February 28, 2005
Tim Bray writes about transition from Mac OS X and Linux to Solaris. This will be useful. We use Solaris on our servers at work and I daily encounter lots of little differences that add up very quickly. A month or two ago I spent a very frustrating day compiling Subversion on Solaris, something that takes practically no thought at all on OS X or Linux, but doing so as an unprivileged user on Solaris took me far, far to long to figure out. All sorts of GNU tools that I've come to rely upon just aren't there by default (say, autoconf). Despite the jubilant dancing that marked my success, I still think I would rather have run my head through several panes of plate glass. Repeatedly.
Otherwise, Solaris is just fine.
