Submitted by Solaris Express 12/2005 (derived from Nevada Build 27) was posted recently, providing a variety of improvements. ZFS and the “Yosemite” UDP performance project were added. Roughly 700 bugs were fixed. You can obtain a free download. An overview of new features is also available.
Solaris Express 12/2005 Released
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Am now installing it. We will see if it was really worth the wait.
this is gona be good…
I’ve been using computers for 22 years now and happen to like Solaris a lot. I’ve seen a lot of good operating systems and bad and think Solaris is one of the best for what it aims to do.
Thanks Sun and to the Solaris Express project! I’m excited for your work.
I’m going to play with this release and hopefully learn some things about solaris zones.
It takes hell of time to register ! and if you were lucky to register, you won’t be lucky downloading it while the server is always down:-s
In the two+ years that I have been downloading Solaris Express, this is the first time I have had any difficulty with the download site.
And the registration does not take that long, it is only one page and asks just a few questions.
Just a guess; maybe its because its the version with ZFS been made available, and thus, every man and his dog wishes to give it a ‘whirl’.
As a side note, can you boot of a ZFS?
No you can’t, I have already checked into that.
Yes it is too sad, I was hoping for this feature :'(
Edited 2005-12-17 17:31
We’re working on ZFS boot! It just didn’t make the first version. Trust us, we want to leave UFS behind too. See Tabriz’s Blog: http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/tabriz?entry=zfs_boot
on the ZFS boot project which is currently in the works. We also need to make a lot of changes to jumpstart, the installer, etc. to support this, so it’s a big project.
Is this will be ready for the next release of Solaris (in January I think) or not ?
I want iiiiiiiiiiittttt ! 🙂
In the two+ years that I have been downloading Solaris Express. Man what a slow download. Is that why it is called SLOWLARIS
The registration process is quite fast and I already have an account, also when I downloaded it I constantly maxed my then 10mbps.
I installed it to but as workstation OS, the few problems I had is that the scheduler doesn’t seem that geared for a desktop, as soon as I used the disk I got quite unsnappy performance from the desktop, also I need to have a sip-phone working, I almost got kphone working and it might be possible with a little more work but then the risk is I’ll have similair problems later. Blastwave.org got quite a few packages but they doesn’t have all software there is, and this might be the last problem, quite a few missing open-source apps ported/as packages.
I think I’ll go with freebsd or ubuntu or something as desktop instead and use solaris for a server and run x remotly from that one instead.
Oh, forgot to mention one thing, the nice guys in #opensolaris asked if it was an USB mouse and since it was they told me to edit some file to raise the priority of it or whatever, so I guess that thing is easily fixed, more ready to install open-source software would still be nice thought.
How many of you are actually running Solaris as desktop/development workstation?
I run Solaris with VMware on Slackware so I can learn my way around the system by doing mostly Desktop-type stuff and a little bit of OS patching and configuring.
I like it very much and might try to run it natively if I get a supported hard disc controller or another computer to install it onto.
this is a little random but i hope sun makes a new GUI for solaris. something QT 4 based and simple yet functional.
Edited 2005-12-17 02:58
What do you have in mind? They already have the Gnome based JDS.
I can’t see why people over-look wxWidgets as an API for a desktop, it’s sooo feature packed, very easy to code for and fast. I think just because Qt is used in KDE, and Gtk in Gnome, they are all people think about… There are other GREAT alternatives to those two out there
To the Sun guys…
Keep em rolling out folk, GREAT JOB
actualy i really like wxwidgets…..
The issue is that WxWidgets is a wrapper over some other API, so the fundamental choice still comes down to Qt and GTK+.
Which version of JDS in this release?
Hi rayiner,
That used to be the case, now wxWidgets has what is called wxUniversal which does not rely on another API below it, iirc SciTech were the sponsors for this project as it was used to get wxWidgets over to MGL, but it runs on X, and even Win32 etc.
Is one able to download Solaris Express or OpenSolaris
and use it to do performance comparisons with other
systems and publish the results?
Direct that question to the forums on opensolaris.org.
That’s bull. Sun/Solaris shouldn’t be concerned with making some GUI environment from scratch. They should do what they do best: engineering operating systems.
Thats one argument.. however, dont forget SunOS is the OS, Solaris is SunOS+GUI etc in a package iirc.
I personally don’t see any reason why Sun should NOT go for the more desktop user approach – Solaris is a known, supported, very good OS, and Apple made a dramatic step in to the world market with their own Unix OS and GUI; so I see no reason why Sun should not do the same… Just because it has a good UI, doesn’t mean it’s not a good engineering OS
Try http://www.bugmenot.com/ .
A nice Firefox extension is available too!
That’s correct, and I think they made a step in the proper direction with JDS. But to design and implement a whole new GUI based on Qt4? I’d be teriffic if they did, but I do not think they have the desire nor the resources to do so.
“That’s correct, and I think they made a step in the proper direction with JDS. But to design and implement a whole new GUI based on Qt4?”
They won’t. Because of Qt’s licensing. If they had based the standard desktop on Qt rather than Gtk, they would have locked all of their commercial software partners into having to pay extremely high licensing fees to license the Qt toolkit for each of their GUI developers.
I suspect the Qt vs. Gtk licensing issue is the main reason KDE lost out to Gnome at becoming the standard Unix desktop. It might be possible to argue that KDE is more popular anyway on Linux. And that might be true. But Gnome is the one that has all the industry backing such as Sun, IBM, HP, and Red Hat. Sun has full time developers assigned to work on Gnome, as does Red Hat of course.
I think your assuming that Sun would require vendors
to compile with QT which they could still offer the
LGPL version of Gnome. Ironic that Sun ships Mysql
but dosn’t require commercial vendors of databases
into a cluase of using Mysql as the database. QT
has it advantages in delivering on embedded
platforms, i.e. pda’s a cell phones. GTK and Gnome
still has to come up with a strategy for these
platforms. If they ever will. KDE is really a
logical progression of CDE while Gnome is still
finding it’s roots.
“I think your assuming that Sun would require vendors
to compile with QT”
No. I’m not assuming that. Vendors could of course build applications using Gtk that ran under KDE.
What I am assuming though, is that vendors would want to produce applications that integrated well with the desktop, followed the standard look and feel of the desktop, etc. And running Gtk applications under KDE, and Qt applications under Gnome, often looks gross and out of place. As a general rule, Qt applications look and feel a lot more “correct” under KDE, and Gtk applications look and feel a lot more “correct” under Gnome.
My original reaction was directed at poundsmack. He said that Sun ought to create an new GUI based on Qt4. I actually did not have anything to say about Qt/GTK, I just wanted to say that it is unlikely that Sun will develop one.