Dimitri Maziuk wrote:
The reason I ask is that AFAIK E4500/Solaris is generally regarded as the most stable server to come out of Sun Microsystems. So I find it a little strange when someone wants to run an OS written for 1 32-bitIntel CPU and later ported to MP and other architectures, whose stable kernel needs 20 revisions to get memory management subsystem to work, on that hardware.
Linux is being built on various Intel and Intel compatibles CPUs, let alone the various BIOSes in the motherboards; the base hardware itself is pretty volatile; so I believe that developing it would take more time. On Sun machines, well, maybe the sofware guys can provide input to the hardware ones so that the hardware would be suitable for the software.
Additionally, there are decades difference between Solaris and Linux; counted from the early BSD (or the early SysV, if you will) to the recent release of Solaris, Linux 1.0 to 2.4.17 is basically nothing. It's no wonder that Solaris is stable; as is Linux, and that's wonderful.
As for tools, AFAIK most GNU tools compile on Solaris just fine. And since its package management system is so primitive, it takes all of five minutes to roll them into a .pkg and install them via pkgadd.
I think somebody has to send an email to Scott McNeally; telling him that .deb format is _way_ neater than .pkg.
Well, .deb is basically built using "ar"; but used with the dependency list, ar looks greater than what it is.
BTW, Solaris' .pkg format is basically is a renamed tarball, right? Oki