Sun Is Working to Make OpenSolaris the Alternative of Choice

Sun is in a place most other companies would wish to be far from. On one side of the street, they are trying desperately to be a partner to Microsoft. It is, after all, good to have the largest software company in the world on your side when you need to get an OS to run on your somewhat proprietary hardware. The other side of the street puts Sun in the place of antagonist to the Redmond giant, big enough in many ways to be a continuing pest, and not just swatted away like the other flies that annoy.

Sun is a company that has been behind an effort to put Microsoft’s Office applications out of the exalted place of number one in business today. This clearly puts Sun in the sights of the Microsoft war machine. Open Office, Sun Office, and IBM Symphony all use code that comes from the halls of Sun, and are as a group, eating away, slowly but surely, at the market share of Microsoft Office, whatever the year.

Now Sun wants to place OpenSolaris in the middle of the Windows - Linux battle. Sun’s operating system is a fully functional operating system, with all the bells and whistles of Windows XP or Ubuntu - except that the install program is from the dark ages.

The Sun installer looks like an open window to computing circa 1988, and is scary in the sense that the person installing is supposed to know what hardware is in the machine, what an IRQ is, and what IRQs can be shared. The operating system makes the assumption that the person installing is somewhat familiar with hexadecimal address schemes, and at what addresses the ROMs of add-in cards might be. Sure, the plug and play features of the hardware should take care of this, but it doesn’t always work. In that respect, it’s like Windows 95, but the graphics are like DOSSHELL from DOS 5.

To take care of this problem, Ian Murdock, the ‘ian’ part of ‘debian’, has been brought on board at Sun to work on the install routines. He is also working on a method of implementing a ’system restore’ feature to OpenSolaris, so that updates that are problematic can be rolled back.

Other projects are underway, to allow OpenSolaris users to have a complete set of full featured solutions, without wanting to go back to the Redmond software used now. One of these projects is the work toward giving corporate users a bulletproof database that will scale up for large databases. For this an alliance with the makers of PostgreSQL will make one less reason to regret the move to open source software.

If Sun can make the OS easy to install, it will go a long way toward the goal, and will be a means to have a ‘real’ Unix survive, along side all the Linux flavors, pretending to the throne.

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[tags] Sun, OpenSolaris, Microsoft, Debian Linux, Ian Murdock, PostgreSQL, Open Office, IBM Symphony, Sun Office [/tags]