Comments on free-software operating system distributions, repositories, etc. Started from experiences around 2012-02 -- 2012-04. Aims: check what's changed in the several years since I had any real look at what distributions have come and gone, and what virtues the main distributions have. For 10 years or so I've used exclusively Gentoo or FreeBSD for my own computers, and RedHat Enterprise for servers managed for other people. Should that change? Should I standardise on other "distros"? Are there distributions with range and up-to-date-ness of packages that rival Gentoo, while have longer support for easy updates, and/or quicker configuration when installing? Some relevant criteria are: - Range: are lots of packages (pref. all that I want) available within the official distribution? For servers we really want everything necessary within the distribution. For laptops/trivia it's ok to have 3rd-party repositories if they are big and likely to be around for a while. - Freshness: are there quite recent versions of packages? Sometimes that's a bad thing, if not very well tested, but for some things (KDE4!) it's helpful to be recent. - Lifecycle: for how long can we expect to be able to do regular or occasional updates without having to coax the distribution through lots of problems? E.g. RHEL would be around 10 years; Gentoo would probably need some help with dependencies (like: failed compilation due to a needed tool needing to be rebuilt after its libraries change!) even if updated daily, and would need major help if updated after a year of no changes (easier to start afresh?). This question is clearly related somewhat negatively to freshness and quantity, as a distribution offering recent versions of a large number of packages won't tend to offer a 10-year effortless update path to keep everything at the newest. - Installation: does the installer identify and configure hardware correctly, give reasonable feedback, avoid ditching out on the slightest peculiarity, and have politeness such as making it easy to avoid overwriting MBRs... - Other support: usually we want the distribution to provide everything; in some cases we (perhaps) accept we want to run some annoying proprietary 3rd-party things, perhaps (worst of all) with kernel modules. An example is Labview + DAQ-etc-drivers. In this case, one family (RHEL) may have full support, while others (e.g. Gentoo, with newer, changing kernels and no rpm support) are very hard to use. It's the fault of the extra software, but sometimes one might prefer to go the easy way... Some typical uses are: - Own laptops: want quick, easy installation that provides hardware support for wireless, audio, sleep, cameras, etc, and provides all the usual packages including multimedia, latex/kile, etc, and preferably an easy option of full-system encryption (typically: one boot partition, then a LUKS partition containing LVM for system, swap and home). - Web/file servers at work: just basic server programs needed, but with very reliable system and updates. - Computation servers at work: want lots of desktop things and scientific-computing libraries, but preferably also long-term updates. Well-integrated virtualisation may be useful, depending on what the users need to run. - Lab computers at work: easy support for nasty proprietary lab things... - Desktop computers at work: mainly, the same as computation servers, though multimedia support is also handy. - Home desktops: can accept a single one needing a little work on updates (e.g. Gentoo) but for running several it's preferable with more reliable, quick updates. - Home servers: not as important as work servers ... but quite similar criteria. These are good sources of lists of current distributions (including ones with non-linux bases too): http://distrowatch.com/ http://linuxfreedom.com/Distros/ The lists are of course dozens or hundreds of entries long, but chances are that any useful distribution would be quite high, e.g. top 20 or so, since the important criteria of being "here to stay" (for a while) and having plenty of available packages are most likely met by distributions with wide circulation. Many minor distributions exist that won't even be considered here: the disadvantages of probable support-cycle and number of packages will almost certainly outweigh possible (unlikely) advantages. Minor distributions are often simply copies, with minor modification, of larger ones, for a special purpose. Even some major distributions are "downstream" versions of others to some extent, which we try to show below. This has a significant effect upon the packages, since interoperability between (e.g.) RHEL/CentOS/ScientificLinux packages, or sharing of packaging systems between Debian/Ubuntu/Mint/etc, provides a very large, high-quality and dependable (not likely to disappear in half a year) collection. =========================================================================== The RedHat family = Fedora Funded partly by RedHat, this is the testing ground for RedHat linux: a sort of "openRHEL", by the terminology of other distributions. It started around 2003, when RedHat split into the Enterprise and community versions. In contrast to RHEL it's very cutting-edge, taking recent versions of packages, and using new methods (e.g. for startup scripts, partition types). There are plenty of mirrors. Typically of the whole RedHat family (and stronlgy US-based distributions) Fedora has to "play very clean" with things infected by questions of software patents and the absurd laws against DVD playback (about breaking the trivial encryption that hangs over from 1990s attempts at DVD "protection"). One should therefore assume by default that there's no multimedia (audio/video) support at all. (Of course, there is, but it lacks much of the support that I'd want.) There are plenty of sources of extra repositories: a large and good on is RPM Fusion http://rpmfusion.org/ , although even this rejects DVD support (dvdcss) which lives alone, a pariah, at e.g. http://rpm.livna.org/ . Fedora naturally uses RedHat package mananer (rpm) internally, but now uses "yum" (Yellowdog Updater Modified!) to coordinate installation/upgrade/etc from chosen repositories. Common yum invocations are: yum update -y (update everything, without asking more) yum list pattern (show installed/available packages matching pattern (e.g. dvd*)) yum install packagelist (install listed packages) The directory /etc/yum.repos.d/ contains repository information. "Good" repositories provide rpms that set up suitable repo files and public keys. The installer and package range is very similar to RHEL -- just a bit newer! As of current release 16, full-system encryption is easily supported as an option in the installer. There are many packages even in the standard distribution, and selection of "all" in the development tools and libraries category (in particular) can make the installed size jump to over 20GB rather than just some 8GB for a fairly complete desktop+server system. = RHEL (RedHat [Enterprise]) The stabilised edition of Fedora! The lifecycle is around 10 years, during which paying subscribers get updates (over https). Updates tend to work very well, so that no changes to config files are needed for the whole lifecycle (the principle of "backporting" security fixes and important errata, but keeping the basic versions and functionality the same). We can confirm this from running servers at work for a whole lifecycle of RHEL4 and part of one for RHEL5. The only exception was samba's support for a very unusually old "win NT domain", that had glitches for a while in RHEL5, but was clearly unimportant to all but a handful of customers and therefore presumably didn't warrant risking further complications by further changes. Another clearly good feature (compared to Gentoo!) is how a remotely initiated "reboot" through ssh or an X-session reliably causes a reboot within moderate time, rather than hanging at some service shutdown... These remote reboots for new kernels have always worked. The default extra security is SElinux with a targeted policy turned on, to limit the higher-risk programs (servers, web-plugins, etc) in their filesystem and network access. This is doubtless a good thing for servers, and often works fine for desktops. It is important to avoid putting anything in an unconventional place: i.e. just accept web things being in /var/www or homedirs in /home , NOT my (once) preferred system of putting these under /srv/http and /srv/home ; otherwise one has to learn all the tricks to change the SElinux policy to label these places suitably for the respective web/nfs/smb servers to be able to access the files! There are some additional, semi-official extra-packages-for-enterprise-linux, EPEL, http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL or http://elrepo.org/ . Then all the extras from RPM Fusion can be used -- http://rpmfusion.org/ it has a separate tree for RHEL versions and Fedora versions. = CentOS (Community Enterprise OS) This is basically RHEL, but built from the publicly available source packages (srpm), and freely distributed as binaries and installer. It used to be very highly used, dwarfing SL (see next!); discussions now suggest that the tables are turning. Since it is technically RHEL, the only differentiating factors are likelihood of continued maintenance and mirrors, and the appearance of its branding. = SL (Scientific Linux) This is the other major open-access RHEL derivative, compiled from RedHat sources by Fermilab and CERN (and others), with the aim of a highly configurable system. There are only a very few packages "officially" added, such as openAFS. There's an option of "branding" with fun atom-pictures on the background and start-button, but otherwise it's very much RHEL. Advantages over RHEL or other derivatives: - system and updates are from open-access network of mirrors (unlike RedHat's) - the source is big organisations, indepdently financed (governments), needing the system to work, and not "going away" soon: so we can expect maintenance over many years, with high confidence. I'd like to support RedHat, of course, but for home things it's silly to spend at enterprise rates, and for work things it's annoying when we can't get updates because someone in a network of buying support contracts has not got onto the cause early enough! And the atom picture's more fun than the Hat. =========================================================================== The Debian family = Debian (The Universal Operating System) Debian has been around since early linux days in the 1990s. Its stable branch is known for long support, stability, and many available packages. Many others get at least some of their packages and patches from Debian (e.g. even Gentoo packages sometimes incorporate Debian patches, though not, fortunately, the famous Debian mistake that weakened openssl's encryption in many systems for several years!). Many other distributions and families are based on Debian's stable or cutting-edge distribution (installer, system scripts, apt-*, packages). These include Knoppix and Ubuntu, which in turn have further descendents. Rather like Gentoo, Debian considers its system to be more general than just a Linux thing: the kernel also ought to be able to be selected, and a FreeBSD kernel is available (but also as a much less supported option). Debian is the source of the famous "apt-" (advanced package tools). For example: apt-get update (get latest lists of available packages) apt-get upgrade (upgrade installed to latest available) apt-cache search .... (search for available packages) This is much quicker than Gentoo emerge, even ignoring the compilation time, presumably due to the more efficient storage and searching of package information. The command (or ncures-based interface) "aptitude" appears to be a higher-level command, related to apt-get etc rather as RedHat's yum is related to its rpm. E.g. aptitude full-upgrade . There are other, GUI-based, packaging interfaces, in particular "Synaptic". The current graphical profile includes pretty stars, planets and a rocket! Full-system encryption is available in the installer, even though it's not available in all derivative systems! = Ubuntu Debian-based, but with newer versions than Debian-stable. Intended to be terribly easy to use. Doesn't even include full-system encryption in the installer. Default uses Gnome. There are loads of variations on it: Kubuntu uses KDE, Xubuntu something simpler (XFCE?), then others with focus on education, music, graphics, etc. All this variation is rather pointless unless having everything on one CD is the great aim -- in any case, one should be able to use the GUI or command-line package-manager (apt-get) to install other packages to get a decent (non-Gnome) desktop and some useful programs. Ubuntu perhaps originated the bizarre idea of not setting a root password but instead setting (at least) the main user to be able to use sudo to run anything. Hence all system commands are shown prefixed with "sudo " on the websites. By this method, knowledge of the one user's password leads to root access (since sudo uses this password), and extra typing is needed for administration, although one presumably gets so used to the sudo prefix that it provides little warning. Thus, the first step to take with a Ubuntu system is to set a root password and obliterate sudo access. In kindness to Ubuntu, once the usual long list of packages (from Gentoo) has been gone through with apt-get, it can be a very reasonable system with good support even for multimedia codecs all from the main repositories. I'd place it at or near top of the list for a simple, quick laptop installation that gets things working and provides the packages I want. = Mint (or KDE-Mint) Ubuntu-derived, and uses Ubuntu repositories. Not really sure how it actually differs, since everyone talks of "good hardware support" etc. Perhaps it's just that the name is nicer and more refreshing. Anyway: this has shown itself excellent on a laptop, having all the pacakges I'd want. = other Ubuntu derivatives PC/OS, Manhattan (special mix of desktops/apps, not just KDE versus Gnome), SuperOS (include extra functionality such as DVD, full Java, etc), etc.etc. =========================================================================== The Gentoo family = Gentoo Well known to us ... it's been the usual system (except RHEL on certain servers) for our computers for the last decade (since the days of breaker and rosebank '.ee.ic.ac.uk', c.2002/2003). A boot CD and chroot are used to untar and configure a base system. The "portage tree" under /usr/portage contains ebuild files and patches describing how to fetch sources, build (in sandbox), and install some tens of thousands of packages. Even the kernel is chosen from various patched versions, then configured and compiled for the specific system. The perceived advantages have been: - having lots of packages available - packages are generally very up to date - older ('unstable') and newer versions are usually available too - packages are generally "vanilla": not lots of changed settings - easy to change packages before compiling (e.g. remove pdftk "DRM") - uninhibited about controversial support (mp3,h264,dvdcss,proprietary,) - fine choice of which optional features to use - choice of compiler options (just in case it really helps so much) - [pretty much] all hardware does work in the end, even if needing work - settings are changed only by the user: no surprises on restart! - [familiarity: tricks with emerge,ebuild,equery, /var/db/pkg etc] = Sabayon Based on Gentoo, but has GUI-based configuration during installation, automatic setup of kernel and hardware, and uses a repository of pre-compiled ("binary package") packages corresponding to the ebuilds under Gentoo's /usr/portage/ . By running emerge --sync it is possible to populate the /usr/portage tree, and then one can choose to install by compiling with "emerge" instead of downloading binary packages. The compiled packages are called the "Entropy" repository, and can be accessed through the "equo" command or the "Sulfur" GUI. [In this way it's a bit like FreeBSD -- FreeBSD has its ports tree (on which Gentoo's was based) that supplement the base system with loads of extra packages, but one can choose to go into ports and compile things or else to get the binaries with pkg_add -r ] Seems a good way to get a Gentooish system onto new hardware for quick use (copying an existing gentoo system would still require some hardware configuration, which Sabayon seems to sort out well.) Sabayon has deliberate inclusion of lots of codecs etc (in spite of problems of patent/dmca/etc) "out of the box". =========================================================================== The SuSE/Novell family = openSuSE http://www.opensuse.org/en/ A little more "stabilised" (release/version-wise) than Fedora, and still imbued with the green flavour and chameleon pictures that we remember from SuSE of 2002 or so. OpenSuSE uses "libzypp" to handle packages (named *.rpm) and their dependencies. The command "zypper" is one interface to this, in the style of rpm. The command "yast" (yet another setup tool), or its GUI version "yast2" (has even qt or gtk options!) can also perform these tasks, /and/ provides management of many other system-settings. Indeed, yast2 is a very user-friendly interface to GUI system configuration. Extra packages, particularly for missing multimedia support are available from third parties, e.g. Packman: mplayer (+ mplayer2, umplayer, smplayer, etc.etc.), http://packman.jacobs-university.de/suse/12.1/Essentials/ = SuSE Enterprise [Desktop|Server] http://www.suse.com/ From Novell, this is the major "enterprise" competitor to RHEL. It builds on openSuSE releases, and apparently even uses the same major version numbers (e.g. SuSE 11, while openSuSE has moved on to 12) in contrast to the quicker-released Fedora (now v17) and slower RHEL (v6). SuSE is seen as smaller overall than RHEL, but appears to have its niches (lots of claims on the webpage about its dominance in certain countries, the mainframe market, etc). It differs from RedHat in not being so resolutely aimed at pure Free Software, anti-patents, etc: the claim of "most interoperable" basically means some deals with our chums at M$, doubtless of some advantage to them too (not least, looking less bad to anti-competition investigators); SuSE is also known for incorporating non-freely distributable components that give it some "added value" (thus lost to anyone trying to redistribute in the style of CentOS or SL). Nevertheless, the Gnome-focused desktop and the configuration tools are well thought out, and the whole thing seems thoroughly user-friendly. =========================================================================== Other GNU/Linux-based = [Mandrake] Mandriva, Mageia and derivatives Mandrake Linux, long ago (mid/late nineties), started based on RedHat. Even from around 2000, we remember Mandrake as being very easy to install and understand. There was a time in the early 2000s when it had superior X-configuration abilities to any other distribution I'd found. In the mid-2000s the name changed to Mandriva: there was a merger with Connectiva, and a trademark dispute with someone else. Mandriva is meant to be user-friendly. Now that so many other distributions are also so good, it's not clear what the advantage would be of Mandriva: the *families* of Debian (loads of packages), RedHat (if one uses the 3rd-party package repositories) and Gentoo / FreeBSD /etc have advantages of large total user-base making loads of packages available. Recent (2011/2012) Mandriva has gone the way of big clunky menus and general Gnome-like behaviour. There are several Mandriva derivatives: a quite general one is PCLinuxOS . Others include "application specific" ones, tailored to particular tasks, therefore not of interest here, where general-purpose systems are the aim. Mageia http://www.mageia.org/ Mageia is a fork of Mandriva, from 2010, since the ownership of Mandriva had troubles. It appears, from v1 (v2 due soon in 2012) to be going in a good direction, in the older style of Mandriva. It will be interesting to see, although the existence of several other distributions with bigger bases of users and packages makes it unlikely that this will be a good competitor for my purposes, except for novelty on a laptop. = Arch http://www.archlinux.org/ The main command-utility for package management is "pacman". Started about 2002. Aims to be "lightweight and simple". Although this sounds un-Gentoo-like, there are some definite similarities in properties. Differences include that packages are normally binary downloads, one can't [therefore] configure so much about each one, and the package manager ("pacman") is written in C with the aim of being fast. Similarities are the base system being non-graphical, and packages unmodified ("vanilla") unless modification was necessary to make them work/integrate (it sounds as though Arch follows this principle even more than Gentoo, whereas distros like Suse tend to modify considerably so that e.g KDE wouldn't even work nicely sharing a homedir between Suse and pure KDE). Configuration/startup is BSD-inspired rather than SysV, aiming for /etc/rc.conf and a few system config files being sufficient. The general principle with packages appears to be to have quite recent ones (in contrast to e.g. Debian and RedHat). = Slackware http://www.slackware.com/ Has been around since 1993, and is claimed as the "oldest still-maintained". Seems to have quite infrequent releases. The aims are said to be "design simplicity" and "being very unix-like" (that could sound ominous if the carelessness and lack of concern for user ease, of old-school Slowaris etc are emulated!). No clear advantage over any other distribution on any of the criteria. =========================================================================== The BSD family = FreeBSD http://www.freebsd.org/ The most widely used of the BSD family, for general-purpose servers, desktops (and laptops, in my case). FreeBSD's "ports" collection was the inspiration for Gentoo's system (see Gentoo section, above). Like Sabayon, FreeBSD offers some of these packages as downloadable binaries, to expedite installation. The command "pkg_add -r ..." installs a named package and its dependencies, from a remote source that can be specified by the PACKAGEROOT environment variable, e.g. PACKAGEROOT=ftp://ftp3.se.freebsd.org ; export PACKAGEROOT . There are usually two "stable" branches, to allow old systems to be maintained for longer. The stable release is called N.M-RELEASE, e.g. 8.2-RELEASE. = ( OpenBSD ) http://www.openbsd.org/ Highly security-oriented. Progenitor of OpenSSH/SSL. Slow, careful update of kernel code. Uses own C-libraries and commands. = ( NetBSD ) http://www.netbsd.org/ Wide-ranging-hardware-oriented: "Run On Anything". = Dragonfly BSD http://www.dragonflybsd.org/ Interesting: not just a different pacakager/installer over FreeBSD, but a BSD variation with enhancements (i.e. separate kernel-development) including another filesystem (hammer: little btrfs-like?), virtual kernels, symlinks dependent on variables, .... = Desktop BSD http://www.desktopbsd.net/ Perhaps trying to be within BSDs as Mandriva and Ubuntu have aimed within Linuxes -- new-user-friendliness of installation (drivers, packages). =========================================================================== Solaris (SunOS) and OpenSolaris family Sun Solaris / Oracle Solaris As a switch from the earlier BSD-based "SunOS [1-4].x" versions, Solaris (SunOS 5) was of partly SysV heritage, licensed from Novell, and launched in 1991. Sun's own Sparc processor was supported from this start in 1991, and UltraSparc (64bit) started in 1998. The x86 (Intel) platform 32bit was supported from 1993, 64bit (amd64) from 2005. Even back in 2002 I remember being able to get an "x86" version or Sun SPARC processor version, freely downloaded from the Sun website; the software was non-free, but one could get a notional "licence" for using it. I ran it on an old SPARC-station and tried the x86 version on a laptop. Its installer had the classic interminable menus and "F2 to continue". Driver support was very limited within the wide scope of commodity PC-hardware, looking very bad next to Linux or BSDs. The "userland tools" such as basic commands, login and desktop, were very clunky: old-style commands that make no attempt at helpful error messages, default of the egregious csh (or plain old sh), and the famous common desktop environment (CDE). A further CD of Free programs was available, and there were some third-party sources of add-ons. One could thereby get some useful basics such as GNU make (gmake) and compiler (gcc) and add further packages or build them (for example, mplayer was one I'd commonly want). There were, back then, even a few amusing proprietary packages available from our friends at M$, at least for SPARC: "internet explorer" and "media player". Why would one ever want to run Solaris, unless for compatibility with SPARC-based servers? At the high end, there were the "containers" and other clever features for running lots of services very independently, over lots of processors. At the desktop end there were still some proprietary programs in design (electronics) that ran on Solaris SPARC, but generally not on Solaris x86. As a developer one might want a Solaris environment. But as a normal desktop user, or for a "normal" simple server, the disadvantages of poor [PC-]hardware driver support, clunky userland, lack of integration of useful packages, etc, make it have only disadvantages over Linux or FreeBSD. It was also proprietary, a very good reason to avoid it... Perhaps the best reason would be the long support-life, typically 12 years. Then there were at least two important changes: ZFS and OpenSolaris. ZFS is like a logical volume management, RAID, very versatile filesystem, copy-on-write snapshots, and data checksumming, all rolled into a single, very simply administered, "filesystem"; this, when it was released in the mid-2000s, was a good enough reason for many to consider Solaris for file-storage. Even later, when ZFS was open source, its licence incompatibility with Linux made only Solaris (and FreeBSD, slowly) be suitable platforms for running it. OpenSolaris, as a release of the main parts of the Solaris kernel sourcecode, was initiated in 2004, and launched (with OSI-approved CDDL licnce) by releasing most of the sourcecode in 2005. An independent committee was formed around 2006 to control the OpenSolaris community. For several years the core (kernel, a few other enterprise-oriented features?) had this open-source development, but the only Sun-initiated /systems/ based on it were Solaris Express (OpenSolaris plus proprietary programs and the clunky old commands) and the usual Solaris. There were meanwhile a few independent efforts to use the open kernel together with other open software to make a separate "distribution". In the early days of the opening of [much of] the Solaris source-code, there were several groups besides the OpenSolaris distribution who put together a distribution (installation or LiveCD) using the Solaris kernel: e.g. Nexenta, BeleniX, Schillix. As an example, Nexenta (seems to have been the biggest) largely combined Solaris kernel with Ubuntu. In 2007 "Project Indiana" was started, to provide a full system based on OpenSolaris and GNU/Gnome/etc userland. The founder of Debian was employed to advise/run the project; it was realised that as well as encouraging wider community work on the kernel and low-level parts, it was important to make lots of userland programs be available within the installation, in order to be competitive. Presumably Sun was hoping for a system akin to RedHat's Fedora and Suse's openSuSE, where the official supported releases would take well-tested stable parts from a faster-moving development branch. Around 2010 the takeover of Sun by Oracle was followed by a lack of OpenSolaris releases. It transpired that the model had changed: Oracle would release (some) kernel code, but only after the binary release (Solaris[Express]): the development of Solaris would no longer be based directly on an earlier open-source release in the way of popular enterprise linuxes. Solaris Express, with partly non-free userland not-yet-open-sourced kernel would be the testing ground from which future Solaris would come. OpenIndiana http://openindiana.org/ was formed in 2010, first as a fork of OpenSolaris, to take over the development work in the spirit of the earlier Sun project Indiana. It chose to maintain its own codebase to avoid dependence on Oracle continuing to release sourcecode, and it modified the code to permit compilation with GNU compilers rather than the proprietary Oracle ones. The forked kernel is called Illumos (think "IllumOS"!) https://www.illumos.org/ . OpenIndiana uses the Sun "IPS" (image packaing system) and pkg command for managing software. Illumian http://www.illumian.org/ in 2011 took over from Nexanta Core Platform (NCP), now running a Debian-/like/ (apt-* commands) system on an illumOS kernel; note that this doesn't directly use the Debian package-versions and configs, and has as yet much more limited range. Illumian and OpenIndiana now collaborate to use and update together the core illumOS code. Some other distributions using the OpenSolaris kernel have continued, using illumOS. StormOS http://stormos.org/ is currently working on putting illumOS within Debian, i.e. taking mainly Debian but with illumOS kernel, as opposed to Illumian which takes just certain Debian components. SmartOS, http://smartos.org/ is a server-oriented illumOS-based distribution, describing itself as "ZFS + DTrace + Zones + KVM", for running further OSs as a hypervisor. Schillix http://schillix.berlios.de/ moved over to illumOS, but last version is from 2010 (still active?). Belenix appears defunct. I tried "Oracle Solaris 11, rel.11-11" on a VirtualBox and on a Dell Optiplex 745. The installation source was the ~530MB CD images or USB image, for "text install", downloaded directly from Oracle. Solaris 11's unhelpfulness (no direct usb image, bad feedback during setup) and incompetence (so many hangs and failures) and compatibility (lacking some basic non-server hardware support like common audio drivers) follow its great tradition, making clear how almost any linux-based or BSD distribution would be much better on practically any desktop or laptop computer even if Solaris included the wealth of good commands and packages that many distributions do [but it doesn't]. However, if ZFS is an important requirement, then for copyright reasons Linux is ruled out (no serious work on integrating ZFS except as a filesystem in userspace, as it couldn't be distributed together); then FreeBSD's adaptation is the most stable non-Solaris one. On the good side, some improvements in Solaris are the "pkg install ..." command that's set up by default to use Oracle's own source, and the existence of virtual terminals (Ctrl-Alt-F1, F2, etc). (I've not seen them before, and am confident they weren't there in e.g. SunOS 5.9 ages ago, when the CDE display manager had an option for "console login".) Some extra sources of software packages for Solaris, still going for Solaris 11, are: - OpenCSW http://www.opencsw.org/ - SunFreeware http://www.sunfreeware.com/ - Blastwave http://www.blastwave.org/ - SunFreeware http://unixpackages.com/ ===========================================================================