Despite years of apparent stagnation and reported mass layoffs, it seems the Solaris team at Oracle has found somewhat of a renewed stride recently. Both branches of Solaris – the one for paying customers (SRU) and the free one for enthusiasts (CBE) – are receiving regular updates again, and there seems to be a more concerted effort to let the outside world know, too. We’ve got another update to the SRU branch this week which brings updates to a few important open source packages, like Django, Firefox, Thunderbird, Golang, and others, to address security issues.
In addition, this update marks as a change in the release cadence for the commercial branch of Solaris. From here on out, there will be two “Critical Patch Updates” per quarter to address security issues, followed by a Support Repository Update containing new features and larger changes.
Now I have a machine nicely running Solaris 11 CBE. My feeling is that I like to experiment with it, I enjoy to challenge my background on Linux, and also I like to see watch on commercial Unix styles.
I as reading some time ago that, while the original Unix was pretty much a sum-up of independent tools, Unix’s like AIX, Solaris or HP-UX introduced large software pieces, tools, to centralize administration, e.i., to avoid dealing with many text files and scripts. And somehow, it looks like this is happening again with Linux, where a single tool, systemd, is taking now most of the administration (in similar fashion IBM was doing before with Unix).
I am not in favor or against that way of administrating tool, but it is interesting to see that in Solaris.
To my knowledge, one of the last systems still based on text file ans scripts is netbsd, an interesting contrast.