Last week, on my country's Liberation Day, Sun released OpenSolaris 2008.05, the much awaited first official fruit of Project Indiana. It delivers many of OpenSolaris' major features, such as DTrace, ZFS, containers, and more, in a Linux distribution-like package. The goal is to allow more people to experience Solaris. A few reviews have since hit the web.Ars Technica took a first look, and was moderately positive about the release. They very much liked the slick installation experience, which was never one of Solaris' strong points (I repeatedly beat myself with a metal rod during Solaris 9 SPARC installs to ease the pain). According to Ars, the installation procedure is "painless, intuitive, and easily on par with Ubuntu and Fedora". OpenSolaris boots into a live CD, and the installer can be launched from there.
Ars says that another good point is the clean GNOME theme used by 2008.05. The new theme, Nimbus, "has soft colors, smooth gradients, and a slightly bubbly look. It's not as snazzy as Murrine, but it's a nice improvement over Clearlooks and it beats the crap out of Ubuntu's brown". The GNOME installation is fairly default, albeit slightly outdated in some areas. In addition, it does not include anything Mono-related - a positive point for some, I'm sure.
Hardware-wise, there were some quirks, especially in the network area. Ars could not get OpenSolaris to connect to the network at all, which brings back bad memories on my end; getting the network up and running on Solaris 9 on my Ultra 5 was always utter hell, and I've more than once wanted to throw my Sun Type 5 keyboard through the window. And Sun aficionados will know how heavy a Type 5 is. Because Ars couldn't get the network up and running, they were unable to properly test the new IPS package management system.
Ars concludes:
Another reviewer, our very own Kaiwai, tested 2008.05 on a Lenovo Thinkpad T61p, and concluded:
In light of the new release, ComputerWorld decided to interview Ian Murdock. The interview is quite interesting, but the following stands out. Upon asking which Murdock thinks is better, Debian or OpenSolaris, he answers:
Which happens to be a whole lot of wisdom and clarity put into a single answer. Something for us OSNews editors and readers to think about.
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Well, this is good news. "Germany will not sign an international anti-piracy treaty, despite having already agreed to it in principal, government sources in Berlin said Friday, February 10." with Germany on the side of reason - for now - we're a huge step closer to stopping ACTA.
"Microsoft today issued a brief statement promising to make 'essential patents' available to competitors at fair and reasonable licensing rates, and promised not to sue companies making products that infringe these patents. The actual patents themselves weren't disclosed, but Microsoft joins both Google and Apple in making recent statements on so-called fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory licensing terms. Such licensing terms designate certain patents as essential to complying with industry standards, making them available for licensing at (supposedly) lower-than-usual rates." This industry is dysfunctional."Like any space opera, the story of information technology is a very simple one. It is played out in a myriad of different ways by a revolving cast of characters, but it always has its loveable heroes, its predictably nefarious villains, innocent civilians to be saved, and bumbling bureaucrats that aren't inherently evil, but begin every story aiding the forces of darkness out of a misplaced belief they are preserving law and order in their corner of the galaxy." He might use Star Wars as an analogy (I strongly dislike Star Wars - Trekkie here), but it sums up very well how I feel about computing today.
"Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a new technique that allows graphics processing units and central processing units on a single chip to collaborate - boosting processor performance by an average of more than 20 percent."
