform robustness choices, it might have a chance.
There's enough technology present in Solaris to make a reasonable case for allowing it to compete against the much unloved Vista for Business, especially when Linux has taken the first wave of public criticism (Eee PC, Ubuntu, et al.)
If they can somehow coordinate a "Shake 'n' Bake" style maneuver with Apple (iPhone/Solaris/Dev with Apple/Sun/ZFS backend and iPhone integration) it could be a very good thing.
Apple will never take the Corporate Desktop summit, and I seriously believe they have stopped caring. Perhaps Sun recognizes this as well.
Re:Hot New Enterprise Dev environment for '09 (Score:4, Interesting)
Sun's new packaging system, IPS, and the new repositories are growing with software selections and software is as easy to manage as Debian's apt-get.
Anyone here that thinks OpenSolaris will fail obviously hasn't used it. Give it a try and I bet a large portion of you Slashdot Linux zealots will move to OpenSolaris or at least give it the respect it deserves.
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Xubuntu v OpenSolaris on old laptop: my experience (Score:3, Interesting)
I had xubuntu 8.1 running om my old HP ze4220 with 512mb or ram, and 1.7ghz celuron processor. I decided to try opensolaris 2008.5.
Xunbuntu won hands down, in every measurable way. I could never get music, or movies, to play on opensolaris. Also, I was never able to read .chm file on opensolaris. Xubuntu was also faster to install, and booted up faster. Opensolaris was not terrrible, it just wasn't as nice as xubuntu.
Neither OS could detect my wireless NIC. XP runs noticeably faster than either xubuntu or opensolaris, and xp does detect my wireless nic.
Again, just my experience.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Due to licensing restrictions, of which most people forget MP3 is proprietary, you need to get a license to download the MP3 GStreamer plugin on OpenSolaris. The license is free from Fluendo's website [fluendo.com], but requires registration. Registration, downloading, and insta
Re:Solaris to beat Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Solaris to beat Linux (Score:5, Interesting)
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Solaris uses "CUPS" for printing. CUPS has come a long way. For one reason because Apple alsouses CUPS in Mac OS X nd has put some effort into making it work. Including hiring the project leader and paying hiom to work full time. Most linux diistros use CUPS also.
I have had the same resilt with CUPS. It finds prints well even networked printers all over the building
Re:Solaris to beat Linux (Score:4, Funny)
Solaris to beat Linux? Somehow I think hitting Mr. Linux Torvalds with a Solaris disc will probably do more damage to the disc....
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Re:Solaris to beat Linux (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, by being licensed under GPLv3, I think OpenSolaris is a morally superior choice.
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Re:Solaris to beat Linux (Score:4, Interesting)
Toshiba is a pretty good brand imho. Much better than the crap eMachine and HP/Compaq crap you'll find at most electronic stores. I can't speak for OpenSolaris, but it looks nice from the review at ArsTechnica.
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Re:Solaris to beat Linux (Score:4, Insightful)
I use HP-UX and Solaris on daily basis: business software of my employer run there.
You have to try to do something on Unix once to start seeing that Linux is not Unix and start hating Unix.
Solaris e.g. still doesn't install any capable text editor by default. You end up with original 'vi' which was last update 1996 and still doesn't support arrow keys (actually it's worse: it interprets unknown key sequences literally). But Solaris is paradise compared to underwhelming HP-UX, where you really end up with bare minimum. Infamous messages "line too long" from awk or sed (yeah, they still do not handle strings longer than 1000 characters). Lack or recursive grep, when you have to pipe 'find' to pretty much anything - but what is not always possible.
Default install of any Linux is quite usable. Default install of both Solaris and HP-UX is miserable torture. (*) For business software, with all its bogosities and hacks, commercial Unix is better: they provide workarounds for literally everything. But deploying (process which takes months) anything on Unix is royal pain. Using Unix daily - is even more so.
Apparently, Unix degraded to some backbone OS: spend five minutes installing something and then just monitor it remotely. That works and works really well. But if you actually need to do something on them ... forget. It is simpler to rewrite every tool they supply in Perl and be with it. Linux on other side looks like it is actually used - actively - by all kinds of people: it is much more polished and can be used painlessly on daily basis without rewriting anything.
(*) Most bogosities of Unix can be worked around by compiling e.g. GNU tools or any other functioning analogue. But there is a catch: Unix doesn't come with compiler preinstalled or even if it is installed it is pretty much incapable of compiling anything big (e.g. gcc). That's the way Unix vendors remind you that they also sell separately commercial compilers and you are welcome to buy them.
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Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Not totally. Java isn't going anywhere (Microsoft hates Java), OpenOffice.org isn't going anywhere (Microsoft hates OpenOffice.org), OpenSolaris isn't going anywhere and Sun's partnerships with Canonical (Ubuntu), Red Hat and Novell/SuSE aren't going anywhere either.
Everyone thinks Microsoft is the only company to play dirty and use alliances as a means of a trap. Companies like Sun and IBM invented these tricks.
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