Solaris Archive

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.

Sun Microsystems plans to phase out its Trusted Solaris secure operating system and replace it with security extension software that can be used with its OpenSolaris operating system, said Mark Thacker, product line manager of Solaris security. OpenSolaris and the Solaris Trusted Extensions software will provide the full functionality of Trusted Solaris, according to Thacker. "This product will simply layer on top of Solaris 10. It will run on top of any piece of hardware that Solaris 10 runs on," Thacker said. Trusted Extensions should be available by mid-2006.

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?

After providing Blastwave many of its PPC-based Open Desktop Workstations to speed up the port of OpenSolaris to PPC, Genesi has announced to donate $50 to Blastwave for each ODW sold, in order to keep the Blastwave community from shutting down.

"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.

Solaris Express 8/2005 (Nevada Build 19, thanks for clearing that up, Dan) was posted today, providing improved hardware compatibility, a IEEE1394 camera driver, improved USB support, support for USB smartcard readers, and roughly 600 bug fixes. You can obtain a free download. An overview of new features is also available.

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.

Sun Microsystems this week matured a bit as an x86 server vendor by kicking off a broad partnership with VMware that will see the companies team on engineering and sales efforts. Of most immediate help to customers is the support of VMware's highest-end partitioning product - ESX Server - with Sun's line of Opteron-based hardware.

"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."

Sun Microsystems has distributed more than two million registered licenses for the Solaris 10 Operating System since the software became available on January 31st. These numbers, coupled with a record number of visitors to the Sun website during the last six months, highlight the incredible demand for the freely available operating system.

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.

"Containers" feature allows multiple virtual machines to share a single copy of the Solaris operating system, unlike other virtual-machine technologies.

A Sun Microsystems desktop engineer has outlined plans to release the code for the company's Java Desktop System (JDS) environment and integrate it better with OpenSolaris.

"Rivalry between different derivatives of OpenSolaris has already begun, two weeks after Sun Microsystems' initial code release."