Oracle Solaris is Unix but not easy to use

I could install transmission by pkg install transmission but it appeared not to be the transmission-daemon and there is no settings.json file.

Finally, I got to know that there is no transmission-daemon for Oracle Solaris.

However, advantages of Oracle Solaris include built-in wget, nano editor, cups service, rsync, and so on.

Tom
 
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I think Solaris is (gradually?) being phased out by Oracle, if it hasn't already been killed. There is the Illumos fork of it, as well as OpenIndiana.

Back in the late 90's, early 2000's, Solaris was probably the Unix to use if you wanted a Unix or Unix like system job. While it may have more builtin, so do most Linux distributions, and the packages you mention, as well as many others, are very easily added with pkg install on FreeBSD, so I'm not sure I'd consider that a major advantage. (By the way, though wget isn't included, there is a builtin fetch command which can do much of what wget does. )
 
Yes. I found Solaris is not good for home use. I want to build a video streaming serve. About to install FreeNAS.

Tom
 
And MacOS is a certificated Unix system. Luckly, I could install latest macOS on my DIY PC. Maybe to use macOS as a server is a good idea.

Tom
 
advantages of Oracle Solaris include built-in wget, nano editor, cups service, rsync, and so on
Surely you're not implying that it is difficult for you to install those! Having them pre-installed is hardly relevant. I am assuming that if you're considering such things as Oracle Solaris you have basic skills to type a short command, but if not, I apologize. We'll gladly help you here. :)
 
Apple seems to be decreasing their support for their server app, (don't remember where I saw that, but if you google it, you should be able to find references to it.)

FreeBSD can do these things you wish. It may take more work (and may not, depending upon which of these systems you want to use). If you get Apple running on non Apple software, it's often fragile, and any upgrade may break it. FreeNAS is good, Solaris is no longer supported, though as I mentioned above, there are alternatives.

With no argument intended, if you think one of these will do the job better for you than FreeBSD, that's fine. Even posting why you find them better for your needs is fine, and possibly useful to the next one who comes along.
 
I find Solaris (especially its illumos descendant) interesting because it is the only free SysV Unix in existence. I wish my WiFi chip was supported yet - it would be an awesome daily driver. :)
 
Apple seems to be decreasing their support for their server app, (don't remember where I saw that, but if you google it, you should be able to find references to it.)

FreeBSD can do these things you wish. It may take more work (and may not, depending upon which of these systems you want to use. If you get Apple running on non Apple software, it's often fragile, and any upgrade may break it. FreeNAS is good, Solaris is no longer supported, though as I mentioned above, there are alternatives.

With no argument intended, if you think one of these will do the job better for you than FreeBSD, that's fine. Even posting why you find them better for your needs is fine, and possibly useful to the next one who comes along.

Actually, my hackintosh is very stable. The only thing you need to be caution is to follow the guide provided by Tonymacx86.com

I built my hackintosh based on tonymacx86's building guide and most of the hardwares were natively supported by macOS.

Tom
 
Thank for linking to that. I guess the only way is to install an illumos-based OS and try it out. I was interested mainly in the "feel". I remember, coming from Linux, the first time I sat at a FreeBSD shell, I said to myself, "Wow, this is so much better". But it was difficult to point what was different.
 
Thank you, license is indeed an important part of the "feeling at home". For some reason, although I like GNU's tools, I am not enamoured of GPL's weltanschauung.
 
Thank for linking to that. I guess the only way is to install an illumos-based OS and try it out. I was interested mainly in the "feel". I remember, coming from Linux, the first time I sat at a FreeBSD shell, I said to myself, "Wow, this is so much better". But it was difficult to point what was different.

For me it was the _MUCH_ more structured and "engineered" feel of FreeBSD compared to linux. This starts with simple things like filesystem-hygiene which has become even worse on linux since systemd scatters stuff in places where they definitely _don't_ belong (e.g. executables under /lib).
Also the integration and interoperability of basic tools and technologies (ZFS) is something that just isn't there on linux and it makes working with the system so much easier and more efficient.

These points are even more true for illumos - at least that's my experience. We're using smartOS for virtualization since ~2 years and I'm running omniOS in a few VMs, mainly for testing. Lots of services I previously ran in jails are now running in zones (dhcp, DNS, radius, ldap....), mainly because migration between hosts is much easier than for jails.
Tools like vmadm/zoneadm (and its siblings) or dladm are very powerful; crossbow is just awesome and even for very sophisticated setups still quite easy to manage compared to e.g. netflow.
SMF is quite a beast, but I've started to like some aspects of it. Like other tools on illumos it has a quite steep learning curve, but after some adjustment period it really makes sense. One thing I just recently discovered and immediately fell in love with, is the ability to get the path of the logfile for a service with svcs -L <service> - no more searching where a service puts its logfile or how it is named (yes, looking at you BIND...), just do less `svcs -L pkgsrc/bind`.


Regarding Oracle Solaris: Essentially all engineering teams for Solaris' key technologies left after the Oracle invasion or at the latest when Oracle re-closed the Solaris source. All further development of the OS and technologies like ZFS then happened outside of Oracle. So for me it's not only an ethical decision not to use Oracle Solaris, but also a purely technical - especially when it comes to ZFS. You just can't use Oracle ZFS properly with any other OS - it's a one-way-ticket if you import a OpenZFS pool in Oracle.
We're backing up our VM snapshots from smartOS to a FreeBSD storage server and NAS, which _just works™_ A colleague is/was running a Linux desktop with ZFS and was also backing up to the same Servers and still uses his data pool with TrueOS. My storage server at home was migrated from an old debian linux installation to FreeBSD (and omniOS for a few weeks of testing) basically by just exporting/importing the storage pool.
Another thing I'm looking forward to is the bhyve port to smartOS/illumos. Combined with the ongoing development of vmadm for FreeBSD by ProjectFiFo it might become a real thing to seamlessly migrate VMs between FreeBSD and smartOS even using the same tools on both systems!
 
I think Solaris is (gradually?) being phased out by Oracle, if it hasn't already been killed. There is the Illumos fork of it, as well as OpenIndiana.

Back in the late 90's, early 2000's, Solaris was probably the Unix to use if you wanted a Unix or Unix like system job. While it may have more builtin, so do most Linux distributions, and the packages you mention, as well as many others, are very easily added with pkg install on FreeBSD, so I'm not sure I'd consider that a major advantage. (By the way, though wget isn't included, there is a builtin fetch command which can do much of what wget does. )

I think Solaris is (gradually?) being phased out by Oracle, if it hasn't already been killed. There is the Illumos fork of it, as well as OpenIndiana.
Well I think at this point is not so much difference from what, the Core Team is been doing with the whole freebsd project.! these guys with their actions have been phasing out freebsd for years..!
 
sko Thank you for inspiring post and the details, I will check smartOS out, if not for "touching" first-hand a bit of a significant part of Unix history.

In the Reddit thread linked above, there is mention of easily running virtualized Windows, or any OS, like FreeBSD, Ubuntu, etc.

Would you know if it is possible at all to connect to such virtualized OS via VNC, from the same smartOS running instance?

That is, does smartOS allow to install, even in the global zone, some sort of X11 manager, so to use a VNC client from there and connect to multiple OS instances running on same machine, without having to connect from a second client computer?

That would be very cool indeed.
 
smartOS is basically a stateless hypervisor. It isn't installed on disk; you only put the image on an SD-card or USB-key. Configuration is stored on the pool, basically in a single file. So you can't and really shouldn't run X11 in the global zone of a smartOS host. Just use any VNC client on a host that has access to the admin interface of the smartOS host (usually a management-VLAN).
If you need more of a general-purpose host, you should go with omniOS (very lightweight base installation, great for server use but can also be set up for desktop use) or OpenIndiana (more biased towards desktop use).

Installing Windows in a VM is still quite a PITA even today; mainly because it still has absolutely no support for paravirtualized devices OOTB. You still have to fiddle around with driver CDs (images) like it's 1999 :rolleyes:

For any other OS (BSDs, illumos, various linuxes) there are prebuild images available via imgadm. Instead of a bloated and systemd-poised ubuntu you should have a look at Alpine in LX-Zones if you absolutely have to run linux.
 
Hey, Solaris is hard to use, for non-computer profession. In contrast, Ubuntu is very friendly. Finally, FreeBSD is between Solaris and Ubuntu.

Tom
 
I guess you are wasting a lot of work. Stick to an Operating System and learn it well.

Your server does not need to run "macOS" because you have "macOS" in your desktop. A desktop OS and a server OS often are optimized to do different things.

Rule of Thumb. Quick test for a decent server OS: "Does it run out of the box in a GUI?", "Can you run it mainly (or only) in a GUI" ? If the answer is "yes", then you can be 99% sure this will be *bad* server.

"Easy to use OS" is hardly related to "Realible Server OS".

Things to consider to select a server OS: documentation, user adoption, price, license, drivers (to do what you intend to), software (to do what you intend to).
 
Hey, Solaris is hard to use, for non-computer profession.

I disagree. With Solaris having been a decent GUI workstation system before FreeBSD even existed, I don't think that it is much harder to adapt for people who don't know operating systems well.

Things to consider to select a server OS: documentation, user adoption, price, license, drivers (to do what you intend to), software (to do what you intend to).

"User adaption" is the least important thing for a server operating system as long as it is still maintained.
 
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