Linux vs. Solaris packaging: it’s a philosophical thing

I thought this was a post worth making because this was the hangup that kept me, as an eight-year Linux user, from really getting Solaris. One of the biggest questions I see repeated all across the Internet is, “why can’t Solaris’s package management be more like Linux?” Criticisms abound both of Solaris’s SysV packaging format and the way that Solaris packages have to be installed. Solaris’s opponents claim that the Linux packaging system is far superior, Solaris’s is stuck in the 20th century, and Solaris has to adapt or survive. OpenSolaris introduced the Image Packaging System (IPS), designed by Ian … Continue Reading →

ZFS Inline Deduplication

Those of you who have been following the lists, the bug trackers or Planet OpenSolaris know this already, but for the rest of you, Sun’s ZFS filesystem has just seen inline dedupe support merged into OpenSolaris trunk, presumably to be appearing in the next major OS release. Jeff Bonwick has, as always, a very detailed blog entry about it, but here’s the only part you really need to know: If you have a storage pool named ‘tank’ and you want to use dedup, just type this: zfs set dedup=on tank That’s it. Just as simple as you would have imagined, … Continue Reading →