FW: Erlang running on different OSs.

[Vance Shipley]

Alexis Lê-Quôc writes:
}
} I'm trying to gather information about the pros and cons of running
} Erlang on Solaris vs. Linux vs. FreeBSD. What is people's experience
} with these platforms, both in development and production? Solaris for
} instance is infintely more expensive than linux or bsd; is there an
} incentive to spending the money on Solaris? I'm not specifically looking
} for hard figures; day-to-day experience is informative as well. By the
} way, I'm not trying to start a OS Holy War...


Solaris is infinitely more expensive than Linux?  I suppose that is literally
true as a Linux distribution can be free if you ftp it from somewhere.
Solaris has a cost in that they only distribute on CD and charge $75 for
the media kit.  A Solaris 8 binary license for any number of machines with
up to 8 CPUs is free for home or office use.  Solaris does not imply using
a Sparc architecture either.

http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/binaries/

I have used Solaris x86 as the OS for a number of my commercial products.
I have also used SCO Openserver, SCO Unixware, FreeBSD and most recently
Redhat Linux.  I found Solaris the most difficult to deal with as far as
administration is concerned.  It was dream to port software to though.
Unixware was a bit better admin wise but horribly worse to port to.
FreeBSD is a very nice OS but unfortunately ignored and as such it suffers
from a lack of vendor support for drivers of the more esoteric sort which
we tend to need for our telephony servers.  Linux is pretty good to port
to, and at least the Redhat distribution is easy to administer.

Today I use Solaris & Redhat for all my products.  Solaris is used when
I need drivers that aren't available for Linux or when it's a large and
expensive machine which justifies it.  Linux is always my preference for
embedded system and other smaller systems.

	-Vance

Motivity Telecom Inc.