Solaris Archive

The OpenSolaris desktop community released an opensource version of the Java Desktop System. "The Java Desktop System is a secure and comprehensive enterprise desktop software solution that combines the best of open source innovation. Java Desktop System is a major component of the Solaris 10 Operating System, x86 and SPARC architecure editions, and an earlier release is also available with a Linux OS."

Yet again hell freezes over. As if Apple's switch to Intel wasn't enough, Sun has announced that IBM is going to sell Solaris on its blade servers. "IBM has agreed to sell Sun's operating system with its BladeCenter servers in "the coming months," according to an IBM spokesman. This is quite the surprise given IBM's contentious relationship with Sun. IBM's services organization, however, does do a large amount of business selling Sun servers and Solaris, which may have helped seal the deal." Jonathan Schwartz announced it in his blog as well.

Solaris Express 10/2005 (derived from Nevada Build 23) was posted today, providing a variety of improvements. And for the first time, gdb and g77 are bundled with the operating system. You can obtain a free download. An overview of new features is also available.

OpenSolaris has started branching into the mobile computing domain. That's a notable step given that Solaris is generally designed for much more powerful servers. The OpenSolaris Laptop Community website was launched earlier this month. It features support for Atheros' 802.11b/g wireless networking chip and said that drivers for Intel's wireless chips is "being evaluated." In addition, Sun engineers are working on adding Solaris support for various power-saving techniques important to the battery-constrained world of mobile computing.

Solaris Express 9/2005 (derived from Nevada Build 21) was posted today, providing a new system for dynamic interrupt distribution, debugging enhancements, and several useful desktop-related improvements. You can obtain a free download. An overview of new features is also available.

A lot of hooplah has been distributed by Sun Microsystems on the advantages of their OpenSolaris/Solaris 10 release. Martin C. Brown has been using said software for the past few months and files his review that helps answer the question: has someone finally found a Linux killer?

"Solaris 9 users and customers will be happy to know that 9/05 is out. Get it for both SPARC and X86. Sadly the Whats New docs for Solaris 9 don't include a per-update review of changes, however the customer notification mail states: "It supports the newer hardware models such as SPARC servers based on the UltraSPARCIV+ processor and the Galaxy x64 servers." So, the big news here boils down to multi-core support for Solaris 9."

"I need to ask the Blastwave and OpenSolaris communities for your help. Despite my best efforts at gathering corporate sponsorship, Blastwave is once again in a financial crisis. We are due to be evicted from the datacenter in three days, and there is little that I can do personally to stop this." You can help out by donating, and while doing that you can also participate in this survey set up to estimate the size of the Blastwave community.

If Sun gets very serious about Solaris 10 on x86 and the Open Solaris project that it hopes will nourish it, Linux vendors had better get very worried. That's because, in the many areas where Linux is miles ahead of Solaris, Sun stands a good chance of catching up quickly if it has the will, whereas in the many areas where Solaris is miles ahead, the Linux community will be hard pressed to narrow the gap.

Solaris Express Community Release build 20 is out. You can download it here. It should be available on the OpenSolaris page soon. In addition, Sun Cluster 3.1 8/05 has been released. More info here.

Bart Smaalders of Sun Microsystems has open sourced libmicro, a portable set of microbenchmarks designed to measure performance of basic system calls and library functions. This framework proved invaluable during Solaris 10 development as a way of identifying areas where performance was lagging behind other Operating Systems, as well regressions between Solaris builds. You can join the libmicro discussion at the OpenSolaris forums.

"With the introduction of Solaris 10 and the dynamic tracing facility (DTRACE), the ability to dynamically instrument a system and solve complex problems is a D script (D is the language used by DTRACE) away. Several extremely useful D scripts have emerged, so I thought I would share my ten favorite DTRACE scripts with the OSNews community."

Solaris Express 7/2005 (a.k.a. Nevada Build 17) was posted today, providing MESA support, observability enhancements, and roughly 500 bug fixes. You can obtain a free download. An overview of new features is also available.

Some key features that Sun was touting last year for the Solaris 10 platform are still missing in action. The two most important are the Project Janus Linux runtime environment and the ZFS file system. While there has been much speculation that Sun will withdraw support for Project Janus, this is not the case.