A journalist once asked the late Gandhiji what he thought of the western civilization. Gandhiji replied:

*”Western Civilization? I think it would be a good idea!”

Gandhiji described the whole of western civilization as the “Kingdom of Satan” which pollutes everybody who touches it. Everything which most people consider progress such as industrialization etc were rejected by Gandhiji and he used to pose ancient Indian civilization where the emphesis was on small, self-sufficient and self-governing village communities. He used to say that – “If the machinery craze grows in our country, it will become an unhappy land”
Gandhiji has time and again emphesized on the need for India to return to its own glorious civilization.

I always wanted to try my hands on to Open Solaris since the day Sun announced that it is making its Solaris operating system open source. I had worked with Soalris 2.6 (read Solaris 6) and Solaris 2.8 (read Solaris 8) as a server operating systems and have found them to be quite stable and rock solid.

Trying out Solaris 10

I downloaded Solaris 10 from Sun’s website to try installing it on my Dell OptiPlex PC (PIII, 256MB), but backed off after finding that it is too slow and took very-very long time to go from one step to another. While thinking about it I realized that Solaris kernel has been designed to work for a server (typically with multiple processors) like a server and hence there are lots of things which this kernel is doing which are not required in case of a PC Server. So I dropped the idea of trying out Solaris 10 for now. I have an old Compaq (now HP) ML370 lying in my server room and might give it a try on that box someday.

OpenSolaris

Next in my quest for learning I downloaded the four CDs of Soalris Express Community Edition 27 and as I was installing it I realised that this is exactly Soalris 10 (with minor differences, ofcourse) and at some point during the installation I found that this is actually internally being treated as Solaris 11 (SunOS 5.11) by Sun. Overall I found that although still under development OpenSolaris to be quite impressive and with a bright future.

GNU/Solaris

GNU fans (like me) will be glad to know that there is a product called Nexenta GNU/Solaris which is based on OpenSolaris. I downloaded the CD last night, burnt it and installed it. Debian users will feel like home. It is a Debian GNU system with a Solaris kernel. It is not an official Debian project yet.

Bottomline

Solaris is a very powerfull kernel and combinig GNU tools and Solaris will definitely give GNU/Linux a tough competition.