November, 15 2004. The Solaris 10/NC04Q4 Launch 2004. Dawn in San Jose, CA was a truly beautiful sight to behold on Monday. As the sun rose over the mountains and shed its light on the valley below – the city, which the night before had seemed so unimpressive, suddenly came to life in the shimmer of the sun’s rays. It seemed a perfect morning for the launch of Sun’s most ambitious project to date. The press and other attendees looked happy, hopeful. Sun’s folks were excited – especially the engineers.
The Good
Solaris 10 represents the culmination of a half billion dollars investment and the work of 3000 engineers. Sun Microsystem’s investment in technology is well evidenced in this version of Solaris – it is all about the technology. According to John Loiacono, Executive Vice President of the Software Group at Sun, the goals for the Solaris Operating System were Performance, Efficiency, Security and Availability. A listing of new features shows that Sun has worked very hard indeed to achieve these goals. New Features include a completely rewritten TCP stack, Dynamic Tracing, Solaris Containers, Linux Application Environment, ZFS, Predictive Self Healing, Solaris Process Rights Management, Guaranteed Source and Binary Compatibility and many others. These eight features alone make it well worthwhile to consider Solaris 10 as an Operating System.
Solaris 10 is FREE. Solaris 10 will be released with a Free Binary Right to Use – RTU. The license will apply to all platforms for end users. It does not come with any technical support other than what is available on the World Wide Web. The freeing of Solaris begins the fulfillment of Scott McNealy’s long ago prophetic statement that software would one day be free.
Solaris has a new logo – simple, but nice.
New Features
Rewritten TCP Stack
Sun claims that the new TCP stack is very much improved over previous versions. Simply upgrading from a previous version of Solaris to Solaris 10 will result in a minimum 20% increase in speed according to Mr. Loiacono. Sun is looking to drive 10 Gigabit Ethernet to full saturation and the improved stack is a giant step towards realizing that goal.
Dynamic Tracing
Dynamic Tracing, or DTrace as the console application front end for it is called, is all the rage in development circles. A search on Google results in 35,300 results today. DTrace is the developer and system administrator’s ultimate tracing tool. It allows the user to instrument the Operating System so that it can be observed in action. Want to know how many I/O operations are occurring at any given moment, or what process caused the I/O at any level of the application stack? DTrace and its scripting language, D, can tell you – fast! Debugging and performance analysis are likely never going to be the same again. I sat down with the author of DTrace, Sun’s Senior Staff Engineer, Bryan Cantrill and asked for a demonstration, what I got was a revelation. In less than 10 minutes I was shown more of the inner workings of the kernel than you would probably be able to navigate in days of debugging or digging through source code. It became clear to me why Sun’s engineers were so pumped. According to Bryan, when DTrace is not running, there is zero overhead on the system and when it is running, the load is proportional to the complexity of the observation. Therefore, a simple question will have a negligible impact on the system and a hard question will have a greater impact. To be fair, during the demonstration, I saw no impact on the system, whatsoever.
Solaris Containers
Formerly, N1 Grid Containers, this technology provides separate virtual instances of the Solaris Operating Environment running on a single machine. Containers are an emerging technology of mammoth proportions. Sun did not promote the containers as much as they could have. This is an extremely important technology as it provides isolation, increased utilization of resources and speedy environment restart, cloning, and other cool features with very little overhead – unlike VMWare and other emulation environments. I sat with one of Sun’s Senior Technical Product Managers for Solaris Containers/Zones, Angel Camacho, for a lab where we created a number of containers. In a little over 15 minutes we were able to create 3 separate containers, with their own IP addresses and file systems. The containers are impressive, simple to understand, simple to use and very powerful, look for enterprise deployments of container technology soon.
Linux Application Environment
Formerly, Project Janus, LAE is the penguin running on the sun – Linux binaries running unmodified, without emulation, on Solaris. This is one ambitious project that aims at bringing the thousands of Linux applications to the Solaris platform.
ZFS
The Zetabyte File System is yet another technological breakthrough. 19 nines reliability, 128 bits, fault resilient file system, combine to provide an awesome new model for the next several decades. Anyone who has ever worked with complex raid configurations will appreciate ZFS. ZFS will provide, massive scalability, easy administration, space age error detection and correction and data security.
Predictive Self-Healing
Solaris 10’s Fault Manager and Service Manager work together to provide comprehensive prediction and detection of system failures – both Hardware and Software. These managers increase reliability and redundancy, while at the same time decrease the likelihood of failure and provide faster recovery and diagnosis. Incomprehensible error messages are replaced with telemetry events that are passed from the Fault Manager to componentized error handlers. The predictive self healing capability allows the Operating System to predict that RAM is likely to fail after some number of events and to remove that one faulty component to be removed without taking down the system.
Solaris Process Rights Management
Thanks to Trusted Solaris, Solaris 10 is going to be much more secure than its predecessors. This is military grade security and it is going to be available by default. There will also be a strengthened cryptographic framework delivered as well.
Guaranteed Source and Binary Compatibility
Since version 2.6 of the Operating System, Solaris has guaranteed Binary Compatibility. This is something that neither Microsoft Windows nor any distribution of Linux has offered. When I spoke with performance expert, Jarod Jenson, Chief Systems Architect for Aeysis, about Sun’s networking performance claim, he supported the claim, stating that his clients consistently found significant performance gains through the simple upgrade to Solaris 10. Coming from a Linux/Microsoft Windows background I was somewhat skeptical of the ‘simple’ characterization of upgrading. Jarod quickly put my skepticism in the back seat. He explained the Binary Compatibility feature and how it eases migrations. The source code guarantee goes much further than the binary compatibility guarantee and guarantees that any source code that compiled and ran on a previous version of Solaris, back to 2.6 will require a simple recompile to run. This is a huge claim and shows a great deal of confidence in Sun’s engineers.
The Bad
The biggest questions on Sun’s plate for the launch event were the Open Source questions. Was Solaris 10 truly going to be open source? What licensing model would be used? What would the terms be? Would DTrace and ZFS be included in the source code? The answers – still to come. The biggest disappointment of the day was the complete lack of final answers to these important questions. Sun lost an opportunity to step up and state, once and for all, that YES Solaris 10 will be completely Open Source and unencumbered by Kodak style patents. The sense, murmurings and whispered wisdom was that indeed Solaris 10 would be Open Source. The license was yet to be determined – but it would definitely encourage openness – that a community process would be forthcoming that would be defined largely by the community – that all of Solaris would be included, everything required to build from source. But at the end of the day, there was no news on the Open Source angle, in San Jose. Stay tuned was the mantra.
Other bad news included the fact that ZFS would not be included in the GA release (general availability release), but that it would be in a future update – tentatively, Update 1. LAE was also not going to be fully guaranteed in the GA release, although the functionality would be part of the final GA release. It should be interesting to see what defines the final GA release – another stay tuned.
The Ugly
All right, we have covered the Good and the Bad, that leaves us with the Ugly. Solaris 10 Beta 7, which was released in October, contains quite a number of changes from the previous Beta 6. The Gnome Desktop look and feel of Beta 6 has become the Java Desktop System look and feel in Beta 7. In addition, the Sun X Server has been replaced with the X.org – X Window System. Also, there is a completely revamped installation program. Coming just a couple of weeks prior to the launch and a couple months prior to the GA release, this seems like a late date to be making such sweeping, visible changes. These late changes combined with the postponement of ZFS and LAE and the lack of clear Open Source licensing are the only dark spots in the otherwise bright outlook for Solaris.
Conclusion
Solaris 10 is a technological marvel that appears to be headed for the history books as one of the most ambitious and advanced general purpose operating environments of this generation. Sun is walking a fine line on the Open Source question. IP enforceability versus community goodwill seems to be Sun’s biggest near term challenge. The free binary RTU for end users might cover some distance towards community acceptance.
Resources
Sun
Solaris 10 Software Express
DTrace Guide
ZFS
Gnome
X.Org
JDS is a gnome theme. It will be running Gnome 2.6.
Xorg is in b69, its just not active and doesn’t have the dev files. Switch dtlogin with gdm and you will see xorg starting. JDS3 is just a distro of GNOME. Some nice patches/themes, but nothing major.
The article wasn’t clear on this point, and I’ve only heard Xorg mentioned as it relates to the x86 version of Solaris 10. Is sun going to keep XSun on the SPARC version of the OS? I can’t think of any reason why they’d change it, but I haven’t seen it addressed at all.
Does anyone have any idea when Looking Glass is going to become their default desktop backbone?.. Solaris 11, 12, or even 13? (hmm, unlicky for some, 13 should only be a one off internal build thats scrapped as soon as the C compiler finnishes and the release jump to 14;))
What exactly IS Sun doing with Looking Glass thats obvious atm, does anyone know? (sorry for being a bit out of the loop on this one)
:Does anyone have any idea when Looking Glass is going to become their default desktop backbone?..”
not very likely. its a experimental prototype and probably requires many changes as a primary DE
and, of course, more than a theme.
Apart from GNOME, it includes StarOffice, Mozilla, Evolution, and Java 2 SE. Also administration tools and others.
So clearly, it’s not just a GNOME theme/distro.
(And it’s not a Linux distro as well — it can run on both Linux and Solaris).
May be it’s category is more close to the Ximian Desktop.
Q. What are the major software components of the Sun Java Desktop System, Release 2?
A. http://wwws.sun.com/software/javadesktopsystem/faq.html#3q1
O.K. if you say so, however, the selection for Gnome is gone, in its place is Java Desktop System and on my system JDS won’t create a session, whereas the Gnome selection worked beautifully in beta 6 and the Solaris folks didn’t flinch or correct me when I made the assertion that JDS had replaced Gnome and then proceeded to discuss the relative merits of each.
”
Apart from GNOME, it includes StarOffice, Mozilla, Evolution, and Java 2 SE. Also administration tools and others. ”
staroffice is a seperate program which just is happened to be bundled together. all distros bundle openoffice so this isnt a exciting thing. mozilla is a dependancy for ephiphany which is part of gnome. evolution is a part of gnome too
java and sys admin stuff is a major differentiator but gnome now ships with some amount of basis sys tools which are likely to be expanded with every release which leavs sun with java and java based stuff which IMHO is not suprising
Sun seems big into making Solaris the big opensource deal. As news.com reports: President Jonathan Schwartz pledges to build a better open-source community around Solaris than the one Linux possesses today. Those are quite ambitious words. Sun is also going to provide legal protection to outsiders using Solaris.
I really hope Sun lives up to their words. I don’t have any experience with Solaris, but diversity is always a good thing.
“President Jonathan Schwartz pledges to build a better open-source community around Solaris than the one Linux possesses today”
I am very wary of this guy since he lied about redhat being proprietary. sun tradionally has been a poorly managed great technology company. I hope guys like Jonathan dont ruin the technology too by going ga ga after a much much smaller company like redhat
Yes, in the press conference at the Launch, Mr. Schwartz made some comments indicating a desire to have such a community. He also related his vision to the Java Community Process, only better. However, grand visions aside, he was not prepared to go into detail.
On the face of it Mr. Schwartz appears to be very genuinely interested in Opening the Source and having a thriving community. I guess that only time will tell what, exactly that means.
Question for the author: Where did you get the idea that Gnome is not Solaris 10? Didn’t you bother to download the Early Access release before you wrote this article?
Yes, Gnome is there. And yes it works great. And yes, the first time you login, you are given the option to select either Gnome or CDE as your default desktop environment (which you can change at any later date from the Solaris login manager.)
I’ve read some of the different tech thats involved in the new release, and I’ve read that there is a free download for x86, but when I went to their site I saw something about an express version? Is it a cut down version, or what exactly is involved with that?
And yes, as others have pointed out. The JDS runs Gnome.
But in this case, that’s not even an issue. Since Solaris 10 Early Access definately has Gnome available, and allows you to choose it from the Solaris login manager as well as set it as your default.
As y’all have pointed out, JDS is built on Gnome, the disconnect, for me, came when the the Gnome selection was removed in the beta 7 installation and a JDS selection added. I incorrectly thought this meant that Gnome was removed and JDS added, while intuitive this was not accurate. I’m kind of irritated with my Solaris engineer buddies who failed to point this out during our discussions surrounding this issue. Clearly, JDS is Gnome+.
The important detail related to the Software Express version:
For Non Commercial Use
Other than that it is simply the most recent build of Solaris 10.
Actually, it is a very ugly version of Gnome.
http://wwws.sun.com/software/products/screenshot.html?img=/software…
http://wwws.sun.com/software/products/screenshot.html?img=/software…
Ugh!
I talked for two hours with our Sun rep at work recently, and the one thing I don’t understand is…
why the Solaris userland utilities are so ancient and crummy. vim is backwards compatible with vi, bash is backwards compatible with sh, the version of tar that comes with Solaris is very ancient (you can’t do a tar -zcvf or tar -jcvf for example). I could go on…
He couldn’t give me a satisfying answer as to why Sun doesn’t provide a more modern UNIX userland environment (yes bash is there, but why is it not the default? Old school bourne shell just plain sucks!). Any OS that forces me to do a /bin/bash command when I su to root, just to retain my sanity, is not going to endear me 😉
My guess is, that if they do open source Solaris, a slew of GNU (or modern BSD) utilties will be the first thing that they add to the base system. Then those of us who have to use Solaris at work will be able to breathe a sigh of relief 🙂
I think Linux is great… But Solaris is one example of how a company can more quickly(in ideal cases) innovate in areas. It kind of comes down to the back-scratch motivation… It produces amazing results, but not necesarily in the same timespan as the paycheck motivational system does.
I don’t think Solaris can have a stronger community than Linux… Linux is a built from scratch open source OS, whereas Solaris is strongly entrenched in propriety, migrating to open source, it will be hard to attract Developers to learn an entirely new system. Though I wish them the best…
Solaris 10 seems amazing. Simply amazing. I wish Sun would put this technology and funding into Linux. I am split, do I support the Linux “always open source but slow to create new innovation” or the Solaris “could be open source soon, but closed and proprietary to a single company” ?
If only the two could merge…
“Actually, it is a very ugly version of Gnome.”
That’s not what comes with Solaris 10 though. Solaris 10 Gnome basicallly has a menubar at the top with an application menu and such, and uses the sawfish window manager.
I know Solaris 10 is primarily a server/technical workstation OS, although I wonder how it would fair on the desktop against Linux. What about things like ACPI/udev/CD-burning, etc…just a thought bc Solaris is such a badass OS. Let me know what your thoughts on this are!
-Eric
“That’s not what comes with Solaris 10 though. Solaris 10 Gnome basicallly has a menubar at the top with an application menu and such, and uses the sawfish window manager.”
Nope. It looks almost exactly like that, but they have polished it quite a bit in the JDS3 on b_69. I quite like the default setup for a new user and an experienced one can move stuff around and select a new theme (its just GNOME 2.6 after all). They screwed with the menu some though, so if you want it back to default GNOME you will have to fix that, but so did RH.
” It looks almost exactly like that, but they have polished it quite a bit in the JDS3 on b_69″
Sorry, I meant it looks almost exactly like the pics the guy who thought it was ugly posted.
“Sorry, I meant it looks almost exactly like the pics the guy who thought it was ugly posted.”
Hmm… Which version of Solaris 10 are you running? I have the Early Access version and it doesn’t look anything like that.
Are you perhaps confusing the Solaris based JDS with Solaris 10? Sun now has two versions of JDS: One based on Solaris, and the other based on Linux. The Solaris version of JDS may very well have the desktop you mention. But plain old Solaris 10 does not.
“I know Solaris 10 is primarily a server/technical workstation OS, although I wonder how it would fair on the desktop against Linux.”
I wouldn’t recommend straight Solaris 10 on the desktop. It’s really more designed for servers.
However, as I mentioned in my last post. Sun also has a JDS now that is based on Solaris. You might want to look into that if you want to use Solaris on the desktop. I have not tried JDS, either the Linux version or the Solaris version. So I can’t really comment on it.
Solaris 10 build 69 10/04
Link: http://wwws.sun.com/software/solaris/solaris-express/get.html
“raven% uname -a
SunOS raven 5.10 s10_69 i86pc i386 i86pc
”
A full install == CDE + JDS3
JDS3 is GNOME 2.6 and looks very much like those shots…except with a bit more polish as I said.
As for desktop performance, I was actually not very impressed with it until I reniced X. Then I have to admit it really took off.
I’m not using the express version. I’m using the Early Access version. I’m not sure what the difference is between the two, but apparently they ship with different versions of the Gnome desktop.
why the Solaris userland utilities are so ancient and crummy. vim is backwards compatible with vi, bash is backwards compatible with sh, the version of tar that comes with Solaris is very ancient (you can’t do a tar -zcvf or tar -jcvf for example). I could go on…
Please do. vim and gtar are both available on the companion CD. The Solaris tar takes different flags and switching it to GNU tar could break backwards compatibility. Linux is the only *IX I’ve seen where /bin/sh is bash. bash is not fully backwards compatible with sh, for example it sets an unchangable environment variable called UID which breaks software where UID is a configuration parameter (such as djbdns)
He couldn’t give me a satisfying answer as to why Sun doesn’t provide a more modern UNIX userland environment (yes bash is there, but why is it not the default? Old school bourne shell just plain sucks!). Any OS that forces me to do a /bin/bash command when I su to root, just to retain my sanity, is not going to endear me 😉
You can always “sudo bash”
My guess is, that if they do open source Solaris, a slew of GNU (or modern BSD) utilties will be the first thing that they add to the base system. Then those of us who have to use Solaris at work will be able to breathe a sigh of relief
I’m so tired of Linux zealots demanding a GNU userspace on every platform because that’s all they’re used to. I personally prefer BSD utilities for the most part.
But it really seems like you haven’t even bothered to check out the companion CD. All the major open source software you want is already available prepackaged on it.
Anybody experienced DTrace? How does it compare to Kprobes of Linux?
They look similar to me (?)
“I’m not using the express version. I’m using the Early Access version. I’m not sure what the difference is between the two, but apparently they ship with different versions of the Gnome desktop.”
How old is it? The build (even on express) before 69 had gnome 2 on it (although I am pretty sure even it had metacity…could be wrong there though).
This has Gnome 2 on it. I can’t tell the build number right now cause I am not at work and that’s where the test station is. But I will let you know sometime tomorrow.
“As news.com reports: President Jonathan Schwartz pledges to build a better open-source community around Solaris than the one Linux possesses today. Those are quite ambitious words.”
Great. Though they’ll probably already going to share code, perhaps the current open source community can learn something from the Solaris community like Sun learned from the current open source community. Competition is good!
IS KDE ON THE COMPANION CD? oh damn that caps key!
The article wasn’t clear on this point, and I’ve only heard Xorg mentioned as it relates to the x86 version of Solaris 10. Is sun going to keep XSun on the SPARC version of the OS? I can’t think of any reason why they’d change it, but I haven’t seen it addressed at all.
XSun is going to be released in S10, as Sun’s graphics team hasn’t ported their framebuffer drivers to Xorg. However, the long term plan is to eventually run Xorg on SPARC as well. As previously stated, this is contingent upon the graphcics team getting the drivers ported at some point in the future.
I’ve read some of the different tech thats involved in the new release, and I’ve read that there is a free download for x86, but when I went to their site I saw something about an express version? Is it a cut down version, or what exactly is involved with that?
Solaris 10, when it’s released, will be free for both SPARC and x86 no matter what number of processors you have. However, Solaris 10 hasn’t yet been released. The target date for General Availability (GA) is January 31st, 2005 (For download; physical media later). So, it should be available soon. Solaris Express is a set of preview Solaris 10 releases which follow a beta schedule. Currently it is on Solaris 10 Beta-7. Beta-8 should be available in the near future and will also include x86-64/Opteron support (64-bit x86 kernel!!), and should also come with StarOffice bundled into JDS. (Among other things…)
why the Solaris userland utilities are so ancient and crummy. vim is backwards compatible with vi, bash is backwards compatible with sh, the version of tar that comes with Solaris is very ancient (you can’t do a tar -zcvf or tar -jcvf for example). I could go on…
Sun has to comply with various and sundry UNIX/POSIX standards, etc. Many of these define specific behaviors and switches for their userland utilites. Further, Sun is unwilling to make backwards-incompatible change as they don’t want to alienate installed customers whose shell scripts magically start breaking. Sun has many of the gnu userland-utilities packaged and delivered with the base operating system in /usr/sfw/bin. Try /usr/sfw/bin/tar, it should work for you.
I wouldn’t recommend straight Solaris 10 on the desktop. It’s really more designed for servers.
I run it as the only operating system on my laptop and use it to do both work and personal computing. I find it to be a very functional desktop.
Any OS that forces me to do a /bin/bash command when I su to root, just to retain my sanity, is not going to endear me 😉
Solaris 10 ships with bash in /usr/bin by default. It isn’t very difficult to edit /etc/passwd to make bash the shell for root.
Anybody experienced DTrace? How does it compare to Kprobes of Linux?
They look similar to me (?)
They really aren’t. I’ve attached a link to Bryan Cantrill’s blog where he discusses the issue. If you’d like a perspective from someone who doesn’t work at Sun, I’m also attaching a link (that’s also contained in Bryan’s blog) from a RedHat developer who also describes some of the shortcomings of the current Linux tracing approaches:
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/bmc/20040718#dtrace_vs_dprobes_ltt
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/bmc/20040725#the_big_putback
http://berrange.com/bitsbobs/mlp/2004/07/dtrace
“I run it as the only operating system on my laptop and use it to do both work and personal computing. I find it to be a very functional desktop.”
I also use it on the desktop of my workstation, and am very happy with it. But I still don’t think I would recommend it as a desktop OS for most users. Not even ones to whom I would recommened JDS or Linux. It’s just harder to work with on the desktop, mostly because many common desktop applications do not have Solaris ports and thus require building from source.
“So far you can only get your binary only blobs, and then you pay for support and you pay for updates.”
You do NOT pay for updates. The updates are free as long as you register. Yes you pay for support but:
A: Support is about 1/3 of what Red Hat charges.
B: Why on earth should they offer you support for free? If you want free support, you can go to the community forums which Sun provides and get free support there from other users.
I was wondering about the benefit of installing solaris on my pc so I ask :
does java apps (swing) react faster than under linux (X11)…
is the reactivity of the general system (not waiting 3 secondes before the gnome start menu opens for example) is better than in a popular linux distro ????
the considered pc is a PIII 800 mhz and 256 meg of ram
Djamé
ps : important -> is solaris correctly localized (french)?
Hi,
Any word on Janus or ZFS?
bye,
Victor
I heard that we must *pay* for bug fixes, and that suxs at best. Without bug fixes, how can we seriously run Solaris (without paying)?
That scares me away immediately from Solaris 10. dont expect much from this “open source” product of Sun.
MJ: thanks for your nice links.
I’m really looking forward to the release of Solaris 10. I’m experimenting with Solaris 9 in VMWare, and when Solaris 10 comes out, I’ll install it on my hard drive and see if it is suitable as a desktop system (for me). As long as it can run GNU Emacs, I’ll be content. 😉
Hi,
As many others have already repeatedly staed, you do *not* have to pay for security/bug fixes – see Simba’s numerous posts on this – you pay for support.
bye,
victor
No info huh?
Is anybody using CDE or everybody is a GNOME lover? Screenshots? New stuff?
Thanks.
Excuse me, but that’s far from a Solaris’ bug…
“President Jonathan Schwartz pledges to build a better open-source community around Solaris than the one Linux possesses today”.
More FUD.
He may be able to garner a small group of loyalist like Mac users. I seriously doubt he will accomplish this statement.
As ever, the success of an OS on a x86(32/64) system is going to be determined by the number of drivers available – for me at least both my laptop and my desktop are not fully supported. Would be nice though to run Solaris again, even at work here they moved our Sparcs over to Debian.
> More FUD.
It’s not FUD, its marketing.
FUD is for example, when SCO say that Linux becames legal problems.
Marketing is, if anybody say, that its own product is better then others.
> He may be able to garner a small group of loyalist like Mac users. I seriously doubt he will accomplish this statement.
At the moment they plan to put Solaris under an OpenSource license and build a OpenSource-Community around it.
Thats more like *BSD and Linux in this case.
But at the moment they plan to do this.
So I think, it is better to temporize.
Wait until Sun have done it. Only then, you can deal out criticism. Before it, it have no sence.
Is exact the same like AIX 4 ?¿?¿?
That is far from a Solaris bug, and a problem with ICQ. You want Solaris for ICQ? Laudable goals….
http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/2004-11/sunflash.20041115.4.h…
according to Sun’s annoucement, we *MUST* pay for bug fixes. period.
please read carefully the link above.
The installer is mighty shit.In interactive mode the installer suddenly stops and spawns a shell.I ask myself to whom solarisch is targeted.I keep my FreeBSD 5.3,the best of all the OS’s i have tried.Please big Blue give us humble x86 geeks the power5 .
Does anyone have a screenshot of Solaris 10 with a good looking pure Gnome desktop (i.e. Gnome 2.6+)?
Basic Q: how does one go about installing Linux apps on this thing? What about dependency management, etc?
“Solaris 10 is a technological marvel that appears to be headed for the history books as one of the most ambitious and advanced general purpose operating environments of this generation.”
Yeah, because in a hundred years time being the most ambitious and advanced general purpose operating environment of an arbitrary generation some time in the 1995-2005 timeframe is going to be *way* up there with neoconservatism.
fnar.
Ok, found the answer to my second Q. I think: http://wwws.sun.com/software/controlstation/
This is confusing as all get out. Is there some special Solaris repository of Linux (binary?) apps? Do we d/l source from the (app-maker) source? Gah!
> “Solaris 10 is a technological marvel that appears to be headed for the history books as one of the most ambitious and advanced general purpose operating environments of this generation.”
> Yeah, because in a hundred years time being the most ambitious and advanced general purpose operating environment of an arbitrary generation some time in the 1995-2005 timeframe is going to be *way* up there with neoconservatism.
Different fields. If you pick up a history textbook, it will likely be on political or economic history. There are also specialised textbooks about the history of various fields and technologies. You rarely find much about one in the other.
Given that there are several books on topics like the history of video games, I see no reason why some book in a hundred years on the history of computers would not mention solaris at all. This goes even more strongly for books written in the nearer future. I agree that the first quoted statement is marketing hype, but to compare it to neoconservatism in terms of historical importance really is apples to oranges.
Not really. If you say something is headed for the history books, in my mind, you mean general history books; those that attempt to to give a fair overview of everything genuinely significant in a particular time. Sure, in a specialist history of operating systems, Solaris will be there. It’s not going to be in the history books grade school classes are using any time in the future, though.
why is it bad that there is it not clear what licens will solaris take for there open-source solaris?
so i dont understand it, you write a review about SOLARIS 10 and not about open-source-solaris. so why is it necessary? please explain it to me, because i dont understand.
my degree is in history, so I know more about historical niches than you’d ever want to. If you ever need to know anything about early modern European grain prices, reasons for the variation thereof, drop me a line. Man, was *that* ever a boring term.
The answer to the Open Source question is not necessary. However, I report you decide
Every reporter present at the event wanted to know what the Open Source Licensing arrangement would be, clearly their interest was and is driven by their readership. So, the logic goes – a great number of people want the answer – no answer – not good….
As for this being a review, definitely not! I am just now in the process of reviewing Solaris 10, this was merely a report of what was revealed at the launch event. A review requires a bit more depth and a lot more hands on experience. Considering the changes between build 63 and build 69 (beta 6 and 7), I won’t be done with the review until around the GA release. I want the review to be relevant to that release as much as possible and the screenshots to be of the released gui and not an older theme of Gnome….
I seem to recall about 3 years ago that Sun released a blurb to the effect that you could use Linux video card device drivers, and maybe some other device drivers, natively, with no changes, on Solaris X86.
Does anyone recall this, or better yet, have you used this??
– AndrewZ
I’ve used Solaris on an off for maybe 5 years. I’ve used Sun OS much longer than that. I have occastionally downloaded open source utilities and compiled them for Solaris. But I’ve never needed or had the desire to delve deeply into Solaris OS code. kernel or otherwise.
From a practical viewpoint, I don’t see what is to be gained by having Solaris open sourced. Aside from the ideological issues, what would be the practical gains of having Solaris source code generally available? What would be gained over the current situation?
Please, no flames or philosphical arguments here, I’d like to hear your points.
regards,
AndrewZ
okay, so i understand 😉 good
so i look forward to the solaris 10 review with screenshots 😉
There is one perfect reason for that:
Compatibility. Solaris prides itself on having GREAT backwards compatibility. Changing things like that could potentially break lots of scripts, as the GNU flags are not fully compatible with the Solaris one.
It would be nice if they offered the option of installing “new” or “old” utils.
They don’t “upgrade” these because they aren’t old.
Only the GNU version of Tar offers that option. You can install GNU tar into Solaris with no trouble if you want, but really, it isn’t needed. And the only thing I’ve seen with Tar is that it can’t access outside compression systems. But since most people happily get around this with pipes, I don’t think anyone who actually uses Solaris has that as a high priority.
The design of Tar in Solaris is aimed towards Tape ARchiving anyways.
SH is used because Bash is bloated and will not work as the root shell with 100% guarenteed results. This is why there is no Unix on the planet that uses Bash by default (that I’m aware of). All I have seen use sh, ksh, or csh. Bash is a linux thing. If they changed to anything, it would probably be csh or ksh, as that’s what *Unix* people use. This is why you get csh in a base install, but have to specify bash if you really want it.
Besides, it’s not that much trouble to type “Bash” when you start a window, is it? Especially not if it guarentees a more stable system. Have you even used anything other than Bash? People always complain about it not being in FreeBSD too, but really, tcsh is easily as powerful… just not what you are used to.
More importantly, Bash in not backwards compatible with sh, as you claim.
“Bash is POSIX-conformant, even where the POSIX specification differs from traditional sh behavior ”
This is part of why they can’t do that.
You spend too much time confusing GNU tools with Unix tools. They aren’t old, they are different.
Maybe if Solaris becomes open source, someone could contribute some long overdue stuff like “standard” audio/video API (OpenAL, V4L2 or some “standard” video API)? Or maybe port to embedded architectures, since it has real-time already?
Paying for bug fixes has always been the way this has worked.
They’ve given away Solaris for personal use for years, and it’s always been with the understanding that security updates are free but bug-fixes only go to people who are paying for support.
Besides, it’s not a big deal since they release a new updated CD every 4 months that includes all the previous bug fixes…
http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/2004-11/sunflash.20041115.4.h…..
according to Sun’s annoucement, we *MUST* pay for bug fixes. period.
please read carefully the link above.
You mean this part:
———–
Today, Sun announced the following subscription services:
* Free right to use (RTU): Includes a RTU license for the Solaris 10 OS for end-user commercial use; security fixes; and update releases via web download. Pricing is $0 USD per central processing unit (CPU) per year with registration.
* Basic Service: Includes all free RTU features plus: all Solaris 10 updates, upgrades and fixes; 90-days installation and configuration support; and one individual online skills self-assessment per system. Pricing is $120 USD per CPU per year.
* Standard Service: Includes all Basic Service features plus: 5×12 phone support; one web course; and optional training credits. Pricing is $240 USD per CPU per year.
* Premium Service: Includes all Standard Service features plus: 7×24 phone support and additional advanced technical and educational services. Pricing is $360 USD per CPU per year.
In addition, through the new Sun Update Connection, subscribers will be able to analyze and update their systems and stay up-to-date from anywhere, all while providing easy access to software baselines and updates. The connection enables users to stay informed with notifications from Sun; act locally using a single-system updater and deploy remotely using our update portal. The Sun Update Connection ensures everyone from the desktop to the enterprise is always up-to-date.
———–
Seems pretty straightforward to me.
The problem with that ICQ is that IT COMES WITH SOLARIS 10 ppl if they didn;t fix that stupid bug .. what about the system ????
Hehe, I think the same thing, but it’s still a good DE and you can always get some very nice icon themes elsewhere.
*I use kde btw* – I like them both.
On Topic: I tried installing S10 on one of my test systems and it didn’t seem to enjoy it much… I figured as much as even many linux distro’s have trouble accepting the hardware in that system. One thing I would also like to note is that the install is really slow… even on the 1.8 I tested it on. I also don’t like their theme for gnome… it’s ummm… ugly.
– Looking glass was an experimental project sun thought would go nowhere but due to interest they have invested more time into it
– Java Desktop runs on All versions of Solaris and ontop of some x86 linux…. I asssume it can run on Linux AMD64 but i am unsure.
Right, because no Linux distribution ever shipped with a buggy app, or anything. Heck, as anyone who reads OSNews would know I’m a big Mandrake fan, but MDK 10.1 OE has a completely broken aoss script, for instance. Every other distribution and OS is the same, there’s always going to be *something* broken. If it’s not vital, it’s not worth screaming about…and a broken third-party ICQ app ain’t vital.
For everyone downloading and installing Express, try to remember that you’re downloading a pre-release beta of the OS. There are going to be some problems with it, especially on x86 where driver support is small, but growing. A lot is changing with respect to the install and boot elements under x86.
according to Sun’s annoucement, we *MUST* pay for bug fixes. period.
please read carefully the link above.
Indeed I did. From what I can tell, you’ll still be able to download the recommended patch clusters from patchfinder as you always have (someone correct me if this is not true). You’ll have to pay for the rest of the patches, as you always have. I only install the recommended patch clusters in between full update releases (also free as stated in that release) and have never had a problem.
But it really seems like you haven’t even bothered to check out the companion CD. All the major open source software you want is already available prepackaged on it.
Don’t forget Blastwave and Sunfreeware.com!
UNIX’s not GNU (ha!), and although some of the GNU tools can be fuller featured, don’t expect them to be the default on Solaris. But as pointed out, they are either integrated (in /usr/sfw) or on the Companion CD (in /opt/sfw).
I prefer GNU Tar too, so I linked /usr/local/bin/tar to /usr/sfw/bin/gtar and put it at the front of my path. It’s not hard!
bash is backwards compatible with sh
Not even slightly! You can’t write a script that uses the bash or ksh features and expect it to work under sh… those features do not exist in sh. If bash wanted to be proper about masquerading as sh, it would error in the same places as the real sh when invoked as such, however, it doesn’t. This promotes incompatibility, but GNU isn’t conerned with that (and since they don’t portend to be UNIX, perhaps that stance is correct).
Actually, some GNU versions of the standard apps are not quite backwards compatible, specifically the ones mentioned: vim and bash.
– I would permanently switch to vim if its ex mode was compatible, but it appears that vim’s ex mode doesn’t support the “g” syntax/semantics as the original vi does–in fact, it’s much less functional as you can’t nest commands with it (and it’s the only reason why I use ex mode to do “automated” editing; I’m aware that vim has it’s own way(s) like the “o” for literal input, but it seems awkward to me).
– While bash’s is sh compatible, the BIG problem I see in many linux distros is that scripts specifying “#! /bin/sh” as the interpreter still use plenty of non-sh, bash functionality since sh is linked to bash. AFAIK, there’s no way to tell bash to *enforce* sh compatibility. This creates a problem when trying to run the script using a real Bourne shell.. kinda like MS and IE-specific web pages
.. anyways, I’ll echo MJ’s response that a lot of “old” stuff is kept and still used for standards compliance. (even without bash, ksh is IMO a good alternative) .. and lastly let me point you to GNU’s own documentaion:
http://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/manual/autoconf-2.57/html_chap…
“When writing your own checks, there are some shell-script programming techniques you should avoid in order to make your code portable. The Bourne shell and upward-compatible shells like the Korn shell and Bash have evolved over the years, but to prevent trouble, do not take advantage of features that were added after UNIX version 7, circa 1977 (see section Systemology).”
I heard that we must *pay* for bug fixes, and that suxs at best. Without bug fixes, how can we seriously run Solaris (without paying)?
So, one of the things that our glorious marketing department has not explained well about this model is that OpenSolaris and Solaris are considered to be different products. As far as Solaris is concerned, you can use it for free whether you’re a corporate or personal customer, it doesn’t matter. As far as bugfixes go, Sun has pledged to make security fixes available; however, they’re not going to give you binary patches for specifc bugs, this is a service that you’re going to have to pay for. (It costs Sun money to develop and perform the release-engineering on these sorts of things). However, Sun is always going to continue to make Solaris product updates avaiable for free. So, while you might not be able to get a binary patch for a specific issue, you will be able to download Solaris 10 update 1, a quarter after Solaris 10 ships. These updates will include all of the bugfixes that we’ve released as patches, as well as various features that have also been backported from the forward-moving Solaris 11 development tree.
OpenSolaris is considered to be fundamentally different, and is always going to track the forward-moving development tree. So, bugfixes should always be available in source form as soon as their integrated into Solaris by Sun, or into OpenSolaris by someone in the community. It’s likely that there will be a community effort to provide nightly/latest builds of OpenSolaris that should always contain the latest features/fixes.
I hope this addresses at least some of your concern.
That scares me away immediately from Solaris 10. dont expect much from this “open source” product of Sun.
Again, Solaris is Sun’s commercial product, and OpenSolaris will be the OSI licensed version of Solaris. OpenSolaris and Solaris development builds should be in sync with each other going forward. The idea is that Sun wants Solaris to continue to be a commerical product, and provide support in such a fashion, while OpenSolaris will the be open-source always freely available version.
MJ, your explaination is pretty clear. The announcement says nothing about OpenSolaris as a separate product.
So may you tell us: technically what are the differences between Solaris and OpenSolaris?
(I have no doubt that Solaris will have some parts that Sun will not release in Open source version)
Thank you.
OpenSolaris hasn’t officially been released yet, so I guess marketing isn’t supposed to give a lot of detail, or may not even consider it a seperate product yet. I’m not officially involved in the OpenSolaris project, so it’s not entirely clear to me how everything is going to work. So far as I can tell, the process will continue to be an evolving work in progress, but the goal is to get Sun developers and community developers interacting with each other to build OpenSolaris, and then in the future, Solaris ™ will be derived from some set of features in OpenSolaris. Again, I don’t really know how all of this is going to work, so this is the best explanation I can offer for now.
Technically speaking, the product should be very similar to Solaris 10. Sun is in the process of identifying encumbered parts of Solaris and either eliminating them, re-writing them, or making arrangements with 3rd parties to obtains rights to the IP. The very first release of OpenSolaris may not include 3rd-party parts; however, all of Sun’s code will be present. However, the general direction of OpenSolaris will tend to being the same as Solaris. (These processes take time). Overall, though, my understanding is that the OpenSolaris engineers and managers are looking for suggestions and collaboration with the community as they set up their process, so if you’re concerned about this ending up like Darwin, it’s certainly going to be more collaborative. Solaris and OpenSolaris should be similar with the main caveat surrounding 3rd party drivers and similar issues.
Sorry I’m not able to say more. I don’t think all of the details have been worked out yet, or if they have, I have no knolwedge of them.
think Fedora Core….
Ever heard of Debian GNU/Linux? This actually is what Debian’s “stable” means – don’t break things by updating. GNU BASH breaks Solaris scripts? Stay the hell out of Solaris. Really easy.
Whatever, Solaris is fine just the way it is.
Solaris 10 ships with bash in /usr/bin by default. It isn’t very difficult to edit /etc/passwd to make bash the shell for root.
Just a note that your shell should not lay on a different partition than the root partition. Imagine that something goes wrong and the system can’t mount /usr/local/sbin for example. (Yeah other stuff breaks too but you can’t login to try to fix it.)