The latest version of Solaris Express has been released, Alan Hargreaves and Torrey McMahon have blogged about some of the new features. Download it from here. More info here.
Solaris Express 02/05 Released
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
i’m confused – i thougt solaris 10 was released? and just 2 days ago their solaris express webpage said that they had a release and you will be downloading that …
is this a post solaris-10 build – on the way to solaris 11? or 10.1?
i only ask because i’d rather use the more “stable” for server use (at home for testing)
Yep, this release is after Solaris 10 and adds some new features like iSCSI.
Hi,
yep this is post Solaris 10, its about two weeks behind the internal development release. 5.10.1 is about the best approximation for a release.
[fintanr@dhcp-ack03-200-118 fintanr] $ uname -r
5.10.1
This is the exact same release mechanism as we used for the Solaris Express builds coming up to Solaris 10. Its an ongoing thing to give people early access to everything thats being developed for Solaris.
Janus? ZFS?
Where is the patch bundle to bring my prior non-beta version of Solaris 10 up to this revision?
Why SunOS 5.10 = Solaris 10 but not SunOS 6.0? What is the convention for naming major SunOS version? Which Solaris will become SunOS 6.0?
Solaris 10 is NOT a major release according to the interface taxonomy definition that is used for Solaris. See the attributes(5) man page.
There will likely never be a SunOS 6.0 because that would only happen if we broke backwards compatibitliy in a non trivial way like we did when we moved from SunOS 4.x to SunOS 5.x (aka Solaris 1.x to Solaris 2.x). This is also the reason that the 2. was removed from the marketing name with Solaris 7 (which would other wise have been Solaris 2.7).
Solaris 10 is what we call a minor release, SunOS 5.10.1 would be a micro release. The update releases (the ones where the output of uname -r does NOT change) are patch releases.
I understand that this isn’t necessarily the same way that every one in the industry uses version numbers but it is how Solaris does it and it is what we have documented for many many years in attributes(5).
“Solaris 10 is what we call a minor release…”
While the general compatibility is there, it took me a bit of effort to grasp the new services management that replaced the traditional init mechanism.
The new JDS is also very nice, but also quite a step up from CDE.
IMO, Solaris 10 is a major minor release. It defintely takes a little retraining to use it to its potential.
From the first link:
“Sun Software Express Program is an entirely new concept that offers high quality snapshots of Sun’s future software products currently under development for our customers to download and use. Express software is fully functional with completely predictable and regular release schedules (monthly in most cases).
Software Express for Solaris is the first product in the Sun Software Express Program. With Software Express for Solaris, Sun is making the latest technologies available for download – built from the development team’s work-in-progress code base released at monthly intervals. Support is included in the Express programs through an innovative web interface for reporting bugs and tracking fixes. Software Express for Solaris is available for both SPARC and x86 platforms.”
For those wanting some more detail about changes in the release (including some stuff you won’t find in the What’s new doc), I’ve posted a summary here: http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/dp/20050301#what_s_new_in_solaris3
To answer an earlier question: we don’t release a patch bundle for this– this is a development release. Issuing patches is an expensive and complex process, and Solaris Express wouldn’t be economically viable for Sun if we had to do the elaborate testing required for patching. You can however upgrade from S10 to SX 2/2005.
With Solaris 8 and 9, when I moved from one hardware release to the other, I could do that by applying the Maintenance Update (MU). I have not done this in a long time (frozen and tightly controlled environment), but sholdn’t this be possible with Solaris 10? Or am I missing something, regarding Solaris Express, which I am not quite sure how it relates to normal solaris releases?!
I just finished burning 5 Solaris 10 install CDs (the software CDs 1-4 and extras), and I would prefere not to have to repeat this download-and-burn.
With Solaris 8 and 9, when I moved from one hardware release to the other, I could do that by applying the Maintenance Update (MU). I have not done this in a long time (frozen and tightly controlled environment), but sholdn’t this be possible with Solaris 10? Or am I missing something, regarding Solaris Express, which I am not quite sure how it relates to normal solaris releases?!
I just finished burning 5 Solaris 10 install CDs (the software CDs 1-4 and extras), and I would prefere not to have to repeat this download-and-burn.
View Solaris Express as like a ‘testing ground’ for new technologies – once stable enough for the main, they pull it back, and incorporate it into the next release of Solaris.
Solaris 10 is the stable line, Solaris 10 Express is the ‘bleeding edge, new features, could possibly make your machine explode’ release.
So in other words, it would be incredibly unwise of someone to use Solaris Express for their mission critical machine. Its a great resource for developers, so that they can get the latest bleeding edge version of Solaris to check software against, however, for something that is fully supported and tested, best bet is to go for Solaris 10.
iSCSI device support sounds cool.
Anyone here to explain why a customer should buy iscsi
products?
Is it cheaper than SAN?
Is iscsi compared to SAN or traditional scsi SLOW?
> Anyone here to explain why a
> customer should buy iscsi products?
A good question. A couple of possible answers
1) Use iSCSI LUNs from a NetApp and you can use NetApp snapshopts for “online” backups. There are other ways of course …
2) iSCSI just needs a network and some storage that supports it, likely you already have both. SAN also needs HBAs and likely Brocade (or other) FC switches, not to mention some SAN management software. They all cost money.
Kev
Many thanks. I thought the Solaris Express program ended once Solaris 10 was released. That was, I think, the source of my confusion.
Allright, so I guess the good MU is still the way to go, then.
Right, Mario. The cool bit is that for those bleeding edge users, SX gets them bits that are *beyond* what’s in S10.
You will also see some selected features from SX come backwards into Solaris 10 updates, although I have no idea if iSCSI is one of the ones planned for this backwards migration.
Right, Mario. The cool bit is that for those bleeding edge users, SX gets them bits that are *beyond* what’s in S10.
You will also see some selected features from SX come backwards into Solaris 10 updates, although I have no idea if iSCSI is one of the ones planned for this backwards migration.
I’d say it depends on the amount of demand expressed by customers. If customers start demanding it, one would assume that SUN would quickly assign programmers to get it up to speed and stability for the next maintainance release.
that’ll do